Six months before my daughter Jessie was born I found a Japanese Bobtail crouched under the still-warm engine of a red Ford Galaxy. I’m partial to just-parked cars – the soft ticking of their motors as they cool, the waves of heat, the freshly pressured rubber hoses. On any given night I can spot the warmest, snuggest automobile in my neighborhood and nearly always find a cat there, purring, trying to force its way up inside the transmission. The night I found Meckie I was roaming the streets of Bowling Green, Ohio, looking for cats with more than five toes on each foot. My wife Susan was finishing her political science degree at a local university; I was teaching a high school biology class and researching a mutant gene called polydactyl, which can produce as many as eight toes per paw. For some reason, 15 percent of the cats in Boston, Massachusetts have extra toes. While Susan huffed and groaned with the weight of her pregnancy I furiously wrote grant proposals for funding to Boston and to Nova Scotia, where evidence suggests the odd gene may have originated.
The wind gets spooky in Bowling Green in late October. It carries a chill from Lake Erie and a scent of oil and steam, but brackish somehow, as if from sunken ships. I was always hungry in those days: since the middle of her second month Susan had refused to shop or cook. She’d developed a taste for pickled okra, a particular brand from Texas. She sat in front of the television taking little bites out of the jar, tossing the hard stem ends into a shoebox she’d set by her chair for that purpose. I didn’t mind quick trips to the store or kitchen duty, but I didn’t keep a regular schedule. Most evenings I’d just heat some frozen eggrolls for dinner. “If you’re going out, bring home a bottle of peanut oil,” Susan called one night as I left the house with my pockets full of cat chow. “Or some Cheez Whiz. I’d I like to try it on my okra.”
I walked to a nearby corner grocery and saw the red Galaxy parked in front. I’d never been beneath a Galaxy. Spitfires were my favorite – a good seven inches between the engine block and the ground. Delta 88s weren’t bad, either. I heard a plaintive whine and bent to look. A black and white kitten. She didn’t want to leave the metal’s warmth; she’d backed herself up to the right front tire and was sharpening her claws on the axle. I lay beneath the bumper with her, cozy, out of the wind. The owner of the car came out and chased us both down the road.
On the way home the kitten slapped my ankles, snagging one of my socks. I named her Meckie after Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera. Her claws were like blades. Susan cried because I’d forgotten the Cheez Whiz.
She accused me of not wanting the baby.
“What do you mean? Of course I want the baby,” I said.
“You always leave the house after dark. Where do you go?”
“Just walking. The Dorfmans’ve bought a brand-new Mazda. It’s a little cramped underneath, but the engine traps heat.”
“You’re unhappy living here with me.”
“Sweetie –”
“It’s horrible, admit it. My awful urpiness in the mornings –”
“I’m with you. You know that.”
“Even my fingers are fat,” she said.
I kissed her forehead. She touched my arms. Meckie had scratched the hell out of my wrists; the marks appeared as though I’d taken a razor blade to myself over the bathroom sink.
______
Ultrasound: the first snapshots of our daughter. Dr. Potts, Susan’s obstetrician, a big man with skinny lips, spread the images on his office desk for us early one morning. All I could see in the pictures were two blurry bars, like a pair of unsharpened pencils, and what appeared to be a series of holes surrounded by rippling waves. The computer-enhanced compositions reminded me of bleak Scandinavian paintings I’d seen in art classes in college – impressionistic studies of people screaming on rocky, violent seashores.
I pointed to one of the pencils. “Is that a penis?” I asked Potts. “We’re going to have a boy?”
“That’s the head,” he said. His ears were padded with tufts of hair as pale as his papery skin. “I can’t be certain, but my guess is you’re looking at a lovely little girl.”
Susan beamed and squeezed my fingers.
In the Honda on the way home I carried the ultrasound prints in my shirt pocket, along with a grocery list: Cheez Whiz, cat food, Ajax, scallions .
