The parlor game goes like this: your porn star name is the name of your first pet and the first street you lived on. My porn star name is Puff Woodhaven. There were some animals before Puff, like the cat who scratched my sister when she was little and was banished, and the Java Temple birds that were done in by a hurricane, but I didn’t personally connect with them.
I knew of the cat who scratched my sister only because the clawing cat, whose name I was never told, was always cited as the reason I couldn’t have one. I knew about the birds because I was the one who found them dead. The Java Temple birds, a type of finch, were a gift from my grandmother.
My mother was one of nine children raised on a farm in North Carolina where animals were food, not pets. She went to the big city, Wilmington, to waitress, go to nursing school, and date soldiers stationed at a nearby Army base. She met one who was shipping out to Hawaii and that seemed the best bet to get off the farm. They married on Dec. 3, 1941. He shipped out to Hawaii, all right, but a little problem called Pearl Harbor meant she had to stay behind. She went back to the farm, where she raised my sister alone, and waited. It was four years before he came back and took them to New York. By that time she had changed her mind about him, but it was too late.
She wasn’t happy about living in her Italian mother-in-law’s house on Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. My grandmother was a hairdresser who looked like one of the Gabor sisters and acted like one, too. Java Temple birds would have been her taste, not my mother’s. Nana had her own money and a social life. My mother was a housewife, far away from her family. To her, Nana was an exotic alien. To Nana, Mama was a rube. They both made fun of each other's accents behind their backs, and not in a nice way. I arrived into this unhappy household.
When I was four, we moved to a Cape Cod style house in Elmont, Long Island. The only way my father could afford it was to rent out the two upstairs rooms…to his mother. So even when we had our own home, Nana was still living with us, much to my mother’s disgust.
Hurricane Diane hit Long Island in August of that year as a heavy, blustery rain. Even though my mother must have known a hurricane was coming, she put the Java Temple birds in the garage where either the noise of the storm scared them to death or the change in the air chilled them. It was a convenient way to get rid them, to claim they had been forgotten in the garage, a place they should never have been anyway. Even at age 4, I knew it was suspicious. And since I was the one who found them dead in the cage, it was not a great first memory to have.
We spent our summer vacation every year in North Carolina on my mother’s family farm. I hated it. All my Southern cousins, aunts and uncles teased me because I was a Yankee. One summer I found a kitten that was my solace and comfort for the entire two weeks. I named it Puff and it licked my ear, an orgasmically pleasant sensation. I can’t imagine or remember how I convinced my parents to let me bring Puff back to New York, but the cat made the trip. Once home, it wasn’t allowed in the house. School started, and I came home one day to find Puff gone. My inquiries met with evasions. The cat was sick…mumble, mumble.
I never knew what happened to Puff. I just knew my mother had something to do with it. I believed my dolls were alive and had feelings, so I had even more of an emotional investment in a real live animal, and it was gone without explanation. No one even suggested looking for it.
Meanwhile, Nana, undeterred by the mysterious hurricane death of the Java Temple birds or the disappearance of Puff, continued to torment my mother. She was always talking about a monkey her boss at the beauty parlor had, how she wanted to give us the monkey. She had us all hopped up about that monkey, and my mother had to be the bad guy and say no monkey. She had a new baby that she didn’t even want, and that was enough.
One thing my mother and Nana agreed on was children: the fewer the better. Anything more than one was viewed as low class in my father’s family. My mother had three. My brother was redeemed by being a boy and a blonde, blued-eyed one at that. I was the unnecessary extra girl.
At Easter we’d get three chicks, one for each of us. Before it became politically incorrect, Woolworth’s would sell chicks that had been dipped in food coloring, so you’d have live pink chicks, green chicks, and blue chicks mixed in with the yellow ones. Chicks are too fragile to live with children or survive long after being bathed in food coloring. They always died and were removed before I knew about it. Or maybe they were just removed and I was told they died. Not one of them made it to chicken, which was just as well, considering what happened to the ducks.
One year we got three ducklings for Easter. I named them Daisy, Daffy and Donald and seemed more enthralled with them than my sister or brother. The ducklings grew up into fat, white ducks and raced around our yard, honking. I could pick them up, but just barely. I’d run around the yard and they’d run with me. There were photographs taken of me hugging the ducks, a whole booklet of 3x3 black and white snapshots. After my mother died and I went through the family photos, I couldn’t find those. I’m not surprised.
