Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love

by Maryrose Wood

  (Mr. Frasconi would prefer I say Randall’s not the sort of Dawg in front of whom your face should get red. But I like it better my way.)

  Nope, Randall’s definitely not the sort of Dawg whose unexpected arrival would make your cheeks turn strawberry ice cream color, but not cool like ice cream, more hot like tomato soup, no matter how much of a fool you might have just been acting like (sorry, Mr. F!).

  Unless, of course, shoot-me-now Matthew Dwyer was standing RIGHT BEHIND HIM.

  Yes, there’s my cutieDawg standing there, skinny and slouched like a greyhound in the cold morning sun. Hair the color of winter grass in Central Park, and soft as a rabbit’s ear. At least, I imagine it is. I’ve never actually touched Matthew’s hair.

  Jess and Kat are looking at me with that mixture of horror and fascination usually reserved for watching reality television. Now that she’s eaten a teacup full of slugs, what will that madcap Felicia do next? I do not disappoint.

  “Hey, Matthew.”

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Listen,” I say, smiling the smile of a used-car salesman with a lemon to unload, the useless, nothing-left-to-lose smile of a death row inmate slurping down one final milk shake. “I have a really cool idea for a, um, science thing. Can I talk to you about it?”

  At the words “science thing,” Matthew perks up like a puppy that just spotted his lost chew toy under the phuton.

  “What is it?” he says in his yummy, quiet voice.

  “Are you gonna be in the lab later? It’s kind of complicated. I’ll come by and we can—”

  I pause for effect, and also to enjoy the sight of Jess sputtering and Kat, who generally avoids eye contact, just outright staring at me. “You know. Talk about it.”

  Matthew nods. “Sure. I have to clean all the rabbit cages today, so I’ll be there, like, all afternoon.”

  Okay cool, cool, later, see ya later. Phase one is complete! How easy is this? X, prepare to surrender your mystery. The Secret of Love is an onion that just lost one layer of skin.

  This afternoon, I will go to the lab, and there, as we breathe in the fragrant bunny-turd aroma of the rabbit hutches, I will tell Matthew all the things that I have, um, decided to tell him.

  Felicia’s Private Kitten Directive Number Gazillion: When your Kittenpals tell you you’re insane, YOU ARE.

  I AM INSANE.

  Uh, Jess? Kat?

  WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP ME???????

  3

  Tick, Tock. Tick, Tock. The Longest Morning of One Kitten’s Life

  During a typical day at the Pound, all us Free Children are supposed to pass the time by digging deeply into our passions, creating our own learning plans, being self-directed and self-motivated and self-self-self. This approach to education offers many advantages, such as the opportunity to spend your day writing love poetry (like me) or breeding genius rabbits (like Matthew). But it is a huge problem when you are in a state of, yes, OBSESSIVE anxiety about a chain of potentially humiliating events you have just set in motion and inside your self is the last place you want to be.

  Luckily, there’s no rule that says I can’t spend the morning tagging along as my fellow Poundmates engage in the self-directed pursuit of their self-induced passions. And no one is more self-directed and passionate than—

  “Why is it so hard to just HELP people? I mean, I’m trying to do something NICE! And she looked at me like I was there to steal her LUNCH or something!” So says Jessica Kornbluth, founder of and (so far) sole participant in the brand-new MFCS Peer Tutoring Outreach Program. We’re in the second-floor kitchen of the Pound. (The building used to be some rich person’s house, and it still feels more like an eccentric old mansion than a school—there are kitchens and sitting rooms and a creaky, tiny elevator with a black iron gate that’s hard to close, so we prefer the narrow, twisty back stairways that sneak you from floor to floor.)

  Jessica “Helping People Is My Thing” Kornbluth is helping herself to a nice foamy cup of coffee with steamed milk. Two shakes of cinnamon, one shake of cocoa. Her mug sports a faded picture of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy standing in the transporter chamber. They’re supposed to appear and disappear based on the temperature of the mug, but that was a million rides through the dishwasher ago, and now they’re just permanently semi-materialized, which I imagine would tickle.

