Wedding Cake for Breakfast (12 page)

As Karl and I wheeled past her, she turned and asked, “How did you do without all your lovely things?”

“Actually,” I told her, “I had everything I needed.”

Animal Husbandry

CLAIRE L
A
ZEBNIK

Going into therapy as an adult is useful because it forces you to realize that the values of the family you grew up in aren't necessarily universal, that the world is full of options, and that you should break free of any inculcated mythos that claims there's only one right way to do things.

Another way to figure that out? Get married.

When you join your life with someone else's, the way you've always done things and the way he's always done things are suddenly vying with each other for the honor of being the way you'll both do things from now on. The first few years of marriage you get to choose which traditions and habits are going to stick and which ones are going to be tossed out along with the ugly ceramic candlesticks Great-aunt Beatrice gave you as a wedding present.

When it dawned on me, shortly after we said “I do,” that my husband's family traditions were now mine for the taking, I was eager to game the system, make this whole “merging life” thing work to my advantage, improve my life by stealing freely from his.

For example:

Rob's family had always celebrated Christmas, but all I had known growing up was that wild ride of a holiday called Hanukkah, with its eight underwhelming nights of cheap candles and crappy presents. As a kid, I'd spent December with my nose pressed up to the TV, sighing with envy as George Bailey's children decorated their tree and pressed flower petals and pulled wings off of angels (or whatever it was they did to angels—I was always a little unclear on that one).

All of which is to say: I desperately wanted a Christmas tree. But my parents refused even to consider it. We were Jewish, and Jews didn't have Christmas trees.

And then I married Rob, whose family had always celebrated Christmas. A tree was part of his tradition—and that meant it could be part of ours.

That first year we picked out a small fir and decorated it with origami birds, and the fact that the paper never caught on fire from the hot bulbs proved to me that we were meant to have a tree from then on.

There were other things I borrowed from Rob's world, some small (adults in his family played board and parlor games, something my parents never did) and some big (turns out you
are
allowed to temper truth with kindness, a total revelation to me after growing up in the Painful House of Brutal Honesty). But nothing brought home the way marriage had enriched my options as much as a ten-pound short-haired rescue cat named Lion.

• • • • • • • •

To say my parents aren't into pets is like saying Hannibal Lecter's a bit of a misogynist. My dad is openly contemptuous of anyone who would willingly feed and house a dog or cat. To him, they're disruptive, dirty, demanding drains on your time and money—and, yeah, maybe they are, but so are kids, and my parents went ahead and had five of
those
.

And of course, the five of us begged for pets when we were little. That's what kids do—they ask for pets. They see
Lassie
on TV or read
Old Yeller
and decide their lives won't be complete without a faithful dear old dog to follow at their footsteps and rescue them when they fall down wells.

I was only a toddler at the time, so I have only a vague memory of the brief period of time when Mom and Dad actually succumbed to our pleas and begrudgingly agreed to get a dog. It's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that they actually gave in on this one, but they were young and tired back then and our eyes were big and cute and irresistible in those days.

Not that it really matters: the dog didn't last long.

He came and went with astonishing speed, leaving nothing behind but a couple of black-and-white photos. I've been told that he bit me, but I have no memory of that. (My brother recently claimed that it was all my fault, that I tried to ride the dog like a horse, and my parents had to give him up for his own sake. I do not believe my brother. He used to cheat at Monopoly.)

After that failed experiment—and the subsequent discovery that my sisters all had pretty violent allergies to anything on four legs—my parents achieved a new level of clarity on the subject:

Scovells are not animal people. We do not have pets.

And thus it was. And thus it would ever be.

My siblings became as virulently antipet as our parents. My sisters learned to equate anything furry with itchy eyes, runny noses, blotchiness, and a general loss of sex appeal. My brother's issue was environmental: pets waste energy and resources and give nothing back.

