My Life in Animals
My father taught Physics and Math at the Putney School in Vermont. His lab had an acrid smell. Dangerous bottles and taps arose from black shelves and table tops. With a sly grin, he called our cats static rags. When I was little, I trusted him and thought he was joking. But the static rags I discovered in the far corner of his lab were soft and furry pelts. One was orange, another grey, another black. Cats had disappeared. I took to the woods and wild places, befriended cats, implored them to seek revenge. I let them in to the lab at off hours, let them walk all over his papers and desk with muddy paws. I fed them the leftovers he craved. They caterwauled outside his study, gave him terrible headaches. I let them out before he got up. He growled with grumpiness, snarled. They hissed when he passed. They were close to my mother, who was herself half cat, and one dark night, she came to me and said, get ready, we’re going. But what about the cats? They’ll find us, she said.
My mother’s name was Elizabeth. She had long soft silver hair and green eyes. She had a loving, caring nature. She came to me one autumn evening when the leaves were in their scarlet skirts and wood smoke tickled my nostrils. I was scuffing along the dirt road that led from behind the tennis courts to the barn. The sun had nearly set and was tinting the sky pink and yellow. My other mother, whose name was Lloyd, was in the Faculty Room sipping after-dinner coffee and probably jabbering about the Rosenbergs or Rothko or some article in the New Yorker. Dad was there, too, but he rarely spoke, only listened. I wasn’t allowed to go there. I had to wait. I decided to walk as far the Pond and see if the ducks were still there. From behind a birch tree, Elizabeth came to me, mewing as she twitched her fluffy silver tail. She blinked. I picked her up. She nestled into my chest and purred. She looked at me with such understanding that I knew straight away she was the real mother I had lost long ago. She could see through my shell into the wounds and bruises nobody else could see and about which I could not speak. My parents weren’t that bothered that I wanted to live with Elizabeth. She always slept on my bed. She warmed me and I knew she loved me despite whatever I had done. And I had done something terrible for which there were no words. When I woke with unspeakable fear in the middle of the night, Elizabeth came close and told me stories of the cats in the woods and how they were protecting me. Her stories lulled me back to sleep. That spring she gave birth inside the covers of my bed to four kittens. A bolt of love-lightning shot through my body as I gazed on their beautiful moist little bodies. I lay my face beside my newborn brothers and sisters and watched them nurse as I wept. And when I, too, nuzzled into our mother’s furry chest and put my lips to her nipple to suck, she purred and laid a silky paw on my face to let me know that in the end everything would be all right.
My father could change into different shapes. In those days at Putney he often turned into a moose. He wore a brown corduroy jacket and his long knobbly legs were encased in dark trousers. His antlers looked like headphones when he sat with his back to the door in the little room he called his study. It was lined with shelves that held grey metal boxes with black knobs and dials. Receivers and transmitters, he told me. He faced the window that looked out onto snowdrifts as he tapped Moose Code into wires. As he watched and listened to my mother’s friends who talked about horrible Nixon and evil McCarthy, so I stood on the threshold of his study and watched and wondered what he was tapping, to whom, and why. I learned Moose Code to try and fathom his secrets, but could never follow the speed of his tappings fast enough to figure out what he was saying into the wires. I learned what knobs and dials to use to transmit messages and when he was out I tapped out my own messages. Shit shit shit,I tapped, a word I’d learned at school but wasn’t sure of its meaning. The word I’d said out loud louder and louder. The word that changed him from Moose to Monster. The word that cost me my body. Shit shit shit, help help help. But nobody answered.
In 1956, my father changed into a porpoise. We left Putney School and went to live in Woods Hole. My mother had been to Europe on her own and when she came back her face had turned grey and her hazel eyes were covered in a soapy film. She hated Woods Hole. She hated the cucumbers Dad had been growing in their bedroom. The cucumbers started on the window sill and trailed all over the room, up and down her dressing table, winding round her Pond’s cold cream and the little gold box of mascara that she spat into and dabbed on to her eyes when she wasn’t crying. Mostly she was crying. Unless she had gone to the cold room in the disused hotel that overlooked the sea, where she painted wild orange and black canvases and smoked cigarette after cigarette and sometimes forgot to come home.
