Feral the Book
Book Summary
In 2006, in our fourth year of marriage, my husband and I suffered the loss of our first baby. Woozy and impulsive in our concussed state of grief, we drove to a country dog shelter to adopt a greyhound named Gandalf. Instead we left with a ringworm-infested cat that was couch-surfing in the lobby.
From there began our 15 years with an affliction we named Matilda — and along with her, our fungal and flea outbreaks, our home destruction, her IBS treatments, and a wonder tail that painted a stripe down our hallway in a way that could not be explained.
But in the spirit she inspired, this cat I never wanted forced me on a winding introspective journey toward radical acceptance and upholstery insurance. Eventually we shipped her 8,000 miles across the ocean to join us in our new life in Australia. In her final days there, we made the choice to let her go, and she returned me to the reason that we found her at the shelter.
FERAL
Love, Loss and Fleas with the World's Worst Cat
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Book Excerpt, Intro to Chapter 1
Inside the Box
November 2018
The sign, written in thick Sharpie marker in the sort of confident elongated script only a 14-year-old would do, was carefully attached to the top of Matilda’s carrier, in front, right next to the clear plastic bag of her IBS medications and large manila envelope of government transport papers that had been meticulously checked and rechecked and authorized and certified and organized and generously taped across the back.
Meow! I’m Matilda. I’m flying from the US to Australia today. My owners there must’ve missed me — even though I’m just a lazy hipster who lays on clean laundry and eats food off the table. As you can probably see here, I’m fat.
And that in a nutshell was Matilda.
But was it? Honestly, how could a nutshell contain this creature? Her transport carrier barely could — we’d even purchased the one sized for a collie.
How would I have properly summed up this cat on a single 8 x 11-inch sheet of paper and in large enough writing to remain visible if looked down upon from (I’m guessing here) five feet up?
There was nothing to argue with what was written on the sign. Except I would’ve included more pertinent details. Like how Matilda loves everyone and everything. And how everything feels harder, yet somehow better, when she’s around. And to please be careful with her, but also know she’s not afraid — she’s never afraid.
I probably would’ve left out her unflattering parts, despite how they define her, because that might defeat the whole purpose of the sign.
Like how she tends to force her large furry bottom into every moment of every day, be it a home plumbing project or a competitive board game or an unattended tray full of paint.
Or how in an unrelenting yowl she demands to be fed round the clock. Like the sort of angry tirade you’d expect of an old man who’s ordered the all-you-can-eat steak buffet and on his second trip there found only some goddamn lettuce!, one that cannot be ignored, not in the same room and not even if you leave the room and shut the door. Because that’s when Matilda balances on her back legs to push it open with her front ones so she can carry on with her rant.
Or that if she doesn’t have fleas right now (and we’ll know when she arrives in LA), she probably will soon enough. Because no matter what we do, she often does. Because like us, I suppose, even the fleas live their best life with her.
Of course the fact remains, this cat is a mess. You wouldn’t need the sign to tell you that. Then how could it be that during the messiest period of my life, it was this cat that held us altogether? Christ, without her then, maybe none of us would be here now. Not in one piece anyway.
So I guess that brings us to the here and now. Here waiting with bated breath for an overseas cat delivery. Now, just as before, she’s the only one that can help — we need her here with us.
“The sign is so the luggage handlers will treat the pet gently,” the man at the transport company had explained to me on the phone. “So they get to know its personality. You know, not toss it around on the tarmac or anything. It reminds people, ‘Hey! There’s somebody’s precious cargo inside that box!’”
September 2006
Four years into marriage, four months after I was pregnant with our first baby, my husband and I came home with a freshly boxed kitten.
It was September. The same month our son Noah was to be born. Except he wasn’t. He died in utero, barely even making it through the spring.
About the time I’d intended to be pushing a stroller home from the park, I now hauled a hole-punched box from the car. I felt it shifting in my hands as I walked into the house, redistributing a slight weight back and forth against the cardboard sides as if bravely attempting to flip itself from my grip in a dramatic escape attempt.
We hoped this new life would fill in the hole left by our baby’s absence. A hole that in time collapsed deeper inside me, into a bottomless pit from which there was no clear escape. Like Noah, I barely made it through the spring. Then I barely made it through the long aching summer to follow.
I’d spent much of that summer hiding out in our house, only leaving for work and bare essentials. Bare essentials included saltine crackers and sliced mozzarella, which I came home from my office to eat during lunch breaks, building them into neat little finger sandwiches so as to appear to be a genuine meal made by a genuine grown-up. Along with watching reruns of Leave It to Beaver, it was all part of a regressive self-soothing ritual I learned from my “latchkey kid” days, back when I at times felt similarly alone.
