Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  McKay found a parking space outside her building and they brought the cat upstairs. Inside the apartment, they put the cage gently on the floor. As soon as McKay opened the door, the cat banged its way out of the cage and ran straight under the couch. There it stayed, staring out at them with fierce yellow eyes. Pru squeaked the squeaky toys and dangled the dangly toys. McKay tried to make helpful suggestions but Pru finally told him to leave.

  The cat hid under the couch all day. It ignored the bowl of food Pru put out, and the little trail of “tempting kitty morsels” she’d made to help it find the litter box in the bathroom. Finally, she gave up, and sat at her desk for a while, trying to come up with a “look” McKay said she had to have for the “identity package” that Bill told her she had to have, to be a real consultant. After a few minutes, she got up and grabbed her swimming suit and gym bag. She was out the front door and pressing the button for the elevator before she remembered that she’d canceled her membership to the Y.

  She could go back to change into her running things. But she didn’t want to run. She wanted to be immersed in a pool of water. She wanted to feel it under her, all around her, holding her up.

  She thought about her pregnant doppelgänger, and the pool at the Sheraton. Would anybody care if she used it, just for a quick swim? It wasn’t like she’d be any trouble. She even had her own towel, in her gym bag. She could just pretend to be another hotel guest. When the elevator door opened she jumped in, excited by the prospect of having something new to do. It made her feel a little dangerous, a little bad, a little like the Artful Dodger, living by her wits alone.

  WHEN SHE RETURNED FROM HER SWIM (NO ONE HAD SAID a word to her, and she’d had the Sheraton’s glorious outdoor pool all to herself!), there was still no sign of the cat. She thought he might have eaten some of the food in his bowl, but it was hard to tell.

  There was no sound until four in the morning. At first she was scared, but then she remembered the cat. She staggered up out of bed and chased it into the other room, slamming the bedroom door between them. She fell back asleep, but in half an hour she awoke again. The cat was vigorously pawing at her bedroom door, making it rattle in its frame. Pru got up again and, in a sort of predawn haze, decided that a better place for the cat would be the bathroom. She managed to catch it after cornering it in the kitchen. She got a good swipe on the forearm for her efforts.

  Just as she was beginning to drift off, the cat took up yowling again. It was an unearthly sound that reverberated against the porcelain tiling. Pru pulled the pillow over her head. The cat yowled for a bit more, then began flinging himself against the bathroom door. The door rattled in its frame, each time he threw his massive weight against it. It unnerved her so much that finally Pru got up and opened the bathroom door. The cat flew past her, straight to a spot under her bed where it was impossible to reach him. It wasn’t even five in the morning yet, too dark for a run, so she lay in bed awhile, cursing.

  At first she cursed McKay for talking her into rescuing the cat. Then she cursed Rudy, first for having chosen such a ridiculous animal in the first place, then for having stuck her with responsibility for the damn thing. The cat spat and growled from his hiding place under the bed. Finally, just before six, she dressed and left her apartment.

  It was so early that no one was out yet. Columbia Road was strangely quiet and empty. The 7-Eleven wasn’t open, but it looked like maybe there were lights on at the Kozy Korner, at the other end of the street.

  She pushed open the door to the café. Inside, it was warm and welcoming. John Owen stood at the counter, reading. When he saw her, he looked up and said, “Hey, Prudence.”

  For some reason, “hey” instead of “hi” caught her off guard. It made her feel as though he’d been expecting her. She took a seat at the counter and looked around. They were the only people in the café.

  “How are you?” he said, folding up the newspaper. “Are you a coffee drinker?”

  “Coffee, yes. I’m, you know, fine.”

  “You know, fine,’” he repeated, placing a cup and saucer in front of her. He filled her cup with coffee, strong from the look of it. “What’s ‘you know, fine’?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to get into it,” she said.

  “Oh, come on,” he said, sitting back down. “What’s going on?”

