The Scratching

Rebecca Rustin

“Oh, but you made a choice, didn’t you?” That was the cruel thing that popped into my head: a reaction devoid of kindness. It smacked me awake. She was alone in a car with an older woman who could only have been her mother, outside Mr. Narayan’s garage, where I was bringing in my own ancient eggbeater for some Vedic healing. Hers was a mint-green hatchback, mine a cantankerous 4-door with rusty innards.

Maya’s mother was rummaging through her purse as though trying to hide a smile, hinting at some immeasurable victory. Maya, usually so lithe, was as a stiffened mass behind the steering wheel, staring off to the side. The little car urged motion but she held it at bay with the brake.

Was it the restrained stillness of the car, or the impression of a private, inward focus, as you might see in one pissing in an alley—that irritated me? And why could I muster no sympathy? If there’s change in my pocket I usually give it to the homeless guy who asks. When I see a tragedy on TV, I make my (tax deductible) donation to the Red Cross. Tsunami? Gimme an 800 number and pass the phone. Earthquake? Yeah, I’m downloading the cheesy charity version of Wavin' Flag. Middle-aged suburban yoga instructor/ spiritual counselor stuck in dutiful-daughter-related purgatory? Sorry, no fucking clue. No solution known to man, woman, or anyone in between. Who’s to say what’s to be done about miserable women in colorless North American cities, watching their lives unspool toward radically unsatisfying conclusions? It’s far too much of a cliché to be taken seriously, and the footage is just plain dull.

Ants, according to E.O. Wilson, born by the hundreds of thousands to a single mother and father, do not lament the death of the father (which occurs very soon after the one and only insemination), and when the mother dies, ants don’t even realize it until well after they’ve consumed most of her mortal remains.

In the Talmud there’s a parable about two sons, one who makes his father work in a mill, but inherits Paradise, and another who feeds his fathers fattened chickens, but inherits Hell. One son feeds his father fattened chickens, but when his father asks where he got them, the son tells the old man to be silent, and eat without speaking, as a dog does. In the second example, a son works in a mill. The king summons the man’s aging father to work for him. The son tells the father, ‘Work in the mill, in my place, and I will go work for the king, in case those who work for the king are treated badly. If workers for the king are beaten, then let me be beaten instead of you.’ That son inherits Paradise, because he honors his father.

Which son is Maya? What should she do?

She gets out of the hatchback. She runs away as fast as she can, as fast as her strength will allow. Her mother eventually climbs behind the wheel and drives home, and tells her husband what Maya (his daughter) did. He experiences that special zoom of rage that moves the bowels, which act returns him to lucidity.

Maya, meanwhile, forgoes the too-intimate confines of a taxi for a city bus, and finds a seat next to an androgynous kid buried deep inside his or her hoodie. White earbud wire snakes up through the jumble of loose cotton clothing and nylon schoolbag. There’s an ‘x’ magic markered over the knuckle of an index finger. The kid’s music is damagingly loud—audible high hats, mosquito guitars, but at least s/he appears non-judgmental, or at least indifferent, toward Maya, while her heart pounds and she tries to calm herself with yogic breathing, the tip of her tongue curled (as with zazen) against the back of her upper front teeth, where the taste of coffee lingers. They’d sat, she and her mother, over coffee and cake in a sunken island café, near the empty space where the Gap used to be. Behind the café counter, an Asian mother and daughter worked side by side in grim cooperation.

The bus driver, whose union is scheduled to go on strike the following day, works the brakes as though hoping to send all the passengers tumbling into the aisle like so many bowling pins. Maya softens her spine, the better to absorb the shock, imagining the bus as a live beast, feeling its tires in contact with the ground, finding its heartbeat, its breath. Riding the bus as though it were a horse. She elongates her neck and imagines she wears a crown of a thousand lotus petals. For the millionth time she concludes that moving away from this city toward a better life somewhere else is what she must do, and she resolves to begin the process at once. The child in the hoodie nods to the music, as though in affirmation. Through the window a man on the sidewalk looks back at her, as though in affirmation. The driver slams on the brakes and the whole bus lurches forward, as though in affirmation.

But what about the cat?

Pete (the cat) and his accoutrements are accepted into the group offices of a cluster of community outreach and social justice organizations on the ground floor of Maya’s apartment building. She has often donated to their kitchen. Three young women dressed in yards of flowing fabric incorporate the meowling tom into their soft folds, Amoeba proteus engulfing its prey, and before they can ask too many questions Maya scoots away, avoiding any more accusing looks from Pete. She wends back up through the building to her top floor apartment, feeling vaguely that she has damned herself, trying not to remember the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, when Holly Golightly abandons her cat. But Holly has Fred Varjak, begging her to stay: “I don’t wanna put you in a cage, I wanna love you!” George Peppard twisting his pretty face with passion. Much different. At least Maya’s cat has a name. So maybe, if this were a movie, there would be pardon for the sin of cat abandonment, and she would be allowed to go toward her new life without retribution.

