Mimi (5 page)

My admiration of
him
was unassailable, since he was in charge of a vehicle. Mom, a pedestrian and bus-user, earned my contempt. I liked to rile her in the grocery store: success was when I got her to yell, entitling me to sympathetic looks from strangers and apologetic candy from Mom.

The first vehicle I ever revered was my little red truck, the envy of the neighborhood, a miniature pickup truck with real headlights, red upholstery, horn, a dashboard covered with knobs and dials, and, under the chassis, the hidden source of propulsion: pedals. I drove that truck everywhere, couldn't be parted from it. And one morning, at about the age of three, I drove it across the street and straight into the nice green Chevron River that surged so appealingly past our house. The truck floated fine and I held on for a wild ride, carried for miles clinging to the steering wheel, giggling and wiggling my toes out behind me in the water. People who saw me go by held their hands to their mouths or started running along the bank, hollering. I paid no attention. I was on my way in the world, and there can be no better feeling. I was happy as a clam in fact, until a boatload of cops fished me out, and left my beautiful red truck to spin away downriver (instilling in me my first real doubts about cops).

But why was I forced to use my truck as a boat, when there was a big old canoe sitting in our garage? The canoe had been hanging in the rafters since before I was born, left there by the previous owners of our house when they moved to Wyoming. But every time Bee and I asked if we could get the canoe down and try it out, Dad claimed the people who owned it might come back for it some day.
Nobody
ever comes back from
Wyoming
! They're stuck there, moaning, “Why? Why?” No, they were never coming back for their stupid canoe. Our parents were just lazy stinkers.

They were the least adventurous people I ever knew! In my whole entire childhood we only left Virtue and Chewing Gum once, apart from trips to the farmers' market just outside of town, where Mom bought stuff for bottling. Talk about corny! She was always pickling something—'maters, cukes, watermelon rind—for what good it did anybody. But one day, for reasons never specified, we all bundled into the hot car and drove through flat, hot plains and hazy, underpopulated towns, where other families mysteriously chose to live, past HoJos and blueberry stands and pet zoos and picnic spots, never stopping, despite our pleas and threats from the back (“I need to go to the bathroom!” “I'm gonna throw up!”).

When you're a kid, you don't really know if you're going to
survive
boredom. It feels life-threatening. Bee and I played I Spy and Ghost, but there were long stretches when she just stared out the window at her imaginary stallion, Hollenius, who was apparently galloping beside our car the whole way. I was left to glare at the brown semicircle of my mom's head, just visible over the front seat, or else chortle my way through my joke book, with which I tormented my family for years. “What's yellow and goes up and down? A banana in an elevator!. . . What did the mayonnaise say when somebody left the fridge door open? Shut the door, I'm dressing!. . . What did one wall say to the other wall? Meetcha at the corner!. . . What trembles at the bottom of the sea?. . .
Aw, forget it.” (A nervous wreck.) And then, a minute later, “What's black and white and red all over?”

The only relief came when Dad thrilled us, and horrified Mom, by taking his hands off the wheel at 50 mph to demonstrate to me how big a salmon is. I was just beginning to grasp the fact that he and I were allies of some kind: men. Mom and Bee were there to be outstripped. Dad and I had developed a habit of guffawing at anything Mom or Bee said (when I remembered to). Our confederacy had solidified over many months of touring the drugstores and movie houses of Virtue and Chewing Gum where Mom had been on dates before she met Dad. He was curiously fixated on these historic locales. The rage and power of the man! And yet he had a fine tenor voice—and could yodel. He yodeled his way through “Sparkling Brown Eyes” for us now, with Bee and me chiming in from the back seat as his echo.

 

There's a ramshackle shack

. . . (There's a ramshackle shack)

Down in ol' Caroline,

That's calling me back

. . . (That's calling me back)

To that ol' gal o' mine.

 

He followed this up, as usual, with:

 

Just a song at twilight

When the lights are low

And the evening shadows

Softly come and go.

