Mary goes in and shouts, “Hi, Nina! I brought a friend home. We’re going to make some cocoa. We’re freezing.”
I wonder who Nina is. I don’t hear her mother come into the kitchen. Then I turn around and there she is. Holy cow! We got some pretty beat-looking types at school, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a beatnik mother,
She’s got on a black T-shirt and blue jeans and old sneakers, and her hair is in a long braid, with uneven bangs in front.
Mary waves a saucepan vaguely at us both and says, “Nina—Davey—this is my mother.”
So Nina is her mother. I stick out my hand. “Uh—how do you do?”
“Hel-looo.” Her voice is low and musical. “I think there is coffee on the stove.”
“I thought I’d make cocoa for a change,” says Mary.
“All right.” Nina puts a cigarette in her mouth and offers one to me.
I say, “No, thank you.”
“Tell me …” She talks in this low, intense kind of voice. “Are you in school with Mary?”
So I tell her I live in Manhattan, and how I ran into Mary when I had Cat on the beach, because that makes it sound sort of respectable, not like a pickup. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in Cat and the beach.
“What do you read? In your school?” she asks, launching each question like a torpedo.
I remember Mary saying something about her mother and poetry, so I say, “Well, uh—last week we read ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ They’re about—I mean, we were studying metaphors and similes. Looking at the ocean today, I sure can see what Longfellow meant about the icy . . .”
I thought I was doing pretty well, but she cut me off again.
“Don’t you read any real poetry? Donne? Auden? Baudelaire?”
Three more torpedoes. “We didn’t get to them yet.”
Nina blows out a great angry cloud of smoke and explodes, “Schools!” Then she sails out of the kitchen.
I guess I look a little shook up. Mary laughs and shoves a mug of cocoa and a plate of cinnamon toast in front of me. “Don’t mind Mother. She just can’t get used to New York schools. Or Coney Island. Or hardly anything around here.
“She grew up on the Left Bank in Paris. Her father was an artist and her mother was a writer, and they taught her to read at home, starting with Chaucer, probably. She never read a kids’ book in her life.
“Anything I ever tell her about school pretty much sounds either childish or stupid to her. What I really love is science—experiments and stuff—and she can’t see that for beans.”
“Our science teacher is a dope,” I say, because she is, “so I really never got very interested in science. But I told Mom and Dad I was coming to the aquarium to take notes today, so they wouldn’t kick up such a fuss.”
Mary shakes her head. “We ought to get our mothers together. Mine thinks I’m wasting time if I even go to the aquarium. I do, though, all the time. I love the walrus.”
“What does your pop do?”
“Father? He teaches philosophy at Brooklyn College. So I get it from both sides. Just think, think, think. Father and Nina aren’t hardly even interested in food. Once in a while Nina spends all day cooking some great fish soup or a chicken in wine, but the rest of the time I’m the only one who takes time off from thinking to cook a hamburger. They live on rolls and coffee and sardines.”
Mary puts our cups in the sink and then opens a low cupboard. Instead of pots and pans it has stacks of records in it. She pulls out West Side Story and then I see there’s a record player on a side table. What d’you know? A record player in the kitchen! This Left Bank style of living has its advantages.
“I sit down here and eat and play records while I do my homework,” says Mary, which sounds pretty nice.
I ask her if she has any Belafonte, and she says, “Yes, a couple,” but she puts on something else. It’s slow, but sort of powerful, and it makes you feel kind of powerful yourself, as if you could do anything.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“It’s called ‘The Moldau’—that’s a river in Europe. It’s by a Czech named Smetana.”
I wander around the kitchen and look out the window. The wind’s still howling, but not so hard. I remember the ocean, all gray and powerful, spotted with whitecaps. I’d like to be out on it.
“You know what’d be fun?” I say out loud. “To be out in a boat on the harbor today. If you didn’t sink.”
“We could take the Staten Island ferry,” Mary says.
“Huh?” I hadn’t even thought there was really any boat we could get on. “Really? Where do you get it?”
