Sleeping with Cats (8 page)

A
t fifteen, abruptly, one section
of my life closed with a great thud that reverberated through me with our move, the death of my grandmother, the murder of my cat and the drug-overdose death of my friend Kim, the withdrawal from the old neighborhood. I felt isolated. The neighborhood into which we carried our battered old furniture was solid working-class, almost middle-class, with neat lawns and single-family homes. There were no gangs, no street-corner boys, no action in the alleys or the hallways of decrepit apartments: only houses side by side, and trees. Zoning was loose in those days, and my mother got away with running a rooming house. She could not put a sign outside but placed ads in the papers.

I left street life. I swore off sex. Now I had a real room of my own, upstairs away from my parents with a door that shut. I shared the upstairs with roomers, usually hapless hopeless traveling salesmen who were separated, divorced or whom no one had the bad sense to marry. They filled their rooms with girlie magazines, how-to-succeed books, paperback detective stories, an occasional photo of family or some pretty girl you knew was not theirs. I collected their discarded pink and white and blue forms, requisitions, sales reports, and began writing poems and stories on the back of them. My mother knew everything about them
within two weeks of their arrival, their adventures and traumas and problems. One drank, and she worried he would set fire to his room. One had come home early to find his wife in bed with his brother-in-law. Another had lost his plumbing business to his own ineptitude and now was on the road, trying to sell space heaters. Another had gambled his life away on the horses. I had little to do with them. The exception was the sole time my mother took in a couple.

The woman, only two years older than me, was pregnant. I spent a lot of time with Lureen because she seemed lost and in a way she reminded me of Kim. There was something wistful and victimized about both of them, and I was a sucker for a hard-luck case. Like Afro-American friends I had back in the old neighborhood, she played the numbers according to dreams and a dream book she had, or from some incident of the day, a license plate she saw at an intersection, a telephone number that stuck in her head from a radio jingle. She was convinced she would hit and their money problems would be over. Her husband worked at a dry-cleaning plant, long hours, low pay.

Six months into a difficult pregnancy, one Sunday Lureen came home from some beery picnic with friends and miscarried, almost in my arms. She had really wanted children but had no prenatal care. We simply didn't go to doctors. The hospital had been a threat in my childhood: if you don't stop getting sick, I'm going to send you to the hospital, my mother would say. My teeth were rotting in my mouth, mostly from poor diet, so I chewed aspirin to control the pain. We never went to the dentist; it did not occur to me as an option. My mother had gone once when I was eleven and had all her teeth pulled. She returned disheveled and bleeding, in great pain. With poor people, they just pulled your teeth. When I finally was forced to go to a dentist after I went to work for the telephone company, he pulled three of my teeth. I was sixteen.

Lureen was devastated. She had carried twins, perfectly formed by then, two little boys. The first fiction I ever wrote was an attempt to recreate her sorrow in a short story. I had not been in my own room for more than a month when I began to write both poetry and fiction. My first poems were about death, of course. I was death obsessed. My room
was upstairs at the front of the house. My parents had a bedroom downstairs by the bathroom that I too used. This was a house three times as big as our old one, with a spacious living room, a big dining room, a kitchen with a breakfast nook, three bedrooms plus my little room, two baths (one used only by the roomers) and a big back porch. In the rear stood a two-car garage and a sour cherry tree I loved. In spring I would lie under it, staring at the miracle of blossoms thrusting out of wood. The two-story house was made of yellow brick. All through my childhood brick had represented something fine and stable, for that was what the houses were built with far out from the center city where we lived. We would drive out there around Christmastime to look at all the lights on the houses. I took the bus in that direction—to go to the all-white high school, to go to Rouge Park, several miles distant, where there was a public swimming pool, although I never really learned to swim.