  She looked at him. He was waiting for her to say something. “Okay, well, remember how, the first time you saw me, I’d just been dumped? Maybe there was a good reason for that. I took in the cat that my ex—Rudy—dumped at the same time, and it’s certifiably insane. Things have pretty much gone from bad to really, really, really bad.”

  “It’s just a cat,” he said. “How insane can it be?”

  She showed him the scratch across her forearm. “I’m telling you, it’s the Charles Manson of cats,” she said. “It should have a little swastika carved in its forehead. I can’t believe they actually sent him home with me.”

  He was laughing. “Where did you get him?”

  “The Humane Society.”

  “So you throw out a two-thousand-dollar TV and keep the cat? What a deal.” She hadn’t seen him laugh before. Immediately she wondered if his wife had taken him back.

  “You seem good,” she said.

  “I’m feeling good. Better. Definitely better. And, it’s nice to have someone in here. You should eat something,” he added.

  He brought her a cinnamon bun, but she was too tired to do more than poke at it. She drank her coffee and fell into a melancholy stupor, watching John finish his crossword puzzle. Every now and then the door would creak open and someone would come in. John would disappear for a few minutes, then return. Little tiny epiphanies, like mini electrical shocks in the brain, kept pestering her. She missed Rudy. Unfinished, uncouth, vulgar old Rudy. She missed him. She missed waking up with him, she missed his crisp, starched shirts in her closet. She missed walking to the Metro with him, holding hands. She missed having someone who would call at the end of the day, and say, So, how’d it go? Someone who didn’t make weekend plans without her. She felt unloved, unlovable. She deserved to be fired, and dumped, and to have a disgusting cat. Picturing John Owen, who stood frowning at the crossword puzzle, in the sack was not a difficult thing to do. Even easier, in fact, than the silent woman behind the counter of the souvlaki place. The cinnamon bun he’d given her was stale.

  Things like that.

  THE CAT WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN WHEN SHE GOT back. She turned on her computer and got to work designing her identity. First, business card.

  She got a little sidetracked searching the Internet for a font. She wanted something that resembled handwriting, something casual but not sloppy, and after an hour or so she found what she was looking for. But when she tried to get her computer to use it, something went wrong. The computer was suddenly an older versionof itself, taking forever to load. Watching the desktop icons struggling to come up on her screen was like being at the Safeway checkout line behind some ninety-year-old sorting through her coupons.

  She ran out to the local Radio Shack and the guy there told her to install more RAM. She managed to open up the computer, find the slots where the RAM was supposed to go, and put everything back together. But it turned out to be the wrong kind of RAM—it took her most of the evening online diagnosing this, so in the morning she went out for the right kind of RAM and started all over again.

  Somehow she managed to stretch out the business card project over another three days. She’d work on it until midnight, moving the image around, adjusting the fonts, making up names for her business. When she could no longer blink without seeing the ghost of her computer screen burned into her retina, she’d stuff her ears with the foam earplugs she’d bought and go to sleep. The earplugs didn’t keep her from waking up to the sound of the cat every night. But they helped. If she was lucky, she could get two or even three hours of sleep before the cat started his scrabbling. Then she’d get up out of bed, stagger around chasing the cat
until she cornered him, and throw him in another room. Then she’d lie in bed, listening to the cat’s rage at his banishment, until six, when John opened the Korner.

  She got to recognizing the other early-morning regulars. Pru felt that anybody looking at them could tell that the one thing they had in common was not having a significant cuddler at home in bed. Their loneliness, their isolation, was practically a badge on their chests. There was the woman in the bad nylon dresses, the old man who scurried in to refill the same old tattered paper cup. A guy who owned an endless supply of pilled sweaters. They would eat their pastries and read their newspapers in silence, chatting in turn with John, who was stationed behind the counter. Every morning he greeted her with, “Hey, Prudence,” and she would sit at her place at the counter. He’d bring her coffee and they’d discuss the quality of that particular morning’s loneliness. They ranked it on a scale of one to ten. “About a six,” she’d say. Or: “Nine, today,” he said one morning. “I had to go to my first dinner party as a bachelor. The hostess’s sixty-five-year-old mother was my ‘date.’” “How was that?” she’d asked. “We kissed, but I didn’t feel anything.” Pru had laughed, but she had the sense that his was lessening, while hers was getting worse.