One day I came home from school and the ducks were gone. In my memory, there is a photograph in my mind. I am standing in the kitchen. My father is sitting at the kitchen table and my mother is standing by the stove. They look puzzled. My mind has canceled the rest, the part where I feel something, where I react to what I am hearing.
My mother and her accomplice, an old European woman who lived down the block, killed my ducks, plucked them and gutted them. The woman took one carcass as her reward for helping. My mother cooked one for dinner that night and the third was in the freezer. My father is telling my mother she has to get rid of the duck in the refrigerator because it is upsetting me. My mother is annoyed that I am thwarting her plans. She doesn’t understand why my reaction matters.
My grief didn’t stop Dad from eating the already cooked duck, which he dismissed as too greasy. All the love I invested in Daisy, Daffy and Donald…and their eulogy was “too greasy.”
I don’t know how I got past that day, but if I didn’t know it before, I knew it then that I was being raised by a woman who was insensitive and couldn’t be trusted to protect me or anything I cared about.
I never met a therapist who wasn’t appalled by this story. One time I tried to defend my mother by explaining that as a child on a farm, she had raised piglets that were later slaughtered for food. Their bladders could be blown up like balloons. Their little tails made a tasty treat when cooked over an open flame. Those were the stories of her childhood she shared. Intellectually, though, I still could not understand how even a child raised on a farm could do this, being a devotee of Charlotte’s Web.
“But you weren’t raised on a farm,” one therapist pointed out. “Your mother wasn’t thinking about your feelings.”
No, she wasn’t. She never did. But even so, she knew it was a pivotal moment in my childhood and our relationship, even though it was never talked about until the end. I left home at 18 to go to college and never came back. We always lived at great distances from each other and only saw each other for a day or two at a time, now and then.
By the time she was 50, she was in declining health, both mentally and physically. She left my father and tried living with my sister, who was too religious for her. She tried living with one of her own sisters who promptly put her in a mental hospital in South Carolina where electric shock therapy only made her worse. Then she came to stay with me.
I was a gracious, if indifferent, host. I worked during the day and my son was in school. Our condo was tiny. There wasn’t much for her to do and she was alone all day. She couldn’t remember how to cook or clean anymore and the least little thing rattled her. After a week she called my father and said I didn’t need her so she was coming back to him. I drove her to the airport. It was the last time I saw her. Her health declined rapidly after that and she died the following year.
Out of nowhere, as we were walking down the ramp toward the boarding gate at the airport, she started talking about something that obviously bothered her. It was disjointed and rambling and it took me awhile to figure out she was talking about the ducks! Twenty-five years too late, and now we’re going to talk about the ducks? Finally? It was like she knew this was going to be the last time she saw me, and this was what she had to say, but she didn’t know what to say because she still didn’t get it.
She said it was humiliating to have to beg for old lettuce from the grocer. That was her explanation. That was it. The simplicity of her reasoning caught me by surprise. There was no time to go into it anyway. She was literally boarding the plane and she was too mentally disoriented now for me to get any satisfaction out of attacking her.
I didn’t get a chance to say: Long Island is famous for its duck farms. Surely someone sold duck food. Or we could have taken them to Valley Stream Park and let them loose at the pond. I think I could have been persuaded to let my ducks enjoy the company of other ducks there.
Why was decapitating, gutting, and cooking them the only option? We weren’t so poor that we needed the food. And did she really think I was going to be all right with that? Me? The child who never got over my turtle dying?
We never got to have that conversation. So instead, I spent my midlife crisis years drawing pictures of the ducks for a therapist, who was more interested in discovering repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Isn’t childhood duck abuse enough trauma?
They don’t sell chicks or ducks in Woolworth’s anymore. I don’t think there are any Woolworth’s left. Ducks needing to be rescued are not easy to come by and really difficult to get past landlords, so I didn’t become the crazy duck lady. The need to protect and rescue something would take a different turn.
Excerpt from chapter 2 of Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady, my book on Amazon Kindle
