My first apartment was an efficiency above a hair salon and a busy road. The interior consisted of three rooms, one barely distinguishable from the next save for the flooring – puke-pink carpeting in the living area, black and white linoleum in the kitchen, white tile in the bathroom.
Though converted into a series of small apartments in the 1970s, the building had first been a motel and when I moved in, in the 90’s, the exterior still maintained its dumpy, perfunctory roadside motel appearance to such an extent that many nights, returning home from work, I couldn’t help but feel a bit like a transient returning home to the Super 8.
I was twenty-one, had only lived in shared spaces before – my parents’ house, little dorm room hovels – and after about three weeks of my new living arrangements I got lonely and got a kitten.
My first pet was a goldfish I named Kermit. I was seven. When my mother accidentally killed him while changing the water in his bowl, it was she who cried and I who assured her it was okay, that goldfish were easy to come by.
I had always considered that memory evidence of my inability to form attachments to pets. As a teenager, I went so far as to contend that if humans were intended to have pets, every once in a while women would give birth to hamsters.
And then, of course, there was the matter of cats. I never wanted a cat, because I feared becoming one of those women. I knew that the “crazy cat lady” must begin with one innocuous kitten and feared the idea that my legacy could become a brief story on the ten o’clock news: men in haz-mat suits carting decades’ worth of yellowing newspapers and hoards of cats from some old brownstone . . .
The kitten looked a bit like a bat – big ears, pink mouth, pink nose that jutted. He was the runt of the litter, not very attractive but grew into a rather handsome, rather large black and white cat who, for lack of a better word, was “bitey” -- not exactly aggressive, just “bitey.”
He was bitey and I was lonely, and lonely people tend to have a high tolerance for the “downside” of certain arrangements.
I put up with – sometimes even loved – this animal that routinely bit and drew blood; that left my hands and arms perpetually marred by welts and scabs. My cat certainly didn’t inspire me to acquire more cats, or to develop an affinity for his species, but he greeted me at the door when I came home from work, he chased my pens when I wrote, he slept in my bed, and when he died unexpectedly one Monday morning five years into our partnership – a cat stroke, I presume – I was shaken.
When he died, I was no longer living in the efficiency apartment. I had a better job, was making more money, had upgraded to a one-bedroom with a galley kitchen and a balcony -- a very loud one-bedroom near O’Hare Airport. (The night Mars was said to be visible, I marveled at the planet from my balcony, only to later realize the fierce red dot was not Mars, but a runway light.)
Complicating my shock the morning I found my cat dead, was the question of what to do with his corpse: Do I put him in his pet carrier and bring him dead to the vet? Wait with all the other live pet-owners in the waiting room? Do I put him in a garbage bag and take him to the dumpster? Do I wait for nightfall and dig a hole by the side of the road?
I asked my parents if I could bury him in their yard, and they agreed. It was February, and the ground was hard. I put my cat in a cardboard box and the box inside of a black Hefty bag and the bag inside of a big plastic storage container and set him in my father’s shed alongside shovels, bags of fertilizer, the lawnmower and decided to wait until spring, or until he began to thaw, whichever came first.
I did all of this stoically, then dutifully went to work when I was through. And once home from work, I cried my way through three rolls of toilet paper and chided myself for being “ridiculous.”
For about a month after the cat died, I would sometimes flinch involuntarily in anticipation of a bite, and in the weeks after the cat’s death, I monitored the wounds on my hands and arms as they healed over, changed colors and faded, reasoning that ours had been an abusive relationship from the start and it was a blessing that he had died.
“Get a normal cat,” one friend advised. “One that doesn’t attack you constantly.”
“It is best to desire nothing,” a Buddhist friend told me. “Free yourself from attachments.”
Before the cat, when I lived in the efficiency alone, I paid a great deal of attention to my next-door neighbors, a couple who fought incessantly and kept birds. In the months I lived in the apartment sans cat, I never saw the birds or the couple, but I could hear both. I heard the couple when they swore and slammed doors and threw things, and when they weren’t fighting, I could hear the birds.
My mother kept birds. Growing up, we had a small aviary in the kitchen that caged one canary, two lovebirds (so named because they fuck incessantly), two parakeets, and a cockatiel my little sister had named “Grandma.” The birds were forever shitting and kicking seed onto the kitchen floor, and their noise was not melodic, not harmonious but senseless nervous chatter that made me uneasy.
One afternoon, trying out the self-cleaning function on her new oven, my mother inadvertently killed each and every one. Their delicate respiratory systems overwhelmed in twenty minutes time the canary, the lovebirds, the parakeets and “Grandma” dropped to the floor of the cage like so much feather-upholstered soapstone.
Mother was devastated. I felt oddly relieved.
In many ways, I preferred the sound of my neighbors fighting to the sound of their birds.
When the neighbors fought, there was a synchronicity. “You smoked my last cigarette,” proceeded by the jangle of keys coasting across the room and hitting our shared wall. “Fuck you,” punctuated by the resonant slam of the front door. It was a bit like counting the beats between lightning and thunder.
The bird noise, on the other hand, was irrational, high-pitched babble that seemed to give voice to the tension lingering between the two when they weren’t arguing.
Prior to the cat, I had little outside of work to occupy my time and, in my own way, I insinuated myself into my neighbors’ relationship, anticipating what arguments would be had next: Will it be an unpaid bill? Cigarettes? Something muted and mysterious? I placed bets about what would be thrown: A book? A coffee mug? A chair? I predicted which door would be slammed: The front? The bathroom?
One Saturday night, I heard her say to him, “I am seriously going to stab you.”