  But those are my thoughts. I doubt Jess is concerned about Captain Kirk’s discomfort; she has Serious Real-Life Issues on her mind, always. She tucks her very organized, businesslike black binder under her arm, with all its pert little color-coded tabs sticking out, and heads for the Red Room.

  There are a few sitting-room areas on each of the Pound’s five mazelike floors, but our favorite is the Red Room, so called because of the floor-length cherry red drapes hanging at the south window. I’m feeling calmer already, curled up on the Red Room’s squishy old sopha, staring into the huge marble fireplace and soaking up that brisk, everything’s-under-control vibe Jess gives off. Maybe I should get a binder, too. Section One: Things Matthew Has Said to Me and What They Might Mean. Section Two: Stupid Things I Have Said to Others That Matthew Might Have Overheard. Section Three: Favorite Foods. Section Four—

  Jess flips her binder open with a loud snap. “That’s her,” she says. “My first student. I mean, peer learning partner.”

  I look at the neatly typewritten form and read:

  NAME: Doris Jean (“D.J.”) Amberson

  SCHOOL: East Harlem Vocational High School, NYC

  GRADE: 9

  WHY DO YOU WANT A PEER LEARNING PARTNER?

  My mama and daddy and especially Grandma Doris say I

  am not learning bo-diddley at this run-down overcrowded

  excuse of a school.

  SPECIAL INTERESTS:

  Here there was something written but scribbled over. Underneath the scribble, in a different handwriting, it said:

  Stuck-up Priss Doris Jean has not one interest that’s special, thank you now go away! XOXOXOX S&D

  “Fascinating, isn’t it? I wonder who S and D are!” Jess says. She closes her binder and beams, looking genuinely pleased. “This is going to be a CHALLENGE!”

  Jess drains the last of her drink, creating a tiny milk-foam mustache on her lip. “I’d better go. I’m supposed to meet her during her lunch period and her school is way uptown.”

  “Bonne chance!” I say, handing her a napkin. We’re such good pals she doesn’t even blink, she just wipes the foam off her mouth and looks at me.

  “Good luck to you, too, Fee.” I’m glad Jess has stopped yelling at me about this Matthew thing. I guess she realizes I’m beyond help.

  Kitten Directive Number Eighty-six: Stand By Your Littermates, No Matter What!

  Jess smiles. “No matter what happens,” she says, like she heard what I was thinking, “he is one lucky Dawg to have YOU interested in HIM. Remember that!”

  And Kitten Kornbluth trots out to do battle, binder tucked under her arm.

  Like a milk mustache,

  Faint traces of you persist.

  Love leaves evidence.

  To be technically correct, a haiku is supposed to make some reference to nature. The cherry blossoms, the melting frost, the baby frogs peeping foolishly in the swamp until the crane gobbles them up—these are supposed to let the reader know what time of year it is. That is the tradition, anyway, and perhaps it is relevant and meaningful in Japan, where the weather turns from winter to spring, summer to fall, providing many opportunities for haiku poets to sprinkle seasonal references on their work, like blueberries on Cheerios.

  Here in New York City, there are only two seasons. Coat and no-coat. Some would argue that there are brief jacket seasons in between and that these happy, mild weeks provide the best opportunities for attractively layered outfits. True, but these weeks are fleeting and purely transitional in nature. If you’re counting actual seasons, we’re talking two and only two.

  What does this mean for New York poets working in
the haiku form? References to coat and no-coat are certainly possible, but in my experience they lack the symbolic oomph of the blossom, the frog, and the crane. Variations, like sock season versus pedicure season, only make matters worse. Mr. Frasconi, though initially confused by my persistent questions on this subject, did finally come to agree with me. So I don’t trouble myself with the seasonal tradition when writing haiku. Counting syllables is enough entertainment for me.

  “ONE-two-three-four-five, ONE-two-three-four-five— bleeping blintzsky Kremlin bleepsky!” A stream of furious Russian swearwords carries through the door of the practice room.

  Often, when I’m looking for a quiet place to write, or think, or frantically OBSESS about some Matthew-related issue, I go down to the basement of the Pound, where there are a dozen small, not-quite-soundproof rooms used by the musically inclined Free Children for practicing. Even if the rooms are all in use, for some reason I find the narrow, fluorescent-lit hallway with its scratchy synthetic carpet an inviting place to camp out. Plus, Kat’s almost always down here practicing, and I never tire of hearing her swear in Russian.

