• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Apparently, Peter can. He may not have performed a DIY funeral on either of his parents, but he has come close.

Peter’s mother, Peggy, loved her cat Heloise, or at least loved to make a fuss about her. (Apparently there was once an Abelard, but that was well before my time.) All day long, Peggy would scream from her bed: “Shut the door! The cat will get out!” or “Where’s the cat? Have you let the cat escape?” She routinely whipped her homecare nurses into a panic. Keeping track of Heloise seemed to be her way of staying connected to the world as she was dying of cancer.

Peggy left Heloise to my daughter, Cleo. By that time, Heloise must have been quite old, but she was so petite and spry that we always thought of her as a kitten. We were all surprised when she began to slow down and eventually died.

Channeling the care Christopher gave his parents, Peter pulled out all the stops for the burial of Heloise. As her body lay covered, rotting in the grass, with an occasional dousing of bleach to ward off the maggots, Peter spent two days crafting her a slight mahogany coffin with meticulous dovetail joints and fancy brass hardware. When it was finally stained and polished to perfection, and Heloise was safely screwed inside, the funeral began. It was fit for a Kennedy. The children walked her coffin to our pet cemetery on a wagon covered with an American flag. There was a BB-gun salute—not twenty-one-gun, but at least twelve-gun—as her remains were lowered into the ground. When the soil was filled in, a lion statue was placed as a headstone. As I watched Peter’s face, it occurred to me that taking such care to bury his mother’s cat was actually his way of letting go of his mother.

I MAKE FUN OF DAIRY AIR AND PRETEND TO BE ON THE LOOKOUT for a better piece of property, but the truth is, this scruffy place works perfectly for our family. We sit on some of the most beautiful landscape in the Northeast, and Peter would have me living in a tent as long as the view was good. There is a mix of woods and fields and a lovely pond that freezes over in the winter, hard enough for us to convince ourselves it is safe for ice skating. Any other time of year, the pond reflects the colors of the spectacular sunsets that melt into the Taconic Mountains. In the fall, the country is downright Rockwellesque, with the color of the changing leaves displayed in about a thousand different hues. The place looks especially picturesque in the winter, when a pristine blanket of snow turns the crap on the lawn into a wonderland of sculpture and our leaky heating produces a perfect row of icicles along the eaves. We could never leave, anyway, with Heloise planted firmly in the pet cemetery. So here I stay, and perhaps one day I will uncover for myself all the hidden potential.

“How did girls get lapped when they had such a clear lead?”

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

I MUST HAVE BEEN JACK THE RIPPER, OR PERHAPS Lucrezia Borgia, in a previous life, since in this one I have been sentenced to life in a two-bedroom apartment with six males. Cleo escaped early on in search of female companion-ship—her choice of an all-girl boarding school not in the least accidental. Devoid of her feminine charms, my close quarters are populated with a gender I am incapable of understanding. I wouldn’t describe myself as a girly-girl, but I do enjoy all the accoutrements that come with being me: the jewelry, the makeup, and of course the shoes. If I lived in a house full of five little girls I would be in heaven. I would sew little matching dresses for all of us and our dolls, purchase exquisite tiaras from the shop down the street, and teach them how to use sex as a weapon and Google-stalk ex-boyfriends. We’d have tea parties, of course, and once we perfected our manners we would take field trips to places like the Plaza or Serendipity, or hell, even American Girl, just to show off our raised pinky fingers. Had I known that my girl time was going to be so fleeting, I would have let Cleo wear that damn pink princess tutu to school