A Million Years with You (4 page)

These cats were identical twins—two black-furred females named Lilith and Eve. I could tell them apart, but only by their behavior, because Eve would sometimes let me pick her up. Another photo from the past (one I'm not proud of) shows me lifting Eve with my hands around her neck. In the photo, I'm burning with concentration, enthralled by this cat. Eve's eyes are half shut, her tongue protrudes slightly, her tail dangles, and her arms and legs are flung wide. She's enduring the experience as best she can.

Lilith, in contrast, allowed no such thing. She'd duck away if I approached, and if I managed to catch her by the tail and pick her up, she'd fight back and scratch me. That's how I knew I had the wrong cat.

But both cats were devoted to my mother. When they were near her, they purred. They also brought her gifts—dead mice mostly—and would either place them in front of her or put them on the stairs where she'd find them when she came down for breakfast. I was a little jealous of the cats, as I could see they were trying to flatter my mother. They never brought me any gifts, so I suspected that they wanted her to like them more than she liked me. I had no real cause to worry—my mom clearly showed that she cared about me—but I worried nevertheless.

 

Back then, most cats came and went freely, indoors and out, and most were not spayed or neutered. This, by the way, is why domestic shorthairs still resemble their ancestor,
Felis silvestris lybica
, the African wildcat, and why cats live longer, healthier lives than dogs. Free to choose their own mates, female cats select for qualities such as strength, good health, and high status. Thus they do a better job than human breeders who select for pushed-in faces or flowing hair. Today such freedom is censured, so please don't send me e-mails or letters to tell me so, because I already know it. Here I'm only saying that at the time of which I am speaking, most cats could do as they pleased.

Our cats gained access to the outside world through little cat flaps in some of the regular doors—a cat could go from our back hall down the stairs to the basement and from there up another flight of stairs to the street. Other cats could come in from the street, but only as far as the basement. The dogs kept them off the upper floors. Thus the basement became a refugium for cats. From what went on there, I saw that cats involved themselves in dramas that were beyond my understanding. I only knew that whatever they were doing was significant to them, and soon enough, it was also significant to me.

 

Our house was heated by a coal furnace, and the heat came through large ducts to registers in the floors. Sometimes I'd hear a voice coming from a register, a long, forceful, meaningful call. I'd realize that right below my feet something strange and important was in progress, and I'd go down to look.

The basement was dark, with just a little daylight coming through a window. As I'd go down the stairs, the voice would stop. Then the silence would be awesome, as it is the woods when there's no wind and the wild things know that a person is near. I'd look around but wouldn't see anything. Then I'd look up. And there, on some of the hot-air ducts just under the ceiling, I'd see two or three pairs of shining eyes. Cats!

The eyes were a little scary. But after all, I was safe at home and the shining eyes were almost mesmerizing, so I'd sit on the floor and wait. Complete silence. Nothing moved, not even the shining eyes. But after a long time, perhaps feeling pressure from the issues that faced him, a cat would lift his voice in a drawn-out call that slowly got louder, held steady, and then faded, as if the cat ran out of breath. Again silence. The other cats would think things over. And then, after a moment, the first cat would repeat himself or one of the others would respond. To me, these eerie calls were also scary, all the more so at close quarters when I didn't know what was going on.

Sometimes I'd go back upstairs in a failure of courage, but often enough I'd stay where I was, wondering about our own two cats. Perhaps they also were a little scared. I'd look around for them and often didn't see them. But now and then I'd see them near the coal bin—an inconspicuous place but one from which they could see the cats who were calling. Imagining what my mother would have done had she been there, I once went to them and tried to lift Eve up to reassure her, but she got away, ran past me, and vanished. By then Lilith had also vanished. That was the last I saw of them that day. But for some reason I remember the event clearly, perhaps because it struck me that our cats weren't scared and didn't need help, and that they too were listening carefully to the eerie calls. It also struck me that however mysterious the calls might seem to me, our cats knew what they meant.

