Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  I know there are good reasons. The homeless would still be homeless when they got there and the people already living in town wouldn’t welcome them or have the same facilities for helping them that the cities have.

  The argument between big-city and small-town life comes down to this: Is it better to fill your life with a wide variety of friends and events in a big city and expose yourself and your family to all the evils that exist there or is it wiser to settle down to the comfortable, the familiar and possibly dull, in a small town? Can you live a fuller life and thus make life seem longer by going places, doing things and mingling with more interesting people in a big city? Or is the quiet continuity of life in a small town more fulfilling?

  I loved Toulon, but I’m back in New York by choice.

  ANIMALS

  AND PETS

  Cats Are for the Birds

  I have never met a cat I liked.

  As an animal lover, I’m constantly disappointed with myself when there’s a cat around.

  Don’t think I haven’t tried to love cats, because I have. I always try to win their affection or, at the very least, try to establish some kind of relationship. Nothing. A cat will walk on my lap, jump on a table next to me where my host has put a dish of corn chips, or rub against my pants, but there is never any warmth in the cat’s gesture.

  “He likes you,” the host will say.

  Well, if those cats I’ve met like me, they have a plenty strange way of showing it. If I got the kind of affection from the people I like that I get from cats whose owners think they like me, I’d leave home.

  Cat owners are amused by things their cats do that don’t amuse me at all. I am not at all inclined to laugh when a cat walks in my potato chips or plants its claws in my clothes, the better to climb into my hostile lap.

  “He can jump from the top of the refrigerator to the shelf in the pantry,” the cat lover says as if it were one of the most desirable things in the world to have a house pet do.

  “Cassandra!” the owner will say sharply to the cat with the cute name. “Get down, Cassandra!”

  Has any cat in all history ever got down out of a stranger’s lap when requested to do so? Cat lovers point out with pride that cats are independent and beholden to nobody. So who needs a cat as a pet? Our whole lives are filled with people who are independent and don’t pay any attention to what we say. In addition we should have a cat who treats us like dogs?

  I’ve known divorced couples who are friendlier toward each other than the average cat is to its owner.

  Cats have come to my mind today because I just read a newspaper article that said cats are now more numerous as pets in American households than dogs. There are 56 million cats and 51 million dogs, according to the article, although I don’t know how they got the cats to stand still long enough to be counted.

  The story used the word “popular.” It said “Cats are more popular as pets than dogs.” That is ridiculous. Cats may be more numerous than dogs but it doesn’t mean they’re more popular. Easier to take care of, maybe. Inclined to reproduce quickly and in large litters, certainly, but if cats are more popular than the greatest animals that inhabit the earth, dogs, then I am more disappointed than usual in the human race.

  I want to be honest with you—I hate everything about cats. I hate the smell of a house or a store that keeps one. I can’t stand the way they gum their food, and having a pile of kitty litter in the corner of my kitchen is about as attractive a thought as inviting a horse into the living room before the parade.

  Cat lovers find charm in the untamability of the animal. I concede that they are absolutely unsusceptible to taking direction of any kind from any human being but it is not an attribute I cherish in a pet. I was never amused by dogs that would roll over on request but there is something lovable about the dog’s willingness to do the trick just to please its owner. I see nothing wrong with having a pet that gives the uncritical kind of love that most dogs give.

  Cat owners go a long way looking for ways to praise them.

  “We never have any mice, not with Cassandra around,” the owner says with pride.

  “No,” I say, “and you never have any birds around, either.”

  It’s true. Cassandra would just as soon torture a hummingbird to death as kill a mouse.

  Killing things is Cassandra’s idea of having a good time. For my part, I prefer mice to cats. At least mice don’t climb in my lap. What worries me most is not cats but people. If people prefer cats to dogs, how can we trust them to choose a president?

  Bless the Beasts

  It’s a mystery to me where wild animals go in the daytime.

  This morning, like every morning of my vacation, I got up before six o’clock because I don’t want to waste my vacation sleeping. As I pulled myself into my underwear, I looked out the window and saw a deer peek cautiously from the bushy edge of a wooded area that lines a path leading back from behind our house.

  The deer looked both ways up and down the path and, seeing nothing and having no way of knowing I was watching it from my bedroom window, it walked out into the open and sauntered down the path. I judged the deer was just getting up too.

  “How nice,” I thought to myself, “to have a house far enough away from the crowd to have a deer living nearby.”

  But why doesn’t it live here during the day? Where does the deer go? There aren’t that many good places to hide. I don’t know whether it’s the same deer or not but I’ve seen a deer ten times this month and always at dawn or dusk.

  The deer had come from a place about twenty feet behind this pentagonal-shaped little building I put up a few years ago to write in. I know the deer sleep there because the tall grass between the trees is matted down and there are well-worn paths leading through the woods.

  Even though I’ve looked out back at all times of day and night, I’ve never caught one deer asleep. Last night I came out here at eleven o’clock and there was no deer there. Where were they?

  There are lots of deer around and it’s always a happy event when we see one. It’s always “Hey, look! A deer.”

