| When olive was born, Amy felt a strong urge to lick her clean. She had watched her cat, Mitzi, do it to three tiny kittens on a soiled bath towel in the closet of her childhood bedroom when she was eight. Mitzi’s kittens looked to Amy as if their mother had just rescued them from drowning. She was slightly confused about where Mitzi really had acquired the kittens, but the licking did not puzzle Amy at all. The licking seemed appropriate. Propriety, of course, prevented Amy from so cleansing her own sticky newborn. Still, when Olive, wet and squirming, was placed abruptly on her deflated abdomen, Amy was sure that such a bath would be a natural response to her child’s primal rooting and grunting. The prior two hours had convinced Amy that human beings are nothing more than animals. |