It's Like This, Cat

by Emily Cheney Neville

  “Yeah.”

  “He been altered?”

  “No.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. He was a stray. I’ve had him almost a year.”

  All the time he’s talking, the doctor is soothing Cat and looking him over. He goes on stroking him and looks up at me. “Well, son, one of these days he’s going to get in one fight too many. Shall we alter him the same time we sew up his leg?”

  So there it is. I can’t seem to answer right away. If the doctor had argued with me, I might have said No. But he just goes on humming and stroking. Finally he says, “It’s tough, I know. Maybe he’s got a right to be a tiger. But you can’t keep a tiger for a pet.”

  I say, “O.K.”

  An attendant takes Cat away, and I go sit in the waiting room, feeling sweaty and cold all over. They tell me it’ll be a couple of hours, so I go out and wander around a lot of blocks I never saw before and drink some Cokes and sit and look up at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Queens.

  When I go back for him, Cat looks the same as ever, except for a bandage all up his right front leg. The doctor tells me to come back Friday and he’ll take out the stitches.

  Mom sees me come in the door, and I guess I look pretty grim, because she says, “Cat will be all right, won’t he, dear?”

  “Yes.” I go past her and down into my room and let Cat out of the basket and then bury my head under the pillow. I’m not exactly ashamed of crying, but I don’t want Mom to hear.

  After a while I pull my head out. Cat is lying there beside me, his eyes half open, the tip end of his tail twitching very slowly. I rub my eyes on the back of his neck and whisper to him, “I’m sorry. Be tough, Cat, anyway, will you?”

  Cat stretches and hops off the bed on his three good legs.

  8

  West Side Story

  The regular park man got sunstroke or something, so I earned fourteen dollars raking and mowing in Gramercy Park in the middle of August. Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to own a key to get in, so the city doesn’t take care of it.

  Real paper money, at this time of year especially, is very cheering. I head up to Sam Goody’s to see what records he’s got on sale and what characters are buying them. Maybe I’ll buy something, maybe not, but as long as I’ve got money in my pocket, I don’t feel like the guy is glaring at me for taking up floor space.

  Along the way I walk through the library, the big one at Forty-second Street. You go in by the lions on Fifth Avenue, and there’s all kinds of pictures and books on exhibit in the halls, and you walk through to the back, where you can take out books. It’s nice and cool, and nobody glares at you unless you either make a lot of noise or go to sleep. I can take books out of here and return them at the Twenty-third Street branch, which is handy.

  Sam Goody’s is air-conditioned, so it’s cool too. There are always several things playing on different machines you can listen to. Almost the most fun is watching the people: little, fat, bald guys buying long-haired classical music, and thin, shaggy beatniks listening to the jazz.

  I go to check if there are any bargains in the Kingston or Belafonte division. There’s a girl standing there reading the backs of records, but I don’t really catch a look at more than her shoes—little red flats they are. After a bit she reaches for a record over my head and says, “Excuse me.”

  “Sure.” Then we catch each other’s eye and both say, “Oh. Gee, hello.”

  Well, we’re both pretty surprised, because this is the girl I met out at Coney Island that day with Nick when I had Cat with me, and now we’re both a long way from Coney Island. This girl isn’t one of the two giggly ones. It’s the third, the one that liked Cat.

  We’ve both forgotten each other’s names, so we begin over with that. I ask her what she’s been doing, and she’s been at Girl Scout camp a few weeks, and then she earned some money babysitting. So she came to think about records, like me. I tell her I’ve been at Coney once this summer, and I looked around for her, which is true, because I did.

  “It’s a big place,” she says, smiling.

  “Say, you live out there, don’t you? How come you get all the way in here by yourself? Doesn’t your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was going to Coney alone.”

  Mary says, “I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows I’m not going to get lost.”

  I say, “Gee, it’d be great to have a mother that didn’t worry about you all the time.”