  Last year we had a mother with triplets. I wish I knew whether this deer I saw today was one of them. I wish I knew where the other two are. I have a terrible feeling about that, of course. We aren’t here in the fall.

  Deer have a remarkable ability not only to hide but to thrive side by side with people. They often live in residential areas. You wouldn’t think there was much of any place for them to hide but they seem to find them.

  It’s a good thing people haven’t scared away all the deer. They’re so nice. I’ve never heard of a mean deer and they seem so vulnerable, so unwarlike. I guess there’d be too many of them if a lot weren’t killed but I can’t imagine shooting one. Bang, bang. You’re dead.

  Deer aren’t the only animals good at hiding. I know they’re here but we seldom see a raccoon, a fox, a skunk or a wildcat. I don’t know why woodchucks are so fearless and why the raccoons are so afraid of being seen. Maybe the raccoons have decided to come out just after dark because they know the garbage is best after dinner.

  Yesterday afternoon we had a torrential downpour. Where did the chipmunks go? I’ve never seen a chipmunk out in the rain. I’m kind of surprised animals don’t like getting wet. Even the robins disappear when it rains. Where do all the robins go that are usually picking worms out of our front lawn? I can’t believe the robins all go to nests. I see an awful lot more robins than robins’ nests around here.

  There has been a mouse around our kitchen at night for the past few weeks. I came out for a drink from the refrigerator the other evening and saw it. I can’t figure where the mouse goes in the daytime. I can’t find a hole anywhere that it could get in or out through.

  When I find a box of cookies chewed open, I hate mice. I have some of the deer hunter in me. I get vicious. I decide to buy traps and kill all the mice. Then I remember the only time I did it and the sight of the mouse, eyes bulging, with blood in its mout
h, caught by the neck with the spring-drived bar, was more than I want to face again. I shouldn’t eat so many cookies on vacation anyway.

  There are times when I wish I was as good at hiding during the daytime as the animals around here are.

  Caught in a Trap

  The organizations trying to eliminate cruelty to animals are right but they’re a little shrill. They give people the impression they’re on the lunatic fringe. Readers tend to associate them with the rich woman who dies and leaves a million dollars to her cat.

  With the probable exception of Greenpeace, which has been effective against the baby-seal slaughter, and a few notable local groups, organizations trying to protect animals from abuse and torture have been largely ineffective. They certainly haven’t discouraged women from wearing fur coats.

  The steel-jawed spring trap with jagged teeth that snap shut on an animal’s leg has been the object of humanitarian organizations’ attacks for a hundred years. Their work has made animal lovers feel better but it hasn’t done much for the animals. There are more leg traps and more animals being caught by the leg than ever before. Thoughtful, compassionate women who would open the screen door to let a fly out before they’d kill one do not associate the fur coats they wear with the cruel and bloody death of the animals whose skin they are made of.

  I don’t want to join these organizations or get their voluminous literature depicting the horrors of the leg-hold trap. I’m on the side of the people fighting cruelty to animals. I wish they were more effective. Maybe they ought to direct their campaigns against women who wear furs instead of against the trappers.

  The men who make their living catching and killing animals are a tough lot. They think of their trade as a manly one and they’ve become inured to hard death. They’re used to seeing animals that have been tortured or starved to death in their traps.

  The way to make sure fewer animals are caught in traps is to discourage people from buying and wearing fur coats. The anticruelty organizations might try having some of their members follow fur-wearing women and men with signs reading, THIS ANIMAL DIED A HORRIBLE DEATH.

  The fear of being the object of public scorn would discourage most people from going out in their fox, raccoon or mink coats.

  Anyone who eats animals, as I regularly do, is on shaky ground talking about cruelty to animals. But, like most people, I don’t associate the food on my plate with the animal on the hoof or the bird on the wing. My attitude toward steak is the same as a woman’s attitude toward a fur coat—the animal and the coat do not seem related. The steel trap or the slaughterhouse do not occur to either of us.

  We all look for ways not to worry. We don’t worry about mink coats because the thirty or so minks that go into making a coat are raised on what they euphemistically call “ranches.” The mink live for that one purpose. If they weren’t valuable for their fur, they would never have been bred to life in the first place. We meat-eaters say that about cattle. It’s weak. The ranches the mink live on are not to be confused with the kind of ranch President Reagan owns either.

  These wild little animals are kept in tiny, filthy cages for all their brief lives because their skins are most valuable if they are unblemished. The mink are often drowned or suffocated when their time comes to become a coat. Even this is a little better than being caught in a leg trap.

  Civilization’s effort to become more civilized sometimes seems like a losing battle. How any society treats its animals is an indication of the degree of its civility. During our stewardship of earth’s civilization, we ought not pamper our pets with vitamin-enriched dog food on one hand and close our eyes to the fur stripped from the animals caught in steel traps on the other.

  A Feeling of Helplessness

  Yesterday morning I had orange juice, toast, marmalade, two scrambled eggs and coffee.

  After breakfast I headed for the shop in back of the house. It was pouring rain and, like always, I’d left my umbrella in the back of the car and my raincoat in the shop. There are a lot of trees between the house and the shop and I had old clothes on, so I made a run for it.

