of the McDonald’s, eating out of the garbage and barking until somebody calls the pound.
My mother has been getting madder and madder about this, and lately she has been going over the line. She runs outside now when she sees it happening. “Irresponsible!” she yells, throwing rocks with one hand, holding Samuel with the other. Her aim is bad, and she’s always too late to actually hit anyone, but still, she shouldn’t be trying. When she comes back in, she says things like ‘“How the fuck can people do that? Don’t they feel bad?” Even though it’s pretty obvious already that no, they don’t.
I tell my mother that maybe she should spend her time worrying about bigger problems, people for instance. There are children starving in Ethiopia. You see them on the news. My mother says she does feel sorry for the children in Ethiopia, but it doesn’t help them out for her to not care about the animals getting run over right in front of our own house. It’s not like you have to choose which one to be worried about, she says.
My mother doesn’t like my French teacher, Mrs. Blanche, because she lets her lab, Daisy, have a litter of puppies every year. Last autumn, Mrs. Blanche sent each of us home with a card that said FREE PUPPIES TO A GOOD HOME!, her phone number on the bottom. My mother saw the card, and I had to grab it out of her hands and tear it up into little pieces so she wouldn’t call Mrs. Blanche and tell her to get Daisy fixed.
“Tell her I’ve got a whole field of free puppies,” my mother said, pointing across the highway, Samuel’s eyes following her hand. “Tell her to come scrape them off the highway and we can see how she likes free puppies then.”
I relay this message to Mrs. Blanche, in much softer language, and she tells me, in French, that she lets Daisy have puppies because it’s nature, and because she wants her children to witness the miracle of life. “La miracle de la vie!” she says, her hands cupped under her pointy chin. And, she adds, in English, Daisy is a good breed. People want her pups, and are willing to pay for them. The mixed breeds, she says, are the problem.
My mother doesn’t believe this. “The miracle of life,” she mutters, hoisting Sam up in her arms. “That’s great. Tell her to come down here and I can show her the miracle of death. What a smart woman. I’m so glad she’s your teacher.”
“She just teaches French.”
Now every time we see a dead animal in the road, my mother points at it and says, “Look, Evelyn, ze meeracle of life!,” trying to do a French accent.
But some of the cats make it across the highway. They hide in the crawl spaces under the stairs of the apartment buildings, creeping around only at night, their bones jutting out of mangy fur, their green eyes shining if you catch them with a light. We hear them mating sometimes, and my mother and I agree it sounds like someone getting murdered. In the morning, garbage bags lie scattered in the road, torn and gutted in the night for milk cartons and TV-dinner trays.
So now someone has started poisoning them, and it’s pretty gross. They go into convulsions before they actually die, their cat legs sticking out straight and stiff, flies buzzing around their mouths. When this happens, my mother pulls the sheets down over the windows and tries not to look.
“People make me sick,” she says, no French accent this time. “They really do.”
She gets mad about things more now, even about things that have nothing to do with her. She is still mad about the nuclear bombs, and now she’s also mad about the Contras. The Contras are in Nicaragua, fighting the Communists, and Ronald Reagan says they are like America’s founding fathers and that we have to do whatever we can to help them. I think so too. We can’t have the Communists in Nicaragua, or they will come into Texas and that will be the end. The Contras are good, and the other people, the Sandinistas, are Communists.
My mother says no, Evelyn. You can’t believe everything Ronnie says. It’s not that simple. The Contras are bad, too. They blindfold people and shoot them, just for being in the way, even old men and little children. They kill nuns and cut off women’s arms in front