Stone Kitten

Marina Antropow Cramer

The flea market is crowded, in spite of the heat and nearly unbearable humidity. Vera and George walk slowly among the tables, not always together. Amber rides perched on her father’s shoulders.

George had not wanted to go. “What do you need? Can’t you go without me?” He sounded peevish.

“I don’t need anything. It’s been so hot, and Amber’s been miserable, teething, and you working every night this week. Please, George, I just need us to go somewhere out of this house.” Vera stopped, dismayed by the whiny note of entreaty in her voice.

“I hate crowds,” he grumbled, turning off the television. “Especially in the summer.” 

George is thin, freckled. He wears a faded blue baseball cap appliqued with his college insignia. He was a pitcher, once. “I was damn good, too,” he told Vera when they first knew each other. It was a rare moment of pride she couldn’t appreciate at the time.

They were only two years apart, but George seemed older to her, and, paradoxically, still a child. To Vera’s mind, baseball was a boy’s pastime, not a serious adult endeavor.

His other passion was American history. “What will you do with it?” she asked when he graduated. “Teach? Be a writer, a Civil War scholar?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Not teach, no. I hate explaining things to people who don’t really care.”

George had tried to find work in his field, but found he did not qualify for even the lowest rung in any academic institution without the required advanced degrees. 

Vera, her own degree still months away, announced, “I’m pregnant.” 

They married.

There was no money for graduate school. George took a job at Woolworth’s. Amber, born six months after the wedding, didn’t care where he worked. Three years ago, George moved up to assistant manager and took a transfer to a larger store; Sunday is his only day off.

Vera had studied foreign languages – French, Italian. She wrote poetry and the occasional short story. It wasn’t a sure career path, but she wasn’t sure a career was what she wanted. She read MS magazine, admired Gloria Steinem’s feminist fire, but didn’t burn her bra.

She teaches part-time in the local school district. She worked hard to convince the school board to offer a voluntary enrichment program of foreign languages and creative writing to fifth and sixth graders. She polled parents, compiled statistics from similar districts, obtained letters of recommendation from professors, a couple of influential friends, the mayor. She did it all herself, and the program is a success, so the victory is truly her own.

George was skeptical at first, then bemused at her determination. Finally, he withdrew, as from something he could not have done himself and did not have the generosity of character to praise. In any case, Vera’s income is barely enough to cover the cost of Amber’s babysitter.

George works several evenings a week. At home, he spends hours closeted in a little study he made for himself in the basement of their run-down rented house. He fills page after page of a growing stack of notebooks with his tiny, precise script. Vera has tried to ask about his project, and he has tried to explain, but he lacks patience and she, genuine interest. If she sometimes asks, “How’s it going?” he always says, “Fine,” in a tone so flat that further conversation about it withers.

Vera has stopped writing. When she’s not teaching, she fills her days with needlework, gardening, and Amber. Amber is bright, energetic, curious. Demanding. Vera’s best friends, Nina and Solange, are not married; they don’t share her preoccupation with motherhood, and she finds their world of work and carefree dating alien and irrelevant. She feels exhausted, but also restless, isolated. The neighborhood’s young mothers have not welcomed her, a renter among suburban homeowners. It seems having a mortgage is the price of admission to their circle.

Sunday is the only day she and George can do things they are too tired for on weekdays.

That spring, with Amber old enough to follow her around, Vera threw herself into gardening. she cleared a good-sized patch in the sunny back part of the yard, the part not shaded by the massive dying beech at the edge of the property. She dug and hoed and fertilized happily for hours. On her knees, hands deep in the soil, with the sun hot on her neck and the smell of earth all around, she found a serenity brightened by her toddler’s cheerful prattling. At night, she drew diagrams, read up on crop rotation, successive planting, organic gardening methods. 

“Come see my garden,” she said to her husband one early summer evening. He obliged, nodding silently while she pointed out the beans, showed off the cabbages, counted the blossoms on the tomato plants.

In late July, he walked with her between the verdant rows to a large grouping of lush-leaved, low-growing plants that dominated the back part of the garden. “What’s this?” 

“Oh,” Vera laughed. “Don’t you remember? That’s zucchini. I didn’t know the plants would get so big. I planted twelve little seeds, and look how they grew.”

George surveyed the overgrown patch and said nothing.

