The Cat Who Got Married

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Four-thirty. If you haven’t found Rajah by then I’ll help you look.”

  Yuppies in business suits on their way to the last summer home beer blast of the season jammed the bus, and at every roadside stop, Eastern European grandmas waited next to produce stands of Indian corn and pumpkins for a ride down a few miles of highway. Their heads were wrapped in scarves, and they held the edges of ratty winter coats together against the cool fall breeze coming off the ocean only a few miles to the east.

  It was a trip I had made many times, going home. I knew how the land flattened out and the endless horizon loomed over the scrub pine and sandy lawns, and the fast food chains got farther and farther apart, and the faded neons of roadside motels and tacky diners took over. It was a psychological thing for me, as I left the noise and the traffic of the city behind for the country roads and truck farms of my childhood. That journey down the shoreline always held a lot of significance for me, as if I was shedding my Manhattan executive skin and becoming a Jersey girl again.

  My mother picked me up in the center of Sea Isle City, faithful as always in her station wagon with the fake wood along the sides. I once asked her why she drove that tank of a car, when she had only one child who could have fit easily into the back of a subcompact, and she told me that as a child growing up in the city those station wagons had symbolized the country to her. I remember thinking that it was nice to have dreams that were so easily fulfilled.

  I threw my bag on the back seat and slid into the front next to my mother. “Hi, Mom.” I kissed her cheek. “Did you find Rajah yet?”

  She put the car into drive and eased out into the slow summer traffic on Landis Avenue. “Your father and I looked everywhere. In all the closets, and under the sofa, and behind the cabinet in the breezeway.”

  My mother turned to me as we waited for the light. “You remember how he used to push the screen in your bedroom window out and slip through? Well, it looks like he did it again. Your father even searched through the rose mallows at the foot of the dunes-- you know Rajah likes to sleep there when he gets out.”

  I looked at the deepening blue sky and took a deep breath of the sea air I had been yearning for all week long in the smoggy city. “Didn’t he used to get into Mrs. Morrison’s house somehow and eat her African violets?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? She passed away during the summer.”

  “That’s right, you told me.” I nodded. “Are Janet and Allan selling the house?”

  “It was finally sold a few weeks ago. It was in terrible condition.”

  The light changed and we turned into our neighborhood. The leafy gray birch and red cedar, power lines, and peeling paint were like a comfortable banner waving welcome home. “So we have new neighbors? Are they nice?”

  “It’s not a they, it’s a him,” my mother said. “His name is Jack Swift. He’s very young. But he owns a new health club on Sea Isle Boulevard, so he must be successful.”

  “Health club? In Sea Isle City?”

  Sea Isle City was a strange place to grow up. In the winter, the place shuts down almost completely, with only a few thousand year-round residents. But in the summer the population blooms to a hundred thousand as swarms of tourists come down from Philly for days, weeks or months.

  I couldn’t see what kind of business a health club could do. People who lived in Sea Isle City all year were working class. You had your small shop owners; municipal government employees like my dad, who was the city engineer; school teachers and cops and firemen, and real estate people like my mom, who handled seasonal rentals for an agency in town.

  As for me, I never cared much for health clubs. They always seemed to be places you went if you were not happy with yourself, a place you went when you were trying to make yourself over into someone else. I had put a lot of effort into making myself the woman I was. I had no desire to change.

  “He’s very good-looking,” my mother said. She looked over at me. “Just about your age, as a matter of fact.”

  I wasn’t interested in my mother’s matchmaking. “So there’s no chance Rajah’s in there.” I drummed my fingers on the arm rest. “Did you ask the other neighbors?”

  “No one has seen him. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Open a fresh can of cat food and he’ll come running. He always has in the past.”

  She pulled into the driveway and shut the car off. “I tried that. I just don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t come back.”

  My mother had gotten Rajah two years before, when I graduated from college and moved into New York City to work. I was determined to be a grown-up, to stop letting my mother spoil me. She wasn’t ready to give up the picture she had always dreamed of, a happy life in the suburbs taking care of her family, so she replaced me with a tiny black kitten of championship stock.

  Her dreams were always so simple. The station wagon, the family, life in the boondocks. It seems so much harder for a modern woman to have dreams that can be satisfied. I dreamed of an education, and I got that. Towards the end of my four years in college, I dreamed of a career, of life in a city that was exciting and challenging, and I got that, too.

  But what I wanted next was much harder to achieve. I wanted what my parents had, after all those years of thinking it wasn’t enough. I wanted someone to love, to care about and to care for me. I wanted a home of my own, not a studio apartment furnished with my parents’ castoffs, and children, and maybe even a station wagon with fake wood panels.

  When I went out with guys, I kept that in the back of my mind. Of course, you can’t say something like that when you first start dating someone; it scares them off. And as I had learned with my last boyfriend, you can’t even talk about the m-word when you’ve gotten to know someone. I’d certainly scared Bob off fast when I’d started to talk about settling down. Bob was a bond trader, working hard and climbing the ladder, and he liked having a pretty girlfriend to go out with, to show off to his friends. But that was where it stopped for him.