The house was a complete mess, and we had spent two months before we moved in stripping and painting and carting out the filth and the trash of thirty years of the previous owner. My parents got the house at a good price because it had stood vacant for a few years. The only way we could afford it, however, was to take in roomers, which covered the mortgage payments. In front against the cement porch we never used, two tall Norwegian spruces loomed. Their gloom suited me: I thought them dark and romantic. My room stood across a hall from those of the roomers, in a gable overlooking the street. It was tiny and unheated. The roof sloped on both sides, but my father, a good carpenter, took an old dresser and a discarded bookcase and built them into the walls, into the wasted space under the eaves. I had a daybed and a small desk, a radio and a turntable that played through it—both of which I purchased from jobs I did after school. I wrote for a neighborhood newspaper, paid by the inch of copy. When I was sixteen, I began working downtown for Sam's cut-rate department store. I worked in better dresses, $4.98 and up, where the older “girls” treated me as a pet. They reminded me a little of my aunt Ruth, for they could make a living, operate in the business world, dress well, tease one another about men without seeming to take them too seriously. My senior year, I went to work part-time for the tele
phone company, as a long-distance operator—a job I continued to do during certain vacations all through college. Christmas meant little to me, so I didn't mind working it.

I painted the walls pale green. They were imitation rough plaster. In the wall opposite the daybed I slept on was a bas-relief of a sailing ship. The two casement windows were narrow and opened onto the street. I thought casement windows romantic. I adored my room. When I was home, that was where I preferred to be. Fortunately, high school gave homework. No matter how quickly I actually did it, homework provided me with a defense for my retreat.

I appreciated what my father had done for my room, and I tried, briefly, to please him, as I had tried when I was younger, with even less success. I was skinny, dark, opinionated and with strange habits. While I had a tortured love-hate relationship with my mother, my relationship with my father was distant and wounded. I had the impression he disliked me. I could never quite give up trying to communicate with my mother. She should, I felt, have been able to understand if only she would try. I was always explaining things I had learned to her, which must have been a real pain in the ass. I lectured her about race, about mythology, about history. With my father, conversations tended to peter out quickly. We would talk about the Tigers and the weather. I could ask him about some process, how steel was made, how electricity was generated. That about finished it off, except for Brutus. Once he had sauntered into our lives, we could talk about the cat. He was a strong personality.

I put the old typewriter my aunt Ruth had given me on the little desk. I had my books, I had my writing. I had girlfriends now like other girls did, middle-class girls who seemed to me quite naive but who were special because of that. If they were naive in some respects—sexually, streetwise—they had vast arcane knowledge about clothing and makeup and body hygiene. They taught me to shave under my arms and use a deodorant. They told me that lipstick was supposed to match what you were wearing, and that you didn't mix silver-toned jewelry with gold—not that I had much to mix. What I had, boyfriends had given me, probably
swiped. They cared about all sorts of things I was indifferent to but knew I was supposed to take an interest in. I began to follow certain white singers whom other girls had crushes on. Basically they tried to show me how to be a proper girl, and if I had wanted to be one, I would have learned more than I did. But I was resistant to sex roles and I wanted something larger and deeper and darker, yearnings I was skilled at keeping mostly out of view. Still, I understood their tutelage was necessary, even to get a scholarship. I was learning to pass. I am not reading this in from contemporary feminism. My writings at the time—1952, 1953—are full of these feelings. I did not feel the way a girl was supposed to. I must be something different.

I was well educated for my age in some respects: I read Freud and Marx, not books about them; I read Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dickens, the Brontës and an enormous amount of poetry. I had zero social graces and no manners, table or otherwise. My parents ate as if the food might disappear any moment, and I gobbled even faster, to get away from the table. I was ill dressed and had no idea how to use makeup. My skin was always good, for my mother trained me to eat fruit and drink water. I was still painfully thin and had little idea how to talk with middle-class boys. The things that aroused my enthusiasm—the novels, the poets, the analytical books that were tools to grasp the world—were not familiar to my peers. My dexterity with a knife and my ability to run like hell were not useful skills for impressing girls in my classes or boys I might date. Actually I hated dating. It was a minefield. I had no better idea how to behave than someone pulled from a tribal culture and dumped in a middle-class muddle. I stumbled through dates, hoping to pass for normal.

