CHAPTER 21

One for Sorrow

I’m always falling in love with someone else’s mother. Once you start looking for mothers, they’re everywhere. I look for mothers who are more like the one I imagine myself coming from, as if I might be reborn if I find the right woman to carry me. I dream up adoption fantasies, dream myself rummaging in the wicker chest in my parents’ bedroom closet. Dream myself finding original paperwork embossed with golden seals, the name of my birth mother, a name that sounds light, names that begin with vowels, my mouth full of air when I say them. Her name is music rising in the sky. Amelia. Elyse. Olivia. I always wake up right before I find her.

Stories live on in my mind long after they’ve ended. My mind is a dream world. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s real. I can remember being very little, probably six or seven, but the time line is fuzzy, difficult to pinpoint. I remember thinking I get along with my mother now as if I had crossed a certain point, a threshold, with her. As if things were getting better, even though when I think of this flashpoint in time, I can’t remember the worse times that came before. That is starting to scare me, because when I look back now, I see mostly bad times, just a feeling of tension, of doom.

It feels like I’ve been walking on a tightrope toward my mother all my life, holding a long white pole for balance. I start at one end of the rope, on a tiny platform. My mother stands on the other side. I’m trying to get to her, heel to toe, heel to toe, my feet in soft ballet slippers. I’m not sure I can get to her fast enough.

John Banks’ mother is easy to love, so I love her. I think she even loves me back. Her name is Polly and she is young and beautiful—long silky hair, gracefully thin body.

John Banks and I started “going together” toward the end of ninth grade, on May 1, 1992, at 9:17 p.m. We were both fifteen years old. We were standing in my bedroom, me leaning against my first CD player, my small collection of CDs shining in their jewel cases from a shelf tacked to the pink wall. My parents have repainted our house dozens of times over the years, but never my room. It has remained pastel pink, the walls still the color of oozing Pepto-Bismol, or thick insulation that looks like cotton candy.

After John asked me the big question, I said yes, then glanced at the digital clock on the face of the CD player, so I could remember the time. Numbers are important to me. My favorites are three, six, nine, and eleven. I’ve taken up numerology, my notebooks filled with pages where I’ve added numbers over and over, checking my math eleven times. In numerology, you can turn anything into a single digit. Just keep adding and adding until there is only one number left. When you add it up, 5/1/1992 becomes 1, the same number my birth date turns into. The two days are linked, somehow: the day I was born, the day I was reborn through John. Aligned in magic, a numeric language.

The Banks family lives on a patch of land on John’s grandfather’s dairy farm in Bullskin Township, outside Connellsville city limits. When I get my driver’s license, my father worries about me driving down State Route 982 by myself, makes me promise to call as soon as I arrive safely. John’s father works for the Department of Transportation. He drives a steamroller over fresh patches of asphalt, wears an orange T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He isn’t home much. John’s mother welcomes me into their home like a daughter, his sister Missy, three years younger than us, like the sister she doesn’t have. John gets jealous when I sneak into Missy’s room to talk about Stone Temple Pilots or look at her most recent paintings, abstract portraits of Scott Weiland, the reed-thin lead singer with a shock of wavy red hair.

My mother doesn’t like John’s family, but that’s not saying much, as she doesn’t like anyone these days, including my father. They live on separate floors of the house—my father ensconced in the cool of the basement, reading the newspaper and Field & Stream magazine. My mother moves from her bedroom to the dining room table and back, taking turns resting her eyes and paying bills, writing checks with the refillable silver pen. Linda is away at college in Pittsburgh. When she comes home on weekends, she sleeps most of the time, waking to stumble into the kitchen and eat something sugary, Hostess fruit pies, their thick crust painted with a hazy white glaze.

There is never a shortage of sweets in our house. I eat Betty Crocker cake frosting straight from the can, entire boxes of Little Debbie Nutty Bars in one sitting. When I start to gain weight, I begin a secret exercise regimen in my bedroom at night. One hundred and eleven leg lifts from a Denise Austin aerobics tape I remember watching at Pam’s apartment years ago. One hundred and eleven sit-ups with my feet on the floor, then 111 sit-ups with the backs of my calves resting on my bed. John likes my new body, traces my hip bones that stick out when I lie down.

