by Vicki Myron
And through it all, there have been the animals: eleven cats for this former cat hater, and even a couple of dogs. They were always there whenever Vicki needed them, just as Christmas Cat had always been. Until 2006, that is, when Shadow’s kittens Rosco and Abbey both passed away within months of each other at the age of sixteen. Nine months later, Choco, a dog Vicki had nursed through severe injuries after he was hit by a car and who had remained devoted to her for the rest of his life, died at the age of twelve. For the first time since she pulled CC from the water almost twenty-five years before, Vicki had no critters around her. It was an empty feeling, especially with her daughter in Minnesota and her husband often away on long business trips, but one she felt ready to endure. Perhaps even enjoy. Then, on a trip to Kodiak to care for her aging mother, a friend introduced her to an elderly dog whose owners had recently died. Bandit, a loving and energetic Border collie mix, now sleeps in her bed every night. In her heart, she knows, she couldn’t possibly love a dog more.
And yet, on those dark Alaska nights, when Vicki Kluever sits in her bentwood rocking chair with the woodstove lit against the long cold hours, a cup of Russian tea in her hand, her husband reading a book on the couch with Bandit at his side, it is the memory of CC the Christmas Cat to which she returns. His lush black fur. His mischievous eyes. The way he would disappear into the forest behind the back fence. The way he would run to her and hold her cheeks and nuzzle his head against her chin. You never forget your first love, I suppose. Especially when his personality embodied everything you believe in. Especially when he taught you to love, when so much of your previous love, outside of family, had been misplaced and flawed. Especially when you saved his life on a quiet Christmas Eve.
SIX
Cookie
“I have never been loved by anyone, not even my daughter or my parents, the way I have been loved by my Cookie.”
This is a New York City story,which maymake youthink it’s as far from Spencer, Iowa, as you can possibly get. But it’s not. In a way, it’s right next door. Because this is not the kind of New York City story you’re used to hearing. It’s not the kind with famous people, crazy prices, arrogant financial tycoons, or glitzy signs for Broadway shows. I admit, there’s nothing quite like standing in Times Square, looking at those glitzy signs. And there’s nothing like walking into Grand Central Station, standing on the upper deck, and seeing the night-sky constellations painted on the ceiling. I was standing near the MetLife Building, just outside Grand Central, when my friend turned to me and said, “You know, before this, I’d never seen a building more than twelve stories tall.” I looked up and the building, which seemed to be tipping over on us, was bigger than the sky. There’s nothing like New York City to make you feel small—or a part of something enormous and splendid, whichever you prefer.
But that’s not New York City. That’s Manhattan. New York City has about eight million people, and apparently only about 20 percent of them live in Manhattan. That’s what this story is about: the other New York. The city over the bridges and past the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Queens, past LaGuardia Airport and the baseball stadium and the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, past even the last stop on the subway lines. This story is about Bayside, a middle-class community near the Long Island Sound, where the traffic is relentless and the houses are crowded thirty to a block, though they still have porches and little front yards. It’s the kind of place a librarian might live in a room of her own, with her cat curled up in a window and sunlight falling on the floor. Which makes Bayside the perfect place for this New York story.
Or at least the perfect place to start, because Bayside is where Lynda Caira’s grandparents settled when they emigrated from Italy to the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1927, they bought a piece of land in what was essentially farm country and built a house. There weren’t many people in Bayside, Queens, then, but anyone who came by was welcome at the Caira table. When the WPA built the Long Island Expressway on the edge of their land, Lynda’s grandmother gave the men free coffee every morning—then paid off the cost of the land and house through the tips she made on her free hot breakfasts. When the expressway was complete, she cooked breakfast for the truckers who stopped by when they saw her light on at 4:00 A.M. Even in the 1950s, when Lynda was born, the house was often full of bags of corn and onions the truckers gave her in exchange for a meal. Often, when Lynda came down for breakfast, she would find a stranger or two at the table. It just wasn’t in her grandmother’s heart to turn anyone away.
