Flirting In Cars

by Alisa Kwitney

  The fifth time Claudius yowled and leaped up onto her bookshelf, toppling reference sheets everywhere, Zoë locked him downstairs in the basement. Then she looked around the kitchen, wishing that the mailman delivered her three subscription newspapers earlier in the day. Zoë sighed. This was, she knew, a fine opportunity to finish her article. She could also use the time to unpack and organize her many boxes of books, which were currently lined up against the wall in the living room. She could clean the kitchen. She could cook something interesting for dinner. Except, of course, that she didn’t know how to make anything more complicated than a meatloaf.

  Exercise. That was what she needed. If she’d been in the city, she could have gone for a walk, or taken a dance class. Or she might have walked to the dance class, and then to the store, and then home. Who would have guessed that moving to the country meant giving up walking as a means of transportation?

  Zoë turned on the radio and sat down on the living room floor with her legs extended on either side of her. God, she felt stiff. She realized she hadn’t been to a class since last month, when she’d canceled her gym membership.

  Zoë reached her arms forward, intensifying the stretch of her inner thighs, and then found herself putting her elbows down on the floor and resting her chin on her palms. “Okay,” she said out loud, “so I am not motivated to do this on my own.” Maybe what she really needed was to talk to a friend. As she got up, her knees gave an audible click as she went to find the phone.

  Claudius howled from the basement as she dialed Bronwyn’s number from memory. She wondered if the move had driven him mad. “Bronwyn, it’s me,” she said. “My cat has gone insane and I’m right behind him. Listen? Can you hear that? That’s him, howling.”

  “This is the same cat I used to think was stuffed because all he did was sleep?”

  “No, this is some other cat inhabiting his body. The demon inhabiting my body, on the other hand, has sapped all my energy. I don’t want to work, I don’t want to clean, I don’t want to work out.” Zoë walked to the kitchen window and looked out at the mountain, which only served to make her feel more isolated. “I’m just staring out the window, the way Claudius used to. Bron, I think I’m depressed, and it’s lovely weather outside. What the hell am I going to do when the weather turns bad?”

  “Does this mean you’re coming back? Please say you are.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday,” said Zoë, as Claudius howled and scrabbled at the other side of the basement door. “Maybe Maya and I can come and stay overnight.”

  “Oh! My gosh, that would be wonderful, but I meant, come back for good,” said Bronwyn, sounding uncomfortable.

  “Seeing as how we’ve only just gotten here, I can’t do anything about moving back just yet. But I can spend the weekend.”

  Bronwyn made an unhappy sound. “The thing is,” she said slowly, “we can’t this weekend. I’ve got two frigging different birthday parties to attend.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. How about next weekend?”

  “This is so lame, but I think Brian’s mom is coming.”

  “I don’t know whom I feel sorrier for, me or you.”

  Bronwyn laughed. “How about the weekend after that?”

  Zoë checked her calendar. They were talking about November, when the picture of a pretty maple tree ablaze in color was replaced by the picture of an oak with one leaf clinging to its highest branch. “I guess that’ll have to do,” she said, penciling the date in. She turned back to October, and realized that she’d forgotten about Halloween. It fell on a school day this year.

  “Crap,” she said. “Bronwyn, do you have any idea what country people do for Halloween? There are no people on my road.”

  “Don’t ask me, I grew up in the burbs. We couldn’t escape our neighbors.”

  Zoë sighed, then felt the short hairs on the back of her neck prickle. “I think I hear something.” She listened harder, and then there was a loud knock on the door that made her jump. “Oh my God, there’s someone here!”

  “Jesus, Zoë, try not to scream in my ear. So there’s someone there. Why don’t you go see who it is and call me back later.”

  Her heart pounding at the unexpected interruption, Zoë walked to the door. “Who is it?” In the back of her mind, she was half expecting Mack. She ran her hands over her hair, which was gathered into a bushy ponytail on top of her head.

  “Satellite company. You order a dish?”

