by Georgianna Groen
Hostility wasn’t the instinct that caused the cat to scratch. On a feline ferocity scale, its act wouldn’t even reach zero. You could say that the scratch barely happened, and that there wasn’t any need for concern; her granddaughter’s skin wasn’t lined with red rips, and there weren’t any painful red pinholes. It was simply the antsy reaction that a cat can be known to display, a cat that’s asleep and disturbed by the touch of a nice but exasperating human.
The animal was both startled and a little annoyed when the baby began to pet it, but playfulness was in its swipe, too; it impulsively reached with one wide, unsheathed paw, and snagged the trespasser, just a little.
Her granddaughter was just about a year and a half and as gentle as feminine gets. She had nothing of a little boy’s conquering pounce; she just wanted to tenderly stroke. When she felt the sharp claws on her fingers, she pulled herself in like a turtle. Her little face slackened from her jaw drooping down, and her eyes glimmered over with tears.
“It’s okay, baby,” the grandmother responded, and felt just like crying. “The kitty cat loves you, Honey. You just surprised him, that’s all.”
And for the rest of her life she was going to wonder, how could that scene be the singular memory that slammed into her like a truck? How could that be the one image that ate her alive with pain? How could an incident so small break her heart, in the face of everything else? But it stayed in her head, clear as daylight, that harmless light clawing, and the baby’s wounded eyes. The memory came at her inevitably, like alarm clocks and hated commercials, but with something far worse than displeasure; she felt a huge fear when she thought of it, and she prayed, even though she was agnostic.
At the time of the scratch, her granddaughter’s mother had abandoned the child many times. The child’s father, her son, had custody, and he sadly was shacked up at her house. He didn’t know what else to do. Childcare was two hundred dollars a week. He had to be both mother and father. And there was another child with them, the baby’s six-year old sister. She wasn’t his by DNA. She was his stepchild, but that didn’t matter; he was the guy she called Dad. The little girls shared a mother addicted to crack, and that made the threesome very tight.
Several months later the grandmother walked into the living room, the place where the scratching had happened. She found her son napping with the baby on the couch. The toddler’s head was tilted on his bent-up knee, and the rest of her draped like strewn flowers in the space between his legs. Her sister, the veteran motherless stoic, was watching inane cartoons.
The grandmother grabbed the remote. She clicked it to Nickelodeon, a channel with good stuff for kids.
The viewer protested, “But I love Tom and Jerry!”
“Sweetie, there are much better things to watch.” The woman was aware that those stupid cartoons were what the child’s mother always stashed her in front of when she showed up. This child showed the signs of the gifted. She was an original, undaunted, a miracle rising from squalor. The grandmother would not let those gifts parch unnoticed. She would not let the crackhead or the TV seep in.
Maybe that was the whole thing. Maybe the cat scratch was etched in her head because she hadn’t been able to stop it. An animal’s sudden behavior is something you can’t click away. Even though the claws hadn’t done any harm and a childhood spent watching a cat and mouse cartoon might indeed do a lot of damage, the claws were the thing to be afraid of, the claws were the thing that was haunting, because the claws were beyond her control.
Babies reached out with their trusting little hands and sometimes their souls got demolished.
She thought about the “crisis pregnancy clinics” that strove to keep knocked-up girls pregnant. She thought about the models of the uteri set up there, the splayed-open wombs showing stark resin fetuses at various stages of growth. The point was to never destroy them, the point was to cherish them, and let them balloon, and never put an end to those heartbeats, and to later on yank them, plump and ready for breathing, from the warm sweet home of the belly.
And then hold them out to the perils, the cruelties, the rejections, the losses, the abandonings, the letdowns, the claws.
It was all really simple: you just had to be there. You just had to stay, and stay. It came down to nothing more. Children grew strong because you stayed there. Adults stayed strong because once, long ago, someone important didn’t leave. But some people didn’t get it. Somehow they just didn’t care. Some pushed out babies and went back to crack. Some bullied women to keep the seed growing but were gone like the wind when it flowered. She was related to someone who’d said: “People who can’t afford health care should just be left to die.” He wasn’t being facetious. He had a wife, a great home, and a pension. He was Happy Days stable, and it made him a prick. No, she wanted to scream at him, no one should ever be left.
Even the grandmother’s cat understood the importance of everything staying, of keeping everything in place. If she wasn’t awake by dawn, he’d get anxious. She was usually up by then. As the curtains grew bright with the newly risen sun, if she wasn’t yet stirring he’d get in her face and meow and meow and meow. He’d bat her shut eyes with his paws. If he got no response, there’d be claws. He knew not to claw at her eyes - that’s what makes cats truly pets - but he’d go for her covered feet. He’d get biting and scratching, as if a crazed schizophrenic. Or maybe he was being like a surgeon down there, stabbing her back to life.
