July 1 – Holy Mary Mother of God, I can see nipples on our cat and her stomach sticks out on both sides, really big. She’s waddling now and I’m pretty sure she’s going to have kittens soon. I want to ask you a very childish thing. When is it going to happen? Will you let me be the first one to know?? Please don’t tell Jeannie first.
Clearly my strategy had failed, appealing directly to God. Well, as long as I was breathing in and out, I wasn’t going to continue this losing streak. I had learned my painful lesson. Number one, no more lies. And number two, I had to switch my attention to the Blessed Mother. It was a crossroads moment; I could feel the pivotal change stirring around me. I had to pledge my allegiance to the holy Mother of God and implore her for favors, except when emergency matters required executive decisions from the very top. Jesus probably wouldn’t even notice me on my knees over there in front of her statue; I’d be just one less person tugging at his robes. He’s got enough to do. But the Blessed Mother? To begin with, there are probably way less people clamoring after her. I could feel the instant improvement of my chances with this simple brainstorm. I felt the surge of hope, a residual rush of future glory.
Then one morning, after 6:30 Mass, Daddy took me to Glendale to drop off the ownership papers for a used car he had sold.
The man who answered the door had paint drips all over his pants, overflowing onto his sandals. On the walls of this big room where he worked hung enormous paintings of the insides of flowers, as if he was close enough to be a bee. The paintings were huge, filling up an entire wall, and the colors were magnificent! I could easily imagine myself to be the bee, buzzing over these luscious reds, oranges, yellows, and greens! And also the artist made big decorations out of found things, like ropes and rusted cans that were flattened. He called them “sculptures.” Against an entire wall, car doors that had been smashed up in accidents leaned side by side. He had begun a painting of one of the doors, and it was dusty with a deep purple color; strangely the smashed parts were the most interesting to look at.
I wanted to touch everything I saw. The place was splattered with all the colors of his paintings, with brushes in stained jars, piles of magazines and scraps of metal and torn images from these magazines stuck on the wall here and there. It was a mess, but I didn’t get the instant feeling that I wanted to put everything away. Instead, I had to keep staring at it all. Inside me, electrical impulses were bouncing around, and yet I felt so comfortable here, almost like I could live here. I felt thirsty for what I was feeling, but the thirst had snuck up on me and there I was, standing in the middle of the ocean, parched for more.
All the way back in the car, I chattered about the beautiful paintings. I wanted to do that all day—paint pictures with bright colors and make things.
“Well, Annie,” Daddy interrupted me, “people are attracted to art because it can be beautiful, and the soul craves beauty, but it’s important to remember what’s really important in life. It’s not the physical beauty of a piece of art, which is temporal, it’s the beauty of your soul, which is eternal.”
“I know Daddy, I know! But art can be your work when you’re alive, can’t it?!” I expected him to tell me about the temptations that painting and creating interesting shapes would offer and why it would be bad for my salvation. I couldn’t think of any famous artists, but the artists of the Renaissance made religious paintings that were turned into holy cards by the Catholic Church. Maybe the church needs more of those. If I learned how to make portraits of saints, there would be no temptation danger. Not like in Hollywood, where unsavory sinners and tempters lurked around every turn. I was willing to give up any ideas I had about being an actor on the spot, if I could just do that.
“It’s difficult to make a living as an artist, Annie,” Daddy said. “People don’t need art. They need food and transportation and schooling. But art is not essential for survival.” I hadn’t thought of this. It was so disappointing what he was saying. “When the economy is on a downturn, you can’t sell your work. People only buy what they really need.”
I felt like screaming. How could something so instantly dazzling be unimportant? This feeling was jumping around everywhere in my body; I was practically trembling with it. It felt more real and essential than the saints themselves. Even the idea of my guardian angel, who followed me around like my shadow pal all my life, receded in my imagination. I was meant to feel like this, wasn’t I? If God hadn’t meant for me to want this, He wouldn’t have made me feel this way.
“I wouldn’t recommend it for you,” Daddy summarized. “Why not think about becoming a secretary? Secretaries can make a good living.”
I thought about the Russian female astronaut who last month became the first woman in space. Aside from wondering why they’re sending people up in spaceships and making such a fuss about it, I was proud of that woman. Because she wanted to go tearing into space in a rocket. That was her idea of a great life, and she stuck with it. At least she got a chance.
We don’t call ourselves House of Bacon for nothing. That Saturday, as I inhaled the smell of bacon fat sizzling on the flat griddle, I heard this high-pitched screechy “meow, meow, meow,” a small, short sound coming from the back porch. It sounded like someone was choking Bitty. I ran out. She was clinging to the screen door, hanging on for dear life by her paws, with a little mouse in her mouth, and out of the mouth of the mouse came this urgent tiny sound that somehow pierced the morning, “Meow, meow, meow!” I pushed open the door, and Bitty put the thing down at my feet. I reached down to pick it up off the cement. Of course I was a Muscle Head for thinking it was a rodent—it was a kitten. The creature was wet and its eyes were sewn shut. Bitty had staggered around the corner so I followed her with this tiny warm lump in my hand.
