It’s like this, cat by Emily Neville (the rosie project .txt) 📖
- Author: Emily Neville
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The phony blonde in the booth looks at me and sneers, “You’re not sixteen. We don’t have a children’s section in this theater.” She doesn’t even ask. She just says it. It’s a great world. I go home. There’s no one there but Cat, so I turn the record player up full blast.
Pop comes home in one of his unexpected fits of generosity that night and takes us to the movies. Cat behaves himself and stays around home and our cellar for a while, so I stop worrying. But it doesn’t last long.
As soon as his claw heals, he starts sashaying off again. One night I hear cats yowling out back and I go out with a bucket of water and douse them and bring Cat in. There’s a pretty little tiger cat, hardly more than a kitten, sitting on the fence licking herself, dry and unconcerned. Cat doesn’t speak to me for a couple of days.
One morning Butch, the janitor, comes up and knocks on our door. “You better come down and look at your cat. He got himself mighty chewed up. Most near dead.”
I hurry down, and there is Cat sprawled in a corner on the cool cement floor. His mouth is half open, and his breath comes in wheezes, like he has asthma. I don’t know whether to pick him up or not.
Butch says, “Best let him lie.”
I sit down beside him. After a bit his breath comes easier and he puts his head down. Then I see he’s got a long, deep claw gouge going from his shoulder down one leg. It’s half an inch open, and anyone can see it won’t heal by itself.
Butch shakes his head. “You gotta take him to the veteran, sure. That’s the cat doctor.”
“Yeah,” I say, not correcting him. It’s not just the gash that’s worrying me. I remember what Aunt Kate said, and it gives me a cold feeling in the stomach: In the back-alley jungle he’d last a year, maybe two.
Looking at Cat, right now, I know she’s right. But Cat’s such a—well, such a cat. How can I take him to be whittled down?
I tell Butch I’ll be back down in a few minutes, and I go upstairs. Mom’s humming and cleaning in the kitchen. I wander around and stare out the window awhile. Finally I go in the kitchen and stare into the icebox, and then I tell Mom about the gash in Cat’s leg.
She asks if I know a vet to take him to.
“Yeah, there’s Speyer. It’s a big, new hospital—good enough for people, even—with a view of the East River. The thing is, Mom, Cat keeps going off and fighting and getting hurt, and people tell me I ought to get him altered.”
Mom wets the sponge and squeezes it out and polishes at the sink, and I wonder if she knows what I’m talking about because I don’t really know how to explain it any better.
She wrings the sponge out, finally, and sits down at the kitchen table.
She says, “Cat’s not a free wild animal now, and he wouldn’t be even if you turned him loose. He belongs to you, so you have to do whatever is best for him, whether it’s what you’d like or not. Ask the doctor and do what he says.”
Mom puts it on the line, all right. It doesn’t make me feel any better about Cat. She takes five dollars out of her pocketbook and gives it to me.
I get out the wicker hamper and go down to the cellar and load Cat in. He meows, a low resentful rumble, but he doesn’t try to get away.
Cat in the hamper is no powder puff, and I get pretty hot walking to the bus, and then from the bus stop to the animal hospital. I get there and wait, and dogs sniff at me, and I fill in forms. The lady asks me if I can afford to pay, and with Mom’s five bucks and four of my own, I say Yes.
The doctor is a youngish guy, but bald, in a white shirt like a dentist’s. I put Cat on the table in front of him. He says, “So why don’t you stay out of fights, like your mommy told you?”
I relax a bit and smile, and he says, “That’s better. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of tomcat. I suppose he got this gash in a fight?”
“Yeah.”
“He been altered?”
“No.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know. He was a stray. I’ve had him almost a year.”
All the time he’s talking, the doctor is soothing Cat and looking him over. He goes on stroking him and looks up at me. “Well, son, one of these days he’s going to get in one fight too many. Shall we alter him the same time we sew up his leg?”
So there it is. I can’t seem to answer right away. If the doctor had argued with me, I might have said No. But he just goes on humming and stroking. Finally he says, “It’s tough, I know. Maybe he’s got a right to be a tiger. But you can’t keep a tiger for a pet.”
I say, “O.K.”
