Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  “Oh,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Ah.” She tried to look interested.

  “Locking him up is compounding the problem. He’s going to keep marking until he feels safe. We need to work on what’s threatening him, so he won’t have to spray anymore. And in the meantime, we have to reduce some of the stresses on him. Understand?”

  Pru nodded, as if she could possibly comprehend what might constitute cat stress. Sleep, eat, sleep. Sure.

  She listened while Dr. Bond explained how to clean the entire apartment with a special enzymatic cleaner, and then cover the bookcases and the cat’s other favorite spraying spots with plastic tarps. She would have to keep the tarps clean, too, throwing them out if they became wet and replacing them with new ones. He stopped then and said,

  “How is this so far?”

  Like too much work for a cat I hate, she thought. But there was something commanding and reassuring in his tone, so she nodded for him to go on.

  “Let him have his run of the place during the day—even your bedroom. It’s a special place to him now, off-limits, which is why he wants back in there so desperately. I understand your need to sleep, so you will have to confine him at night. But during the day, Whoop is allowed to go wherever he wants. Put all your food and your”—he consulted her folder again—“vintage cashmere sweaters out of reach.

  “Next, let him eat whenever he wants. I think maybe he’s attacking your food because he’s hungry, or he perceives he’s hungry. You need to leave a bowl of dry food and one of fresh water out for him at all times.”

  “So, basically, let him do whatever he wants.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But look at him,” Pru couldn’t help saying. “He’s so fat he’s going to explode. Isn’t it really unhealthy for him to eat all day?”

  “You were going to bring him back to the shelter, where he certainly would have been euthanized. Does it really matter how he dies?”

  At this point, the cat himself ventured out from his hiding place. His tail was pointing straight up in the air, giving him a very smug look.

  “Oh, hush, you,” Pru said.

  She could have sworn Dr. Bond had grinned slightly at that. But he quickly turned somber again, and said, “Last, and this will probably be the hardest thing for you, I want you to play with Whoop whenever you can. Drag a string for him, rub him between the ears, let him bat around a foil ball. Don’t just leave things out for him, or he’ll get tired of them. Get down there and play with him. I think you’ll find that if you pay attention to him during the day, he won’t be so needy at night. And it’ll be good exercise for him. Since you’re so concerned with his obesity.”

  Although she didn’t particularly like his recommendations, she found herself pleased that he was telling her exactly what to do. It sounded so clean and orderly, his plan. Finally, someone who had the answers. She watched the silver pen in his hand flash as he made his notes. She wanted to throw out her other problems, just to see what he’d say. Just to watch that beautiful pen spell out the detailed, easy-to-follow plan he would create for her. “What about me?” she wanted to shout. “I’m stressed, too! I’m a good girl, a handsome girl!”

  The cat chose that moment to do something he’d never done before: He came over to Pru and rubbed up against her legs. Suck-up! she thought.

  “See?” said Bond, more pleasantly. “He’s really not so bad. Are you, big boy?”

  She cleared her throat. “What about the Prozac?”

  “I don’t think it would do him any good. Let’s make these adjustments first and see what happens.”

  Dr. Bond showed her how to lure Whoop backward into his cage and close the door without alarming him. Dr. Bond gave her a couple cans of diet cat food and some cat toys and said she should call him in two weeks to report on their progress.

  The cat had settled right down in his cage and was beginning to wash himself. As she was leaving the office, two women stood talking together in the outer lobby. One of them had a small beagle sort of dog on a leash that kept leaping up to nip the other woman in the crotch. Neither woman did anything about it. The woman being nipped didn’t even put a hand down to shield herself. There was a wet smear on her skirt from the dog’s nose, but they both continued to talk and pay it no mind.

  Pru just couldn’t understand that. Was that where she was headed? Would she, too, slide so far down that spiral that soon she’d be walking around with kitty pictures in her wallet and a rear end covered in pet hair? From there, it was the tiniest leap into total and complete acceptance that the good life, as she’d known it, was over. She could kiss her self-esteem good-bye, along with any remaining impervious pieces of her heart.