Though your heart be weary,

Sad the day and long,

Still to us at twilight

Comes love's old sweet song.

 

And “The Brown and the Yellow Ale”, which made Bee and me snicker, due to our scatological interpretation of its meaning:

 

He asked was the woman with me my daughter

O the brown and the yellow ale!

And I said she was my married wife.

O love of my heart!

 

He asked would I lend her for an hour and a day

O the brown and the yellow ale!

And I said I would do anything that was fair.

O love of my heart!

 

By the time we stopped at a motel, I was comatose in a corner, having seen nothing out of the window but the tops of pine trees for hours. It was twilight and I stood unsteadily in the tree-lined parking lot beside the road, feeling smug about the people still stuck in their cars, driving by.
We
had somewhere to stay, and it wasn't the usual kind of motel either, some U-shaped, two-story, paint-peeling number surrounding a bug-blocked pool. No, this was a real log cabin by a lake, with a fireplace! Bee and I went nuts when we saw it. That night we slept on camp beds with eiderdowns and feather pillows, perched on a balcony above the main room. She and I always spoke of that place later as the epitome of coziness. We were cozy in our beds that night, peering down through the wooden banister rails at our parents talking quietly by the fire. The illusion of contentment was profound.

The next day, there were pancakes at a nearby diner, and foot-dangling on the jetty. The lake was darker than we'd thought the night before, and full of yuck-muck lurking in the murk. Bee and I insisted on swimming in it anyway though, and this was when Mom forced us to make one of the most peculiar decisions of our lives: since we hadn't brought any bathing suits she wanted us to choose whether we swam in our undershirts or our under
pants
—so as to save one dry item of underwear for the ride home. How do parents think this sort of stuff up? They all worry far too much about you catching cold.

I chose to swim in my underpants; Bee chose her undershirt. I always thought she made the wrong decision. The sight of her bare ass in the water embarrassed me. I felt kind of sorry for her. But we soon forgot about this sartorial conundrum (although I'm
still
thinking about it!), as we attempted to make it to the raft in the middle of the pond without getting sucked down into its muddy depths by leeches, or something worse. We were all too aware of the slimy black fish that must live in that slimy black pond.

Then it was back in the car for the long drive home, with goosebumps (despite the change into dry duds) and Baba Yaga stories, another of Bee's bad choices. Baba Yaga gave me the creeps, with her peroxide-yellow hair, her mangy old cat, and that house on chicken feet. Baba Yaga flies cumbersomely on a pestle (god only knows what she did with the mortar) and all I could think about was her torpedoing toward me, top speed, with those mile-long bazongas of hers, dugs she had to spread out on a clothes line to dry! And her saggy-baggy arms, and legs so dimpled her thighs were striated with
folds
(horrific details of bodily decay I must have observed at Virtue Gum Factory summer picnics, where middle-aged women tended to let loose with shorts and sleeveless tops, to mind-boggling effect). But what about those claw-like hands, and the arthritic jaws, with which Baba Yaga would munch me if she got the chance? No good could come of those old teeth and old teats. Baba Yaga eats like a
man,
like she owns the place, and spits the bones out into the dark gelatinous lake. . .

When we reached our street, Dad woke us up by saying, as always, “And so they turned the corner to find the smoldering remains of what was once 39 Cranberry Avenue,” which never failed to amuse us. But it wasn't smoldering yet.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY

My “
cat found
”
notices
had been up for two weeks now without any response. Bubbles was safely mine. I briefly considered issuing some “
girlfriend dumped
” signs as well, to see if anyone rose to the challenge of taking over Gertrude’s role. But Bubbles had already done that, proving himself a superior companion on almost every front (no
sex
was on offer—but sex with Gertrude wasn’t a grievous loss). He wasn’t clingy or demanding, like some people I could mention. He just liked to be near me. He loved me! In fact he was the most even-tempered and well-adjusted personality I’d ever known, sure of himself, but never arrogant in that standoffish feline way, and always affectionate. He had great concentration abilities too, and would stare for twenty minutes at a time at a pigeon on the roof, or a spider on the floor. Liked watching baseball too! Bubbles was clearly a very intelligent cat. Also a big investigator: he’d check out any open door or closet, but he was polite about it and didn’t knock things over—he wasn’t searching for food or anything, just having a good look around. And musical! There was nothing he liked better than lying atop the piano licking himself while I played Schubert.

