The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [63]
It's a house easily lost in green or memory. Such is its effaced dignity, a postwar modesty tinged with shame regarding exposed cinderblock foundations, aluminum siding, low ceilings, unadorned windows, door frames, staircase, fireplace. Were it to disappear, fall in or sail off one night, neighbors walking their dogs might say, “Wasn't there a house there among the trees? Maybe. Or maybe we were mistaken.”
It's a house aware of New England's weathers, the changing light altering the interiors as if it wanted to be a different house each season. By summer it stars the upper rooms among treetops. The boys climb out the windows to sit on the roof overlooking the woods where they sun themselves, drink iced coffee.
Winters we live downstairs in front of the fire. Then with the spring thaw the basement floods, soaking this or that box of books and photos we carry up the bulkhead and mete out, pinning pictures to the clothesline, saving as many as we can, throwing the rest away, not without relief.
Our animals bring in the weathers. By now we have nine cats and three dogs who smell of the grass, the autumn leaves, smell of rain, dust, pinesap. Spring, summer, and fall the cats bring their kills into the house—mice, voles, birds. This morning I woke to find a sleek star-nosed mole on my pillow.
Stephen has rescued a kangaroo mouse from Vasco, by far the most gifted hunter. Stephen resuscitated the mouse by rubbing its throat and belly, and kept the mouse as a pet in his old hamster cage. He named him Frederick, who seemed happy to be protected through the winter. By spring he escaped his cage, though we see him now and then around the house, nearly sauntering toward the kitchen.
The cat we call Mr. T. once caught a wood thrush and carried it up to Trevor's room. We discovered Mr. T. and her bird apparently resting together, the bird alert, quiet in its wisdom, Mr. T. lounging next to it. Trevor carefully, stealthily lifted the bird from between Mr. T.'s paws and delivered it outside. It sat on Trevor's finger a few moments, then flew up into the mountain ash where it chirped and crabbed, furious for the near-fatal adventure.
The wide backyard slopes toward the woods, the hillside covered with pine needles on which G.Q. likes to slide on his back. He slides under the huge white pine, the hammock strung between trees, slides toward what will be his own burial ground when, later this year, he'll suddenly have a stroke, his epitaph to read Earth, receive an honored guest…
But from this April window today I can still watch him, Rufus, Buster, and some of the cats as they lounge in the new grass near the woods. Stephen and Trevor have dragged lawn chairs down there and they sun themselves among their brood.
I love those animals who lie so peacefully around my boys. I'm grateful for the many times they have drawn the boys away from anger, sadness. They've taught us in ways only animals can; their muteness insists that we listen with eyes and hearts. We lived blessed in our speculations.
The animals offer us a subject besides ourselves, besides the frustration of human interaction, work, scheduling, bad tempers, fatigue. They become our higher concern, need care and attendance in spite of run-ins with the law, missed classes, failing grades, flat tires, snowstorms, the furnace on the blink, the refrigerator empty. Care of the animals, above all, is what we come to value in one another. To defer to and care properly for them in the midst of crisis is to be a success, to be praised and cherished.
We mirror our animals and they us. Buster mirrors us in his sudden shifts to seizing. We must stop what we are doing and come to his aid. Stripping off the urine-soaked sheets, our T-shirts smeared with feces, we make peace with our own helplessness as we practice a tolerance of a kind we hadn't believed ourselves capable.
As for G.Q., we now know he can't help his aggression