Sleeping with Cats Read Online Free

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    When I was three, my father was rehired and we moved into a house my parents bought, where we would live until I was fifteen. It was a tiny house with asbestos siding that had been foreclosed on by the bank. Myparents would be paying it off for the next ten years. It was in a working-class neighborhood largely Irish, Polish Catholic, and African-American. My parents had a bad Depression and it was not over, although my father was back at work. My mother was a housewife. I will not say she did not work, because she worked incessantly. My mother had been taken out of school in the middle of the tenth grade and sent to work as a chambermaid. My father had finished high school and gone to a technical night school, which had given him some sort of credential as an engineer, although he did not have a college diploma. He worked for Westinghouse installing and repairing heavy machinery. He worked for them at least fifty years, never promoted until the end when he was the last person left in the Detroit office; then they gave him an honorary title: supervisor—of himself.
    Lucy and Lon moved out as tenant farmers to a small holding near the River Rouge Ford Plant. Every Sunday we drove to see them. I could see and smell the red smoke across the marshes. My mother would bring cakes or home-canned goods to Lucy and Lon. In exchange, they would kill a chicken for us to take home. I remember Lucy swinging the chicken and then chopping the head off, and how much blood gushed out. Through much of my early childhood, until World War II brought prosperity to Detroit, that was the only meat we could afford. I remember plucking the chickens and scorching the stumps of the feathers. Perhaps that made it easier to pluck out the quill ends. Out of the mysterious opened belly of the chicken came eggs, some with shells and some without, down to the tiniest little yellow and red worlds. My mother made a wonderful soup with the unborn eggs. Then she usually made thechicken as a pot roast with vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, celery: a dish I still make, with many variations. My mother was not a good cook, but she had her successes—most of which I have learned by trial and error to duplicate.
    Even after my father went back to work, times were hard and there was little surplus. Sometimes it was difficult to make the house payments, and my mother would take me with her when she went to the bank to stave them off. My mother’s only tool in the battle with bureaucracy and men with power was flirtation. She was an accomplished and persuasive flirt, a tiny woman with an extravagant hourglass figure, intense dark brown eyes and short curly black hair. She had a way of walking, a way of moving, a way of sitting that drew men’s eyes to her. She moved like the dancer two of her sisters had been. Half the men we dealt with were convinced she was crazy about them, but she mostly felt contempt. They were marks. She had a job to do and she did it. She was obsessed with my father, not with any of these men about whom she had a rich vocabulary of Yiddish insults which she muttered to me after each encounter.
    I shared my parents’ bedroom until my brother was forced by my parents to marry his girlfriend Isabelle. Our parents came home unexpectedly and caught Grant and Isabelle having sex on the couch while they were baby-sitting me. The marriage did not last, but I inherited my brother’s room—not really a room but a hallway. This was the space my grandmother shared with me every summer. Isabelle, Grant’s first wife, was a redhead with creamy skin. I remember he played the guitar then. I adored him. He was warm and emotional where my father was cold and withdrawn and judgmental. I adored my father too when I was little, but I think by the time I was seven, I had learned I could not please him. My brother would get bored if I asked too much of him, but while he was paying attention, he was affectionate and funny and