 

From then on, as long as we had cats, the basement remained a place of wonder. At the time I knew nothing about human reproduction, let alone feline reproduction, and not until later in life did I realize that the intruders were males who had come to inseminate our cats if our cats would have them. Thus the males were probably threatening each other, or at least were trying to show our cats that they had high status and power. But although I didn't understand the reason for the calls, I felt their suppressed emotion, their intensity, which is why I kept going to the basement. Perhaps the male cats clashed sometimes, but I don't remember any fighting. I remember only the strange, long-drawn-out calls and the two sisters crouched low, listening.

Now and then there would be kittens. The two sisters nursed each other's kittens. Sometimes they'd move the kittens to different places in the basement, carrying them by the back of the neck. When kittens were present, the males were unwelcome. Either they didn't come into the basement, or the two sisters drove them back up the stairs and out the cat flap.

There was so much to know, and no way to know it. All too soon the kittens would vanish. I'd get home from school and they'd be gone, evidently given away by my parents, who didn't tell me. But in time the threatening moans would rise anew through the hot-air registers, and the shadowy, fascinating life of cats would cycle again.

 

The awe I now feel for other species began in our basement. But at the time I didn't hope to understand what I was seeing. The urge to understand things came later in life. I was just looking at the cat world, experiencing it, identifying with it. I soon stopped thinking of our cats by their names, as I saw nothing about them that related to people. Names seemed alien to all cats. Unlike dogs, cats didn't take their names seriously, nor anything else we said or did—except to put cat food in a saucer. But they didn't even need our food. They were hunters. Our food was just a convenience. The world of these cats was complete, and entirely their own.

I wanted very much to join their world, so I tried to be a cat, to lap up milk from a saucer and walk on all fours. My mom had been a ballerina and enrolled me in a ballet school where we were instructed to invent a dance. So while the other little girls flitted around, pointing their toes and waving their arms, I crawled on my hands and knees because this was the closest I could come to shape-changing. At that age I didn't have the words to explain why acting like a cat was a good idea, but it wasn't ballet, and I soon was ejected from the class. Perhaps my desire shows why, in the abovementioned photo, I carried poor Eve by the neck. That's more or less how a cat would carry a kitten. Perhaps it was just another of my clumsy efforts at shape-changing.

 

When I was six or seven, Eve and Lilith vanished, and it was my fault. The pediatrician had told my parents that the bouts of bronchitis I'd been having were caused by an allergy to cats. I was devastated. I must have cried for weeks. I would gladly have endured bronchitis if we could have kept the cats, but no one asked me. Tom, who not only helped us manage the house but was also an accomplished artist, then painted a picture of a cat for me—not one of our cats but a beautiful, long-haired brown tabby. It wasn't as good as a real cat, but it helped. To this day it hangs on the wall by my desk.

I never learned what happened to our cats, except that, knowing my mother, I'm sure they went to good homes. What I do know is that I paid no attention to the pediatrician. When I grew up I adopted a cat, then another cat. I've had cats ever since—I have six at the time of this writing, all of them rescues—and the occasional wheeze or snuffle never bothers me. I attribute it to pollen.

 

Aware of my grief at the loss of our cats, Gran began to take me to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which was near our house. I braved the filigreed metal stairs through which one could see from the top floor to the basement, and thus were scary. I thought I might fall through. But I'd screw up my courage and keep going because the reward at the top was great. There we'd see stuffed mammals, all kinds of them, ranging in size from a stuffed elephant and a stuffed camel to a stuffed mongoose and stuffed squirrels. I'd spend time in front of a lynx, but its neck was too thin, as it had been stuffed poorly, so it didn't seem lifelike and wasn't all that interesting. The cats I really went to see were the tigers, especially a Siberian tiger. To think that a cat could be so big! It was hundreds of times bigger than me, and true to the taxonomy of the time, it was mounted in attack mode with its jaws open, displaying its terrible teeth.

