“Yes,” affirms Carol. My mother draws a silver Jacobson’s department store box from the cabinet. She sits back down and opens it. It is filled with photographs of cats. My mother is not a linear person, and the images are not organized chronologically.
My mother shows Carol pictures of Little Fox, the cat to whom she used to sing her original lullaby, “Cuddle Cats,” in retaliation against my father’s saying he abhorred the word “cuddle.”
We’re just a couple of cuddle cats, cuddling all day long
We’re just a couple of cuddle cats, that’s why I’m singing this song
Cuddling, cuddling, cuddling all day long
Singing, singing, singing our cuddle cat song
(Repeat indefinitely)
My mother shuffles past a black-and-white photograph of a cat that catches Carol’s eye. “Which one is that?” Carol asks.
“Hmm?” my mother hums.
“The gray one,” Carol says. The cat appears to be gray, but as the picture was taken in black and white, in real life the cat could have been orange, deep cream, or pale brown.
“I don’t want to talk about that one,” my mother says, abandoning her gentle, nostalgic tone.
“Why not? What’s his name?” asks Carol. My mother speaks a Z-word name that Carol forgets immediately. Then she pauses, and inhales slowly through her nose.
“My second husband was a painter with an ungovernable temper. He used to come home and throw his paints against the wall. One night he came home and threw that cat against the wall.”
“He killed it,” Carol gasps. My mother silently returns Carol’s gaze.
“There have been three people I haven’t been able to save. That cat was one of them. The first two were my best friends. David Grant. We were best friends in high school. Then we both went to the University of Michigan. He was an art major. He had an original Andy Warhol print in his apartment. And Patricia Alexander. We sang ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ together for the high school talent show. She went on to a school out of state. Each of them got married shortly after college. And I lost them.”
“To marriage?” asks Carol.
“David was gay, but he was in denial. He left his wife and went to San Francisco. But he couldn’t deal with his sexuality. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. And Patricia. One night her husband found her. Hanged in the shower. A suicide, but I’ve never believed it. She wasn’t the type. For years, I’ve had dreams about her being trapped under the stairs, trying to escape, and me not being able to save her. Sometimes in the dreams I am inside her body, trapped inside her body, and trapped under the stairs, trying to make noise, trying to call out, and not being able to …” she pauses. “I think Patricia was murdered by her husband.
“I’m the one who lost myself to marriage. But I saved myself. I fell in love with Laurence way too young. At eighteen. He was handsome, and very well read. He started beating me as soon we married, especially in the abdomen. It’s a miracle Evan wasn’t miscarried. Laurence broke my hands and my nose. He beat me until I was unrecognizable. Once Laurence made me a sandwich. I thought how uncharacteristic. Braunschweiger. He had hidden an enormous amount of LSD inside. For hours I saw only red and green. I stepped into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw a reptile staring back. One morning, I packed up some things, whisked up Evan, and got out. I became unrecognizable on my terms. I changed my name from Elizabeth Hartshorn to Clare de Lanvallei, the name of an English ancestor of mine who was among the signers of the Magna Carta. Then after the second husband I finally married Rick. Then I had Joseph, fourteen years after having Evan. When I married Rick I just threw all my old names together. My legal name is Clare Christina Elizabeth Christine Hartshorn de Lanvallei McKay.” My mother chuckles at her many names.
Carol feels the urge to cry, and roots nervously through her purse full of medications, pulls out her Visine drops, and drowns her eyes in saline.
“The hour approaches, Carol,” my mother says.
“Let’s do it,” Carol says, dabbing at her Visine tears with a tissue.
Carol waits on the porch, as my mother has instructed. She smokes an extra-long Marlboro Light. My mother wrestles Gummidge into a cat carrier at the back of the house, loads her into the silver station wagon, and pulls up.
When my father, a lanky man with a few wisps of black hair remaining on his mostly bare head, arrives home, no one else is there. He is coming from the grocery store that he manages. He places a carton of milk, a package of sliced turkey breast, and a bag of apples into the refrigerator and exhaustedly sits down at the kitchen table, amidst a sea of the last two weeks’ newspapers. He begins idly reading one of them through his square-framed glasses. He remains there for thirty minutes before my mother and Carol burst through the door, cat carrier in hand.
“Roxy has an announcement to make!” my mother shouts.
“Who’s Roxy?” my father asks.
“Roxy is a cat,” she informs him.
“You got another cat?” he asks, his expression moving from puzzled to perturbed.
“Yes,” my mother says, proudly.
“Jesus,” he says.
“Would you like to meet her?” she asks.
“S’pose so,” he answers. My mother opens the wire door and a calico scampers out. “That’s Mrs. Gummidge!” my father exclaims.
“It was determined today, by the veterinarian, that the-cat-known-as-Mrs. Gummidge was not eight years of age, as previously imagined, but is, in fact, a sprightly one year old. It was also determined, at the veterinarian’s, that the-cat-known-as-Mrs. Gummidge had a nasty sliver lodged in her side, causing her to cry and act generally like a curmudgeon. As this cat’s age has been clarified, and her troubles assuaged, she wishes to put forth a new image, and asks, now, to be known only as Roxy!”
“Roxy is moving out of her cell and into my house!” Carol announces. She had once toyed out loud with the idea of adopting Mrs. Gummidge, remarking that two sad women might make one another happy. The way two rawngs make a rah-at. Now that Roxy has appeared, she seems to have revised her logic: a happy cat might cheer her up. She places Roxy in the passenger seat of her car and lights a cigarette. The two drive coolly away.
At 9:30 p.m., my father retreats to bed, as he always does. Soon thereafter, Cleopatra rises languorously from a living room nest and saunters up to join my father in the king-sized bed. As always, my mother remains in the kitchen, indefinitely, reading mystery novels and sipping flavored decaf, well into the deep sleep of Cleopatra and my father.
My mother sets her book aside and creeps out to revel in the new space of the pantry—the erstwhile home of a cat who suddenly switched lives and names. New discoveries have thrown the cat’s former persona into a liminal zone between past reality and fiction. Who lived here? My mother asks herself. Who was this “Mrs. Gummidge”?
Mrs. Gummidge was a being with several names and a being with no name. She was a Z-word that was hard to remember, with a face rendered gray by a limited and artful memory. My mother swoops up the bag of Whiskas, nearly empty now at the end of the day. She shakes it like a gigantic maraca, humming a syncopated version of “Cuddle Cats.” Drawn by the sound of food—or perhaps by the Latin rhythm—Don Diego appears at her feet. My mother does not finish the song, but pours all the rhythm, the remaining morsels of Whiskas, into a Blue Willow bowl.
My mother turns, and begins to walk to bed. Mounting the stairs, she pauses, thinking that she hears the distant cry of a lost, hungry feline. She continues on her way. The stairs are loud and creaky and she barely hears the rustling of her spirit,