Enclosing herself at last in her apartment another image arises: the bloody fate that befell the young man on that bus across the prairies, stabbed to death by the random maniac beside him. Did the Fates cut his thread short because he was running away?

And now that she’s given up her cat and decided to leave, where is Maya going? She hasn’t thought this through. She needs to go back to Mr. Narayan’s and get the car, but if she does she will almost certainly lose her nerve. The car’s very headlights will reproach her (the hatchback was a gift from her parents). She will be lost to a future whose discernible features were already too ugly for her to look at anymore. She wishes she could call someone. There was, for a while, a therapist, but upon adding up the tax receipts it was clear that she couldn’t afford to keep going. She has a sister, but the sister’s boyfriend hates her. She can’t face Facebook.

If she calls her sister she will be shunted back to her usual role: She will again be the sniveling old maid (spinster not factotum, though at times she does feel like a servant), Bette Davis in Now, Voyager before she goes on the cruise, Bette Davis in her room with her novels, the family gathered downstairs with Dr. Jacquith and the china and chintz. Bette Davis with her heavy eyebrows and granny glasses, Emily Dickenson without the potential, Donna Reed in the Christmas that Might Have Been sequence of It’s a Wonderful Life, heavy eyebrows again, no lipstick—movie make-up code for feminine sexual frustration.

Now, Voyager, depart! (much, much for thee is yet in store)—wasn’t it a Voyageur bus the prairie man was killed on? Walt Whitman could never have foreseen such terrible irony.

Maya takes up her place at the bathroom mirror. A frankly Semitic schnoz protruding from the relatively uninteresting planes of her face like a sail. Hey, why did Jews develop big noses? So they could use them as sun dials when they were wandering the desert. Why do Jews have big noses? So they can sniff out all your money. Why do Jews have big noses? Because they lie, like Pinocchio. As time ate away at the flesh of her face, Maya fancied her nose was becoming more and more prominent. Soon it would become a super-feature. The nostrils would see and taste, rendering the eyes and mouth redundant. It would hear, and her ears would wither and fall off. She would be a harbinger, a latter-day Lucy, an evolutionary ground zero.

Was she good enough to run away? Likable enough? Would she be welcome somewhere else? And who would love her? Who would be her friend? Hadn’t she spent too much time already in dutiful-daughter land? Wouldn’t they smell it on her, as a mother bird rejects a foundling when it’s returned to the nest by human hands?

The phone rings and she lets it repeat itself. She has an old-fashioned answering machine, and hears her father draw a breath and clear his throat. She shuts the bathroom door so she hears his voice but not the words; she squeezes a pimple too hard and it bleeds and bleeds. When she emerges with a wad of tissue to her jaw, the blue winter dusk is falling. Maya presses the button on the machine.

“It’s your father. I put the car up the street on the Thursday side. Your mother drove herself home. She says to thank you for the ride and sorry if you’re feeling a little tired. She hopes it wasn’t something she said, but—what? [Her mother’s voice in the background]—she says she’ll call you tomorrow. I guess you have your house keys or we would have heard from you by now. I took a taxi home. Thought I should leave you alone. OK? Take it easy. Alright? G’bye.”

Maya dims the lights. With the cat gone, the air in the apartment smells remarkably clean. When she first moved out of her parents’ house, she immediately procured a pet, since growing up there had always been one, but she hadn’t realized the significance of the ‘house’ part of the term ‘house cat,’ and how it worked best when there was an out-of-the-way place for the litter box, such as a corner of the basement or garage. She had never found quite the right place in any of her apartments, and despite the new gadgetry and advanced-formula deodorizing kitty litter and conscientious cleaning, there was always a bit of a smell.

Maya takes a deep, guiltily appreciative breath through her prodigious nose, goes to stand at the centre of her thick Persian rug, and unfurls a yoga mat. She bows her head and brings her hands together in front of her heart, samasthithi; raises them over her head and arcs back slightly; dives forward and lets her head dangle “like a ripe mango,” as her favorite yoga teacher liked to say. The babble in her mind dwindles to an inchoate low-frequency hum. She sinks to her knees, leans forward and rests her forehead on the floor, her arms stretched out behind her in child’s pose. She positions her elbows, clasps her hands to support the back of her skull, shifts her weight forward, and lifts up into a headstand. Her organs slosh together in jolly surprise. Her upper back and neck find their musculature; her feet form a tidy unit atop the whole, sentry like the head of a giraffe. Nothing, nothing, nothing, she thinks. Ohm.

Still upside-down, Maya hears a faint scratching coming from the front door. (Once she spent a summer in an old wooden house in New England. Every so often she’d hear a scratching at the window in her bedroom. One day she traced the sound to its source: A proudly magnificent beetle, standing on its hind legs in a corner of the window frame, scratching at the wood with its mighty black horns, its shell an improbable Joseph’s coat of many colors—green, orange, purple, red—and Maya was honored to be chosen.)

Maya rights herself and goes to stand in the darkened hallway. The scratching at the door stops. Meow goes Pete on the other side, and she is disappointed.