It worked of course. She would rise, quite annoyed but accepting, knowing that the animal just needed to see that everything was the same. That she would do what she did every morning at dawn, which was add some new kibble to his yesterday’s-chow, and freshen his water bowl.
And children bit and scratched too, in their way, when they couldn’t wake adults. Years later, when the baby was five, her rage was like a wildcat that lived under the table and lashed out at feet without warning. She and her big sister and now a third, her tiny sister, now lived in a house their father managed to rent. Their mother had come and gone more times, and gone was the far greater truth. She’d parked herself there for a bit, with the new baby, and then taken off, just like always. The little girl had seen her father crazy with pain, she’d seen him yell and break things and knock her mother down. She had learned how to be a seductress. At three she had learned to climb onto Daddy’s lap and focus right into his eyes, and stroke on his face and coo to him, to make him relax around Mommy. And Daddy had never once swatted her for that, not like the mean sleeping cat did.
But mostly she spat like a terrified kitten. She’d seen months, nearly years, go by with nothing of that feminine person around, nothing of that hovering angel that all other kids got to keep. She’d been told a hundred times over, that Mommy was sick, Mommy was in the hospital, Mommy just couldn’t come home; because nobody wanted her to know about and talk about a suburban mother turned crack whore.
She failed kindergarten. She couldn’t sit still. She hollered and pouted and shut her mind off when anyone tried to teach her. Her grandmother visited regularly, and one day when the woman was sitting with her and trying to get her to talk, the little girl looked at her archly and said, with an eerily adult air: “What I do is none of your business. I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re not part of this family.” And her grandmother immediately informed her that yes she was part of this family, it was indescribably so; that she wouldn’t be here without her, and neither, of course, would her daddy. The child then got solemn and quiet, and couldn’t seem to think of a comeback because the concept was new and amazing. Her soul had become so unhinged and free-floating, out in that motherless space, that it was different to have someone grab onto her now, and say yes, something big out there gathers, and yes, there’s much more than that hole she’d fallen into like a discarded animal.
Yes, I do come and go, the grandmother thought to herself, and that makes you hate my guts. But someday you’ll understand, my poor baby, that grandparents are supposed to come and go, and that Grandma will always come back.
The woman was on a mission to show her. The mission was so big she didn’t see it. When something’s as important as breathing, you don’t ever think about it. You don’t even know that it’s there. It’s just like the cord that the fetus doesn’t know of, that keeps it alive and growing.
Her granddaughter, that one in the middle, that child who was the least spared, the one who unlike her big sister wasn’t blessed with a drive to self-build, and who unlike her baby sister wasn’t blessed with a stepmother’s rescue at the very lucky age of just two, was the emblem, the manifestation, of herself when at six her own mother dropped dead, and before that had not been an addict but a caregiver almost as gone, felled by her aneurysm and her husband’s desertion, her ability to mother having shrunk to a speck, and then all of a sudden another stroke pounced, and she was snatched right out of the air.
The grandmother knew it could get worse for her granddaughter, just as it got worse . . . but I’m here for you, she wanted to tell her, I promise I won’t disappear. Death wasn’t going to take her from this child, not even if she felt the age of heart attacks creeping closer, not even if she felt such a heavy fatigue that she fell into naps like a sloth . . . her anger was a thousand times stronger than the child’s, because age only made it more honed; she’d had to fight the killer claws since she was small, and now she would fight them for her.
No, I won’t let you fall away from me, like my sons did when they were young boys, when I was so young and things were so hard that no matter how much I applied my fierce youth, life just kept pummeling me . . . once I was just like your daddy, I was making my biggest mistake, and right in the middle of my idiocy, I pushed him forth out of my womb. That’s what we do when we’re young, you see; we create you out of the refuse of our drastically foolish dreams. And then, of course, you get clawed. I hurt your daddy and your uncles. I was never on drugs and my health never failed me, but I took on way too much. I was insanely alone, and there I was being the world to three boys, who needed a man and a whole lot more income and a mother not beaten by stress. Maybe I can make it all up to your daddy, by giving you and your sisters the full-blown strong woman I wasn’t, and by giving you love that’s not tattered by beasts, strange scratching phantoms that can’t be expelled, that grow big inside like a baby, that attack and tear asunder the force of a mother who’s single and poor and so motherless herself, with absolutely nowhere to turn.
But it wasn’t all for her son. It was for a whole new generation. She had known from the moment of her granddaughter’s birth, and from the moment that her stepgranddaughter made it official by being the first to say Grandma, that she had to be around for those two little girls, because her time had come to be grand.