  COVERED IN THE PLASTIC TARPS, HER APARTMENT ENDED up looking like an auto detailing shop, and not the funky artist’s loft she’d hoped that it would.

  “Here we go,” she said to the cat, unlocking the door of the cage. The cat hesitated, then came bounding out. He was making his usual beeline for under the couch, when he spotted his supper dish. It was an oversized Tupperware that was designed to hold, by the look of it, six or seven lasagnas, and now contained eight and a half pounds of Science Diet Hairball Control Light. He approached the bowl gingerly, not daring to believe his incredible bounty. He sniffed, then began wolfing down the food, glancing up at Pru to see when she was going to get up and snatch it from him. Pru sat down at the table with the newspaper and began reading. She stayed where she was while the cat lapped at his water, sniffed at the tarps, and ran through the apartment a few times. He hid from her when she folded up the paper and stood up, but, as she was preparing her dinner, he crept out and began bounding around again. He even came into the kitchen area to sniff at the can of tuna she’d opened for her dinner.

  “What do you want?” she said to him. “Tuna?”

  The cat licked his lips and bobbed his head once, as if to say yes.

  “Why the hell not,” she said, tossing him a chunk. “I was going to have you euthanized, after all.”

  Finally the cat settled himself on the couch, instead of under it, and began to wash himself. She tried to interest him in some of the cat toys, but he was still too scared of her to play.

  Before going to bed, she was supposed to put the cat in the bathroom. She approached him as Dr. Bond had instructed, from behind, while talking in a low, soothing tone. “I’m sorry to have to do this, um, Big Whoop,” she said. To her surprise, the cat allowed himself to be picked up and brought into the bathroom. There wasn’t much room in there for him, with the three boxes of cat litter—sand, clay, and pine—that she was to offer to him until he made his preference known. He threw himself into a corner of the bathroom and regarded her resentfully as she closed the door.

  She was about to turn out the light when McKay called to see how it went.

  “What did you think of Bradley?”

  “Not what I expected.”

  “You should see his Donna Summer.”

  “He’s a drag queen?”

  “I’m sure it’s called something a little more P.C., like gender illusionist.”

  She tried to imagine Dr. Bond in a sparkly wig and lip gloss. Oddly, it was not impossible. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me this before my appointment.”

  “So? Did he give you the Prozac?”

  “No. I’m supposed to do the opposite of everything I was doing. I’m supposed to give him everything he wants, whenever he wants it, until his anxiety eases.”

  McKay made approving sounds. “He’s very Zen in his approach,” McKay said.

  The cat still woke her up at four o’clock in the morning, but he’d stopped hurling himself against doors. When she came home from breakfast at the Korner—no sign of Sexy Yoga Babe, thank heavens—he was sitting on her bed. She changed the water in his bowl, then sat at her desk to work. A few days later, when Pru brought home the new laser printer, he played at batting around the Styrofoam inserts from the box. He sat and watched as she set up all the cords.
Presently, he came closer to bat at the pages, with curious fascination, as the first batch of her business cards came rolling out of the printer.

  Prudence Whistler

  GRANTS, FUND-RAISING, GRAPHIC DESIGN,

  LIFE COACHING, ORGANIZATION

  She didn’t really know what she meant by “life coaching” and “organization,” but they sounded like things she’d like to try.

  She’d had to hold herself back from including “on-air talent.” Rudy (oh Rudy, that shit) used to tell her all the time that she should be on public radio. Oh, he’d told her so many things she’d been all too happy to believe.

  She separated the cards from the sheets, and felt a wave of disappointment. They looked cheap, and unprofessional. There were little tufts of perforated paper hanging off the edges. They looked desperate. She wouldn’t hire a person with such a card to come toss out her urine-covered plastic tarps, much less do anything professional. She canceled the rest of the print job and threw the cards in the trash. A week’s worth of work, right there.

