Inheritance

Years ago, when I lived in the city, I inherited a cat from a roommate, and I lived with that cat for three years until it became disoriented and started walking into walls. It was as if the cat had suddenly lost its way around the apartment. It would take a wrong turn and arrive at a bookshelf and pause, unable to change direction. I took it to the animal hospital on the Upper East Side where they said the cat probably had a stroke and then the cat collapsed right there on the steel examination table and foamed at the mouth and all the vets and vets-in-training became very excited and there were suddenly several people in the room springing into action, pulling back the cat’s lips and exposing its gums and peeling back its eye lids, and another vet or vet intern walked into the room with greasy-smelling takeout food in a plastic bag about to leak and took out his phone and recorded the whole thing and I was too shocked to yell at them to stop and then one of them said, I think that was it, and listened to the cat’s chest and pronounced the cat dead, and I walked all the way home, half the length of Manhattan, and called the old roommate who was the original owner of the cat and left her a message.

Now I live in the woods upstate. Instead of a cat, I recently babysat a dog. Lucy the dog, courtesy of Cookie, my leftover stepdaughter, who dropped off the dog to go camping with friends. It’s part of the deal of having a leftover stepdaughter. I also have ex-laws, leftover in-laws. Also, you would think their names would be the other way around, that Cookie would be the dog, and Lucy would be the stepdaughter. There’s also the matter of the fox.

I don’t think of myself as a dog person. I’m not a cat person either. I never replaced the cat, but I did miss it. My apartment was too quiet afterwards. I was alone when I went to bed because there was no creature climbing in with me and situating itself in the gap between the pillows and kneading its paws into the bedding like it was making bread, the leftover gesture from nursing, pawing at a nipple, trying to extract milk. I missed the way it licked itself, the way it would get up and walk out of the room, as if ignoring me, but desperately wanting attention, holding its tail up high to make me look at its asshole.

I admit, I felt freed when the cat died. I didn’t have to find a cat sitter when I travelled. I didn’t have to clean the litter box. I didn’t have to try to get the cat into a carrying case when I took it to get shots, which I dutifully continued to do once a year after the cat was abandoned to my care. I learned to approach the cat from behind and wrap a towel around it and stuff it in the bag before it quite knew what was happening, and I ignored its sad howls as I lugged it down the stairs.

You have a friend there, Paul said when Lucy wandered in on camera. Yes, I said. I’m dog sitting. I see that, Paul said. Do you like dogs? he asked. I said, I never had a dog. I think I’m a little scared of them. I never felt that confidence that dog owners seem to have. What do you mean? he asked. I said, a friend told me a story of how her girlfriend brought her dog to a family Thanksgiving and there was another dog there and the girlfriend’s dog started a fight and got the other dog in its jaw and she and her girlfriend had to pry open their dog’s mouth and extract the smaller dog. I’m not sure I could do that, I said. You don’t feel you have dominion over the animals, Paul said. Is that a bible quote? I asked. Should I have that? I asked.

I told Paul nothing much was going on and I should have canceled the session. What do you do when you have this kind of peace? he asked. Oh, I wouldn’t call it peace, I said. My mind is very active. How so? he asked. I brought my hand up to brush the hair out of my face. I watched myself perform the gesture in my video square that I do not close. I am working, I said. I have a lot of things to get together. I said this in a I-don’t-expect-you-to-understand way even though I was paying him to understand. I sometimes think I should get a new therapist. That having a male therapist puts me in a particular role that I am already in the habit of playing.

After I took care of Lucy, it rained for days. Sometimes I barely left the house. I just sat there and fermented and thought about the house potentially sinking into a newly formed marsh, or a newly re-formed marsh, the woods becoming a river valley again to accommodate all the rain. Lucy was gone, so I didn’t have to take her out for a walk and again I felt relieved, not having the duty of care that I apparently should not have been entrusted with.

I met with friends, who asked what is up with me. I said, I’ve had a strange experience. I lost Cookie’s dog and then it turned up dead. Then before I had a chance to take it to be cremated, another animal came and ate it and then I just got rid of it, but I told Cookie the dog was cremated. She didn’t want the ashes? Ruth asked. She hasn’t asked about them, I said. It wasn’t your fault, Dee said. Thank you, I said. That means a lot from you, I said, because Dee has a dog she is inseparable from and carries with her like a favorite fashion accessory in a special purse. I omit the part of the story where I let Lucy off-leash because she seemed like she could handle it as she was very well behaved until I was sitting outside reading a book and when I looked up she was gone. I panicked for an hour but then she popped out of the brush and I exhaled and all was well, but the next time she vanished, she came home wrapped in a blue plastic tarp, the color of an Ikea bag, delivered by my neighbor who expressed his condolences as he slid the blue-wrapped Lucy out of his truck and onto the lawn. After he left, I peeked into the Ikea bag enough to see Lucy was mangled. It was Sunday and the vet was closed. I thought about driving to the city, back to the same animal hospital where I had taken the cat, but in the end, I decided not to. I took care of it. I got rid of it, as I said to Ruth and Dee. Neither of them knew me before I moved up here, back when I had a cat.