“Look at my carrots.” She pulled a fingerling from the yielding ground. “Almost big enough to eat.” George smiled tolerantly and went back to the house.

*

It is late afternoon when Vera finds the kitten, buried among broken vintage toys, chipped dishes, and mismatched cutlery. She is hot, tired, thirsty, and determined not to leave the flea market until the last possible moment. Some of the merchants are starting to pack their wares; some have already gone, leaving crushed food containers, soda cans, and empty cartons behind. The ground is littered with candy wrappers and cigarette butts. Sticky pools of melted ice cream draw hordes of swarming ants.

But home is a warren of small cluttered rooms, with a toddler for company. After Amber’s bedtime, Vera knows she’ll face spending the evening alone. George is leafing through a fat volume at the used book stand – not even Amber’s insistent drumming on his head can disturb his concentration. He will buy the book, of course, and retreat with it to his study until late into the night.

The kitten is of cheap white stone; the dust of many years has settled into the cracks and convolutions of its coat, which is molded to suggest fluffiness. Vera has seen similar decorations on the doors and shutters of strangers’ homes and has never given any thought to owning one. She turns to find George at her elbow, the book he just bought tucked under his arm.

“Oh, George, look at this,” she says, on impulse.

“I hate cats. You know that, Vera.”

“It’s not a cat. It’s a kitten,” she protests. She holds it with both hands, like a child, and looks into its face. She sees there signs of innocence, of fear commingled with playfulness. The silly object is both whimsical and sad, and suddenly intensely desirable. Angry tears well up in her eyes; Vera, determined not to let them fall, clenches her teeth and clutches the kitten more firmly.

George turns away. “Buy it. You have money.”

That night, in bed, Vera lies on her back listening to the fan’s hopeless shuddering in the loose window frame. “I’ll put my kitten in the garden,” she says out loud, “on the fencepost.” She doesn’t know if George has heard, whether he is even awake.

The night is stifling, turgid and still. Now and then, the fan pushes a mass of humid air in her direction, giving no relief. Vera gets up, walks barefoot through the house to the back porch. A full moon ringed with celestial mist looks ghostly among bruised purple clouds.

She picks up the kitten, strokes the stone face, marvels again at its sly, quizzical expression. She touches the tufted ears, smiles. In a moment of determination, Vera goes into the basement, comes back with a hammer and nail.

The garden looks magical in the moonlight, full of strange shadows. Some leaves appear silvery, others black and mysterious. All blossoms are shut tight against the night; she knows they will open again at the sun’s bidding. Waiting, she thinks. Waiting to grow.

She holds the kitten up against the fencepost, moving it this way and that, choosing the best angle and height. Satisfied, she hammers in the nail and hangs the kitten in place, using her finger to guide the indentation on its chest over the nail. She sits down on the grass in front of the garden gate and weeps silently for what feels like a long time. From its new place overlooking the garden, the kitten watches her over its shoulder.

Vera has stopped crying by the time George comes out. He stands near her; his bare feet look long and pale in the dry, darkly matted grass. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “Was that you hammering? I thought I heard hammering.”

Vera nods, points to the kitten on the fencepost.

“I see,” he says.

No, you don’t, she wants to shout. You don’t see. But she says nothing.

George walks up to the fence, grasps it with both hands. “When are you going to do something about the zucchini?” His voice is cold and tight.

“What? The zucchini?”

“Yeah. How much goddam zucchini do you think we need? Look at it, will you? It’s choking everything around it, it’s taking over the whole garden, spreading like a disease, all because of your stupidity. Can’t you even read directions?” He is rocking back and forth, his voice rising. “I hate, I fucking hate zucchini.”

“Is that all?” Vera gets up off the ground, her eyes wide. “Is that all?”

She brushes past him into the garden. The ground is dry and dusty from the relentless heat of many days, but the sturdy plants are healthy. Vera has to pull hard to get them out. Methodically, one by one, she uproots every plant and flings each one with deadly accuracy over the fence and onto the grass into a neat heap.

“There.” She turns to face him, triumphant, the last plant, with several mid-sized fruit attached, in her hand. She tosses it slightly off the mark; it bounces against the fencepost. The kitten falls to the ground and shatters on the flagstone walk.

Vera, already on the path back to the house, hears the crash. She pauses but does not turn around. She does not see George, rooted in place, open his mouth as if to speak, then press his lips together and stare at the ground. Numb, exhausted, Vera goes into the house and shuts the door.