I remember to work different parts of each muscle, to burn the most calories. I have to do these exercises so I can continue my nightly eating binges. I’m too afraid to make myself vomit, although I’ve flirted with pushing the handle of my toothbrush past my molars, making myself gag a few times. I always chicken out.

I’m rarely home, but when I am, the silence has its own temperature, the air degrees cooler than at John’s house. I have my own phone line in my bedroom now, an artery connecting me to John whenever I need him, which is pretty much all the time. He is my teenage husband, my protector, my best and only friend. I call him every morning before school, at 6:11 a.m. We don’t talk long. It’s more of a check-in, making sure we’re both still alive, that we’ve made it through the night.

John makes me kiss him in the hallway at school between each class, gets mad when I try to get away with just a peck on the cheek. He wants French kisses, at least three swipes, he instructs, which is how he refers to the movement of his tongue inside my mouth. One day, Mr. Saltz, a history teacher, catches us making out like this against a locker. He whistles for us to stop—a loud high-pitched whistle from putting two fingers in his mouth. He was able to find out John’s name, but not mine. John was called to the principal’s office the next day after morning announcements. All the students in his homeroom let out the mandatory collective oooooooooooh that happens when a kid gets in trouble.

The principal tells John to kiss me outside of school, which John thinks means next to the buses at the end of the day, so now I’m required to let him have his three swipes while kids watch from the windows, cat calling until my face turns red. I climb the three steps leading into the bus feeling like John has branded me, picturing his handprints glowing bright on my waist, my breasts.

Polly isn’t the first mother I’ve fallen in love with. I have a history of them, beginning with Amy Nickels’s mom, Bubbles, back in elementary school and continuing with Dina’s mom, Teresa, in junior high. Teresa smoked Marlboro Reds and worked gigantic jigsaw puzzles that covered their enormous table in the formal dining room, always something in her hand—a cigarette, a piece of sky. But Polly is the one I’ve fallen hardest for, deeply wishing I was her daughter. I’d rather be John’s sister than his Baby Lynn, anyway. My middle name is Lynn, so he’s given me this nickname, as if I’m his child now. He feeds me and undresses me, swaddles me in blankets in his room, then dry humps me violently while I close my eyes.

★ ★ ★

My mother has become a cat person. It started a few years ago, when she took in a lazy orange stray with long hair, tufts of fur seeping between the pads of his paws, his tail a plume in the air. She named him Midas, and I used to pretend that he could turn me to gold with a single touch, like the folk tale. The cat just started hanging around our yard one day. He even jumped in the Blazer when my dad opened its brown and white door to get in to go to work. Strange for a stray cat to do that, my mother thought. He must really want us to take him in for some reason.

After Midas was in our home for a few days, that reason was discovered. The cat is the reincarnation of my grandfather, JR, my mother’s dead father. Now everything the cat does is analyzed. The way he saunters around like he owns the place, his lumpy fatness, the way he torments my cat, Charmin. Midas hits her like my father hit my mother, my mother says, on her hands and knees scrubbing the bathtub with Comet and a washrag she throws in the trash afterward.

I’ve had Charmin since third grade. She came to me because of superstition, the ways most things do. We sat eating dinner in a fast-food restaurant next to Green Gate Mall in Greensburg, two towns over from Connellsville. My mother always preferred Green Gate to Laurel Mall, which is closer in distance, but has become somewhat of a ghost town now that Metzler’s and Montgomery Ward have closed. I was eating a kid’s meal, a plastic-wrapped burger, a sleeve of french fries, and my prize inside was a folded-up poster of a black and white kitten posing in a basket with balls of multicolored yarn. I’d been asking for a cat for years, but was always met with silence, so I didn’t really think much of tossing out the request yet again, inspired by my superstitions and the poster, which I thought was a sign. This time, my parents exchanged a look and my father said, “Let’s go back to the mall, to the pet store this time.”

