Sleeping with Cats Read Online Free Page A

endearing. He looked like me. Everyone we touched looked like us, nieces, nephews, cousins. We all have dark hair and dark dark brown Oriental eyes, a stocky build.
    It’s hard to excavate my childhood. On one hand, I have vivid sensualand emotional memories. I know I was fearful of death. Perhaps it was my favorite aunt on my father’s side dying young from complications after an auto accident on an icy mountain road near Monday’s Corners—my uncle Zimmy, a coal miner, driving and presumably drunk, after a dance. Perhaps it was the death of the first cat I remember, Whiskers. For whatever reason, I was terrified that my mother would suddenly die, or that my grandmother, when she slept with me, would stop breathing. Perhaps it was my mother’s melodramatic streak, for she would assume a pose and say, “You’ll be sorry you did that when I’m dead!” “When I’m dead and gone, you’ll remember how wicked you were to me!” “When you’ve put me in my grave, you’ll understand what it is to be a motherless child, alone in the mean world without anybody to take care of you!”
    My room was painted “robin’s egg blue”—a name that impressed me because I did know what color the eggs of the neighborhood robins were, as sometimes cowbirds would push them from the nests and I would find them broken on the ground.
    Until age nine or ten, I found this tiny house and yard rich and wonderful. I was fascinated by the mirror that hung near the front door, which I have to this day, one of the few relics of my childhood. It has an owl’s head on top, the ornate frame made of once-gilded plaster. On a shelf stood a strange teapot from my great-grandmother back in Lithuania, the pattern long faded into the grayish curve of the sides. When my father broke it in a temper tantrum years later, I was furious, for I had always presumed it would be mine someday. I found the space under the front porch mysterious, sandy and hung with spiderwebs. I loved the front porch, screened in by my father, with its creaky glider I could lie on and stare up at the boards of the dark green ceiling. That was one piece of furniture my cat was allowed on, so we curled up there together.
    We always had a car. My father’s manhood meshed strongly with automobiles, and even if we were eating only oatmeal or beans and potatoes, the car always had gas. After the war, he bought a new car every two years. There was no money to go to the dentist when mother or I had a toothache. I went to school in hand-me-downs, sometimes with AuntRuth’s initials shaming me on my blouses; but a new car was as important to him as the fact that we owned our tiny ramshackle house. To him it meant that we were middle class. We weren’t, but never mind. There was a lawn out front the size of a nine-by-twelve rug, but it had grass growing on it, and that too was a badge of his station in life. These things were very important to my parents. To my father being able to regard himself as middle class was necessary because he had been raised with those pretensions—for his family had to differentiate themselves from the coal miners around them—and to my mother, it was important because she had not been so raised. Her childhood and adolescence had been spent in vicious poverty, too many children and too little of everything else.
    I remember once sitting in Austin, Texas, with the fine poet, my friend Audre Lorde (who wrote a remarkable memoir, Zami ). We were in a Holiday Inn that had at the top one of those restaurants that revolved—a fad of the time. We were looking down into the neighborhood of working-class or poor families, and Audre remarked that living in places where people had little houses and little yards was better than living in the downtown areas of cities. I agreed, thinking of my Detroit neighborhood. At the end of every block loomed dilapidated apartment houses where