  “Yes! Yes, yes, I did.” She glanced down at herself. Her breasts were spilling out of a tank top with a built-in shelf bra. “Hang on a moment, and I’ll let you in.” Zoë ran to the closet, threw a sweater on over her tank top, and then came back to open the door.

  The satellite dish guy stood in her doorway, a large, hulking shape in a beige uniform, checking something off on an order form.

  “You know, I usually don’t watch much TV, but I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see you. I feel so cut off without CNN.” A brief paranoid thought struck her: What if he’s really an ax murderer? He looked a little like an ax murderer.

  “Uh-huh. Sign here.” He handed her the form.

  She signed. “I was expecting someone earlier in the week, but I guess you’re pretty busy around here.” In the city, people complained that you could scream and your neighbors wouldn’t even call the cops. But out here, thought Zoë, there was no one to even hear you scream.

  But if the satellite guy really was a serial killer, he wasn’t the charming kind. Barely glancing at her, he took the order form back and ripped off the bottom sheet. “Okay, I’ll go set up the dish.” He spoke in a low grumble, and Zoë was reminded of Lurch, the zombified butler from the old Addams Family TV show.

  “Oh. Great,” said Zoë. “I’ll just get back to work, then. My editor at the New York Times is waiting to speak with me.”

  The satellite man barely nodded and walked away. Zoë walked over to her computer and turned it on.

  In order to fully understand the plight of women in restrictive Middle Eastern societies, she wrote, you’d have to imagine yourself stuck in the middle of the country without a car, or the ability to drive a car if you had one. In that situation, you wouldn’t just be isolated, you would be dependent on others, and therefore vulnerable.

  On a roll at last, she’d just finished a thousand words when the satellite man walked into the kitchen and told her he was done.

  “Just in time for the weekend. My daughter will be thrilled,” said Zoë as Claudius began howling again from the basement.

  The man’s eyes widened, the first sign of human expression he’d shown. “Jeez, what’s that?”

  “Oh, shoot, I forgot my cat.” Zoë opened the door and Claudius darted out, then sat down to clean his paw with an air of injured dignity. “He’s been acting very strangely.”

  “Probably just wants to get out and go hunting,” said the man, bending over to scratch Claudius’s massive orange head. “You don’t like being cooped up inside, do you, puss? Poor old feller.” He straightened up. “Well, ma’am, you enjoy your satellite TV.” He opened the back door, then paused. “And if you have any questions, feel free to call us.”

  “Thanks again,” said Zoë, just as Claudius, seeing his chance, shot through the small gap and vanished into the wooded area behind the house.

  “Whoops,” said the satellite man, but Zoë had the feeling he’d done it on purpose.

  The next day Claudius was still missing. Maya, exhausted from her first week of school, had gotten extremely upset when Zoë had told her that Claudius was out in the yard somewhere.

  “Did you call his name? Did you try cat food?”

  “I did, Maya. I’m sure he’ll come back soon.”

  Tears glistened in Maya’s eyes. “But why did you even let him out, Mom? It’s dangerous out there!” Her voice, rising in panic, ended on a wail.

  “It wasn’t me, Maya, it was the satellite guy. You want to call him up and yell at him?”

  Maya folded her arm
s in front of her chest. “You call him up.”

  “I already yelled at him in person. Come on, let’s go have a look for the emperor. I can’t imagine he’ll want to rough it for long.”

  “Fine,” said Maya, clearly not placated. “But if we don’t find him we’re never watching TV again!”

  “Aw, please, that’s not fair.”

  Maya narrowed her eyes. “Stop kidding around, Mom, we have a cat to find.”

  But in the end, even though they were still catless after much searching of the dilapidated chicken coop and the rattling of Claudius’s food dish, they did settle down in the living room to watch one of the satellite stations. Some obscure programmer had decided to show Born Free, a film Zoë had last seen in 1971, when she’d been in first grade.

  “Mommy.”

  “Yes?” Zoë stroked her daughter’s head, which was in her lap. Onscreen, the slender blond British actress playing Joy Adamson watched Elsa the lion cub play across a faded African plain.