  There’s a cement pad in front of the door of the shop and a wooden sill on top of the six-inch step. The sill overhangs the cement by three inches. As I ran toward the door, there was a little flutter on the ground. It startled me briefly until I saw what it was. It was a small black bird and it half hopped and half flew into the bushes in back. I don’t want to lie to you and give you the name of the bird because I don’t know what it was. Lots of birds look like sparrows to me.

  I didn’t think much about it. It seemed as though it was probably a baby bird that hadn’t learned to fly yet. There are a lot of nesting birds around. One purple martin chose the hanging plant on the side porch as a place to lay three eggs. Unfortunately, the hinges are gone on the screen door in front and we’ve been using the side door for going in and out. The bird obviously laid the eggs during the week we were away, when there was no traffic, and must regret it now. We all know how difficult it is to choose the right home.

  About an hour after I first saw the little bird outside the shop, I went out and looked for her again. Under the wooden sill I saw what I hadn’t seen before. It was one lone, baby blue egg. Suddenly I got the whole picture and felt terrible about having scared the bird away. It must have been the mother who had laid the egg there in desperation during the night. I suspect her nest must have been flooded out and the overhang of the doorstep was an emergency haven.

  I got an old piece of towel and moved the egg onto it. After gently wrapping it, I took the bundle to the house and put the towel with the egg in a strainer over a lamp in the living room. With my hand, I tried to test for a spot that would have come closest to the warmth of a real mother bird’s body. This is something about which I have no real knowledge, never having spent any time under a bird’s body.

  Later in the morning I did see the mother bird again. She was hopping around in the woods nearby. The temperature was way down around 60 and it was still raining heavily. Obviously, I needed a veterinarian specializing in ornithology. Should I go get the egg from its warm place over the lamp and put it back down on the cold cement in the hope that the mother would find the egg again? Though even if she did, there was no way she could hatch it and nourish it there until it could fly. For one thing, I’d be going in and out of my shop ten times a day, right over her. On the other hand, what if, by some wild chance, I did exactly the right thing with the egg and it hatches? What do I do then? Do I fly away and come back with flies or worms or whatever it is little birds eat?

  It made me feel ill at ease all day. I knew the mother bird was out there and I knew that little chick was in there but I had no idea how to get the two together. There’s an old nest under the eaves of the garage but birds don’t go to old nests and she’d never have found the egg there anyway.

  It kind of ruined my day. Every time I looked out, I thought about it. I’m no great bird lover but there was something poignant about the situation. It was such a tiny problem in my life and yet I was absolutely helpless.

  When I went to bed last night, I left the light on for the blue egg in the towel. How long does it take for a bird’s egg to get to be a bird, anyway?

  For breakfast today, I had toast, marmalade and coffee. No egg.

  Nature Seems So Unnatural

  It’s strange that Nature isn’t nicer. It sure deals in a lot of death. The animals around our summer place don’t have much of a life and what they do have doesn’t last that long. The flowers don’t have it much better, with either too much or too little rain, too much or too little sun and always a killer weed after them.

  During July, I saw so much of the chipmunks that I got to know them apart. When I left the door of the shop open while I was working, the chippies would come and go past the door. I always spoke to them.

  About a month ago I saw a cat around our place. I don’t know whose cat it is—we’re more than a quarter of a mile from the nearest neighbor—but t
he cat often was hanging around when I got up in the morning.

  There has been a marked drop-off in the activity of mice in our kitchen since I first saw the cat. I imagine it has had something to do with the fact that I now can leave a bag of cookies on the shelf in the pantry at night and not have them nibbled during the night.

  I noticed too, though, that I no longer saw my good friends the chipmunks passing my door or disappearing down their holes, and I was angered by the thought that the cat was killing the chippies.

  This morning at about 6:15, there was a strange cat noise up by the shop as I was dressing. It wasn’t the sound of a cat fight. It was a mournful wail. I didn’t think much of it. I don’t know cat sounds.

  At 9:30 I was loading the car for the trip home. Margie went up to the shop looking for a checkbook I thought I’d left there. She came back with her hand to her mouth and a ghastly look in her face.

  “Someone’s killed a kitten up there,” she said. “It looks as though its throat was slit.”

  I had seen the familiar cat in the area within the past ten minutes so I didn’t think it was her.

  “Kitten?” I asked.

  “It’s not real small but it looks young. It’s terrible. We’ll have to get a shovel and bury it.”

  I went down to the house for some things I wanted to load into the car, putting off the dreaded job. When I finally started up for the shop, I saw the old cat lurking by the far corner of it. The shop is surrounded by woods and brush.

  The cat just looked at me and, as I got closer, I saw a furry object at its feet. She had dragged the dead kitten toward the woods and must have stopped when she saw me coming. You’d think the cat would know I wouldn’t hurt her.

  It seemed apparent that the cat who’d been killing birds, chipmunks and mice must have been the kitten’s mother. She must have been the one who let out the sad, plaintive wail when she found her young one dead.