“Down at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It’s quite a ways. I’ve always gone there in a car. But maybe we could do it on bikes, if we don’t freeze.”
“We won’t freeze. But what about bikes?”
“You can use my brother’s. He’s away at college. Maybe I can find a windbreaker of his, too.”
She finds the things and we get ready and go into the living room, where Nina is sitting reading and sipping a glass of wine.
“We’re going on our bikes to the ferry and over to Staten Island,” Mary says. She doesn’t even ask.
“Oh-h-h.” It’s a long, low note, faintly questioning.
“We thought with the wind blowing and all, it’d be exciting,” Mary explains, and I think, Uh-o, that’s going to cook it. My mother would have kittens if I said I was going out on a ferry in a storm.
But Nina just says, “I see,” and goes back to reading her book. I say good-bye and she looks up again and smiles, and that’s all.
It’s another funny thing—Nina doesn’t seem to pay any attention to who Mary brings home, like most mothers are always snooping if their daughter brings home a guy. Without stopping to think, I say, “Do you bring home a lot of guys?”
Mary laughs. “Not a lot. Sometimes one of the boys at school comes home when we’re studying for a science test.”
I laugh, too, but what I’m thinking of is how Pop would look if I brought a girl home and said we were studying for a test!
14
Expedition by Ferry
As we ride through Brooklyn the wind belts us around from both sides and right in the teeth. But the sun’s beginning to break through, and it’s easy riding, no hills.
This part of Brooklyn is mostly rows of houses joined together, or low apartment buildings, with little patches of lawn in front of them. There’s lots of trees along the streets. It doesn’t look anything like Manhattan, but not anything like the country, either. It’s just Brooklyn.
All of a sudden we’re circling a golf course. What d’you know? Right in New York City!
“Ever play golf?” The wind snatches the words out of my mouth and carries them back to Mary. I see her mouth shaping like a “No,” but no sound comes my way. I drop back beside her and say, “I’ll show you sometime. My pop’s got a set of clubs I used a couple of times.”
“Probably I better carry the clubs and you play. I can play tennis, though.”
We pass the golf course and head down into a sort of main street. Anyway there’s lots of banks and dime stores and traffic. Mary leads the way. We make a couple of turns and zigzags and then go under the parkway, and there’s the ferry. It’s taken us most of an hour to get from Mary’s house.
I’m hoping the ferry isn’t too expensive, so I’ll have plenty of money left for a good lunch. But while I’m mooning, Mary has wheeled her bike right up and paid her own fare. Well, I guess that’s one of the things I like about her. She’s independent. Still, I’m going to buy lunch.
The ferry is terrific. I’m going to come ride ferries every day it’s windy. The boat doesn’t roll any, but we stand right up in front and the wind blows clouds of spray in our faces. You can pretend you’re on a full-rigged schooner running before a hurricane. But you look down at that choppy gray water, and you know you’d be done if you got blown overboard, even if it is just an
old ferryboat in New York harbor.
The ferry ride is fast, only about fifteen minutes. We ride off in Staten Island and start thinking where to go. I know what’s first with me.
I ask Mary, “What do you like, hamburgers or sandwiches?”
“Both. I mean either,” she says.
The first place we see is a delicatessen, which is about my favorite kind of place to eat anyway. I order a hot pastrami, and Mary says she never had one, but she’ll try the same.
“Where could we go on Staten Island?” I say. “I never was here before.”
“About the only place I’ve been is the zoo. I’ve been there lots of times. The vet let me watch her operate on a snake once.”
This is a pretty surprising thing for a girl to tell you in the middle of a mouthful of hot pastrami. The pastrami is great, and they put it on a roll with a lot of olives and onions and relish. Mary likes it too.
“Is the vet a woman? Aren’t you scared of snakes?”
“Uh-un, I never was really. But when you’re watching an operation, you get so interested you don’t think about it being icky or scary. The vet is a woman. She’s been there quite a while.”