I did not play tennis, I did not swim, I did not bowl. I knew how to dance, but mostly the wild dancing of my old neighborhood rather than the social dancing of high school. I could jitterbug but couldn't fox-trot. I knew a fair amount about baseball from my father, for we had even gone to see the Tigers at Briggs Stadium. Friends dragged me to hockey games (this was the heyday of Gordie Howe), but I understood little about the rules. Basketball and football were alien to me. I did not watch TV because I would have had to stay downstairs with my parents and
risk confrontation and questioning. I was enamored of foreign movies and went sometimes with Edith or with one of my other friends. Edith was the daughter of a foreman at Fords, from a Finnish-American family. I saw
Les Enfants Terribles
—Cocteau—ten times. I remember adoring
The Man in the White Suit
with Alec Guinness and
Kind Hearts and Coronets
.

I was an editor of the school paper and joined clubs, the way adolescence was supposed to be. Much of the time, I saw myself playing a role at school but occasionally I lost it and got into arguments. I was an open socialist, thrown out of social studies classes a couple of times. I was pleased not to have to defend myself physically, very pleased. I was leading a far more normal adolescent life with the sense that all of me that counted was underground. That first fall, just as the weather was turning crisp and cold, another cat came to our door.

At first I thought he looked like Fluffy, but his legs were longer, his brown tabby fur a bit darker and with clearer markings, and he had lynx-like tufts in his ears. We thought he was a mature cat. We were wrong. He was only half grown. At his full size, he weighed twenty-two pounds, and not much of that was fat. He became quite simply enormous. In that section of Detroit in all the years my parents lived there and afterward, there were a great many very big dark brown tabby cats with tufts in their ears, for he populated the neighborhood with his progeny. He maintained a large territory but seldom bore a mark of fighting. He was aloof but not hostile to other cats, and they rarely challenged his benevolent rule. He was simply the dominant animal in his domain.

I named him Noble Brutus, as I was studying Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
at the time and I had read Caesar's
Gallic Wars
in Latin. I did not like Caesar. I thought Brutus had done a good job on him. I might call my new cat Brutus to my heart's content, but to my parents, he was Butch. He came to either name. Edith said he would probably come to any name at all and tried that out: “Come on, Felix. Come, Bugs Bunny.” He sat down and stared at her. Then he turned his back and stalked away. He knew his two names.

He had an equable nature, affectionate but strong willed. He would
not do what he did not want to do. He wanted to sit in our laps, but soon, he was much too big. When my father lay on the couch, he would climb on his chest, covering it completely. Otherwise he sat beside me or overflowed a hassock. Sometimes he wanted to be out at night, busy with his courting and caterwauling. Mostly he wanted to spend the night inside. In this house I had far more privacy, and the front and side doors were far from my parents' bedroom. I could easily let him in and take him upstairs. He was better than the high setting on the heating pad in that cold room. He would get under the covers and stretch out next to me. As he came into his full size, he warmed most of my torso as I curled around him. I slept with him until I went away to college.

In the old neighborhood, I knew who lived in every house, their financial situation, their family troubles, their religion, their ethnicity, their virtues and vices. In this new neighborhood, I knew none of the neighbors. Gradually, around the time I left for college, Mother began to gather a coterie of women who came in through the kitchen door to talk, to gossip, to consult. By the time Father dragged her from the neighborhood many years later, she had wide acquaintance there. During the early years in the house, however, she was busy with the roomers and with making the yard and house her own. My mother never visited neighborhood friends. She made them come to her.

When I worked at Sam's cut-rate department store, I brought a sandwich from home or bought a hot dog and ate it standing, gulped down with Vernor's ginger ale, the Detroit spicy specialty, so I could spend the bulk of my lunch hour in the downtown branch library. Edith and I bought a dress together that we thought very adult: navy taffeta that rustled invitingly and was cut out in a diamond pattern on the neck and shoulders. We imagined it daring. We passed that dress back and forth for the next three years, for parties. Finally I gave it to her, since the color suited her better and my notion of sophistication had changed by then.