  When we walked into the house, my father was sitting in the living room sneezing. For as long as I can remember, my father has been allergic to pollen, dust, mold, and, as he put it, “anything that flies through the air smaller than a B-52.”

  I walked over and kissed the top of his balding head. “Susie Q,” he said. “Welcome home.” He sneezed again. “Damn these allergies. The gardeners were here today, cutting the grass and putting down the mulch. Must have stirred something up.”

  “Has Rajah come home?” my mother asked.

  My father shook his head, and sneezed again. “We should go look for him again before it gets too dark,” my mother said.

  “Supper,” my father said, between sneezes. “Swift.”

  “What?” My mother turned to him. “Swift? Oh, my. I invited that nice Mr. Swift next door to dinner and I forgot all about it.”

  “Look, mom, no matchmaking, OK? I came down for a vacation.”

  “You’re always so defensive, Susan. I’m not matchmaking, I’m just being a good neighbor.”

  “Mom.” I stretched the word out to three or four syllables, reverting back to a teenaged state. It seems like I’m doomed to act that way when I’m around my parents. I can imagine I’ll be fifty one day, still whining and complaining whenever my mother suggests something.

  “He’ll be here in a few minutes,” my mother said. “Put your bag in your room and come help me fix dinner.”

  Jack Swift rang the doorbell promptly at seven-thirty. “Punctual,” my father said, smiling. His anti-histamine had kicked in, and he had stopped sneezing.

  “It’s not like he had to worry about traffic,” I said.

  My mother answered the door and ushered him in. He was in his late twenties—at least a few years older than I was. So much for my mother’s thinking he was my age.

  He was good-looking in a jocky kind of way. His sleek, dark hair was cut very stylishly, full on top and in back, tapering down fast to his collar. He had a strong chin and deep
-set dark eyes, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist.

  I never liked very athletic guys-- if you date a jock, he makes you go to baseball games with him and get up early to go jogging. I like to sleep in and I don’t like any place where guys drink beer, curse and spit a lot.

  My father opened a bottle of white wine and poured us all glasses, and Jack and I sat on my mother’s tweed sofa, leaving as much space between us as we could.

  “What brought you to Sea Isle City?” I asked.

  “I was working as a personal trainer at a health club in Summit, up near Newark,” he said. “One of my clients has a summer home down here, and he said he couldn’t find a good place to work out when he was here.”

  He sipped his wine. “We kept talking, and he said that he owned a building on Sea Isle Boulevard that would be great for a club.”

  “What are you going to do in the winter?”

  “I’ve got ideas. Mommy and Me exercise classes in the mornings. Yoga, spinning and zumba in the afternoons and after work. You have to cater to the local clientele.”

  “You teach zumba?” I asked. I’d taken a couple of those classes with a girlfriend, and it was a pretty wild, sexy kind of dance exercise.

  “I can teach pretty much anything. You ever tried it?”

  From the way he was looking at me, I imagined he was seeing me in some skimpy workout outfit and I blushed. “Just a couple of times.”

  “I’d love to work out with you some time.”

  Fortunately my mom called us in to dinner then, and conversation shifted to what he was doing with Mrs. Morrison’s house. My father, ever the engineer, wanted to know all the details of Jack’s remodeling plans, but I didn’t want to hear about it.

  When you go home, you want everything to be the way it was when you were growing up. You want to see the same neighbors, the same stores, the same old Christmas decorations year after year. Change is not good when it attacks your stable center, your home town.

  “I always liked Mrs. Morrison’s porch,” I said. That’s where she had raised her African violets, under lights, and you could see that purple glow from anywhere on the street.

  “I’m making that into my workout room,” Jack said.

  It seemed funny that a room that had been dedicated to something as sedentary as African violets had been rededicated to activity and sweat.

  “Would you like to come over and see what I’ve done with the house? I could probably use a woman’s eye to look it over. I don’t want it to look like some kind of 1960s bachelor pad.”

  “Susan has a wonderful sense of design,” my mother said. “In high school she used to sit in math class drawing house plans.”

  “Mother.”

  “Really?” Jack asked. “Did you doodle your initials twined with your boyfriend’s in little hearts on your notebook, too?”

  “I wasn’t trying to design Barbie’s dream house,” I said indignantly. “I was experimenting with ideas about modern architecture.”

  Even I thought that sounded pompous. But it was true. Back then I thought I might want to be an architect. Instead I went to school for fashion merchandising and ended up as a very junior stylist, deciding which accessories went with which outfit, often getting overruled by the editor or the photographer.

  “Seriously,” Jack said. “I’d like your advice.”

  “Sure,” I said, managing a smile. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “It’s a date, then. Why don’t you come over around two?”

  I hated that word, date. In Manhattan, I went on double dates sometimes, with my girlfriend Janet and her boyfriend Beau, and random friends and co-workers of Beau’s. I’d had a couple of casual boyfriends, and a few blind dates. But I found the word irritating because it carried so much freight with it.

  Jack left around nine-thirty. I was tired and said I was going to turn in. “That’s not a bad idea,” my father said. “Looking for that damn cat wore me out.”