And also because they were girls. And then there were three little girls. After more episodes of taking back the addict, her son finally got himself free. Four hearts mangled by the street cat.
His mother helped out, but clearly, what her son dearly needed was a good, strong, sweet wife. He found one, a godsend, a true, steadfast girl, who ardently wanted to help raise the kids. And God, she was even pretty!
Was life really that fair, sometimes?
This young woman told her, again and again, that she’d never leave those children.
Well, all right, okay. She’d see. When the grandmother was little and her mother had totally vanished, her aunt had taken her in. That kin had emphatically and repeatedly said: “I promise I’ll never, ever leave you.” And she’d left her not once, but twice. And also there were others who dumped her.
And now it shot through her, that panicked wrenched hurting, that image of the baby, getting cat-scratched.
* * * * * * *
“Thank you, oh thank you, oh thank you so much!” the stepmother exclaimed over presents she’d bought her. Beautiful dresses and sexy, classy tops, things to make her feel like a goddess. You couldn’t buy love, and for sure you couldn’t nail it, nothing was ever that firm, but you could ease the feeling of being a drudge, you could do that for someone hardworking.
And also, you could do that for someone downhearted.
Her son had grabbed his wife’s cats by their heads - not by the scruffs of their necks, like he should have - and had thrown them in his trunk and driven them away and stuck them in a distant field. They’d been pissing and shitting all over the house, and one day, a bit drunk, he’d had quite enough.
His mother was worried about how that affected their owner, the stepmom the family adored. Her son could be awful sometimes. He should have taken the cats to a shelter, but no, he couldn’t be bothered; he thought his mate stalled their removal, so his punitive impulse was to boot them somewhere.
His mother was aware that he and one of his brothers had a very bad history with cats. When they were boys and their stepfather abused them, they’d done some unspeakable things.
She’d taken what she’d heard and pushed it way down so she could still love her sons.
But she couldn’t push it down this time, not with this young woman’s heartbreak and anger over those cats. Her son had grown into a man, just another human being that you couldn’t keep from harm, or from harming himself, or others. The only thing to do was to comfort the girl - to shelter her from her own son.
After the stepmom had donned the new clothes, and found they all fit and looked stunning, and the grandmother felt that she’d restored some well-being to a place where it recently died, she turned her attention to her granddaughter, the middle child, the one who’d once been most at risk. She said, “What a wonderful job you’ve done, setting the table so well!”
The child, now eight years old, had lost all her wrath. Now she was grounded in wanting to please, in wanting to show she could do that.
“My mom taught me how to set tables.” She meant the stepmom, of course. “Can I wash the dishes, after dinner? I know how to do that well, too.”
“Of course you can wash the dishes! And I know you’ll do a great job!”
The grandmother remembered what had happened to her when she was that age. She carried it around on her face. She played it in her head with its smashed, broken noises, something like a scratched DVD. Soon after her aunt had courageously taken her, her father, successful but working too hard to have time to raise his daughter, had stepped in and decided it was unfair for him to have to support her aunt’s husband. The guy was a laid-off, hard-drinking wreck, and her father was afraid that the money he sent would get siphoned off for the other man’s lifestyle. His grown-up, oldest daughter, the issue from his first marriage, had offered to take his youngest daughter for pay. This half-sibling was twenty years older than she, quite old enough to serve as her mother. So off she was packed, to her.
Just why this stranger came through for her then, she would never understand. It must have been all about the money. From her very first moment with that woman, she knew that she wasn’t loved. This caregiver was cold, stern, and critical. She almost never gave hugs. And she was quick to beat her hard on her butt, with long-handled wooden scrubbing brushes over typical little-kid mood swings.
A couple of years later, when the woman pushed her out, a shrink who’d been called to evaluate her said the problem was that it was evident that the child couldn’t take her as her mother.
The child wasn’t so sure about that. She knew how to make beds the hospital way, and also how to knit and crochet; she’d let the new mom teach her all that. She’d watched her bake cakes and make suppers; she’d been eager to shadow her idol. And when she got sent to an overnight camp that was supposed to last for two weeks, she was released after just five days. She’d been crying so hard, so homesick, that she couldn’t function at all there.
Someone had come for her at the camp, and had driven her back to her “mother.” When she arrived at the home she missed dearly, she could see that the woman was disgusted. Not glad to see her at all. She’d been desperately crying for this person for days, and clearly, this person despised it.
That shrink was dead wrong. She hadn’t been loved back, that’s all.
The first time she’d touched herself she had been six, right after her mother died. One day after Sunday school she was sprawled on the sofa in her aunt’s sunny living room. Everyone else was outside. She pulled up her pretty little dress and started rubbing; she had recently discovered that felt good. That day she got the most amazing surprise of her very short life: that day, she found out just how good.