I chose Charmin because she was the only kitten there who wasn’t black. She’s gray with a little patch of white at her throat. Black cats are bad luck, so I couldn’t choose any of the three dark kittens in the cage who were trying desperately to climb the metal slats. Instead, I chose the fuzzy gray one who sat in the corner of the pen pretending not to notice me. After I made my selection, the pet store worker retrieved Charmin from the cage and handed her to my father, who held her briefly before she was whisked into a cardboard box with two round holes in the top for breathing.

I carried the trembling box through the mall as my family followed me. I rattled off possible names for the kitten—Downy, Snuggle, and Charmin were the extent of my suggestions. I felt pressed to find a name for her quickly, to claim her before anyone changed their minds about me having her. In spite of years of writing lists of impossible names for imaginary children, I could only think of household products. Somewhere near the food court, it was official. This kitten would be named Charmin.

She’d have plenty of nicknames over the course of her life, the string of which began with Babs, the name of a character I remembered from a short story in our first-grade reading book. Her nicknames bloomed from there—Babs, Babsilina, Babby Babe, Babbit, Babbi-tee, Babbi-tee-tee. I never really thought about where the naming came from, I just knew that this cat was an ever-changing creature. When she would disappear around the house and I couldn’t find her for hours, I believed she was traveling through time. I pictured her in ancient Egypt with the pyramids, flying with Amelia Earhart, riding the trolley in San Francisco, the familiar ding of the trolley bell from the Rice-A-Roni commercial.

Charmin was our first cat, and Midas arrived years later. After that, my mother began actively looking for stray cats to take in. They are her new children. My mother has dreams about Midas talking to her, dreams in which he says to her I’m hungry, Mama, and she feeds him with a baby bottle. My mother believes that she can find the rest of her dead family living through animals in the neighborhood. She borrowed a trap from a neighbor to catch a wild black-haired pregnant cat, kept her in our garage for weeks, the creature wailing and hissing, trying to bite our hands when we replenished her food dish.

One day, as I was leaving the wild cat after refilling her water, I pushed the button for the automatic garage door opener by mistake. I’d meant to flick the light switch beside it, but instead the door rolled up with its noisy lumber and the pregnant cat bolted down the driveway, her swollen belly waving a kind of goodbye to me as she ran. My mother cried all night for that cat, which she believed might have been her mother, though she’d needed more time to be sure.

Midas goes for walks on a leash. My mother bought a green collar for him, a lightweight lead for her to hold. The cat prances around the backyard, as if on parade. My mother waits patiently as he moves slowly, decides to lay under the burning bush for a while, or rub himself against the pink azalea blossoms. The cat doesn’t mind, in fact he likes it.

One evening Midas manages to catch a low-flying crow even though he is tethered to my mother. She doesn’t really see it happen, just the aftermath. She looks away for a moment, and when she looks back, Midas has the black shiny bird between his paws. It makes my mother nervous, because there are many superstitions surrounding crows, like the fortune-telling verse that describes your luck based upon how many crows you see together at once. One for sorrow, two for joy. To make matters worse, a crow flying low over your house is an omen of sickness approaching. The next day, my mother bleaches the baseboards, opens all the windows, sprays everything in the house with lemon Pledge.

My mother started setting out small bowls of cat food around the backyard, hoping to attract her family. My father helped by creating a box out of plywood from the basement Ping-Pong table we didn’t use anymore. He lined it with old rags and newspaper for warmth. Finally, one morning, I looked out on the porch and saw a dirty white cat step out of the box. I yelled for my mother, even though that was forbidden in this house. Linda and I were to seek her out personally if we needed her. She wasn’t an animal to be summoned with calls and whistles, she’d told us when were too young to master snapping our fingers let alone whistling.

But now, yelling is okay if a cat is involved. This one is pregnant, too, and I name her Veronica, after the Elvis Costello song. Is it all in that pretty little head of yours? What goes on in that place in the dark?