  Over time, she’d gotten more comfortable confiding in him. It seemed that, somewhere along the line, she’d stopped talking to straight men like she did her gay and women friends. It surprised her that she and John could talk openly like this together, without worrying how their personal allure might be compromised by these unsightly feelings. Oddly enough, the opposite seemed to be happening. Sometimes she was so excited to see him in the morning that she didn’t even get angry at the cat for its noise. She recognized that something familiar and yet new was happening to her. Lust and admiration and pure affection were all converging in one horrible, irresistible package. And oh, he was such a bad, bad bet. Formerly happily married, forced into a separation he didn’t want. So adrift, so rudderless. That boat could end up on just about any old shore.

  AT THE END OF HER FIRST MONTH OF UNEMPLOYMENT she was no closer to finding a job. Between the morning paper and the puzzle, the cat, her friends, and the problems she was having with her computer, she hadn’t even produced a decent résumé and cover letter. How did people work at home before the Internet? she wondered, after logging on one morning to find thirty-two new e-mails. Presumably, they must have actually worked. Pru had her hands full just maintaining her relationships. Kate McCabe was keeping her busy analyzing the actions of the unattainable man she had her eye on, and the unavailable men eyeing her. Kate told her everything they said, and Pru and she then parsed every word and nuance to see if any intent or purpose could be reliably surmised. Pru was also in a rapid-fire e-mail group with McKay and three other friends from college. They all had desk jobs, and kept a constant flow of messages circulating, most of them full of nonsense, LOLs, private jokes a million years old. Then there was Patsy, who needed to talk about the progression of her long-distance relationship with Jacob, which did indeed seem to be progressing, mainly by phone. They talked so long and late into the night that they kept falling asleep on the phone together. Jacob was still The One, Patsy maintained. Her soul mate, the yang to her yin, the fizz in her gin, the Brad to her Angelina, the moon to her ocean. She announced they were contemplating matching tattoos, “our names, in each other’s handwriting!”

  “Wait,” said Pru, “your name in his handwriting?”

  “No—his name on me in his handwriting, and mine on him with his.”

  “Your own name on yourself? I don’t get it.”

  “No—my name in my handwriting— Oh, shut up.”

  And, of course, there was Pru’s secret hobby, which she came across by accident one day when she mistakenly typed “Couch leather bag” in the search box on eBay. She found several “Couch” bags for sale, and although she wasn’t sure of the ethics of the situation, placed a bid, and won it, for ten dollars. Surely it wasn’t her fault if some eBay seller had failed to carefully proof-read her listing?

  After her e-mail, she opened her to-do list and stared at it. The to-do list had by now taken on a life of its own. Usually, just looking at it was enough to discourage her for the rest of the day. She’d organized her tasks into categories and subcategories, having spent many hours scouring the Internet for appropriate kinds of list-organizing software and testing out each one. Each task was color-coded and prioritized, and with each passing day that she didn’t actually do any of the things on the to-do list, the longer it became, and the more her anxiety increased, the heavier that bucket in her arms became, and the more often she found herself wondering about the possibility of supporting herself by reselling the misspelled designer wear she found on eBay.

  She still hadn’t taken Rudy’s cat back to the Humane Society. She wasn’t sure what was stopping her. Certainly, it wasn’t because the cat had become any easier to live with. If anything, the situation was so entirely out of hand that she hardly knew what to do. For one thing, he had begun eating everything in sight. He would emerge from his hiding place while Pru was out of the house and eat all of the canned cat food she’d left for him that morning, and anything of hers she might have left out, too. An open sleeve of saltines. A packet of cream cheese. Entire loaves of bread. One night, when she got home from the Hilton on P Street, where she was now stealing her swims, she found a bag of bagels ripped open and half devoured on the kitchen floor. There were crumbs all over the floor, and somehow in the process a cup of coffee dregs had been spilled over the stack of bills she’d neatly piled on the counter, waiting to be paid.