I digest this along with the rest of my sandwich. Then we both have a piece of apple pie. You can tell from the way the crust looks—browned and a little uneven—that they make it right here.
“So shall we go to the zoo?” Mary asks.
“O.K.” I get up to get her coat and mine. When I turn around, there she is up by the cashier, getting ready to pay her check.
“Hey, I’m buying lunch,” I say, steaming up with the other check.
“Oh, that’s all right.” She smiles. “I’ve got it.”
I don’t care if she’s got it. I want to pay it. I suppose it’s a silly thing to get sore about, but it sort of annoys me. Anyway, how do you maneuver around to do something for a girl when she doesn’t even know you want to?
The man in the deli gives us directions to get to the zoo, which isn’t far. It’s a low brick building in a nice park. In the lobby there are some fish tanks, then there’s a wing for birds on one side, animals on the other, and snakes straight ahead.
We go for snakes. Mary really seems to like them.
She says, “The vet here likes them, and I guess she got me interested. You know, they don’t really understand how a snake moves? Mechanically, I mean. She’s trying to find out.”
We look at them all, little ones and big ones, and then we go watch the birds. The keeper is just feeding them. The parrot shouts at him, and the pelican and the eagles gobble up their fish and raw meat, but the vulture just sits on his perch looking bored. Probably needs a desert and a dying Legionnaire to whet his appetite.
In the animal wing a strange-looking dame is down at the end, talking to a sleepy tiger.
“Come on, darling, just a little roar. Couldn’t you give me just a soft one today?” she’s cooing at him. The tiger blinks and looks away.
The lady notices us standing there and says, “He’s my baby. I’ve been coming to see him for fourteen years. Some days he roars for me beautifully.”
She has a short conversation with the lion, then moves along with us toward the small cats, a puma and a jaguar. She looks in the next cage, which is empty, and shakes her head mournfully.
“I had the sweetest little leopard. He died last week. Would you believe it? The zoo never let me know he was sick. I could have come and helped take care of him. I might have saved his life.”
She goes on talking, sometimes to herself, sometimes to the puma, and we cross over to look at two otters chasing each other up an underwater tunnel.
“What is she, some kind of nut?” Mary says. “Does she think this is her private zoo?”
I shrug. “I suppose she’s a little off. But so’s my Aunt Kate, the one who gave me Cat. They just happen to like cats better than people. Kate thinks all the stray cats in the world are her children, and I guess this one feels the same way about the big cats here.”
We mosey around a little bit more and then head back to the ferry. I make good and sure I’m ahead, and I get to the ticket office and buy two tickets.
“Would you care for a ride across the harbor in my yacht?” I say.
“Why, of course. I’d be delighted,” says Mary.
A small thing, but it makes me feel good.
Over in Brooklyn I see a clock on a bank, and it says five o’clock. I do some fast calculating and say, “Uh-oh, I better phone. I’ll never make it home by dinnertime.”
I phone and get Pop. He’s home early from work. Just my luck.
“I got to get this bike back to this kid in Coney,” I tell him. “Then I’ll be right home. About seven.”
“What do you mean this bike and this kid? Who? Anyway, I thought you were already at Coney Island.”
I suppose lawyers just get in the habit of asking questions. I start explaining. “Well, it was awfully cold over in Coney, and we thought we’d go over to Staten Island on the ferry and go to the zoo. So now we just got back to Brooklyn, and I’m downtown and I got to take the bike back.”
“So who’s ‘we’? You got a rat in your pocket?”
I can distract Mom but not Pop. “Well, actually, it’s a girl named Mary. It’s her brother’s bike. He’s away in college.”
All I can hear now is Pop at the other end of the line, laughing his head off.
“So what’s so funny about that?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing. Only now I can see what all the shouting was about at breakfast.”
“Oh.”
“O.K. Now mind you get that girl, as well as the bicycle of the brother who goes to college, home safe. Hear? I’ll tell your mother you narrowly escaped drowning, and she’ll probably save you a bone for dinner. O.K.?”