Susan wouldn’t let go of my hand. Today she was happy about the baby. Jessie hadn’t been penciled in on our calendar, but when we first got the news we decided to forge ahead. We’d always talked about raising a child someday. We reasoned that, eventually, most good citizens marshalled their genes and produced worthy heirs – it was one of the things that made them good citizens.
Susan raised my hand to her lips and kissed my bitten nails. “We’ll teach her to wipe herself gently so she doesn’t get a rash,” she said, “and to go easy on the coconut when she’s baking a cake because coconut’s expensive now at the market, and we’ll show her how Peter Jennings’s face is more trustworthy than Dan Rather’s, though they’ll both be wrinkly by the time she’s watching the news, and we’ll impress on her –”
The edges of the prints nudged my skin through the thin cotton fabric of my shirt. I shivered.
A bulky cop stopped us at a crosswalk a block from our house. Healthy-looking children with all their limbs in place ran across the street, clanking their Back to the Future lunch pails against perfectly formed little thighs.
Behind us a woman in a rumbling Pontiac lined her mouth with lipstick. She appraised herself rather critically, I thought, in her rearview mirror. I fantasized walking back to her car, opening the passenger door, and sliding in beside her.
“And we’ll teach her to curtsy and to pray, and to have –” Susan caught her breath and gripped my hand till it hurt. “– unassailable character. Right, Josh?”
______
The decision to have a child comes from a deep and private place in the heart, the part that holds marriage sacred, that honors long-range planning and decent behavior. And despite these family pillars, you’re never really sure if what you wanted was actually a baby.
I tried to be happy. I tried to prepare. And all the while I was thinking, “Holy God, we’re going to be swimming in shit.”
Susan taught me a prayer to pass on to the child:
“Angel of God – come on, Josh, do it with me.”
“My guardian dear,” I recited.
“To whom God’s love.”
“Entrusts me here.”
“Ever this day … Joshua, ever this day…”
“I forget.”
“Be …”
“At my side.”
“To light, to guard.”
“To rule and guide.”
Lately she prayed I’d do something with Meckie before the baby moved in. “The Knife,” as we called the cat (two of our quilts were in tatters), had grown into a good, solid hunter. Each day after school I’d come home to find pulled-apart little creature-hearts on our porch.
“I won’t have our daughter crawling through diseased former things on the floor,” Susan told me one night.
I was chopping daikon for a Chinese dinner. Chinese had been Susie’s favorite before she’d started craving okra. “Let me work with her,” I said.
“You can’t work with cats. They’re untrainable. You, of all people, should know that.” She looked at me.
“What is it?” I said.
“I was wondering what kind of daddy you’ll make.”
“Shall we trot out all my flaws? They’re in a bag here somewhere – no no, those are the mushrooms …”
She laughed. “Our little girl’ll be screaming for supper and you’ll be out with your head up a Rabbit’s ass.”
I liked to hear her laugh. “Help me clobber these carrots, will you?” I handed her a knife. “I’m ready for her, Susie. I’m ready for anything.”
“How do you know?”
“My dreams,” I said.
Usually my past returned m sleep. Like videotapes, my dreams replayed hard facts and added very little by way of imagination or editorial comment. Often at night my mind recalled the trips I’d taken on research grants: Barcelona, where I once found a rare wire-haired Balinese under an I.R.A.-brand delivery truck, Iran in the Shah’s last year of power. Behind an outdoor market in Tehran I’d followed a beautiful blotched tabby down a dead-end alley. The cat had whorls instead of stripes, an uncommon marking in the Middle East, and I wanted to note its gender, the state of its health, etc. Two SAVAK agents picked me up and took me in for questioning – strange behavior, they said. Suspicious character.
But last night my dreams had been different. “Forward-looking,” I told Susan. “In one dream I followed a slender Siamese under a classic white Fairlane. When I poked my head beneath the bumper, the oil pan started to leak and out popped a baby drenched in ro-W-40. ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘Take me home and show me the good life, with Mars bars and lots of TV.’”