And instead of thinking, “I should call the police,” I thought, “With what?”
The morning I left my apartment to pick up my kitten from a co-worker’s house, was the first time I saw one of my neighbors. She was sitting in the breezeway in a plastic chair she had tilted back against the brick so as to rest her legs on the railing.
When I noticed her there, my first instinct was to hurry back inside. I had heard them fighting and that felt far worse, far more embarrassing in my mind than if I had heard them fucking. The sound of sex reveals little. The sound of a fight reveals everything.
I couldn’t look at her face, and her legs – pale and hairless -- blocked my way. At her calf, a Band-Aid, a dark spot worked its way through. I wondered if they had in fact had a stabbing fight, but reasoned the calf would be a strange and useless place to stab someone.
She had a walkman in her lap and I had to say “excuse me” twice before she dropped her legs and let me by.
For two days, I fed my kitten tuna fish and wrestled him with one hand. At night, I kept him in the bathroom where I had made a shoebox bed stuffed with an old concert t-shirt, a wristwatch tucked into the folds because I read somewhere the second hand’s “tsk” mimics a mother’s heart.
Preoccupied during the day by my job, and at night by care for the new pet, I scarcely had time to consider the neighbors. This must be the point of pets, I thought. To make you pay more attention to your own life.
When the weather got warm enough to open windows, random bird feathers began floating into my bathroom like secret messages. They landed on the sink, the toilet, and in the bathtub. I would find them stuck to the bottoms of my feet or on my legs, sometimes on my towels and because they were sometimes on my towels I would sometimes find them in my hair. They were generally small and soft, of a yellow or blue variety, but I never could accurately identify the genus.
Once, I knew something about birds. Something beyond the superficial “lovebirds are called lovebirds because they’re always fucking.” I used to know actual, scientific things about birds.
As much as I’d like to believe I was once a burgeoning bird-scholar, the truth is I once had a crush on my high school biology teacher. I initially took her class, “Animal Behavior,” a class that was widely understood to be “biology for burnouts” not because I was a burnout but because I disliked science and needed a science credit. It would not be the last time I took a seemingly pointless course just to satisfy a requirement. (In college, I would take a class entitled “Walking for Fitness” to meet my one physical education credit, and that class, unlike Animal Behavior, was exactly what it seemed: moderate exercise for lazy sons of bitches.)
I never became a physical fitness enthusiast because I never cared for my college gym teacher, but I cared for my high school science teacher and my high school science teacher cared for birds. Birds were her passion, and when we came upon the “Bird Unit” I zealously studied the calls, was one of only two students to ace the bird call exam. That year, I was able to sit in my parents’ yard and identify the presence of birds I could not see – red-winged blackbird, goldfinch, sparrow . . .
But at twenty-two, with my shitty apartment and my kitten, picking the neighbors’ birds’ feathers off my toilet seat, I was forced to confront the fact that all my ornithological knowledge was gone because it had been fueled by a superficial crush, a silly attachment. I couldn’t remember the call of the Read-headed Woodpecker anymore than I could remember why I had a crush on the teacher who taught it to me.
Shortly after acquiring the kitten, I had a bad night, one of those nights where I would lie awake on my futon, and acknowledge how much I hated my job, how much I hated my apartment, how much I didn’t want my life to be my actual life. It was one of those nights where the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be felt vast and impossible. I thought of the cat sleeping in my bathroom, “It’s true. You will die alone with a bunch of cats.” And to keep myself off the dangerous path of my own thoughts, I decided to listen for the neighbors.
I couldn’t hear them. They were not fighting. All I could hear were the birds, vaguely squawking, and when the birds stopped making noise, I drifted to sleep figuring the neighbors were fighting elsewhere.
In the middle of the night, I felt a small itch against my nose and lifted my head, removed two feathers from my face. The feathers had never landed anywhere but my bathroom, and this was an egregious invasion. I sat up, turned on the light, and just as I resolved to call the landlord in the morning, I discovered the feathers were coming from my pillow.
Some feathers had emerged completely and were laying on the pillowcase – white, the length of a nail clipping – while others poked out at the very tip, barely detectable. I pulled at those. Removed one after the other, thinking each would be the last, but the feathers kept coming. I feared if I pulled many more, I would deflate my pillow completely.
At one point, I realized the feathers were synthetic, and the realization disturbed me. It disturbed me to think that some company, some factory was in the business of manufacturing thousands upon thousands of feathers to stuff pillows. In my estimation, it was a bit like manufacturing thousands and thousands of arms and ankles and hands without the intention of ever creating anything real to attach them to.
A cousin of mine bought her two-year-old a Guinea Pig with the express intention of teaching her about death and loss. Guinea pigs live, on average, four years. At first I thought the idea macabre and unfair. Then I thought, there’s no guarantee the kid will grow attached to it. The lesson could fail. I hoped, for the sake of the kid, that the lesson would fail.
I used to believe short life expectancy was, in part, the trouble with pets. I used to wonder why we’d set ourselves up to get attached to something that we would, God willing, outlive. Why, I used to wonder, would we humans, with all of our silly human attachments, acquire a pet only to lose them and suffer the loss?
For many weeks after my cat’s death, I swept up bits of stray food and found small clumps of his fur embedded in the carpeting, single strands woven into the fabric of couch cushions, blankets, sweaters. But it was when I found one of his toys – a small plastic ball filled with catnip – wedged under a bookshelf that I realized it was these small bits of persistence, and not the death itself, that are the trouble with people and pets alike.
Image: emdot / marya via Flickr
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