  “Oh, Mom worries.” Mary giggles. “You should have heard her when I said I liked Gone With the Wind and I didn’t like Anna Karenina. I pretty nearly got disowned.”

  “What does she think about science fiction?” I ask, and Mary makes a face, and we both laugh.

  I go on. “Well, my mom doesn’t care what I read. She worries about what I eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I’m about to kill myself. It’s a nuisance, really.”

  Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, “I think maybe it’d be nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you’re comfortable and all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time.”

  This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective mothers, and Mary picks up the record of West Side Story and says, “Gee, I’d like to see that. Did you?”

  I say No, and to tell the truth I hadn’t hardly heard of it.

  “I read a book about him. It was wonderful,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “Bernstein. The man who wrote it.”

  “What’s West Side Story about, him?” I ask cautiously.

  “No, no—he wrote the music. It’s about some kids in two gangs, and there’s a lot of dancing, and then there’s a fight and this kid gets—well, it isn’t a thing you can tell the story of very well. You have to see it.”

  This gives me a very simple idea.

  “Why don’t we?” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Go see it. Why not? We got money.”

  “So we do,” she says slowly. “You think they’ll let us in, I mean being under sixteen?”

  You know, this is the first girl I really ever talked to that talks like a person, not trying to be cute or something.

  We walk around to the theater, and being it’s Wednesday, there’s a matinee about to start. The man doesn’t seem to be one bit worried about taking our money. No wonder. It’s two dollars and ninety cents each. So we’re inside with our tickets before we’ve hardly stopped to think.

  Suddenly Mary says, “Oops! I better call Mom! Let’s find out what time the show is over.”

  We do, and Mary phones. She says to me, “I just told her I was walking past West Side Story and found I could get a ticket. I didn’t say anything about you.”

  “Why, would she mind?”

  Mary squints and looks puzzled. “I don’t know. I just really don’t know. It never happened before.”

  We go in to the show, and she is right, it’s terrific. I hardly ever went to a live show before, except a couple of children’s things and something by Shakespeare Pop took me to that was very confusing. But this West Side Story is clear as a bell.

  We have an orangeade during intermission, and I make the big gesture and pay for both of them. Mary says, “Isn’t it wonderful! I just happened to meet you at the beach, and then I meet you at Goody’s, and we get to see this show that I’ve wanted to go to for ages. None of my friends at school want to spend this much money on a show.”

  “It’s wonderful,” I say. “After it’s over, I’m going back to buy the record.”

  So after the show we buy it, and then we walk along together to the subway. I’ll have to get off at the first stop, Fourteenth Street, and she’ll go on to Coney, the end of the line.

  It’s hard to talk on the subway. There’s so much noise you have to shout, which is hard if you don’t know what to say. Anyway, you can’t ask a girl
for her phone number shouting on the subway. At least I can’t.

  I’m not so sure about the phone-number business either. I sort of can’t imagine calling up and saying, “Oh, uh, Mary, this is Dave. You want to go to a movie or something, huh?” It sounds stupid, and I’d be embarrassed. What she said, it’s true—it’s sort of wonderful the way we just ran into each other twice and had so much fun.

  So I’m wondering how I can happen to run into her again. Maybe the beach, in the fall. Let’s see, a school holiday—Columbus Day.

  The train is pulling into Fourteenth Street. I shout, “Hey, how about we go to the beach again this fall? Maybe Columbus Day?”

  “O.K.!” she shouts. “Columbus Day in the morning.”

  “Columbus Day in the morning” sounds loud and clear because by then the subway has stopped. People snicker, and Mary blushes.

  “So long,” I say, and we both wave, and the train goes.

  9

  Fathers

  That operation didn’t make as much difference to Cat as you might think. I took him back to the clinic to get the stitches out of his leg and the bandages off. A few nights later I heard yowls coming up from the backyard. I went down and pulled him out of a fight. He wasn’t hurt yet, but he sure was right back in there pitching. He seems to have a standing feud with the cat next door.

