So I started inhabiting my own body again, because it was not going to go away. I rode my sea-foam green bike along the wide tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood. I took long walks, in which my mind dangled like a kite string.
People noticed when I lost weight. You look so healthy. You look so great. And as much as I enjoyed these compliments, I feared them as well: that they would go away, or that I was too greedy for them in the first place. It made me uncomfortable how much my weight loss changed my perceived value. After I quit drinking, I saw the world differently. But after I lost weight, the world saw me differently.
It was like I’d suddenly become visible, after years of camouflage I didn’t know I was wearing. There is something undeniably attractive about a person who is not hiding—in clothes, under extra weight, behind her addictions. My mother and Anna were right all along: There was great beauty in nature.
IN THE EVENINGS, I pulled out a leash for Bubba so we could walk outside in the buzzing summer night. The cat had been sick for a while. He was 15 years old. I didn’t know how much longer he had, and if I wasn’t careful, I could spend a whole day freaking out about this.
When I met Bubba, he was an outdoor cat. But one day he came back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment with incisor bites in the side of his cheek, like two toothpicks through raw dough. There was a series of expensive surgeries. A long stretch of recovery time. He became an indoor cat after that.
It was a miserable power struggle to break him. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to win an argument with a cat, but good luck with that. He would slip out when we weren’t looking, settle scores in some back alley near midnight, and return two days later like Don Draper crashing through the front door after a bender. What? What are you looking at?
I loved him for all of this. I, too, was drawn to places that would destroy me. I, too, came home with bruises, and it never stopped me. The cat was an appealing mix of strapping adventurer and cuddle bug. People say cats are aloof, but they are just very, very discerning about whom they trust. I liked caring for that cranky little guy. Women can be very good at ladling their love into the unsmiling mouth of a creature who nonetheless needs them.
I come from a long line of nurses on both sides of my family. We give gentle strokes and change bedpans and wipe up vomit splashed on the floor while cracking vaguely inappropriate jokes. When I think about my own failure to take care of myself, I wonder sometimes if I wasn’t unconsciously waiting for someone like me to come along. Pay off my credit cards, clean up my oopsies. Other people’s messes can be so much more interesting than our own.
Maybe that’s why I needed the cat so much. This may sound absurd, but cats are caretakers. They will kill your mice and curl up at your side when you’re ill. One night in Brooklyn, I became fluish and had to lie on the cold tile floor of the bathroom with my pillow and a duvet. It was one of those moments when my loneliness ached like a broken bone. And the cat padded into the bathroom and lay down beside me, and we slept like this, both of us curled against the warm side of the other.
Now it was my turn to take care of him. The sickness required pills, popped into his mouth twice a day. X-rays, constant experimentation with his food. Jennifer was a veterinarian now; the child who once saved wounded birds had grown up to be a woman who saved people’s pets. When Bubba got sick, she was the person we both needed.
My new house was mere blocks from where Bubba had once prowled, and when he started meowing at the door again—after years of remaining silent on the issue—I wanted to do something for him. Let him roam his home turf again, before he died. I wanted to find some compromise where he could venture into the lusty outdoors that called to him—but stay tethered to me.
The leash was my big idea. Jennifer swore up and down it wouldn’t work. Leashes were against a cat’s nature, she insisted, and for a long time, she was right. Then one day, I put on his harness—blue vinyl ropes along his haunches, like he was about to jump out of an airplane—and he discovered this simple act of surrender led to the outside world.
He inched through the doorway with his nose twitching. When his paws touched the familiar dirt, his whole body went electric. This. All of this. The breeze in his fur. Those feral smells. A blade of grass dragged along the side of his mouth. He rolled around in the dirt. He sniffed the grille of my car like it contained all the decadence of the world.
He tugged too hard, then I tugged too hard, but eventually we found our rhythm. We got so good at this nightly routine, we could stay out there for an hour at a time, exploring grassy corners and wandering into the undiscovered country of the driveway. He lay with his fur against the cool gravel, and I stared up at the sky, two animals finding their way into the wild on a short leash now.
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