  Even worse, her apartment was beginning to smell like the litter box. Actually, it smelled of a cat not using its litter box. She could smell it as soon as she stepped off the elevator. She kept her hat pulled low over her eyes as she keyed into her apartment, and if anyone else happened to get off the elevator at the same time, she would look around in disgust with them, as if she, too, could not believe someone would stink up the hall that way. McKay, coming in with her one night, announced, “If you can stand the cat piss, folks, you can stand the show.”

  Still, she couldn’t bring herself to dump the cat again. Part of it had to do with the logistical difficulties. She just didn’t feel up to the task of getting the cat back into its cage, which would require picking him up and holding him. She’d gotten used to picking him up long enough to fling him into the bathroom or the closet, but couldn’t imagine actually managing to stuff it back into the tiny carrier. If McKay refused to drive her, which was likely, she’d have to take a bus, possibly with a transfer, back out to Northeast D.C. And then she’d have to face the kid in the cutoff shorts and explain that living with the cat was impossible.

  It was all too much for her current state of unhappiness, running pretty much at a constant level seven, by her best estimate. She felt like she had a continual head cold, without the runny nose. The problems of her to-do list, her income, where she was going in life, seemed like someone else’s problems. She knew she should be attending to these things, but as long as her severance held out, drinking coffee and commiserating with John, reading about the Battle of Britain, and playing pool with McKay seemed infinitely preferable. Besides, it was impossible to work from home, when your home smelled like the bathrooms at Camden Yards.

  One night when the cat was shut in the hall closet, the location furthest from her bedroom, she woke up to the familiar thud, thud, thud as the cat heaved itself against the closet door. Then suddenly there came a desperate, strangled yowl and a horrible crash.

  She rushed to the hall closet and pulled open the door. The cat, clearly unharmed, came flying out and dashed to its hiding place under her bed. Her heart still pounding in her chest, she peered inside the closet. The hanging rod and the shelf above it were now on the ground, on top of the coats and shoe boxes they’d once held.

  Her leather coat was on the ground. She picked it up, fingers trembling. It was perhaps her most treasur
ed item of clothing, which made it her most treasured item, period. She’d gotten it one weekend in Greenwich Village, after seeing The Matrix with Rudy. It was perfectly cut, its leather buttery soft. The entire left side of the coat, from breast to knee, had been shredded, in the cat’s fall. The wine-colored lining peeped through, in places where the cat’s claws had gone in the deepest, as if the coat were bleeding.

  “THE CAT HAS TO GO,” SHE SAID TO JOHN, A FEW HOURS later, “or I do.”

  He was pouring her coffee. She put her head on the counter. “My most prized possession in the whole world,” she moaned. “Destroyed.”

  “We’ll find you another coat,” he said.

  “You don’t understand. That wasn’t just some coat. That was my Matrix coat. I could never afford something like that now. Fucking cat!”

  “The poor thing,” John said. “He’s just traumatized because Rudy abandoned him. I mean, imagine it, one minute you’re, you know, on the pillow, the next, you’re in a cage at the pound. Sure, he’s going to be angry.”

  She looked down at her shoes. She thought perhaps she’d forgotten to put her contacts in, everything was so fuzzy, but she was pretty sure she was wearing one loafer and one ballet flat. “My shoes don’t match,” she said.

  John peered over the edge of the bar. “So go home and change them.”

  She picked her head up off the counter. It was heavy with fatigue. When was the last time she’d slept for more than four hours? “Okay,” she said, through the cotton of her head. “Where do I live?”

  John managed to convey a look that reached out and ruffled her hair, without actually reaching out to ruffle her hair, which would have only annoyed her. She liked the kind of friends they were. But another part of her feared that if something didn’t happen soon they’d end up at the point of no return, neutral chums between whom there wasn’t anything more than a faint echo of a romantic spark. Or, worse: Something would happen soon. The thought gave her a grip of fear in her stomach. What, then?