  However, he’s been coming home nights regularly, and sometimes in the cool part of the morning he’ll sit out on the front stoop with me. He sits on a pillar about six feet above the sidewalk, and I sit on the steps and play my transistor and read.

  Every time a dog gets walked down the street under Cat’s perch, he gathers himself up in a ball, as if he were going to spring. Of course, the poor dog never knows it was about to be pounced on and wags on down the street. Cat lets his tail go to sleep then and sneers.

  Between weathercasts I hear him purring, loud rumbly purrs, and I look up and see Tom there, stroking Cat’s fur up backward toward his ears. Tom is looking out into the street and sort of whistling without making any sound.

  “Gee, hi!” I say.

  “Hi, too,” he says. He strokes Cat back down the right way, gives him a pat, and sits down. “I just been down to see your dad. He’s quite a guy.”

  “Huh-h-h? You got sunstroke or something? Didn’t he read you about ten lectures on Healthy Living, Honest Effort, Baseball, and Long Walks with a Dog?”

  “No-o-o.” Tom grins, but then he sits and stares out at the street again, so I wait.

  “You know,” he says, “you give me an idea. You talk like your dad is a real pain, and that’s the way I always have felt about mine. But your dad looks like a great guy to me, so—well, maybe mine could be too, if I gave him a chance. Your dad was saying I should.”

  “Should what? You should go home?”

  “No. Your dad said I ought to write him a long letter and face up to all the things I’ve goofed on. Quitting NYU, the cellar trouble, all that. Then tell him I’m going to get a job and go to night school. Your dad figures probably he’d help me. He said he’d write him, too. No reason he should. I’m nothing in his life. It’s pretty nice of him.”

  I try to digest all this, and it sure is puzzling. The time I ran down that crumb of a doorman on my bike, accidental on purpose, I didn’t get any long understanding talks. I just got kept in for a month.

  Tom slaps me in the middle of the back and stands up. “Hilda’s gone back to work at the coffee shop. I guess I’ll go down and see her before the lunch rush, and then go home and write my letter.”

  “Say ‘Hi’ for me.”

  “O.K. So long.”

  The weather cools off some, and Pop starts to talk about vacation. He’s taking two weeks, last of August and first of September, so I start shopping around for various bits of fishing tackle and picnic gear we might need. We’re going to this lake up in Connecticut, where we get a sort of motel cottage. It has a little hot plate for making coffee in the morning, but most of the rest of the time we eat out, which is neat.

  We’re sitting around the living room one evening, sorting stuff out, when the doorbell rings. I go answer it, and Tom walks in. He nods at me like he hardly sees me and comes into the living room. He shakes hands like a wooden Indian. His face looks shut up again, the way it did that day I left him in the filling station.

  He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a letter. I can see a post-office stamp in red ink with a pointing hand by the address. He throws it down on Dad’s table.

  “I got my answer all right.”

  Pop looks at the letter and I see his foot start to twitch the way it does when he’s about to blow. But he looks at Tom, and instead of blowing he just says, “Your father left town? No forwarding address?”

  “I guess so. He just left. Him and that woman he married.” Tom’s voice trails off and he walks over to the window. We all sit quiet a minute.

  Finally Pop says gently, “Well, don’t waste too much breath on her. She’s nothing to do with you.”

  Tom turns around angrily. “She’s no good. She loafs around and drinks all the time. She talked him into going.”

  “And he went.” There’s another short silence, and Pop goes on. “Where was this you lived?”

  “House. It was a pretty nice little house, too. Dark red with white trim, and enough of a yard to play a little ball, and I grew a few lettuces every spring. I even got one ear of corn once. We moved there when I was in second grade because my mom said it was near a good local school. I lived there till I went to college. I suppose he sold it, or got a loan, and they lit off to drink it up. Soon’s they’d got me off their hands.”