In the morning, when she looks out the kitchen window, she sees a mound of vegetation, as if someone had been weeding and neglected to clean up. Limp yellow blossoms adorn the tangled mass of wilted leaves; a few shiny-green zucchini catch the sun, dirty root fingers stick up in all directions like vague place markers of the night’s violence. A pathetic scattering of white plaster, a little heap of meaningless debris, waits to be washed away by the first welcome rain.

In the weeks that follow, Vera no longer talks to George. It’s not a deliberate decision – she simply can’t think of anything to say. Nothing matters enough to make the effort. There might be a brief, cryptic exchange, of the administrative kind: who will pick up the dry cleaning, the baby needs a snowsuit, did you pay the rent? Replies are curt, monosyllabic. The rest is silence.

Evenings, she has taken to stitching needlework projects by the lamp in Amber’s room. It is an awful lamp – a clown clutching a fistful of balloons under a white paper shade spread like an umbrella over his head – a gift from George’s aunt who shops only at Woolworth’s. Late at night, in bed, her mind’s eye is haunted by the lamp’s horrid details: the gaudy blue and yellow costume with oversized Chaplinesque shoes, the grotesque face, its mask fixed in a grinning grimace that suggests more pain than laughter. She sees every clumsy brushstroke in the sequence of balloons – red, purple, yellow on the bottom, green, blue, and a single pink one at the apex of the pyramid. How many hours have I spent staring at this lamp? What’s wrong with me?

George has stopped spending time in his study; it’s possible he, too, has abandoned his project. He reads, sometimes, in the living room – esoteric historical treatises from the library or, more often now, sports magazines. Mostly, he naps in the recliner with the television on, its images flickering across the surface of the beer bottle dangling from his fingers. In the early days, Vera liked the way he held his beer bottle by the neck, its top concealed in the cup of his palm. She had loved the graceful droop of his wrist, the nonchalant, relaxed posture so alien to her own intensity.

Now, the same pose fills her with rage. She never drinks beer anymore.

She doesn’t eat much, either. Fixing Amber’s lunch and snacks is a pleasure, but dinner has become a daily endurance trial. Food does not interest her at all; cooking sickens her almost as much as in the early days of her pregnancy. She prepares the boring meals then sits, pushing a small portion around on her plate. She makes designs with the vegetables, surrounds them with forked peaks of mashed potatoes or flattened rice beds; what little she eats tastes bland, overcooked.

George’s appetite seems unaffected. He consumes everything before him with indiscriminate enthusiasm, glancing at Vera now and then as if afraid he might run out of time. After a few weeks, it is he who breaks the silence, demanding to know what’s wrong.

She wants to say, You disgust me with your sloppy habits, your lack of ambition. I despise the little mind rattling around in your head. I hate your infernal baseball cap. I can’t stand the way you walk, sit, breathe. The thought of touching you gives me the creeps.

“Nothing,” she says. She wipes the baby’s face with the edge of her napkin. “I don’t feel well.”

“Gimme a break,” he mutters, scraping his chair back. “You sit there like a zombie day after day, you pick at your food and pretend I don’t exist. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“I’m tired,” she says, so softly he has to lean forward to hear, his bony frame doubled up in his chair, his chin nearly level with the tabletop. He looks so ridiculous she almost laughs.

“You’re tired. You think that’s news? And what kind of fucking meal you call this, anyway?” He points to the leftover waterlogged macaroni, limp gray peas, minute steak shriveled at the edges like a burnt love letter. “You call this cooking? Who the hell wants to eat this shit?” He waves his arms, his body rising out of his chair in time with the pitch of his voice.

“You just did.” She avoids his eyes, stacks the plates and moves toward the kitchen sink. “If you don’t like it, cook it yourself.” This last was a thought, not intended to be spoken. It slipped past her lips and lies between them, the words heavy as poisoned gas.

Vera turns to the sink. With a soundless rush, George is beside her. He grasps her arm and spins her around. He strikes her full in the face with an open hand.

The plates slip from her hands and clatter to the floor. Vera stares at the mess at her feet and recognizes nothing. Shapes and textures glimmer before her eyes; she does not know their name or purpose. Amber backs into a far corner of the room, wailing.

George releases Vera, stares at his own upraised hand poised to hit her again. He lowers it slowly, with apparent effort. “Vera–” he says.