  At dinnertime, she went into the kitchen for her usual can of tuna. She was feeling defeated and low. The cat followed her in this time, and was sitting up on his haunches, waiting for his scrap, before she’d even opened the can. They had a little routine, she realized, and threw him some. She took her tuna and a sleeve of crackers to the couch, and tried to watch GoodFellas on her laptop. Eventually, though, the violence was too much. Not even the lure of Lorraine Bracco’s dresses could offset it. She winced at every gunshot, until finally closing up her laptop for good. The cat sat nearby, washing. The only sound was the gentle scraping of his rough tongue against paw pads. Now she was regretting having dumped Rudy’s TV set. She would give anything to fill the emptiness around her with the cheerful blather of this season’s young and beautiful, the electronic mirth of a laugh track, the gentle assurances of tampon commercial voice-overs or the entrancing spectacle of B-list celebrities gasping their last on some reality show. Anything but this, the white silence of her loneliness.

  On her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth, she noticed that the box filled with clay litter had been used. She threw out the other two boxes, thinking how ridiculously obvious that should have been to her. That night, she put him as usual in the bathroom but didn’t shut the door. Sometime after midnight she woke up to find the cat on her bed. She could feel him sitting there watching her. When she didn’t kick him off, he got up and came to sniff the blankets. Then he sniffed her hand. She could feel his whiskers tickling her wrist. After a while, he settled himself and, tentatively, pushed his head under her hand.

  She worked her fingers in a little circle on his head, between the ears. A low rumbling filled his body. He was purring. It was the first time she’d heard that since he’d arrived. She found a spot in front of his ear that made him dip his head with pleasure. He rolled heavily onto his side, paws flexing in the air. He looked so fat and happy that she smiled.

  Tomorrow, she would go to the stationer’s on Eighteenth, where Fiona got her wedding invitations, and have them make up new business cards for her. It would cost a little, but she was sure it’d be worth paying to have them engraved. And matching letterhead, she thought, warming to the idea. On some lovely, textured vellum paper.

  She closed her eyes, and after a long while of scratching Big Whoop’s head, while he flexed and purred, she fell asleep.

  Eight

  Annali was showing Pru her new baby. Pru recognized it as Dipsy, the green Teletubby with the halo. They were sitting on the deck of Pru’s grandmother’s beach house in Delaware, eating strawberry Jell-O Jigglers and watching Patsy and Jacob as they made their way down the beach.

  Pru hadn’t been in the beach house in years. When she and Patsy were kids, they would visit the house every summer, even after her grandmother had died. But Nadine and Leonard seemed to slow down drastically when Pru was in college. They found the ten-hour trip difficult, between the packing and the driving and opening and closing up the house. Pru was surprised to realize the house had been, for the past ten years, largely unoccupied. She’d actually forgotten about it until Patsy brought it up. Annali called the Dipsy “PBSKids” and stuck it under her nightgown to nurse. Pru thought that her niece looked like a child from a Robert McCloskey book, a girl named Sal, maybe, or Jane. She looked as though she should be digging for clams on a beach in Maine, or squatting to pet a duckling. Annali had a tight cap of coarse, curly blond hair, and pink cheeks. Her face was round and shining, and she always looked a little bit sleepy. It had been such a relief when she’d run up to Pru in the airport. Pru hadn’t fully realized it at the time, but she’d been afraid Annali had forgotten who she was.

  Annali was holding the little knit hat she carried with her everywhere she went. It was the hat Pru’s mother had made for Pru when she was a baby. The yarn used to be white with colored flecks in it, but Annali had loved it until it turned a sort of speckled gray. Annali fingered the hat when she sucked her thumb, and rubbed her knuckles against it as she fell asleep.

  Labor Day weekend was the best one in Rehoboth Beach— still warm and beautiful, the last gasp of the season. From the window of the Peter Pan bus she’d taken up from D.C., Pru saw the same boardwalk she’d remembered as a kid, the huge red sign for Dolle’s Salt Water Taffy. All the same places were there, with their ancient, faded signs: Starkey’s Cones and Sundaes, Gus & Gus Place Hamburgers French Fries and Fried Chicken, and the Playland/Virtual Fun Redemption Arcade.

  “PBSKids wants more Jell-O,” Annali said, pushing Dipsy’s head into the bowl.