Cookie was despondent when I told her about the dog. She threw her arms around my neck and sobbed and I felt her tears and snot against my skin at the opening of my shirt. I remember once walking with Cookie in a park and passing by a group of toddlers and she fawned over their cuteness and said, I think I want three kids. I want something to depend on me for their life.

Maybe there are more dead animals than usual or maybe this happens every summer. Or maybe I have become more attuned to them. I see them more. So many of them lying on the sides of roads or in the middle of the road and everyone just drives by them or drives over them by positioning their tires on either side of the body to avoid the blood and the underside of the car sails over the carcasses. I tell myself that the squirrel who dashed in front of my car made it to the other side. In the garden, I picked two hornworm caterpillars off the tomato plant and tossed them over the fence. They had wasp eggs on their backs that looked like grains of rice and you are supposed to leave them be when they have the wasp eggs because they are the good kind of wasps and the caterpillars babysit them or nurse them or whatever, but I’m killing everything these days and it’s not limited to accidents or who is “not the good kind.” I’m surprised the fox hasn’t died. I can’t believe I still think of myself as a good person.

Cookie stopped in with two of her friends on the way to a wedding in the Berkshires. She’s at the age when everyone is getting married. The fox was out for the day. I cleaned after he left but maybe it wasn’t enough. Cookie looked concerned. Lucy’s dog bed was back out in the living room, now with a slice in it and cloud puffs of stuffing bubbling out. There are scratches on the doorframe and the screen has been shredded. The floor is pockmarked from his claws. I burned incense earlier and Cookie smelled it. She asked if I had adopted a dog. No, I said, I rescued a fox. Really? Cookie was intrigued. How did you do that? It was very tame, I said. The potty training, or whatever you call it, is a bit of a challenge. He’s more like an outdoor cat. Huh, Cookie said. Aren’t you not supposed to do that to wild animals? she asked. Do what? I asked. Bring them inside, domesticate them so they can’t survive on their own. Oh, he can survive, I said. He’s out all day. That’s why he’s not here. Okay, Cookie said. I’m not sure if she believed me. She thinks I am covering up for something. She doesn’t like when there are changes to the house because someday it will be hers. She thinks I am letting it go, destroying it by bringing feral creatures inside. She is worried I will be taken over and I will take the house along with me.

The fox did not come back. Maybe it was Cookie’s smell and he could smell it from outside. Or it was me. I tried to force something. The fox was not a cat. The fox made that clear.

Do you miss having the dog, Paul asked. I was caught off guard. I hadn’t told Paul what happened to Lucy. I didn’t want to repeat the story, dig it up again, even though that’s what I pay him for. No, I said. Not really. I miss the fox, I said, and then I had to explain the whole thing. The fox I took in after Lucy the dog perished. The fox that maybe ate Lucy. The fox I liked more than Lucy. Huh, Paul said, after I relayed that the fox preferred a litter box. Do you think it was someone else’s fox? Maybe someone trained it. People have done that with wolves. No, I don’t think so, I said. What was it about the fox that appealed to you? he asked.

I didn’t want to talk about the fox, especially with Paul, who has a tendency to romanticize heterosexuality. And it would play into that, how I thought of myself as a Beatrix Potter character with the fox, living in a cozy house carved out of a tree stump with clean earth walls and I have a stove and I am a good baker and maker of stew and I wear an apron and I have a hand-sculpted wood table and two chairs, and the fox and I eat off plates and pour cups of tea out of the tea pot and we go outside and gather dew from honeysuckles for cocktails and inside we light candles and snuggle under a patchwork quilt and read tarot cards and I work on my book at a typewriter or with a pen dipped in a pot of blackberry ink and the fox does what the fox does.

That is all ridiculous, I know. It was never like that between us so I cannot miss it. We didn’t have a Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh life. We were both undomesticated. Maybe in a good way.

But I do miss the shit, the threat of a gash. I miss the wet.

Andrea Kleine is a novelist, performance artist, and filmmaker. She is the author of the novels EDEN (HMH/Mariner, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Publishing Triangle Award for LGBTQ fiction; and CALF (Soft Skull Press, 2015), a Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of 2015. She has received numerous honors for her work including support from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Ucross, Baryshnikov Arts, Lighthouse Works, multiple MacDowell fellowships, and many others. Her recent evening-length performance works have been commissioned by New York Live Arts and The Chocolate Factory Theater. Her feature-length nonfiction film, The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be, created in isolation during the pandemic, is currently streaming. She is working on a new film, We Want to Be Ready, and a new novel, How to Make Friends with Birds. She lives in Upstate New York.