  That’s right, quiet Kat! Cusses like a merchant sailor on the Baltic Sea, like a KGB agent who can’t get a signal on his shoe phone, but only when she has her violin in hand. She has quite a repertoire (of Russian profanity, I mean). When I ask her what the words mean, she just looks at me. “It’s so obscene,” she’ll say gravely, “it’s untranslatable.”

  Like New York weather, Kat comes in two seasons. No-Violin Kat is shy and says as little as possible, but Violin Kat looks you straight in the eye when she talks, stomps her foot when she’s frustrated, yells filth in Russian when she makes a mistake, and practices, practices, practices. Especially when she has a recital coming up, which she does.

  I wonder if I could find some magic object, like Kat’s violin, that would render me invincible on demand? My problem (like I only have ONE!) is that I think of things that make perfect sense inside my own head (where, like any poet, I spend a lot of time). But when these ideas get LOOSE and are all of a sudden lying there in the cruel light of day, the perfect sense part goes p ft! All gone.

  Right now, as the minutes separating Me from Doom tick-tock away, that’s how I’m feeling about the Search for X. I mean, WHAT was I thinking? Wouldn’t it be easier, and in fact totally preferable, to leave things with Matthew the way they are? Me pining and yearning, him oblivious? It’s not an ideal relationship, but it’s something, right?

  Kat opens the door of the practice room. She’s breathless, as if she’s just done fifty jumping jacks. She’s holding her violin. Watch out.

  “Felicia! What are you doing here?” She looks at me with the crazed eyes of someone who just got out of the Bach Violin Concerto No. 2 in E Major alive, but barely. “Why are you hiding here in the basement? I thought you were going upstairs to confess your love to Matthew—”

  “I am! Later!” I interrupt. Thinking about it is unbearable. “Now I’m just, you know. Writing poems and stuff. You sound good today,” I add lamely.

  “I sound TERRIBLE! I’m going to smash my violin into a thousand pieces and set the pieces on fire and never, ever play again!” She wipes her sweaty forehead with her sleeve. “Do you want to come in?”

  What I want is to hold that magic violin and suck up all its mojo, make myself stop thinking, and just be fearless and foolhardy in the name of love! But that’s asking a lot.

  Kat rarely lets me in the room with her while she’s practicing, so I know this is a special invitation. I enter the sacred cubicle and close the door behind me.

  “Do you want me to turn pages or something?” I ask.

  She turns her back to the music stand.

  “Just sit there,” she says. “I think I have it memorized. It’s going to sound like bleeping borscht paprika bleepsky, but I don’t care right now. The goal is not to stop.”

  The goal is not to stop. Hmmmmm. This sentence activates the philosopher-poet centers of my brain in a pleasant, provocative way. I turn it over in my mind as Kat cues her imaginary accompanist with a look, inhales sharply, and begins to play.

  I spotted Matthew on my very first day at the Pound. I was in the gungest of gung-ho moods that day, quite pleased at having survived the less-than-stimulating early years of my education, which I did by perfecting a kind of dreamy daze. Now I was hoping for something more.

  (To summarize: two years of fancy private preschool; then my parents split up and I switched to public school, where I spent another two years drawing ponies and writing verse novels while the other kids were getting hooked on phonics, which drove my mom insane, which led to a year of homeschooling, which was fun because I basically sat around and read my way through the bookstore, but Mom was all guilt ridden because she had to deal with the customers and couldn’t do lots of “educational” stuff with me, so back to public school for a final, dreamy-dazed shift before I was old enough for the Pound.)

  Was it the way his long limbs struck weird angles when he sat cross-legged on the floor? Or the quiet-but-not-shy voice he used to ask questions during orientation, like “Will I be able to access the lab during holiday breaks?” (The rest of us were very curious as to why he would need to do that, but that was before we knew about the genius rabbit project.)

  What was it about Matthew that made him stand out in the crowd, a vivid Fujicolor Dawg in a sea of half-ripe Polaroids? I knew I couldn’t take my eyes off him, but why?