When she was eight and came home from camp and her sick sibling-mother only shunned her, she spent that whole summer under a tree, making passionate love to herself.
“I went to her school today,” the stepmother was announcing. “I read storybooks to her whole class.” She was telling this with a smile. She was glowing with a sweet blooming pride. And the granddaughter was drawing and writing nearby, as serene and asexual as any loved child.
During the following summer, the grandmother collected the three little girls and brought them to her home in Cape Cod. She moved there several years back and the children came every July. They always stayed longer than a month. She always made sure they were busy: day camp, art classes, beach explorations galore, whale watches, boogey-boarding, windsurfing, high teas, and gardening. And last but not least, horseback riding.
They would have what she’d never been able to give her children. And they would have and not lose what she’d only seen glimmers of when she was a little girl. She would hang all the fruits of their brilliance and fun all over the walls of her house: framed joyful photos, dangling crafts, and artwork, stuff to sustain her long after they’d left, when all that remained was those remnants of their presence, and the cold lonely drives out to see them.
She was giving those children what few people had given her when she was a child, people like her father, who was tied up with his business and who paid other people to raise her, but would sometimes show up to thrill her. He took her to wonderful places. One of those places was a dude ranch. And that was even something that stayed, that was even something that no one took away until she decided they should. For three straight Augusts, when she was ten, eleven, and twelve, her father fed her passion for horses.
During that summer with the granddaughters, she provided the middle child, the eight-year-old, with her first few riding lessons. The child had no clue how to make the pony go, and the pony, a rather savvy creature, was fully aware of her greenness and stubbornly just stood still. It wouldn’t even take one step. But there were good teachers around them, and they got the pony going, and they taught the little rider how to take charge and make it go all by herself.
The father and stepmother saw the last lesson; they had sojourned out to the Cape. By then her granddaughter was able to get the pony to trot.
It was wonderful to see her with that much control and to be able to show that off, but she had quite a ways to go - for one thing, she butt-bumped, which was painful to watch. No one had taught her how to post yet, and the pony would trot for just a few yards before settling into a walk. The human astride it had no rhythm yet so it would not keep trotting.
But the child was nonetheless happy and proud; she was firmly on top of a beloved beast that she was learning how to merge with and rule; and then all of a sudden in the middle of a trot the pony broke into a canter. Something had spooked it and made it bolt forth; it was coming around a big curve when it happened, straight toward the adults who watched it, and the little girl’s fear faced them, too.
The feeling of that long, leggy lope was too different, it was new and it was proof that she’d lost the control, and most of all, it was so fast - her eyes and mouth widened with terrified surprise. She swayed too much on the saddle, flailing wide and loopy with the reins; and then she fell off, onto the sand.
Her grandmother ran out to her, gathered her up, and felt her frantic heartbeat and her trembling. The child wasn’t hurt, but dear God how she could have been, she’d been thrown just a bit past a thick railroad tie that was used as a small jumping hurtle. The pony had cantered right over that bump, and the worst thing to think of was what could have happened if she’d landed on that protruding wood slab. There certainly would have been bruises, unforgettable pain, and possibly even real injuries. A broken rib maybe, or a shin, or even a fractured jaw.
In an annex of the grandmother’s blood-bright mental gallery, there were portraits of the very dead Superman star, the beautiful Christopher Reeves, who’d been permanently felled by a horse jump . . . suddenly they loomed huge and lurid.
“It’s okay, Honey,” her father called out. “That was no worse than falling off your bike.” Her stepmom said cheering things, too.
But the grandmother knew it was much worse than that. This was the same as the cat scratch.
The master riding instructor strode over. “You’ve got to get right back on,” she said. “The thing to do, whenever you get thrown, is just to get right back on.”
The wisdom of those words pulled the moment back together. The little girl still quivered, and her face beneath the helmet was just like a hiding mouse and yet, she seemed to understand. The pony was brought back over to her, and she mounted and walked it around.
There were no further incidents with the animal.
After that summer, the grandmother was busy making plans for the following summer. She would make the next year even better. She’d discovered a horseback riding day camp. That would be just the thing! She was scared of the child getting injured, but mostly she felt happy and excited. She was scared of the child getting left by the stepmother, but she also felt something sort of lovely. It was something quite new to her, that feeling, maybe it was that nice sounding thing she’d always heard about, that thing people called “security.” Was maturity making her soft? She had never, ever allowed herself such a tranquil state of repose; it spread like a well-tended garden inside her. Maybe she was starting to believe in such things, maybe because faith was winning her over, maybe because faith was something strong, something fighting, maybe faith was something that stayed.