I didn't drink the family Kool-Aid as readily as the others. For years, I remained obsessed with the idea of having a pup all my own. When I was still in elementary school, I read every novel I could find about kids who went blind and subsequently needed guide dogs. (There were more of those than you might think—it was practically a genre unto itself.) It seemed almost too easy: all you had to do was play with one illegal firework and the next thing you knew your parents were thrusting the nicest, smartest, most loyal dog at you.

I was sure I'd found the perfect solution, the one way I could get my parents to budge on the no-pets issue: they couldn't refuse their poor blinded daughter a guide dog, could they?

I thought about it a lot. Way too much. The dog was the most appealing part of the fantasy, but I was also ready to embrace the other aspects of going blind—at least as it was described in these books—like learning to tell your change by feeling the edges of the coins, having someone pin your clothing together so you always had matching outfits, and of course falling in love with the guy in your Braille class who had a deep warm voice and made devilishly funny little jokes about not being able to see.

One limiting factor: I didn't have a lot of access to defective fireworks. But I felt fairly confident I didn't need it. My eyesight was so bad that by eight, I was wearing glasses; by ten, they were as thick as Coke bottles; and by twelve, I was begging for contact lenses so I had some chance of one day being asked out on a date. Clearly I was on a myopic trajectory that would lead me right to guide-dog training camp.

To my disappointment, my vision, awful as it was, remained correctable, and I couldn't figure out any other way to convince my parents to give me a pet. As my years living at home dwindled, so did the odds that I would ever know the joys of curling up with my own little Toto.

For the next phase of my life, I was in college or moving around. Dogs weren't an option, and I forgot about wanting one. My older sisters were all getting married and settling down and having kids. None of them had pets. It never even occurred to me that they might. I assumed I'd never have a pet either. I had finally bought into the family line.

We are not animal people. I am not an animal person.

And thus it was. And thus it would ever be.

• • • • • • • •

And then I married Rob.

Leafing through his old photo albums one day after we'd joined our lives together, I noticed that page after page showed him curled up with some ball of fluff or another. Cats, mostly, but there were also a lot of photos of a silly little dachshund cruelly named Moishe. This wasn't news to me: I'd known Rob had pets growing up. I'd just never thought about it much.

But that day, something that had been dormant inside of me stirred and stretched. The little girl who had dreamed about getting a dog opened her eyes and said, “Now?”

I still wanted a dog—a sweet big loyal retriever, who would be exactly like Old Yeller except for the rabies part. And look what I'd just done—married a man who came from a family that liked dogs! Rob had had a dog! He was all over this dog thing! Our lives had just been permanently joined in matrimony. I could finally have a dog!

Rob said we couldn't get a dog.

It had something to do with his long hours and our small apartment and how it would be left at home too much and need to be walked and blahdy-blah-blah. I pretty much stopped listening at the word
no,
a tactic that's served me well through the subsequent two decades of our marriage.

But I started listening again when he said, “A cat, though . . . We could think about getting a cat.”

A cat?

I didn't know how I felt about that. My exposure to cats was pretty much limited to Disney's Cinderella and various James Bond movies, so I'd always assumed they were evil. Dogs were sweet and cute and loving and threw themselves at rabid wolves for you. But cats? Cats were all claws and teeth and selfishness. They were supervillain accessories.

Still, Rob had had cats his whole childhood. And loved them. And wasn't this whole marriage thing about opening yourself up to someone else's truth? Learning to embrace something that was foreign to you because it felt right to him? Learning, in this case, to embrace a cat?

But none of my allergic sisters would be able to walk into our apartment if we got a cat. And while my parents and brother didn't have that issue, I would knowingly be laying myself open to their criticism and ridicule, since they thought it was immoral to feed a pet when kids were starving all over the world.

On the other hand, Rob's family would be fine with it.

Good enough.

We got the name of a well-regarded cat shelter. It turned out to be a single-family home that had been handed over to the felines. It didn't smell pretty. Every piece of furniture was covered by a blanket of meowing fur.

