Et Tu Brute?

by Sharon Bell Buchbinder

          

"He's black. Bad luck," my mother said.

The kitten looked at me with huge golden eyes and I was smitten. He was the cutest kitten I'd ever seen. And the last one left from the litter--because he was black.

"Can you hear him? He's purring," said the woman who was giving him away.

I held him close to my ear and heard his little motor running.

"It's my thirteenth birthday. He'll be good luck, not bad luck. Please, Mom?"

We took him home in a battered aluminum washtub on an old raggedy towel. He couldn't have been more than eight weeks old. My mother gave me all the usual warnings about who was taking care of him. I didn't care. We were meant to be together. I knew he loved me as much as I loved him.

"So what are you going to name that bad luck cat?" my mother asked.

"We have a dog named Caesar. Why not Brutus?" I said.

"I hope that cat's better than the useless dog," she said.

Caesar was a mixed breed gift from a veterinarian. Part beagle, part sooner, my mother liked to say.

"He'd sooner be there than here," she'd say. "He can't help it. It's just his nature."

He ran away a lot. Not that I could blame him. I ran away a lot, too. That is, until I figured out they just kept taking me home.

"Keep that cat away from my canary," my mother ordered when we arrived home. The canary was the only living creature in the house that my mother seemed to care about. She talked to it in an endless stream of bird talk and played Hartz Mountain records so it could sing along with a chorus of other operatic canaries. She often let it out to fly around while it sang to the records.

Brutus and I spent days together in the field next door, climbing trees, reading books, or just talking. He was my feline confidante. He knew how frightened I was, how I lived in terror of my mother's erratic moods, tempers and beatings. He would climb into bed with me and lie beside me, giving comfort with his purring.

My sister's old high school biology specimen, a giant formaldehyde stiffened orange tabby cat, was stored in plastic under my bed. When Brutus felt like being in charge, he'd go under my bed and beat the dead cat in the bag. I'd hang my head over the bed and tolerate the pounding blood in my ears just to watch him in action. He was ferocious. He'd growl, spit, smack, hop, jump on top of roll over and beat on the other cat. After a few minutes of unbridled aggression, he'd emerge victorious and sit on the bed beside me, grooming himself. The winner got the girl.

One habit that Brutus had that drove me crazy was nose-smacking. I'd be asleep or close to asleep. He'd hunker down alongside my legs, flick his tail, wiggle his butt, then gallop up to my nose and smack it. It was a rude awakening. Then, my deaf grand-mother came over to spend the night and woke up to find Brutus smacking her nose. She slugged him. Brutus flew out of the room, never to smack another nose again.

We lived in a small rural town, next to a cow pasture. Brutus was an indoor, outdoor cat. He wandered the neighborhood and would bring home the occasional mouse for praise. One winter a blizzard hit. Brutus disappeared. I waded in hip deep snow looking for him in the field next door, praying that I'd find him.

"Probably froze to death," my mother said.

"Don't say that!" I said.

"That's just the way things are. Nothing you can do about it," she replied.

A week later, a ratty, rail-thin black cat appeared at our back door. I didn't recognize him at first, he was so gaunt. When he responded to his name, I wept for joy. He recovered and stayed indoors more than he went out.

One day, when I was in high school, I heard the familiar sounds of Brutus under my bed, growling. I hung my head over the side of the bed, anticipating the usual amusement of Brutus versus Tabby.

Instead, I was nose-to-beak with the limp, bleeding body of my mother's yellow canary in Brutus' mouth.

I screamed and ran into the kitchen crying. The Hartz Mountain record was playing in the living room and the door to the bird cage was wide open.

"What's the matter with you?" my mother asked.

I pointed mutely to the bird cage.

"What? Speak up, you idiot," she said.

"The bird. It's out of the cage," I said.

"Yeah, so?"

"Brutus got the canary," I said. I was terrified she'd kill the cat.

She just stared at me for a long time.

"Get a shoe box. Bury the canary," she said.

"But what about Brutus?" I asked.

"He can't help it. It's just his nature."

I was stunned by her response. And relieved that she wasn't going to kill my cat.

Years later, I found myself struggling with my relationship with my now elderly mother. In spite of all her abusive behavior, I realized that I still yearned for her love or some small measure of approval.

Then I recalled the incident with Brutus--and it hit me.

She couldn't help it. It was just her nature.

***********

Sharon Bell Buchbinder, RN, PhD was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children. When her parents separated, she was put on a plane, alone, at the age of three, and sent away to be cared for by her deaf, non-speaking grandmother. A year later, her mother, brother and sister arrived and the family moved to the “projects,” old army barracks converted to government subsidized housing. Sharon learned how to avoid being beaten up by hiding in the coal bin and became an avid reader, an excellent student, and a short story writer. Her main goals were to graduate from high school with good grades and without getting pregnant. She achieved both.

After wandering through numerous majors and almost as many colleges and universities, Sharon earned degrees in psychology, nursing, wifery, motherhood, and a PhD in Public Health Sciences. She spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow in the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health’s Department of Mental Hygiene and two years as a pediatric researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Sharon tells people that she was lured away by the prospects of big money at a state school, but in reality, she needed new audiences for her jokes. Almost ten years later, she is now a Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Science at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. When not attempting to make students and colleagues laugh, Sharon Bell Buchbinder can be found fishing, golfing, or writing. She and her husband, Dale, have one college age son, Joshua, and live in Baltimore, Maryland.  Additional information can be found at http://www.towson.edu/users/buch. More information is available at  Contact Sharon.