When the city divided Bayside into urban lots, her grandmother (who ran the house after her husband’s early death) kept four plots just off a highway exit in the heart of the community. Lynda called it the Farm, because there were a hundred tomato plants, a vegetable garden, a grape arbor, and a small grove of peach, apple, and fig trees. Lynda’s family lived on the ground floor with her grandmother, who made wine and tomato sauce and still got up every morning at 4:00 A.M. to cook. Lynda’s aunt and uncle lived upstairs. Other relatives were constantly around for a visit. In the case of some relatives from Italy, the visit lasted five years, but her grandmother never considered doing anything other than rising early to cook for them all. Lynda’s father’s parents, also Italian immigrants, lived a short walk away. Other relatives were scattered on neighboring blocks. Bayside was filling up with houses, most bought by young families, so the backyard barbeques were always smoking and the streets were full of kids. The neighbors watched out for one another; the shopkeepers greeted the children by name. But the defining characteristics of Bayside, at least for Lynda Caira, were her family events: the large Italian meals, the communion dresses, and the week set aside every August for canning tomatoes.
At fourteen, Lynda went to work down the road at Gertz department store. After high school, she trained to become a medical technician. She got married, moved to a tiny four-room town house in the Bell Boulevard section of Bayside, about a mile from her grandmother’s house, and worked for a local pediatrician. Two years into the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter and gave her the most popular American name of the 1970s: Jennifer.
After seven years of marriage, Lynda Caira got divorced. The divorce was the right thing to do, and she never questioned her decision. Her parents took the news hard at first, but her grandmother, then in her eighties, told her simply, “If this is what you need, then I support you.” With her grandmother’s blessing, Lynda’s “sin” was absolved and, in time, her parents came around. She even kept two of her best friends: her former mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who sided with her in the divorce.
But that didn’t mean the divorce was easy for Lynda’s five-year-old daughter, who was old enough to know her life was changing but too young to understand why. Lynda’s neighbor suggested she adopt a cat to help Jennifer with the transition. The neighbor worked in a bakery, and the bakery cat—despite the health code, cats live in many of the small neighborhood bakeries in New York City to keep the mice away—had just given birth to kittens. There was a runt in the litter, and the mother cat refused to take care of her. If she didn’t find a home, the kitten was going to die.
“Sure,” Lynda told the neighbor. “Bring her home for me.”
The next day, the neighbor arrived with a tiny gray dust ball of a kitten. She was tennis ball-size and fuzzy, with little ears and big green eyes. She even trembled a bit as she stared around the unfamiliar room, her eyes wide with fear. How could anyone push this baby away? Lynda wondered. How could her own mother leave her to die?
They took the kitten. Jennifer, who was over the moon, named her Snuggles. The kitten was too young to be weaned, so Lynda and Jennifer fed her formula from a bottle several times a day. When she got a little older, they spoon-fed her liquids and soft food. Jennifer gave her constant attention. Perhaps a little too much attention, and certainly too much grabbing—she was only five—but Snuggles was nurtured with care and love from the moment she entered Lynda and Jennifer’s home
.
She didn’t return the affection. She wasn’t a bad cat; she just wasn’t much of a . . . Snuggles. Some people have preconceived notions about cats: They are aloof and arrogant; they are self-centered; they are loners. Unfortunately, Snuggles fit the stereotype. It wasn’t that she was mean. She never scratched or hissed. She just wasn’t a social animal. She didn’t want to play; she didn’t want to be touched; she wasn’t emotionally invested in Lynda and Jennifer and, quite frankly, didn’t care whether they were home or away. Snuggles preferred her own space.
Jennifer was disappointed. Adults may appreciate the refined dignity (and quiet!) of a cat staring motionless out a sunny window, completely ignoring the world around them, but what kind of child wants a cat like that?
“I want to go to the baby orphanage!” she told her mother.
“We can go,” Lynda told her, “but you can’t bring anything home. We are already blessed with Snuggles.”
Tight-lipped consideration—is it worth protesting?—and then, “Okay, okay, okay, Mommy. We won’t bring anything home.”