Vera picks Amber up, holds her close. George, down on one knee, is gathering the noodles and scattered peas onto the dish shards with his hands. “I’m–” he starts to say.

“Leave that.”

He looks up at her with the freckled childlike face of the misbehaving boy who knows he has gone too far, whose only hope now is to confess and be forgiven. She knows he’s sorry. She doesn’t care.

Amber quiets down. Vera rocks a little, lays the baby’s head against her shoulder, strokes the damp hair. Surely this is a scene from some other life, something she has read or seen on television. This is not her life, not her marriage. She has never known a man who would hit a woman in anger. She had no more imagined George could do that than she believed he could fly.

“Vera,” he tries again, “I’m–”

“Shut up.” She shivers, keeps her face, her voice, stony. “Go away.”

George stands and turns obediently toward the basement stairs. “That will never happen again,” she tells his retreating back.

*

The old beech tree behind the garden is tall and stately, its trunk so thick Vera can barely put her arms around it. They have watched it die slowly, noticed how the size of the vegetable plot is directly proportional to the progress of the tree’s demise. Each spring there are fewer and fewer leaves, allowing the sun to penetrate deeper among the defoliated branches. Now it stands denuded, vulnerable, dead. And the garden is bathed in sunlight.

George believes the beech has begun to rot inside, that it is dangerous. He says it’s brittle and would easily burn if struck by lightning. He calls it a hazard and an eyesore. He will cut it down on Sunday. 

“Fine,” Vera says. It doesn’t matter to her one way or the other.

Sunday, it rains before dawn, but by nine o’clock everything is dry. She sees him out the kitchen window, assembling his equipment: ladder, rope, chainsaw, six-pack. Early this morning, waiting for the coffee to boil, she had watched from the same window and listened, entranced, to a mockingbird perched on the tree’s topmost branch. The curious limb curved like a question mark against the clearing sky. The bird sang furiously, lustily filling the air with urgent replication, repeating round after round of songs stolen from other birds. Something about its performance had caught at her heart, as if she, too, would sing in imitation of joy.

“I’ll need you to hold the ladder,” George says, “while I cut the branches.” He’s wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a windbreaker; there’s an unseasonable chill in the air. Vera pulls on a sweatshirt, takes Amber to the neighbors. When she returns, he is circling around the tree, beer in hand, studying the hefty lower limbs. He points to a branch on the left, some four or five feet long, thick as a man’s thigh. “We’ll do this one first.”

The ladder vibrates under his step and sways a little. Vera concentrates and tightens her grip. She feels foolish standing there, holding the ladder. She hopes no one is watching.

George yanks at the rip cord, again and again, until the chainsaw snarls overhead, sending down a shower of chips and sawdust as the blade violates wood. He shifts his weight, makes another incision. Eyes shut against the dust and debris, Vera hears the branch groan.

“Move to the other side, under the ladder,” George yells. “Now.”

She obeys, ducking behind the ladder just as the branch cracks like a pistol shot and crashes to the ground. Its twigs graze her knuckles, drawing blood.

George climbs halfway down, jumps to stand beside her. “You all right?” he asks hoarsely. He takes his cap off and pushes his hair back with a shaky hand. She nods, wipes the blood off her hands onto her shirt. The fallen branch is resting upright against the ladder, its wide end sunk into the ground on the very spot where she had been standing.

Together, they lift the limb and move it to one side, away from the ladder. The fact that George had saved her from injury or maybe even death, does not register on Vera until much later, in bed, when she lies rigid next to him, unable to speak the words of gratitude for his warning, his quick thinking.

The other branch is forked. George crawls out a little distance along it to cut off its tributary. He loses his grip. He throws the chainsaw wide, knowing he will fall. Vera sees his jacket fill with a gust of wind and, for the briefest of moments, he is suspended in midair. He is, well, flying. Then he is sitting on the ground, dazed but unhurt. Anything, anything is possible, she thinks.

The rest is easy. Several more limbs come off without incident, and the top ten feet crashes into the woods behind the garden, leaving a stump seven feet high that his chainsaw is not powerful enough to remove.

Later, at dusk, Vera looks up from washing the dishes and is surprised at the deep unbroken expanse of sky. She wonders if the mockingbird will return, if a lower perch will do for its immodest performance. She will miss the tree, even though it was dead.

***