About a month after we take her in, Veronica is pacing around my parents’ bedroom, yowling. Honey Louise leans into her for a sniff, and Veronica, who I’ve nicknamed Vern, takes a swipe at the dog with one white paw. Honey Louise lets out a little yelp and backs away into her corner of the room, the old yellow and green afghan I used to masturbate under as a child spread out for her, a makeshift dog bed. All of our animals have middle names, thanks to me. Veronica’s middle name is Ghost, because when we found her (or when she found us as my mother says) she was so dirty that her white fur looked oddly transparent, like an apparition of a cat instead of a real cat. Charmin’s middle name is Tuesday. Not because we brought her home on a Tuesday, but rather after Prince Tuesday on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, which is filmed at the PBS station in Pittsburgh.

Later that morning, Veronica Ghost makes herself comfortable under the corner dresser in Linda’s room. Linda and I watch, our bellies pressed to the maroon carpet, as the cat opens herself, pushes out a total of six kittens—five white and one pitch-black. She eats the afterbirth, something we thought was an urban legend, but there it is, strings of dark red disappearing into Veronica’s fanged mouth. The kittens are making newborn sounds, their mother rolling them around as she licks them into clean balls and they begin to root and nurse. I’m narrating the entire event, as if to record what’s happening into an invisible tape recorder in the air. “Here comes another one!” I say to no one in particular.

My mother has purchased an old playpen from the classifieds in the Daily Courier. She has been preparing it for days, lining it with scraps of blankets and quilts. We will wait until Veronica has finished cleaning the kittens, then we’ll transfer the family into the play pen, a safe container for them to live inside of for a while.

Sometime in the afternoon of their birthday, I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the playpen, just watching Veronica and the kittens, their eyes still sealed shut, the way they root like little blind mice. I begin to notice that Veronica is nursing all of the kittens except one. One white kitten lies behind Veronica, its small body wedged between its mother’s back and the netted wall of the playpen. The other five kittens suck and knead Veronica’s wet stomach with their miniature paws, but this kitten is blocked from drinking. I watch the poor thing climb over Veronica, struggle to push its way toward the bright pink teats. Just when it looks as though it may start to eat, Veronica picks the kitten up by the scruff of its neck with her mouth, tosses it behind her back. As I watch, I feel something hard forming in my belly, in the very guts of me.

Something is not right. I think Veronica wishes to starve the kitten, but how could a mother do that to her child? The kitten cries and cries, sharp little sounds that pierce the air in the room, pierce holes in my body, holes through which my love for this kitten pours. My love forms a small lake of sadness around me, and I wade in it for just a few moments, until I finally stand and run for my father.

★ ★ ★

Dr. Meerhoff retrieves a small bottle of kitten milk from a small refrigerator. He takes a medicine dropper from his white coat pocket, fills it with milk, puts it to the kitten’s lips. It’s a girl, but I haven’t named her. You mustn’t name an animal until you’re sure it will live. So in my mind she is “little girl” for now. Little girl sucks and licks desperately at the tip of the medicine dropper, and as she does, the milk bubbles from her nose. Dr. Meerhoff says she has a cleft palate, which means that there is a hole in the roof of her mouth through which milk gets re-routed instead of going into her belly. He says Veronica knew this, and that is why she was starving little girl. She didn’t want to waste her milk on her.

“You can keep her alive, but you’ll have to hand-feed her with a special dropper until she’s old enough for surgery,” Dr. Meerhoff says. “Or we can keep her for you and let her go.” I think about those words together in the same sentence—keep her, let her go. I look at my father’s face and I know that the kitten will always be little girl. She will have no other name.

We keep Veronica and the surviving kittens in the other room, which is a small room connected to our basement. We’ll shut them in the other room so the dog and other cats won’t bother them. On May 1, 1992, when I say yes to going with John, the kittens are only weeks old. After we make it official, John and I will go down to the other room, say we’re visiting the kittens, but really he’s pinning my stomach against the wall, rubbing the hardness of his jeans against my back while he holds my wrists, squeezes faint red rings into my skin. It begins this way and will always be this way, him shaping me into various poses, using me any way he wants.