An attendant takes Cat away, and I go sit in the waiting room, feeling sweaty and cold all over. They tell me it’ll be a couple of hours, so I go out and wander around a lot of blocks I never saw before and drink some cokes and sit and look up at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Queens.
When I go back for him, Cat looks the same as ever, except for a bandage all up his right front leg. The doctor tells me to come back Friday and he’ll take out the stitches.
Mom sees me come in the door, and I guess I look pretty grim, because she says, “Cat will be all right, won’t he, dear?”
“Yes.” I go past her and down into my room and let Cat out of the basket and then bury my head under the pillow. I’m not exactly ashamed of crying, but I don’t want Mom to hear.
After a while I pull my head out. Cat is lying there beside me, his eyes half open, the tip end of his tail twitching very slowly. I rub my eyes on the back of his neck and whisper to him, “I’m sorry. Be tough, Cat, anyway, will you?”
Cat stretches and hops off the bed on his three good legs.
The regular park man got sunstroke or something, so I earned fourteen dollars raking and mowing in Gramercy Park in the middle of August. Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to own a key to get in, so the city doesn’t take care of it.
Real paper money, at this time of year especially, is very cheering. I head up to Sam Goody’s to see what records he’s got on sale and what characters are buying them. Maybe I’ll buy something, maybe not, but as long as I’ve got money in my pocket, I don’t feel like the guy is glaring at me for taking up floor space.
Along the way I walk through the library, the big one at Forty-second Street. You go in by the lions on Fifth Avenue, and there’s all kinds of pictures and books on exhibit in the halls, and you walk through to the back, where you can take out books. It’s nice and cool, and nobody glares at you unless you either make a lot of noise or go to sleep. I can take books out of here and return them at the Twenty-third Street branch, which is handy.
Sam Goody’s is air-conditioned, so it’s cool too. There are always several things playing on different machines you can listen to. Almost the most fun is watching the people: little, fat, bald guys buying long-haired classical music, and thin, shaggy beatniks listening to the jazz.
I go to check if there are any bargains in the Kingston or Belafonte division. There’s a girl standing there reading the backs of records, but I don’t really catch a look at more than her shoes—little red flats they are. After a bit she reaches for a record over my head and says, “Excuse me.”
“Sure.” Then we catch each other’s eye and both say, “Oh. Gee, hello.”
Well, we’re both pretty surprised, because this is the girl I met out at Coney Island that day with Nick when I had Cat with me, and now we’re both a long way from Coney Island. This girl isn’t one of the two giggly ones. It’s the third, the one that liked Cat.
We’ve both forgotten each other’s names, so we begin over with that. I ask her what she’s been doing, and she’s been at Girl Scout camp a few weeks, and then she earned some money baby-sitting. So she came to think about records, like me. I tell her I’ve been at Coney once this summer, and I looked around for her, which is true, because I did.
“It’s a big place,” she says, smiling.
“Say, you live out there, don’t you? How come you get all the way in here by yourself? Doesn’t your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was going to Coney alone.”
Mary says, “I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows I’m not going to get lost.”
I say, “Gee, it’d be great to have a mother that didn’t worry about you all the time.”
“Oh, Mom worries.” Mary giggles. “You should have heard her when I said I liked Gone With the Wind and I didn’t like Anna Karenina. I pretty nearly got disowned.”
“What does she think about science fiction?” I ask, and Mary makes a face, and we both laugh.
I go on. “Well, my mom doesn’t care what I read. She worries about what I eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I’m about to kill myself. It’s a nuisance, really.”
Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, “I think maybe it’d be nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you’re comfortable and all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time.”
This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective mothers, and Mary picks up the record of West Side Story and says, “Gee, I’d like to see that. Did you?”
I say No, and to tell the truth I hadn’t hardly heard of it.
“I read a book about him. It was wonderful,” she says.
“Who?”
“Bernstein. The man who wrote it.”
“What’s West Side Story about, him?” I ask cautiously.
“No, no—he wrote the music. It’s about some kids in two gangs, and there’s a lot of dancing, and then there’s a fight and this kid gets—well, it isn’t a thing you can tell the story of very well. You have to see it.”
This gives me a very simple idea.
“Why don’t we?” I say.
“Huh?”
“Go see it. Why not?
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