A Cosmo quiz I took in college told me I was an extrovert — the person likely to be found telling stories to a bunch of half-conscious 20-somethings nursing from their red plastic cups. Or at least that was how I interpreted it back then. Though the drinkware evolved in my 30s, this fact held true until our baby died. Social engagements, party guests, now they were something to dread, even to fear. So I carefully avoided them and the possibility of anyone mentioning our loss to me.
Especially in the anemic words, “Sorry for your loss.”
Loss softened up the edges, a cop-out, I thought, a polite way to tip-toe around the rough ugliness of a death still living on inside me. And always left unspoken were the critical parts that came with it. Loss? Of my baby, of my pregnancy, yes — but of what else? My appetite? My faith in God? My confidence as an adult? My belief in things working out for the best?
Or there was the lack of any mention of our loss — I avoided that, too. Somehow both scenarios felt equally traumatic. A party for my husband’s work began with me gasping for air in a Famous Dave’s parking lot. It ended with me sobbing in the car. Like some kind of tragic Hollywood red carpet walk — as clearly you’d expect at a strip mall joint that served sandwiches on honest-to-God trash can lids — I thought I’d enter the room under attentive spotlight, to all eyes firmly on me, to those same drippy looks of sympathy I got from the nurses at the hospital.
Except then it was comforting. Now it felt smothering.
So there I was, steeling myself all day to prepare for their sympathetic looks — the fear nearly consuming me on the drive over as my breath began to shallow, then quicken — and instead I arrived to find just the opposite. Instead of the tragic red carpet walk, I was the D-list actor quickly ushered to her seat. Did I even have a seat? Eyes darted away from me as soon as they landed, conversations pivoted from me at the table.
Mark’s office coworkers, who earlier in the year offered to throw us a baby shower, the ones who barbecued with us, spent Halloweens at our annual costume party, now treated me like a stranger. And in a way they were correct. I was a stranger now, to myself, to my own body especially. Stranger than I ever felt in my life.
I’m a walking fetal tomb.
That disturbing thought hit me as I walked back to the car later that night. I imagined if my stomach were transparent like it seemed, you’d see a tiny coffin where our baby came to rest. And the little soul that left my body, it took mine, too. If an expecting mother is said to glow, what was the look of a woman carrying death in her womb? Was I tinged in gray, a hollowed out face atop a concave body? That night surely proved it. I looked just as grotesque to others as I felt.
“No one would look at me!” I wept to Mark on the drive home.
“They just don’t know what to say, that’s all,” he countered softly.
Mark was always better about not giving much thought to the opinions of others. Mark once danced to The Little Mermaid’s Under the Sea that played on a grocery store Muzak station because the spirit had moved him in the produce aisle, trading nods with an elderly woman pushing past him with her cart as he began slapping on a honeydew like a steelpan drum. (I had snuck away before his encore.) “Did you see that lady, she thought it was funny,” he’d said after spotting me hiding beside the deli counter.
Whereas for me, “What do people think?” was at times all I could think about, like a part of my brain hadn’t evolved since middle school. I couldn’t so much as walk into that grocery store without wondering, How do I look walking into the grocery store? Is my posture okay? Do my arms swing correctly?
“No, that’s not it!” I flicked off the car radio and cried harder. “They don’t want to look at me, Mark!” My voice became shrill as it narrowed to the point where I could smugly rest my case. “Do you know what it is? It’s that I remind people that bad things can happen.” I paused for a dramatic gasp of air. “And nobody wants that reminder over buffalo wings on a Friday!”
Friday tasted like rotten fruit on my tongue, and I spat it with contempt for what it meant to everyone there. A tasty red cherry on top of their week, a nice exhale that would never come for me. Not that day, not the next, not in any weekend soon to follow.
I vowed to skip parties after that. Surely a nice exhale for everyone involved.
But then, following that restaurant night, my sadness turned its shape into something harder. Into something sharper. It seemed something in me had been settled that night over spicy wings on a trash can lid. An internal agreement, a permission I’d been granted. And soon thereafter I leaned straight into the ice-cold shards of Rage! in my heart.
And yet, I was encouraged that, unlike my sadness, it was an emotion I could control. Indeed, one I could even inflict on others. It was a brilliant new marketing strategy I’d devised! Sad, quiet, invisible woman — now with NEW added rage! From there I released my Bereaved 2.0. A short time later it was flying off the shelves ...