  I can’t answer, of course, because the answer is X. Matthew, obviously, has X. Tons of X. Gives it off like sparks. Generates it the way balloons generate static on your hair, the way picnics generate ants.

  I ponder this as I trudge up the stairs, imagining lightning bolts of X flying from Matthew’s fingertips. Each step seems more difficult than the one before, as if gravity is increasing the closer I get to the fifth floor. Which is, of course, impossible, since gravity decreases the farther you get from the center of the earth. But the laws of nature do not apply if the Dawg o’ your dreams is waiting at a higher altitude, under the skylights of the fifth-floor lab, scrubbing out stinky rabbit hutches with a rag and totally, blissfully unaware of the BOMBSHELL OF LOVE you are about to drop upon his sweet head.

  Still fortified by the strains of Kat’s music playing in my mind’s ear (and, for the record, she only had to stop once), I push open the door of the lab.

  The stairwell is dim, but the lab is filled with light. On a sunny day like today, the room warms up and gets humid from all the plants growing under the skylights. I feel my pores opening up and hope the effect is more dewy glow than nervous perspiration. Either way, I’m here.

  So is Matthew. Yellow rubber gloves, a red bandanna tied around his head to keep his hair off his face, a fat, silver-gray rabbit squirming under one arm.

  “Hold Frosty a minute?” he says by way of greeting. I’ve never held Frosty before, but I know he’s Matthew’s favorite.

  Like the genius rabbit he is, Frosty climbs happily into my arms, puts his two silver-tufted front paws on my chest, and touches his nose to mine. Matthew peels off his gloves and goes to wash his hands at the big utility sink by the back wall. Frosty gazes at me, all-knowing. These genius rabbits take some getting used to.

  “Perfect timing. I’m ready for a break,” Matthew calls to me, drying his hands. He chats easily with his dozen or so mentally enhanced bunny friends, who are hopping loose around the lab. “You guys may be smart, but you sure are stinky.”

  Frosty is now snuffling my right ear. I wonder if he’s trying to tell me something. Stop, before it’s too late? Relax, everything will be fine? Or even, Don’t worry, Matthew has been waiting for just this type of moment to confess his secret passion for you? Ha ha, very funny, superbunny.

  I sit down on one of the wooden crates that are scattered around the room and do like Mom does during her morning meditation, which is supposed to make her all chilled out and wise and sagacious like the Dalai Lama (NOT! Aside to Mom: Can’t you
just take meds, like the other moms?). Breathe in, breathe out. Frosty seems to like the way my belly moves when I do this, and cuddles against me.

  And then, it happens. I can’t explain it, but somehow, everything seems different, safe, fundamentally okay on the molecular level. Frosty must be offering up some secret bunny mojo, the way Kat’s violin does for her. The part of me that was freaking out seems to go p ft! and fly away, and the part of me that’s been aching to tell the truth starts to expand and grow lighter with every deep breath.

  Frosty takes my thumb gently between his teeth and gives it an approving shake. Matthew returns and looks happy to see Frosty so contented in my lap.

  Happy enough to decide he’s actually madly, deeply, and X-cellently in love with me?

  This Kitten is about to find out!

  Here’s the part where I can pretend that Matthew heard me out, threw his arms around me and proposed, or at least asked me to the junior prom two years in advance. The Blissful End and fade out!

  Or, here’s the part where I can get all Alice in Wonderland and swear that Frosty actually leapt up between Matthew and me and spoke aloud, in a piping little bunny voice:

  “Felicia! Matthew! My dear, sweet humans! How nice that you two, who are obviously and indisputably destined to be 2-gethah-4-evah, are finally discovering what we in the rabbit realm have always known! That the key to making happy burrows, which some call X, is quite simple, obvious really, but can only be attained by—Whoops! I’m late! I’m late!”

  But that’s not exactly what happens.

  What does happen is this:

  I look into Matthew’s eyes, still feeling Frosty’s encouraging teeth on my thumb, and I open my mouth, and out come words. They’re clumsy, mumbled words that communicate, if you can make them out, some vague sense of an amazing phenomenon that demands to be understood, one of those ideas so self-evident that it’s easy to miss, and clichés of that ilk.