Articles Available Online

Mary Gaitskill’s fiction is full of cats – stray kittens wandering in and out of people’s lives, little white cats seen briefly from the window of a passing car, cats remembered from childhood, cats that never really existed but who are summoned up in conversation as a way for characters to find something to say to one another Women and children are often compared to cats, in her stories Men are too, although if a man is closely associated with an animal in a Gaitskill story, that animal is more likely to be a dog or a horse (a notable exception is the overconfident academic in ‘Stuff’, who the narrator describes as having ‘gone to seed in the manner of an old cat who knows where to find the food dish’)   Cats are everywhere in Gaitskill’s work, once you start looking for them In ‘Because they wanted to’, the title story from the 1997 collection recently reissued by Penguin, a girl named Elise finds herself babysitting three small children whose mother might just have abandoned them The story is told almost entirely from Elise’s point of view: she is something of a lost cat herself, too dazed by her own precarious circumstances to be able to successfully evaluate the circumstances of others, or really even to notice them She sees the ad for a babysitter on a noticeboard at the STD clinic (it’s written on notepaper printed with pictures of cats), and takes on the job, despite having no experience with children and no guarantee that she’ll get paid Elise has run away from home, or at least wandered away from it, and the babysitting job seems at first like some sort of solution – a way of being less lost, of being part of someone else’s team It’s not really like that though The mother and her children are just as lost as she is; like Elise, they’ve run out of the glue that holds an ordinary life together   Struggling to find something to say to the children, who are scared and confused and already wondering when their mother will