The baby orphanage was the North Shore Animal League, the nation’s largest no-kill animal shelter. Located in Port Washington, New York, in the western section of Long Island, the sanctuary was only six miles from the Caira home in Bayside. Three or four times a year, Lynda and Jennifer would drive out to the sanctuary to ooh and aah over the baby kittens. They were cute, so playful and full of energy, but Lynda always managed to usher Jennifer from the building after an hour without adoption papers in her hand or a kitten in tow.
Until August 31, 1990. Just another summer day in outer Queens. Just another mother-daughter visit to the “baby orphanage” they so enjoyed. Jennifer was twelve that summer, so the two of them had visited the North Shore Animal League for seven years without giving in to the staring eyes, pink noses, and batting paws of the needy animals. But this time . . . a kitten meowed.
Immediately. As soon as they walked in the door. And she wasn’t just meowing. This kitten was stretching her front leg through the bars and screaming for attention. She was gray and black tiger-striped, with a white chest, a mostly white face, and huge bat ears that made her head seem tiny underneath them. She was undeniably cute, so cute, in fact, that Lynda made an effort to ignore her. But Jennifer was captivated.
“Oh, Mommy, look at this one,” she said.
Lynda kept walking, putting her finger into a few cages to play with the kittens.
“Oh, please come back and look at this baby,” Jennifer pleaded. “Please, Mommy. Look how she’s screaming. She really wants me to hold her.”
Lynda turned back and stared at the thin little kitten trying desperately to escape her big cage. A card on the front said: COOKIE. FEMALE. DOMESTIC SHORTHAIR.
“Okay,” Lynda said to the volunteer. “Take her out. Jennifer, you can hold her. For a minute. Then back she goes.”
Cookie had something else in mind. As soon as she was out of the cage, she leapt from Jennifer’s hands to Lynda’s shirt and, after a desperate scramble, wrapped her arms tightly around Lynda’s neck. Then she leaned back, peered up with her big green eyes, and howled into Lynda’s face. A volunteer came over to help, but the kitten clasped its paws together and wouldn’t let go. She was begging and pleading—for attention? For love? For a home? Whatever it was, the kitten was adamant. She knew what she wanted, and she wanted Lynda. It took two volunteers to pry the two-pound cat off her chest.
“Oh, Mommy,” Jennifer pleaded. “We have to take her home. We have to.”
“No, Jennifer,” Lynda said. “We are not taking her home. We have Snuggles. We cannot have another cat.” She wasn’t really worried about Snuggles. Snuggles didn’t care about anything, so why would she care about another kitten in the house? But their town house was small. It just didn’t seem big enough for another pet.
She was turning to tell the volunteers to put the kitten back in its cage when she noticed that it had on several colorful collars, each with a few tags.
“Why is she wearing all those?” Lynda asked.
“Those are for her medications,” the volunteer said. And then he told her the story of Cookie.
When she was five weeks old, Cookie was hit by a car. She was found bleeding in the road and brought in terrible pain to the animal league, which performed two surgeries on her broken shoulder. One set of medicine was for the pain in her shoulder, which hadn’t yet healed. Beneath the injuries were the affects of a hard life on the street with no mother to teach or protect her: malnutrition and bleeding gums, worms in both ears, parasites in her digestive tract, a left eye (now mostly healed) so swollen from conjunctivitis she could barely open it. They all needed treating. Then there was the gash in her hip. She had been sliced open when the car hit her, and the damage was so severe the veterinarian wasn’t able to fully close the wound. She had to be cleaned and bandaged several times a day, and much of her medication was to prevent infection. It had taken several weeks of intensive care, in fact, just to get her well enough for the adoption area, and even now she was relegated to the “solitary confinement” of her private, well-scrubbed cage. The poor cat was lonely, traumatized, and wounded. And she was only nine weeks old.
Lynda looked at Cookie again. This time, she noticed the encrusted eye and the awkward hunch of her shoulder. Her hip wasn’t bandaged, but she could see the matting of salve in her fur. She glanced at her infected ears, her poor backside. But what Lynda really saw was the hunger in her eyes. Cookie wasn’t Snuggles. In fact, she was the exact opposite of Snuggles. This cat wanted someone to care about her. She was desperate for it. When she reached a paw through the bars this time, Lynda was sure that Cookie had chosen her. Love me, she was saying, and I will love you in return.