The vet checked Bubbles out and found nothing wrong with him besides emaciation, which was diminishing. His teeth were good, and the limp had vanished. The vet gave him a few vaccinations and recommended a diet of Fancy Feast cat food (the Classic variety, not the grilled kind or the stuff with gravy), because it’s just meat, instead of all the buckwheat and pumpkin seeds and barbecue flavor Manhattanites think their cats need. “Cats were made to eat meat,” he said with unexpected vehemence. “This is all they need, nutritionally.” A real cat-food zealot. Nuts, but I liked him: he wanted the best for Bubbles.

The only other thing he could tell me was that Bubbles was female, not male. I was surprised. But in the end, what’s the difference, with a
cat
? We’re all so hooked on these dichotomies: male/female, human/animal, right/wrong. We
act
like they’re opposites but they’re not really, just part of the same spectrum. You neuter a cat and that’s the end of it, just as Virtue neutered Chewing Gum and Minneapolis neutered St. Paul. Bubbles had already been spayed, so all I had to do was adjust with grace to his/her new gender. (As far as I knew, he/she didn’t give a damn about
mine.
)

I added “gender changes” and “dualism” to my List of Melancholy, along with “
Ant and Bee
books”. Also, “shaving.” It occurred to me that shaving gives men an airtight excuse for vanity and self-obsession—otherwise we’d be obliterated by hair! During my convalescence, I’d had time for several ornate additions to my list. The entry on “bathrobes” had numbered subdivisions:

WHY I HATE BATHROBES

1. The belt never stays tied.

2. Often an old Kleenex in the pocket.

3. They’re always too hot.

4. And frequently tartan.

5. Remind me of slippers.

6. Or of men lounging around in Sears catalogs. Next page: a billion socks.

7. Reminiscent of oddly formal occasions in childhood—Christmas and sleepovers—when pj’s are for some reason deemed
not enough
.

I was clearly not ready to go back to work: I hadn’t regressed enough yet. I couldn’t face anyone else’s pain but my own,
especially
the patients’. You have to gear up for that, crank the old smile into place. Nor did I feel like leaving Bubbles. So it was fortunate I was my own boss: my time off was up to me. I kept my partners notified of my progress and in return was sent get-well cards and hot-water bottles from the nurses, and a bunch of flowers weekly—leaving me free to whirl the whorl of hair on my left wrist, examine my collection of clutch pencils, accidentally unravel a whole sweater Gertrude had knitted me
(
just by pulling on one annoying thread), and look up cheerleading websites, which turned out to be all about
bulimia
, not ponytails and candied thighs. What boors women are, always thinking about their stomachs!

The next item for my List of Melancholy was “bulldozers”: the fact that I’d never yet driven one and now probably never would. Come on, you get in that windowed rookery and start manoeuvering those gears, turning the thing 360 degrees, lifting and lowering the scoop! The verticals and horizontals, the bare molded flanks, the mammoth treads, the shiny joints and pistons, the giant nuts and bolts, and all the greases needed to make those monsters go! So goddam male it breaks your heart! The sheer weight of it, its steadiness under duress, the power, the know-how—the determination in its makers to build
the machine you need,
whatever the consequences. Its pliant usefulness, as those arms lift beseechingly aloft!. . .
All I’ve ever wanted, all
anyone
really wants, is to get inside a bulldozer and make it do its stuff.