  “What if Rajah comes home during the night?” my mother asked.

  “I’ll leave the screen open in my room. He got out that way, he can get back in that way too.”

  The next morning my mother woke me at eight-thirty to tell me Rajah had not come home yet. “What do you want me to do, Mom? Get down on all fours and eat cat food for you? He’ll come back.” I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  When I finally got up it was sunny, but too cold to go to the beach, so I went grocery shopping with my mother. “Don’t forget, you’re seeing Jack today at two,” she said as we browsed through the health food section.

  “I’m not seeing him. I’m seeing his house.” My mother nodded and smiled.

  Then a frown wrinkled her forehead. “Do you think Rajah might have gotten into his house?”

  I shook my head. “He would have said something last night.”

  When we got home we made up a flyer that said “Cat Missing,” including a couple of digital pictures of Rajah in different poses. We wrote in a description of him and our name, address and phone number. “Do you think those pictures do him justice?” my mother asked.

  “He’s a cat, Mother.”

  “He has feelings.” She looked at the clock. “It’s almost two. You’re due next door. I’ll go down to the Speedy Copy and run some of these off.”

  I walked next door as my mother drove off. “Punctual,” Jack said.

  “It’s not like I had to consider traffic.” He laughed, I laughed. He showed me around the house. He had consolidated two small bedrooms into an office and put down new carpeting in the living room.

  “The house was kind of run-down,” he said. “I had to rip up carpeting and linoleum everywhere. I put quarry tile down in the kitchen and on the porch. That’s where I have all my weights and my equipment. Would you like to see it?”

  The doorbell rang before I could answer. It was my mother, with a stack of flyers from Speedy Copy. Rajah’s face stared up at us sadly, the way lost animals always do. The Rajah I remembered, haughty and proud, had been replaced by a fluffy black cat who looked like he missed his family. “Will you help me put these up?” To me she said, “Your father is having another allergy attack. I left him in bed with the vaporizer and a box of tissues.”

  My mother had bought two staple guns and gave one to us, with a cartridge of refill staples. She took the streets that ran perpendicular to the bay in our neighborhood, and Jack and I took the ones that ran parallel.

  We’d gone about a block, me holding up the flyers to telephone poles and him stapling, before I said, “I could do my own streets and we could move a lot faster.”

  “Only one staple gun between us,” he said. “Besides, I’m not in any hurry.”

  “Don’t you have to work? Don’t people need to get fit on the weekends?”

  “Even the owner gets a day off now and then. I can think of worse ways to spend mine than walking around outdoors with a pretty girl.”

  I blushed. It was a beautiful day, the kind of crisp, clear day in early fall that makes you so glad that the summer heat has passed. The sky was absolutely cloudless, and overhead seagulls wheeled and cawed. The leaves had not yet begun to turn color, so we were still surrounded by the richness of summer.

  “I’m sorry for being so rude,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t know what my mother has said to you about me.”

  “Don’t worry, she hasn’t told me about your social life, or your boyfriends, or what you think about. Tell me, what do you think about?”

  We stapled another poster to another telephone pole. I wanted to tell him. I had a feeling he would understand about wanting a house in a town where you knew people, a family, a life. But it was suddenly important not to scare him off, so I said, “I think about a lot of things. Right now, I think I’d like to find this damn cat so I can just go home and relax.”

  We talked about him. He was from a suburb of Newark, and he’d grown up loving the shore. He majored in phys. ed. in college, and taught high school gym for two years. T
hen he’d been an instructor at a health club until his financial backer came through.

  “It’s not too busy, but I can pay my bills,” he said. “And I get to live here at the shore, which I love.”

  “I love it too. Sometimes I wish I could move back here.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Thomas Wolfe said it. You can’t go home again. I’d be a kid again, living under my mother’s thumb. Like this business with you, for example. I’m twenty-five years old and she’s fixing me up with dates.”

  Jack’s face fell. “I’m sorry. I like you. But I’m having trouble forgetting my mom set us up.”

  When we finished putting up the flyers, Jack walked me back home and said, “If you’re free tonight, Susan, I’d like to buy you dinner. We could keep it a secret. You wouldn’t have to tell your mother.”

  “I like that.” I smiled, and he kissed my cheek. “Seven o’clock?”

  “I’ll be prompt,” he said.

  My mother had gone out again. My father was in the living room reading a magazine. “She went to buy an answering machine, in case anyone calls about the cat while we’re out.” He put down the magazine. “I think she’s going overboard.”

  “Rajah is what she has instead of me.” I went into my room to get ready for dinner. When my mother came back, I told her I was going out with my old friend Debbie, who was married and lived across town. When I slipped out the door she was busy with my father, trying to figure out the directions to the answering machine.

  Jack and I ate at my favorite restaurant, right on the water, where the fish was fresh and served on paper plates, with plastic knives and forks. The vast canopy of stars overhead were our lights, along with a small candle in a round glass bowl covered with plastic netting. “Let me guess, my mom told you I like this place,” I said.

  Jack looked up from his clams. “Do you? I do. Remember, I live here.”