“O.K. Bye.”
Him and his jokes. Ha, ha, ha. Funny, though, him worrying about me getting Mary home safe, when her own mother doesn’t worry any.
We start along toward her house slowly, as there’s a good deal of traffic now. I’m wondering how to see Mary again without having to ask for her number and phoning and making a date. Something about telephoning I don’t like. Besides, I’d probably go out to a pay phone so the family wouldn’t listen, and that’d make me feel stupid to begin with.
Just then we start rounding the golf course, and I whack the handle bar of my bike and say, “Hey, that’s it!”
“What’s it?”
“Golf. Let’s play golf. Not now, I don’t mean. Next holiday. We’ve got Election Day coming up. I’ll borrow Pop’s clubs and take the subway and meet you here. How about ten o’clock?”
“Hunh?” Mary looks startled. “Well, I suppose I could try, or anyway I could walk around.”
“It’s easy. I’ll show you.” The two times I played, I only hit the ball decently about four or five times. But the times I did hit it, it seemed easy.
We get to Mary’s house and I put the bikes away and give her back her brother’s jacket. “I guess I’ll go right along. It’s getting late. See you Election Day.”
“O.K., bye. Say—thanks for the ferry ride!”
15
Dollars and Cats
Wednesday night before Thanksgiving I go down to the delicatessen to buy some Coke, so I can really enjoy myself watching TV. Tom is just finishing work at the flower shop, and I ask him if he wants to come along home.
“Nah. Thanks. I got to be at work early tomorrow.” He doesn’t sound too cheery.
“How’s the job going?”
“O.K., I guess.” We walk along a little ways. “The job’s not bad, but I don’t want to be a florist all my life, and I can’t see this job will train me for anything else.”
That seems pretty true. It must be tough not getting regular holidays off, too. “You have to work all day tomorrow?” I ask.
“I open the store up at seven and start working on orders we’ve already got. I’ll get through around three or four.”
; “Hey, you want to come for dinner? We’re not eating till evening.”
Tom grins. “You cooking the dinner? Maybe you better ask your mother.”
“It’ll be all right with Mom. Look, I’ll ask her and come let you know in the store tomorrow, O.K.?”
“Hmm. Well, sure. Thanks. I’ve got a date with Hilda later in the evening, but she’s got to eat with her folks first.”
“O.K. See you tomorrow.”
“Right.”
Mom says it’s all right about Tom coming, so I go down and tell him in the morning. Turns out Mom has asked Kate to have dinner with us, too, which is quite a step. For Kate, I mean. I think she would have turned the invitation down, except no one can bear to hurt Mom’s feelings. Kate’s been in our house before, of course, but then she just came in to chat or have tea or something. It wasn’t like an invitation.
She comes, and she looks like someone from another world. I’ve never seen her in anything but her old skirts and sneakers, so the “good clothes” she’s wearing now must have been hanging in a closet twenty years. The dress and shoes are way out of style, and she’s carrying a real old black patent-leather pocketbook. Usually she just lugs her old cloth shopping bag, mostly full of cat goodies. Come to think of it, that’s it: Kate lives in a world that is just her own and the cats’. I never saw her trying to fit into the ordinary world before.
Cat knows her right away, though. Clothes don’t fool him. He rubs her leg and curls up on the sofa beside her, still keeping a half-open eye on the oven door in the kitchen, where the turkey is roasting.
Tom comes in, also in city clothes—a white shirt and tie and jacket—the first time I ever saw him in them. He sits down on the other side of Cat, who stretches one paw out toward him negligently.
Looking at Kate and Tom sitting there on the sofa, both looking a little ill at ease, I get a funny idea. My family is starting to collect people the way Kate collects homeless cats. Of course, Kate and Tom aren’t homeless. They’re people-less—not part of any family. I think Mom always wanted more people to take care of, so she’s glad to have them.
It's Like This, Cat Page 8