Susan shook her head. “A good father wouldn’t let that old thing in the house.” She pointed at Meckie. “And a really good father’ d promise not to leave –”
“Ah,” I said. “I see.”
Susan frequently complained about my field trips – my “animal habits,” she called them. She also said I didn’t make enough money. Absolutely true. “If you joined an honest-to-goodness research institute, instead of teaching, you’d have more security and benefits,” she said. “You’re thirty-four, Josh. We need to be more settled.” Also true – and the only course of action now that we were about to have a child. But I liked chasing cats around the globe. It kept me on my toes, and made me feel younger than I was.
______
One evening, late in her second trimester, after a wheezy, throbbing day in which Susan had had second thoughts – about the baby, about me, about virtually the entire planet (oddly, these black moods were always followed by weeks of maternal rapture) – I snapped a picture of her in the bath. Dime-sized bubbles of soap wavered and popped on her belly. “It’s all over for me,” she said when she saw me with the camera. She mourned her lost youth. “From now on, it’s chicken broth and buckets of drool.” At that instant she looked to me more sensual than ever. Radiant and pink, with her red hair pulled back. I wanted to cuddle under a Buick with her. “Talk to me,” I said.
“It’s your fault I’m this way.”
The flashcube sizzled.
______
Perilous, the first year of our marriage. Several near breakups. I hated to remember it now, but I couldn’t forget in light of this permanent bond, this pencil-shaped new person that was about to be visited upon us.
Our joint therapist had once described Susan’s restlessness as “low-level depression.” He said she was suffering from poor self-esteem, stemming from her childhood (her father was a stern Lutheran minister). “Until she corrects her self-image,” the doctor told us, “she can’t be happy.” This may have been the case, but it seemed to me at the time that Susie’s biggest problem was low-level horniness: a constant mild ache, wherever she was, to run her hands along the naked flesh of a stranger.
I was fairly well-acquainted with this sort of thing myself. But I felt that a person had to be disciplined, otherwise you left sticky messes in your wake.
For months after we’d introduced ourselves at college we circled each other warily. She was dating someone. A banker. My banker, as it happened. I was seeing several women. We felt an attraction, a grab, at the very least a tug – the emotional equivalent of a stubbed toe, perhaps. We had a series of coincidental half-meetings in restaurants and malls, hurried conversations, and one night, when we both failed to float safe excuses, a half-attempt at sex. Susan stopped us. She was still partially committed to the banker, she said, and could only go so far.
I began to call her every day. I suggested we meet in disaster areas (earthquakes, tornadoes) where buildings and electrical power had been halved. We could sit together in candlelight, I said, sipping straight Half-and-Half (leaving it unfinished, of course) and listen to bootleg tapes I’d bought in high school. I had the Beatles in rehearsal: they ran through parts of songs, then quit. “I’ll only wear half my clothes if you’ll just wear half of yours,” I said.
I had no romantic illusions about Susie. I was never intrigued by the mystery of unattainability. I simply felt lucky and at home when I heard her voice.
After the wedding she’d sometimes insist, “I never wanted a husband.”
“Then why did you marry me?” I’d say.
She wouldn’t answer. She’d just look at me and repeat, “I never wanted a husband.”
______
I went to the vet and asked her if I could prepare Meckie for the baby, so that animal and child wouldn’t be in each other’s way. She gave me a short list of tips.
1) Before the Big Day arrives, expose your cat to small infants. If you can’t find a neighbor baby ask relatives and friends to videotape their children. Play the tapes for your pet.
2) Familiarize your cat with baby smells. Powder, food, clothes. If possible, bring home a dirty diaper and let the cat get acquainted with the scent.
One night I called Frank Peterson, the vice principal at the high school where I taught. His wife Janet had just had a baby. “Frank? Joshua Storey here. Fine, fine,” I said into the phone. “Yeah, I heard, that’s great. Susie’s eight months along herself. I know, they get that way –”
“Get what way?” Susan snapped.