  “But why does she want to release Elsa into the wild, Mommy?”

  Zoë remembered wondering the same thing. Why would you give up a lioness that adored you? It had been incomprehensible, one of those crazy grown-up things, like putting on makeup that didn’t look like you were wearing makeup.

  “She can’t keep Elsa as a pet anymore, and she doesn’t want to have her lioness go into a zoo.”

  Maya, who had been listening, put her head back down on Zoë’s legs. “I want to work with lions in Africa when I grow up.”

  Zoë smiled. “Do you know, that’s just what I said the first time I saw this movie.” For years she’d imagined herself as a kind of combination Hollywood Joy Adamson and young Jane Goodall, cool and composed in neat khaki shorts, her hair magically transformed into a smooth ponytail, her voice vaguely British as she described herd migrations. It was never clear to Zoë whom exactly she was describing the herds to—an invisible TV audience? Tarzan?

  In any case, that dream had died when she was about twelve and went on a camping trip. Unable to sleep with the open sky above her, Zoë discovered that she was not at home in the great outdoors. But she’d passed the fantasy of working with animals on to Maya, talking about the way Jane Goodall’s empathy and open-mindedness had made her a better scientist than other, more academically qualified candidates.

  “So Maya,” she said now, “don’t you think you’d get a little lonely, living out there in the bush?” It was an old joke between them: Zoë always tempted Maya with civilization, and Maya always remained steadfast in her love of the wild.

  “No, I’d be surrounded by animals.”

  “With no pizza parlors. No movie theaters.”

  “We don’t have those things here either, and I love it.” Maya watched the faded sixties African landscape on the TV set. “I want to live close to nature,” Maya said. “I don’t ever want to go back to the city.”

  Uh-oh. Their little routine had never ended with that punchline before. “Well,” Zoë said, “you may find you’ll change your mind about that.”

  “I won’t. The city is too crowded.”

  “But there’s so much to do there. Museums, restaurants, parks.” Zoë realized that they were playing out their prescribed parts again, but this time there was a note of underlying seriousness in her own voice and, God help her, in Maya’s.

  “Who needs parks when you have a forest in your backyard?”

  Zoë, deciding it was better to change the subject, tucked the knitted afghan more tightly around her daughter’s narrow shoulders. “You cold?” No use convincing her daughter that the city had more to offer when they still had the whole school year to get through.

  “No, I feel all right.” Now that the sun was going down, there was a nip in the air, but they had agreed to leave a window open in case Claudius decided to come back. “But I am hungry.”

  “Me, too. What do you feel like? Roast wildebeest? Gazelle chops?”

  “Something we can eat on a tray. Oh, Mommy, look, they’re abandoning her!” On the television screen, the young lioness was galloping full tilt after Adamson’s open jeep. Zoë didn’t think she’d ever heard Maya say the word “abandon” before. The school was already having a positive effect. “Do you feel like a grilled cheese sandwich?”

  “Okay, but no tomato. I hate warm tomato.”

  Zoë propped an extra cushion under her daughter’s head. “What do you mean, ‘okay’? Do you mean, ‘You are a wonderful mother to go fix me food and feed me on a tray like a princess’?”

  Maya looked up, dimpling. “Indeed, Mother,” she drawled in a fair imitation of 1940s BBC upper-class English, “that is exactly what I wished to say.” Then, in a normal voice, she added, “Come quick before something happens. I don’t want to be alone if something sad’s going to happen.”

  “I won’t be five minutes.” Zoë hummed the theme song to Born Free as she grilled their sandwiches, feeling better than she had all week. This was the way things were supposed to be, mother and daughter curled up together, bound not just by love and common history but by the similarities in their tastes, their preferences, their personalities. Romances with men might come and go, but the romance you had with a child could be trusted to sustain you.

  Zoë had just arranged the food on a tray when she heard a faint scrabbling sound, and a thump. “Maya?” She walked into the living room, where Maya was still lying on the couch while Elsa the lioness approached a male lion. “Strange.”