The volunteer placed a hand gently on Lynda’s shoulder and said, “She’s never acted like that with anyone else.”
Lynda believes that to this day. Cookie chose her. But I admit I’m skeptical. After all, Cookie was probably reaching for everyone who passed her cage. I tend to think Lynda was the one who acted differently that day, the one who opened her heart to a wounded animal. It was Lynda who thought, I have to help her. I don’t know if she’ll live. But she’s coming home with me.
It really was a commitment, too, because Cookie really was sick. Her adoption papers came with a carload of medicine and a box of bandages bigger than she was. The animal league even told Lynda that if she couldn’t heal the gash in Cookie’s hip, or any of her other major ailments, they would take her back and let her live out her (probably short) life at the shelter. But Lynda wasn’t deterred. In fact, she was energized. Every day, she forced five or six pills down Cookie’s throat. Twice a day, she applied a salve to Cookie’s wound. Then she put a bandage over it and wrapped another bigger bandage around the kitten’s furry little bottom to hold everything in place. Then she gave her a hug, and a pet, and told her that she was loved. After a few months, Cookie healed. No more conjunctivitis, no more worms in her intestines, no more ear infections, and no more wound. When you looked at her, it was as if the car accident and illnesses had never happened; she was simply a beautiful cat.
Jennifer really, really, really wanted Cookie to be her cat. Snuggles was supposed to be her cat, but Snuggles wasn’t anyone’s cat. Cookie was her second chance. Every night, Jennifer took Cookie into her bed to sleep with her. She even closed her door so Cookie couldn’t get away. But on the fourth night, when Jennifer forgot to close her door, Cookie scampered out of the room, climbed onto Lynda’s bed, and lay down on one of Lynda’s pillows. Jennifer couldn’t keep Cookie a prisoner every night, and when she left her door open again, the cat ran to Mommy’s bed. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: When you give your heart to an injured animal, they never forget it. So when Lynda finally offered her the spare pillow, Cookie climbed onto that pillow and slept in Lynda’s bed every night for the rest of her life. She wasn’t Jennifer’s cat; she was Mommy’s cat. The poor little girl had been thwarte
d again.
Not that it wasn’t partially Jennifer’s fault. After all, she did dress Cookie up from time to time in doll dresses. Cabbage Patch Kid dresses, to be exact, since those fit best. And had the nicest accessories. The sole remaining picture of those humiliations shows Cookie on the sofa in a light blue shirt with white fringe and a comically small cowboy hat. Cookie’s facial expression can’t be mistaken: I am mortified.
Don’t blame Jennifer, though. She was only twelve. And Cookie may have been humiliated, but she was never harmed. She never protested. She never fought back. She wore the dresses; she played tea party; she was a good friend. She loved Jennifer despite the cowboy hats. But she worshipped Lynda. From the moment Cookie saw Lynda walk into the North Shore Animal League, she was Lynda’s cat. Or more accurately, Lynda was Cookie’s human. As Lynda always said: Cookie knew a sucker when she saw one.
But that wasn’t true, and Lynda knew it. She wasn’t being played for a sucker any more than Dewey played me for a sucker all those years. Yes, we were doting parents, but there was a genuine bond. It wasn’t a Snuggles situation; it wasn’t “give me the food and beat it.” Cats like Dewey and Cookie give as much as they get. The only difference? Dewey gave to a community; Cookie gave to Lynda Caira.
She gave Lynda love. She gave Lynda attention. She wanted to be nearby, to be underfoot, to be touched. No, she insisted on being touched. If Lynda left a room, Cookie followed her and brushed against her leg. She sat on her foot. She jumped on her lap. If she wasn’t getting enough petting, she nudged Lynda’s arm with her head, then twisted around to show exactly the spot where she wanted to be scratched. She loved to climb on Lynda’s chest and give her a kiss. That’s right, a kiss. Every few hours, Cookie would stretch up and put her lips to Lynda’s lips, like a young daughter shyly giving her mother a good-night peck.