“Listen, we have this kitty over here, and I was wondering if we could borrow one of little Michael’s diapers, a soiled one, yeah, to show it … oh sure, we’d wash it before we brought it back,” I promised.
Susan dog-eared her copy of Henry Kissinger’s American Foreign Policy, on which she had an upcoming exam. “For God’s sake,” she said. “Haven’t these people heard of Pampers?”
3) Set up the crib before the infant arrives and train your pet to stay away from it. Otherwise, the cat may want to sleep with your child.
In a tiny room just off the kitchen I cleared a space next to the washer and dryer, built the crib, hung pink curtains, and taped up several pages torn from a Dumbo coloring book I’d found at the store. I sat in a corner of the room gripping a water pistol, a finely detailed German Luger, and squirted Meckie whenever she came near the crib. She glared at me, hatefully. “Screw you both,” I said to my wife and my cat on particularly bad days. Susan wasn’t talking much. Okra stems lay in the shoebox at her feet. I called my mother for advice. “Be patient with her, Josh. Her body’s going through changes.”
“You’re telling me. She’s as big as the World Trade Center.”
“What are you feeding her?”
I glanced at the box. “Size nines,” I said.
______
“What will our baby look like?” Susie asked me one night. “I mean, genetically speaking, what are the possibilities?”
“It’s hard to predict,” I said. I pictured various members of our families. “She could be big as a battleship or small as a bath toy.”
Susie wasn’t pleased. She was so large by now she couldn’t haul herself out of a chair without my help.
One evening after dinner she wanted to take my picture. “With your shirt off,” she demanded, posing me by a window.
“Why?” I asked.
“When our daughter’s old enough to appreciate men, I want her to see how young and sexy her father was.”
“Somehow you just made me feel old.”
She popped a flashcube onto the camera. “Flex your muscles, Josh. A little Schwarzenegger action.”
“Our kid’s going to think her parents were pornographers,” I said. I was depressed. That morning I’d resigned my post at the high school, effective at the end of the summer. Bio-Systems Research, Inc. of Toledo, Ohio, a small outfit on a farm road south of Lake Erie, had hired me to write grant proposals at three times the salary I was making as a teacher. Instantly I’d become a better potential father in Susie’s eyes, a more upstanding citizen, but my schedule looked daunting to me and I wouldn’t earn a vacation for another two years.
“Glad to have you on our team,” Wayne Miller, my new boss, had told me at lunch. “We’ve been trying to bag federal dollars for months. We’re going to need you ‘round the clock here at first.”
I was going to miss chasing cats. With my long hours I feared I’d miss seeing Jessie grow up.
Susie circled me with the camera, standing on tiptoe or crouching (sort of), as though she couldn’t see me.
“Josh?”
“Yes?”
“Smile.”
______
In Buenos Aires, shortly after the military coup in March ’76, I saw a gorgeous gray Angora with only three legs, limping from car to car. Under the tense scrutiny of several heavily armed young soldiers, I coaxed the cat out of a jeep and took it to a vet. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.
In the days before Jessie was born I’d lie in bed with Susan, rubbing baby oil on her belly, trying to calm her fears about the world. “Our little girl’ll be so helpless …,” she’d say. I practiced my lullabies on her, from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats:
The Rum Tum Tugger is artful and knowing.
The Rum Tum Tugger doesn’t care for a cuddle;
But he’ll leap on your lap in the middle of your sewing,
For there’s nothing he enjoys like a horrible muddle.
______
The night Susan gave birth I decided I couldn’t be a father after all. I’d driven her (fumbling with the gear shift, finding fifth when I wanted third) to the hospital early in the afternoon, but Potts said it was a false alarm. “She’ll probably be in labor yet for several hours,” he told me.
The maternity wing’s waiting room was empty except for myself and two other expectant dads who’d obviously been through the process before. They seemed relaxed, and were having a mild argument about the causes of sudden infant death syndrome.
I found Potts again and asked him what I’d miss if I left for twenty minutes. “Go get yourself some dinner,” he said. “She’ll be all right.”