Now remember, I knew nothing about cats, except that (a) Walt Disney hated them, and (b) my sisters were allergic to them, and (c) they had many sharp parts. And now I was supposed to pick one out of the hundreds that surrounded us at this place? How do you pick out a “good” cat when they're all inherently evil?

I looked around, patted a few, and tried to pretend I wasn't afraid that they might turn on us en masse at any moment.

Even Rob was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. “This one seems nice,” he would say. “Or this one?” We petted, we scooped, we touched, we despaired.

Finally, exhausted and dispirited, I sat down and was just saying, “Maybe we should give up,” when a big yellow short-haired cat suddenly jumped into my lap. He pressed his forehead against mine then started kneading my chest, purring audibly and occasionally pausing to rub his cheek against my chin.

I cut off in midwhine.

“This one,” I said with a certainty I'd never known before in my life and haven't enjoyed since. “I want this one.”

Keep your Old Yellers and your Shilohs and your Lassies. There has never been and there never will be a pet to rival Lion the Cat. (Okay, Lion was a stupid name, but it was still an improvement over “Puffy,” which is what he'd been called up until then.)

He was terrified when we first brought him home, and hid far under the bed. I got on my knees and called to him, and he cautiously crept out and came right to me. My heart melted: he trusted me even though I didn't know the first thing about taking care of him. I took him on my lap, hugged him, and promised I'd do my best to honor that trust.

Take the best qualities of a dog—loyalty, affection, sweetness—and pair them with the best qualities of a cat—self-sufficiency, cleanliness, softness—and you had Lion. He didn't require much in the way of care: he never had a single accident, knew what a litter box was for, and used it from the moment we touched his paw to the sand. He happily ate dry food—no picky eater, he. He was always eager to jump on our laps and knead, but kept himself occupied with chasing down dust motes and attacking dangerous shoelaces when we were busy. He was my constant companion when Rob was working long hours—and Rob, a TV writer, was always working long hours during that first year of our marriage.

Oh, and one more thing? Lion was hypoallergenic. He didn't make anyone sneeze, not even my sensitive sisters.

He was the gift that kept on giving—usually dead rodents, but I appreciated them for the love tokens they were.

The floodgates were open: now that I knew the bliss of pet ownership, I wanted more. We adopted a tiny gray kitten. Named Ender after the hero of my favorite science-fiction novel, he proved that cats, like people, are not all equally lovable: sadly, Ender was a nut-job who'd cuddle with you for five minutes then suddenly gouge out a chunk of your arm and run off, leaving you bloody and cursing.

He did, however, enlighten me in one area: I'd never completely understood the whole “cats have nine lives” thing, but after Ender survived hanging himself from a living room curtain pull (I cut them all after that so he couldn't do it again) and after he'd taken several huge falls from heights he shouldn't have been able to reach in the first place, I realized that cats really do recover from a lot of risky business that would take any other animal down.

I never fell in love with Ender the way I did with Lion, but I tolerated his bad behavior because he was so cute (a mistake I've begged my teenage daughter not to make once she starts dating). Anyway, Lion was sweet enough for both of them: he gave me faith not just in cats but in the idea of pets. He was good and faithful and kind and warm. He was love.

Lion lived with us for many years, in several different apartments and homes, but one night a friend came to visit with his dog, and Lion ran out of the house even though it was dark out. A little while later, I heard the sound of an animal screaming. Once.

He never came home again. I had heard stories of cats that disappeared for long periods of time and then miraculously showed up on their owners' doorsteps, and for months—even years—I clung to the hope that Lion would one day reappear, come strutting up with a throaty meow just as I left the house one day. Except . . . I couldn't forget that scream. It haunted me. I knew what had happened. I could keep hoping I was wrong. But I knew.

Some coyote had attacked and eaten him, in the dark recesses of the overgrown canyon below our house.