  Zoë took the tray and was carefully maneuvering her way back into the living room when her bare foot connected with something warm and furry. Shocked, she took a step backward, then slid on a patch of something wet and sticky.

  She screamed and landed hard on her tailbone, the cheese sandwiches flying off the tray.

  “Mom, what is it?” Maya stood in the doorway, her eyes wide. “Oh my God, Claudius!” For a terrible second, Zoë thought her daughter was saying that she had just tripped over the corpse of their cat. But then she saw that Claudius was ecstatically rubbing himself against Maya’s ankles, his purr as loud as an outboard motor.

  And then Zoë glanced down at the mound of matted fur at her feet, saw what it was, and screamed.

  Twelve

  I am so sorry to bother you on a Saturday night,” said Zoë, before she’d even opened the door completely. “It’s just…it was still hopping. And bleeding. I think I could have handled one, but not both.”

  “Don’t worry about it. My sister’s lived in the country her whole life and she still freaks out about mice.” Mack could smell a slightly foul smell in the air, which probably meant a ruptured large intestine. “In the living room, you said?”

  “Well, there’s a big part of it there.”

  “So we’re talking search and recovery.”

  “It was search and rescue, but between the time I called you and when you got here, the rabbit died.” She gave a wry smile. “Words to strike a man dumb.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The old pregnancy tests involved killing a rabbit,” Zoë said over her shoulder as he followed her into the kitchen. “So ‘the rabbit died’ used to mean ‘I’m pregnant.’ Anyway, here are the cleaning supplies.” She handed him rubber gloves, a plastic bag, a bottle of spray disinfectant, and a roll of paper towels.

  Mack stared at the gloves, still a little befuddled by the rabbit-pregnancy connection. “Do we suspect this particular bunny of having Ebola? All I need is a paper towel.”

  “This isn’t a bunny. This is a head, a puddle of viscous black stuff, a foot, and something that looks like an eel.”

  “You didn’t consider taking the cat and putting him in another room?”

  “He was rather insistent about staying. Here. Take the gloves. I’m sure you don’t want to head out for your Saturday night frolics smelling like viscera.”

  “Actually,” Mack said, “this is my big activity tonight.” The minute the words were out, he wanted to hit himself. What the hell did he have t
o go and say that for? Why not just announce: I don’t have much of a life?

  “Well, let me tell you, you still want the gloves. I slipped in what’s left of Bugs over there, and it wasn’t pretty. I may never wear those clothes again.” She pointed to something soaking in a bucket that smelled strongly of disinfectant.

  As Zoë turned, Mack realized that the shapeless, tie-dyed cotton dress she was wearing was backlit and he could see the silhouette of her voluptuous body with embarrassing clarity. He dragged his eyes up, noticing that she’d twisted her thick, dark hair into a loose knot on the top of her head. It was still damp, he realized; she must have showered. In a way, this all reminded Mack of ambulance calls, where you showed up and found people half naked or in their pajamas, their dinner half eaten on the table. Except in those sorts of situations, he tended not to notice things like breasts. “Okay,” he said, “I’d better get to it.”

  “I only spotted one foot, by the way. If you could look for the other three…” She was standing against the light again, and he turned abruptly toward the living room, only to find himself face to face with the little blond girl, who was wearing a pair of silky pink Cinderella pajamas the exact shade of liquid amoxicillin.

  “I threw up,” she said, sounding very matter-of-fact.

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “I’m worried that I’m not going to be much good helping animals in the wild if I throw up when I see a dead rabbit.”

  “It just takes a little getting used to. Why don’t you go brush the bad taste from your teeth and I’ll take care of the mess.”

  The girl tilted her blond head to one side, considering. “But how do you get used to it, if you never do it?” She paused. “I think I’d better watch you. Is it okay if I watch you?”

  “As long as you don’t throw up again.”

  “I wonder,” said the girl slowly, “if that’s really the kind of promise you can keep. I mean, it’s not like promising not to steal or lie, is it?”

  Mack was struggling to come up with a response when he saw that the girl’s eyes were sparkling with mischief. “Hang on, are you having fun with me?”