Bitty was my cat. A while back, Paul (#1) had rescued her from an experiment at JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab), and I had laid claim to her. I was a mark for small creatures with limited IQ and a cuteness factor and I immediately pitied her, imagining the lab experiments she was probably subjected to. Attaching electric charges to her to see if her hair spiked. Or maybe they just let her float around in zero gravity and bang into things. They could have done anything to her. I didn’t have to get in a fight over ownership rights, like the Russians were doing over Cuba, or like Jeannie and I do over everything, because there was a certain inevitable neglect which followed anything new to the house after a few days went by. The new thing, if it was alive, could give you attention and make you feel chosen and important, but sooner or later, it also demanded that you look at it and give it a stream of your energy and focus. The cat was so small and insignificant looking that we called her Bitty. I liked her immediately because she had orange and white fur. She was a marmalade cat and our hair practically matched.
Once the novelty of her small face and thin meow wore off, I was the one who fed Bitty and patted her. We had our own language; I’d call her in a high-pitched squeaky voice, “Here Bitty Bitty!” She was never far away. I’d pick her up and flip her over on her back and hold her like a baby suckling at my non-existent breast, gazing into those yellow marble eyes as if she were my very own. I got her to purr within ten seconds of the flip. Once she accidentally ran past the feet of Mother or Daddy while they were closing up the house for the night and somehow, out of fifteen beds, she found mine and slept next to my face until Daddy shook my feet for 6:30 Mass.
So like this, we became the two sustaining members of the Mutual Admiration Society. She wasn’t very big. Maybe her growth was stunted by the experiments at JPL, and by the time she got pregnant, she still looked like an adolescent kitten. When her belly swelled up and her titties started to show, she could hardly walk around without falling over. She tilted to one side then caught her balance, lurching to the other side. Once she got to the other side she listed back. She walked in a sort of stumble and lollop. Mother said she would hide herself when “her time came,” and Mother would know. In spite of this very credible source, I was just beginning to think independently. I created a number of havens from cardboard boxes lined with newspaper and put them in corners, under the beds, in closets, and around bushes, just in case Mother was wrong.
Now Bitty jumped up onto the wooden chair with the old cushion and lay on her side, furiously licking her butt, her back leg jutting way above her head. Lick, lick, lick, lick. I realized she had rejected the box I had strategically placed in the corner of the porch, but I grabbed the towel in it and rubbed off the baby kitty in my palm until it wasn’t so wet and put it down by her belly of ten breasts, hoping the kitty would know which one to suck on. Bitty had ruined the cushion; it was now covered with blood and shiny goo. A dark little ball slowly inched out. A head. Lick, lick, lick, lick. Then the body slid out. Bitty stopped licking. She seemed exhausted. The kitten just lay there. Clara pushed open the screen door.
“Aren’t you getting ready? The photographer is going to be here.” A new mumu she had just sewn billowed around her.
“Yeah, but look at this! Bitty is having her kittens! Stand back, but you can look.” Clara crouched down. I picked up the second one and rubbed it off and put it next to the first one.
“Okay, that one is Number One and that’s Number Two,” I said, pointing to the two lumps. Just then the head of another kitten emerged.
“Where’s the Daddy cat?” Clara asked. I shrugged.
“Mother says that animals don’t have souls, so it doesn’t matter if the dad never shows up.” I proudly shared my knowledge of my very own cat with Clara.
“They’re born out of wedlock,” she added.
“Clara, there’s no such thing as out of wedlock in the animal world. They don’t get married!”
“How convenient for them,” she said.
“We can baptize them anyway, just in case,” I added. “Besides, they’ll learn everything they’ll need to survive from their mother, so you don’t need to worry.”
“I’m not worried about them,” Clara stated. “How many do you think she has in there?” Then she picked up the ends of her mumu and sat down on the floorboards next to me.
“They usually come in litters,” I replied, stating the obvious but feeling like an expert. “The Catholic Church is probably going to be proud of Bitty, once she gets them all out. Maybe she’ll have five.”
“Maybe,” said Clara sarcastically. “Maybe the Catholic Church will make her a saint.”
So the two of us, Clara in her huge mumu, and me starving for my bacon breakfast, sat and watched Bitty push out a total of seven kittens and lick off the shiny bag around each kitten. Once I knew there were seven, I re-named them all after the seven sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders, and Matrimony.
I went into the house and put on my dress for the family portrait between the births of Extreme Unction and Holy Orders, and after Matrimony was born, our human family stood out on the front lawn and had our picture taken, with Mother and Daddy in the middle and Jude on Mother’s lap. I stood next to Clara, her eyes wet, in the back row. I held her hand and squeezed it when they snapped the picture. I thought about Bitty.
She was another creature altogether, and she never said one word in human language, but she trusted me, a non-cat, well enough to give me her firstborn. She jumped up on the screen door with her baby in her mouth and dropped it off at my feet! She knew I would pick it up and take care of it. She wasn’t afraid of me at all! She wanted me to watch her during the birth of six more kittens. And you know what I think? I think she was proud of herself.