  Tom bites off the last word. Suddenly I can see the picture pretty clear: the nice house, the father Tom always talked down and hoped would measure up. Now it’s like somebody has taken his whole childhood and crumpled it up like a wad of tissue paper and thrown it away.

  Mom gets up and goes into the kitchen. Pop’s foot keeps on twitching. Finally he says, “Well, I steered you wrong. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s just as well to have it settled.”

  “It’s settled, all right,” Tom says.

  Mom brings out a tray of ginger-ale glasses. It seems sort of inadequate at a moment like this, but when Tom takes a glass from her he looks like he’s going to bust out crying.

  He drinks some and blows his nose, and Dad says, “When are you supposed to check in with the Youth Board again?”

  “Tuesday. My day off. And I wind up the filling-station job the next week, right after Labor Day.”

  “Labor Day. Hm-m. We’ve got to get moving. If you like, I’ll come down to the Youth Board with you, and we’ll see what we can all cook up. Don’t worry too much. I have a feeling you’re just beginning to fight—really fight, not just throw a few stones.”

  “I don’t know why you bother.” Tom starts to stand up. But while we’ve been talking, Cat has been creeping up under the side table, playing the ambush game, and he launches himself at Tom just as he starts to stand. It throws him off balance and he sits back in the chair, holding Cat.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Pop says. “Cat’s on your side.”

  10

  Cat and the Parkway

  Cat may be on Tom’s side, but whether Pop is on Cat’s side is something else again. I worry about this all the time we’re planning the vacation. Suppose the motel won’t take cats? Or suppose he runs away in the country? If he messes up the vacation in any way, I know Pop’ll say to get rid of him.

  I practice putting Cat back in the wicker hamper to see if I can keep him in that sometimes, but he meows like crazy. That’d drive Pop nuts in the car, and it certainly wouldn’t hide him from any motel-keeper. So I just sit back and hope for the best, but I got a nasty feeling in the bottom of my stomach that some thing’s going to go haywire.

  Pop’s pretty snappish anyway. He’s working late nearly every night, getting stuff cleared up before vacation. He doesn’t want any extra problems, especially n
ot Cat problems. Mom’s been having asthma a good deal lately, and we’re all pretty jumpy. It’s always like this at the end of the summer.

  Tuesday night when he gets home, I ask Pop what’s happened about Tom.

  “We’ll work something out,” he says, which isn’t what you’d call a big explanation.

  “You think he can get back into college?”

  “I don’t know. The Youth Board is going to work on it. They’re arranging for him to make up the midyear exams he missed, so he can get credit for that semester. Then he can probably start making up the second semester at night school if he has a job.

  “Apparently the Youth Board knew his father had skipped—they’ve been trying to trace him. I don’t think it’ll do any good if they find him. Tom had better just cross him off and figure his own life for himself.”

  You know, I see “bad guys” in television and stuff, but with the people I really know I always lump the parents on one team and the kids on the other. Now here’s my pop calmly figuring a kid better chalk off his father as a bad lot and go it alone. If your father died, I suppose you could face up to it eventually, but having him just fade out on you, not care what you did—that’d be worse.

  While I’m doing all this hard thinking, Pop has gone back to reading the paper. I notice the column of want ads on the back, and all of a sudden my mind clicks on Tom and jobs.

  “Hey, Pop! You know the florist on the corner, Palumbo, where you always get Mom the plant on Mother’s Day? I went in there a couple of weeks ago, because he had a sign up, ‘Helper Wanted.’ I thought maybe it was deliveries and stuff that I could do after school. But he said he needed a full-time man. I’m pretty sure the sign’s still up.”

  “Palumbo, huhn?” Pop takes off his glasses and scratches his head with them. He looks at his watch and sighs. “They still open?”

  They are, and Pop goes right down to see the guy. He knows him fairly well anyway—there’s Mother’s Day, and Easter, and also the shop is the polling place for our district, so Pop’s in there every Election Day. He always buys some little bunch of flowers Election Day because he figures the guy ought to get some business having his shop all messed up for the day.