At home I treated Meckie to half a pound of mozzarella. (I had been saving it for pizza, but Susan informed me that morning we’d have to start watching our calories – “For the baby’s sake,” she said. “We need to stay fit.”) I stood in the middle of the kitchen with the grater in my hand, and let the cheese filings fall to the floor. Meckie purred around my ankles.
After my hot pot pie I took a walk around the block. The red lights of the radio tower at the end of our street darkened nearby roofs; the tower’s guy wires creaked. A cold lake breeze gave me goosebumps. I didn’t know my neighbors very well but I’d become intimate with their cars. Tonight the Moore’s Datsun was warm. Its windows were down – the interior smelled of French fries. The Ryersons had finally washed their station wagon.
Yellow lights burned in windows up and down the neighborhood. Dinnertime. Squash, potatoes, beets. I felt keenly the rhythms of the families around me.
In Fred and Alice Dorfman’s level drive I noticed a plastic baby doll, left by their daughter after play. The driveway was spotted with oil. I recalled the dream I’d had about the Fair-lane, but this coincidence didn’t startle me as much as the doll itself. Its features were lifelike and lovely. And casual. As though infancy, or birth itself, could be taken for granted – a notion so at odds with what I’d felt for months now, I became disoriented and somehow frightened.
I lingered in the street. Then, I remember, I ran back home, switched off all the lights. I hopped into the Honda and raced without thinking through town. Video stores lined the highway. Life-sized cardboard Rambos stood in the store windows, preening. Slick muscles and guns. Several filling stations appeared to be failing along this strip of road. Owners had taped hand-lettered signs to their pumps: “Sorry, No Gas.”
In a gravel parking lot just outside the city, teenaged boys crumpled cans of beer. They carried bowling balls in rhinestone-studded bags.
I imagined my daughter sitting beside me in the car, her umbilical cord wrapped like a seat belt around her waist. Take a look around, Jess, this is it, I thought.
Diesel trucks kicked up dust in my lane. To my right, the tattered husks of old drive-in movie screens. The torn white canvases on which actors used to dance, kiss, sing, flapped now in the breeze like huge cicada shells.
Past fields of mint and wild onion I drove. Their loamy smells stung tears into my eyes. For a long time, with the radio on, I didn’t slow down or stop.
______
Sometimes when you’ve been joking with a friend, then you shake hands and part, you may still have the trace of a smile on your lips – a little facial echo of a happy moment. That’s how Susan looked in her hospital bed when I walked into her room from the nursery.
She reached out her hand to me. The space around her pillow smelled of roses (I’d bought a dozen at an all-night Safeway when I’d driven back to town) and rubbing alcohol.
“Hi,” I said. I kissed her eyebrows.
“Have you seen her?”
“I’ve seen her.”
“Does she have all her fingers and toes?”
“Yes, and she came with her own little American Express card.”
Susan smiled. “Josh,” she said.
“I love you,” I said.
“I think I want to rest for a minute.”
“Okay,” I whispered. “Angel of God –”
She squeezed my hand. “My guardian dear …” But she slept before I reached the next line.
______
This afternoon the baby and I lie on the floor staring in delight and disgust at the Knife’s latest gift: a half-dead pigeon, one wing meekly thumping the carpet. I say, “We’d better get this out of here before your mother sees it, Jess.”
But Susie’s standing in the doorway, laughing, with the camera. She’s quit fighting the squalor that baby and pet and an occasionally still-ambivalent husband – not to mention her own uncertainties – have brought to her life. She’s not very good with the Kodak; heads and feet tend to be missing from her shots. I once read that cats (depending on their gene-patterns) can’t see many colors. They can’t tell gray from green. Complex shapes are fairly easy for them to resolve, but they can’t distinguish human faces.
Meckie stares at me as though I’ll snatch her catch. She’s right. Then I’ll vacuum the carpet.
But first, I think, I’ll lie still for a while. It’s pleasant here on the floor. I watch my wife twist the lens and try to pull our daughter into focus.