It was, in short, very scary. I was frightened but also enthralled. I wasn't sure it wouldn't come to life and kill us because we were standing too close. But if we moved away, we couldn't see it clearly because it was boxed in by other, less riveting exhibits, so we'd go back to face it again. Scared as I was, I was so entranced by that tiger that I had to see it at least once a week, and I'd stand in front of it until forced to leave, frozen in place with awe and fear like a bird hypnotized by a snake.

I began to have nightmares. When I was forced to go to bed (always, it seemed, in broad daylight), I'd imagine that once it got dark, a tiger, that tiger, would climb up the side of the house and come in the window. Sometimes the wind would blow leaves against the house. The scratching sound, I knew, was the tiger's claws, climbing.

I'd call my mother. She'd sit beside my bed. I'd ask her over and over if anything would hurt me in the dark. She'd tell me over and over that nothing would hurt me. This went on for months, if I remember rightly, taking much of my mother's valuable time. Yet during those months I'm not sure she knew that the danger I envisioned was a tiger. Often enough people don't want to name the terrors that haunt them, and I think that happened to me, because Gran and I kept going to the museum, and with every visit my fears would be refreshed.

I remembered this clearly years later, when I had two small children of my own and they too had fears about a tiger. Having lost none of my fascination with the cat family, I had read to them about tigers. But I didn't have my mother's time or patience and wanted to erase their fears as quickly as I could. So when one of my kids would call to me that a tiger was under the bed, I'd go in and look at it. “Goodness me,” I'd say. “That's a tiger, sure enough. Why don't I take him to the kitchen and see if he wants some milk?” Then with great effort I'd drag him out. “He's scared,” I'd say to explain his reluctance. When he was out I'd pick him up, reassuring him as I did so. But he was really heavy. It took all my strength. My knees would buckle, and huffing and puffing, I'd stagger with him out of the room. My children thought all this was exceptionally funny. They'd laugh, and their fears would vanish.

My mother must have sat beside my bed hundreds of times, reassuring me about the danger in the dark. I only had to drag the tiger from under my children's beds two or three times, and after that he stopped coming. So I recommend the method.

 

The first book I wrote was called
Shege The Tiger
. I'm not sure when I wrote it because the date on the cover is “Tuesday.” I signed it Miss E. Marshall, illustrated it myself, and bound its pages between cardboard covers held together with O rings. I do remember why I wrote it, though. At the time, I had no other way to obtain a book about an animal. Reading
Shege
wasn't as good as reading something by another author, but I had no choice. A disaster occurred that would have left me with nothing.

The scene is as fresh in my mind today as on the day it happened. On that black day, the school librarian told me I couldn't read any more books about animals. I'd read too many already, and there were more important subjects. She said I should read about people.

I was aghast. I already knew about people. I begged her. I said I'd just read a little and promised to read other things too. She said no. She would not let me take any more animal books from the library. The only books I would be allowed to read henceforth would be about people.

Her decree was like a death. With those terrible words, she cut me off from what I cared about the most. I stood speechless in front of her, suddenly aware of her power, knowing I couldn't change her mind, realizing how bleak my future would be.

For the rest of the day I was despondent. I had to do something. When I came home from school, I assembled some paper, a pencil, some crayons, and two pieces of cardboard that the laundry put inside Dad's clean shirts. Then I sat on the floor of my parents' bedroom and wrote
Shege
. The name, I think, derives from Shere Khan in Kipling's
Jungle Book
, and she's a Siberian tiger because, thanks to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, I knew these were the biggest kind of tiger. Therefore she lives in the “Siberian jungles,” because from the
Jungle Book
I learned that tigers are jungle animals. If there was such a thing as a Siberian tiger, it followed that there was a Siberian jungle.

I couldn't spell, but I didn't know it—among other mistakes I wrote
nois
for noise,
frunt
for front, and
prytty
for pretty—but when a hydrophobic jackal enters the scene, I must have known I was out of my depth and got help in spelling
hydrophobia
.