Dad often went out to sea to talk to the porpoises. Sometimes on his grey metal box in his office at the Oceanographic Institute he played the songs the porpoises whistled. Once he took me out to sea with him, where he and his friends worked on a square float with a donut hole in the middle down which they dangled wires. They fiddled with knobs and dials in the cabin of the donut and they all wore oilskins. Dad told me I could fish because there wasn’t much for me to do on the donut. I dropped a line over the side and watched the grey waves and the dark sky. After a long chilly time, something tugged ferociously on the line. I struggled to reel it in. It was a huge grey eel that writhed into a question mark as it flopped and splashed. It wanted to kill me. I screamed.
In Woods Hole, my new friend Noni and I were becoming alchemists. Noni’s family was actually the family into which I had been born. My father had snatched me away from them when I was a baby. I was glad to be back with my real family and ate most of my meals there and sometimes slept there, too. After school Noni and I went down into the cellar of her house on Buzzards Bay Avenue where we were cross-breeding white and brown mice to make the Golden Mouse. We were going to be famous and make lots of money. Her father let us use old screen windows to build cages and runs. We each had a special mouse. Mine was albino and I sometimes took it to school in my shirt pocket. When some of the girls saw it squirming in my pocket during class, they screamed and ran out of the classroom. I was sent home. One of our cats ate my mouse. But we were getting there, Noni and I. A brown mother mouse gave birth to a litter, some of which were nearly gold. We really were nearing fame and riches. Then my mother took me and my sister away and we never came back.
The school where my mother sent me and my sister in Buffalo was overrun with aliens. There were hordes of them in ponytails and braces, bobby socks and flouncy skirts and the boy aliens all had crewcuts and chewed gum as they sneered at me. Metal lockers clattered and banged. Bells shrieked. Teachers yelled. The aliens in my class were mostly twelve or thirteen. I was ten. The teacher shouted at me for getting the right answer in the wrong way. I shouted back that if my way worked, what was wrong about that? She put me in detention. I vowed never to return. And I didn’t, so after I’d read all the books in the apartment and still wouldn’t go to school, my mother put me in the New York State Asylum for the Insane. They put me in a bed-cage with high bars. Howls and moans echoed down the corridors. The nurses, who were ghosts, let me out and told me to go and play with the screaming children, whom I knew to be injured crows with sharp beaks. I refused. A man in a white coat came to talk to me. What do you want to do? He asked me. I want to be with my cats and my books, I said. He asked me what books I liked and we talked about Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and Emily Dickinson and he told me of others I did not know. He told the ghost to take the bars from the bed so it was no longer a cage. Later, he brought me a whole stack of books and told me everything would be all right in the end. I read all day long for a week and then they let me out.
In the summer, when we lived in our old farmhouse on the edge of the Sakonnet River, I was a seagull. After a long swim and several dives, I walked dripping wet over the hot sand down the beach to the red barnacled rocks, where a small cluster of low rocks had a dip in the top. It was just the right size for me to lie in. Humans could not see me when I lay there, but the seagulls could. Circling overhead, they mewled and cried. I watched and listened, wondering if I could learn to fly. I learned their calls and called to them. They came to the edge of the rock, almost touching me as they cocked their heads and stared with lemon eyes. I asked them what the secret of flying was. They shrugged their wing-shoulders and said, it’s easy. But it wasn’t. I was old enough to know people really didn’t fly except in airplanes. But I wasn’t like other people, I was something else. And later, I did fly. In the night when I had been ill in bed for many weeks with a sickness for which there was no name, I became a swan and flew across the sea to the pond in Constable’s painting of Salisbury Cathedral. My Lloyd mother got rid of all our cats, including my mother Elizabeth, and said they now all had good homes. I wasn’t sure I believed her. But sometimes, in the middle of cold English nights, Elizabeth still comes to me and tells me to be patient, because now almost everything is all right.