  “PBSKids needs something to eat besides Jell-O,” said Pru. She was already planning the wholesome meals she’d prepare during Annali’s stay. She was taking her back to D.C. with her in the morning, so Patsy and Jacob could have some “grown-up” time together. Annali’s diet seemed to consist solely of Jell-O and “lollipops,” big spoonfuls of peanut butter. She didn’t think she once saw the girl eat a vegetable or anything made with a whole grain. And Pru herself could do with something other than tuna and crackers.

  The house was situated on a relatively isolated strip of beach just north of town. She could still make out Patsy and Jacob, two black scrawls holding hands, coming toward her down the beach. The shawl Patsy had tied around her waist whipped her legs in the mild wind, and her hair blew long and loose.

  Since Pru had arrived last night, Patsy and Jacob hadn’t stopped talking for a moment. Their ongoing dialogue ranged far and wide—Tibet, the perfection of the arch of Patsy’s foot, Sid Vicious, the origin of the word salacious (whether Greek or Latin), getting Annali to swim. Although the subjects changed frequently, Pru noticed, there was a single connecting line: Things Patsy and Jacob See in Exactly the Same Way.

  There was a second favorite topic: Things Patsy and Jacob Don’t See in Exactly the Same Way, and Why One or the Other Is Completely Wrong.

  They were enthralled with each other. When Pru didn’t feel invisible, she felt like a groupie. She felt she was being called upon to appreciate their specialness. She didn’t want to dislike Jacob, but she couldn’t help it. Pru found it hard to trust someone so clearly fortunate in all ways. But, then again, maybe she was just jealous.

  The fact was she’d never seen Patsy so happy. She’d hardly dated at all since having Annali. The daily life of a single mom with a young child wasn’t so attractive to most guys, especially the ones still hanging around Nome, Ohio. They were stuck in a kind of time warp, drinking beer at the same bars, their car stereos still programmed to WMMS, Home of the Buzzard! Playing the Rock You Grew Up With.

  Annali shoved the Teletubby into her lap and said, “Auntie Pru, I have to burp.”

  “So, burp,” Pru said.

  Annali opened her mouth and a thick, red stream fell across the white patio table.

  For a minute Pru thought she was playing a trick on her. As she watched the blood drip through the cracks in the table, her stomach clenched.

  “Aunt Pr
u?” Annali said, in a frightened, quavering voice. Pru raised her eyes from the table. Annali’s eyes were round and glassy. Pru stood up and the chair behind her clattered to the floor.

  She ran to the balcony and screamed Patsy’s name as loud as she could. They were much closer than she’d expected. Patsy looked up, dropped Jacob’s hand, and broke into a full run. She came thundering up the wooden stairs, Jacob right behind her.

  “What happened? Jesus God,” she said, when she saw the table. For a moment, they were all mesmerized.

  Then Patsy recovered, throwing her hands in the air and crying, “Oopsie!” She sang it out in this trilling, Romper Room voice, like Oopsie, you spilled your juice! And not Oopsie, you just threw up your own liver!

  Jacob stepped forward, stuck a finger in the pool of blood, and brought it up to his tongue. The expression in his eyes was calm and medically professional. Pru felt her throat close, in protest.

  “It’s Jell-O,” he said. He held up the finger. “Red Jell-O,” he said, tasting it again. “Maybe strawberry?”

  Patsy started to laugh. “Oh, you monkey!” she cried, catching Annali up in her arms.

  “You gave us such a freakin’ scare! Jesus!”

  Pru sank into a chair. She had been so afraid that she’d been unable to move. She hadn’t known what to do after yelling for Patsy. It left her shaken, and confused.

  “It’s the wrong viscosity for blood,” Jacob said, pleasantly, after Patsy had taken Annali inside to get cleaned up. He poked at the pool again, to illustrate. “Blood from the gut is dark and grainy, like coffee grounds. You can see this is totally smooth.”

  “Jacob,” she managed to say, “thank you.”

  “See? A guy like me can really come in handy. I also make a good cocktail, if you’re ready for one.”