by Laura Sims
*
I wake the next morning to the sight of Cat stretched out beside me on the bed, bathing her chest with her tongue. She’s happy here. This is her home. Nathan can’t have her. If he’d wanted to keep her, he should have taken her when he left.
I’m steering clear of the actress’s house for a while. I cross the street to the opposite side. I circle the whole block to avoid walking by. It’s like pushing Reset, like Bernardo rewriting his paper for a whole new grade.
The block party looms. By then, Nathan will have lost interest in Cat. I’ll celebrate my freedom, and Cat’s, with my dear neighbors. I’ll wear a brightly colored strapless dress and high-heeled sandals like hers. I’ll buy food from the gourmet store where the actress shops and arrive breathless, carrying artfully stamped and packed paper bags. I’ll get pleasantly tipsy without descending into sloppy drunkenness. I’ll flirt with the men my age and younger—single or married. I’ll wear “our” shade of lipstick. Someone might even mistake me for her, at first, one of the old-timers on the block. They’ll say, “Sorry—I thought you were her,” and I’ll blush attractively, touch my hair and say, “Honest mistake.” I’ll spare an affectionate glance for the kids in the bouncy house, jumping for joy. I know that feeling! I’ll want to shout. I’m jumping on the inside, just like you! And then that old bag, Mrs. H, will sidle up and ask with a sneer in her voice, “Which one is yours?”
*
I said yes to lunch with Shana only because I didn’t have the energy to explain that I never wanted to see her again. I sit here telling her all the right things in between sips of iced tea. I requested we meet at a sleek lunch spot in the city. I’m wearing one of my most flattering dresses, the dark red one with a deep V-neck and a tightly cinched waist. I’m even wearing heels. I’ve gathered my hair into a sophisticated bun, and worn the dangly gold earrings that accentuate the long curve of my neck. I warm to the appreciative looks I’m getting from our waiter and every other man in the room. Shana doesn’t seem to notice everyone noticing me. She’s squinting at me like there’s something wrong, but I go on as if I haven’t noticed. “Oh my god, guess what? Nathan is trying to get Cat! He wants to take Cat from me. Can you believe it?” I lean close to her over the table, lowering my voice, nearly whispering through my perfectly matte red lips as if I were starring in the actress’s lone spy movie, the one where she is a double agent who convinces everyone around her, everyone who comes in contact with her, that she’s on their side. Shana fools with her glass, turns it by the stem. Won’t meet my eyes. “You don’t like the cat, though. Right? And wasn’t it his? I mean originally?”
The waitress—I’d thought we had a waiter, but somehow I was wrong—comes to take our plates. In the silence I refuse to fill, I look at the tables around us. All the men in the room have vanished. All I see are women like us, middle-aged, carefully coiffed and dressed, hunching over their salads in twos and threes. Picking at leaves of spinach. Goat cheese. Walnuts. Beets. Sipping iced tea or chilled white wine. Talking animatedly. The talk like a stream, like an unending buzz. I can hear my heart inside of the noise, pounding against it. No. No, Shana. You are not right.
I don’t say a word, but signal for the check. I watch Shana, flustered, collect her expensive-but-dowdy cardigan off the back of her chair and rummage through her designer-knockoff purse for her wallet. I’m fairly certain she can feel the waves of hatred and disgust coming off of me. I hate you. And I hate this place, full of clucking hens like us. I won’t do this again. I mean it this time.
Nathan has called and left another message. Less tentative this time. More insistent. “I’ll come by Saturday morning to pick her up. Pack up her stuff. I’ll call or text when I’m there.” Mr. In Charge. Mr. Taking Control. Ha! That’s what he thinks.
*
There she is, the actress. Stepping out, with the baby in his carrier, looking fresh, fit, well rested, and happy. Not carefully toned and preserved, like the lunching ladies, but effortlessly beautiful—like a handful of ripe berries just before you pop them into your mouth. After having not seen her, after having avoided her house for a brief little while because of what happened with the husband, the sight of her makes me squint. How does one get to live such a charmed life? How does one get to literally have it all? It strikes me as funny—that billions of us should be schlepping along, some of us barely surviving, while one person gets to be praised and lifted up by eternal light. When she passes my stoop without turning to look, I’m there with my cigarette in one hand, the other hand covering my mouth, convulsing with laughter.
The last time I laughed, really laughed, was with Nathan, watching that ridiculous buddy comedy about two cops who go undercover at a high school. One is fat and funny—the other is tall, handsome, and dumb. I’d been so reluctant to go—I knew it would be full of lighthearted woman-hating, and it was—but the physical stuff got me over and over again. The fat one falls in a pool. The fat one chugs beer and then barfs it back up. How I love to laugh! That deep-belly guffaw that’s happening right now, that tells me: I am not her! I never will be! I may as well be the funny fat one myself. Why not? Stuff my face until I’m roly-poly, until I could roll right through the world and make people weep with laughter.
Mrs. H catches my eye when I pass her later on the way to the subway. “Haven’t seen your husband around,” she says matter-of-factly. Like she’s pleased with herself and sorry for me all at once. Toxic combination. I don’t need your pity, old thing! “No,” I say, smiling sweetly, “you haven’t.”
I am sick to death of women. Kind women, careful women, strong-and-silent women, caretaking women, lonely women, old women, young women, perfect women, dead women, crazy women, haunted women, bitter women, hateful women, harsh women, hounded women, all women! I am not one of you! Leave me alone, leave me to the straightforwardly horrible men.
*
Cat purrs contentedly in the morning sun. I look at her and feel soft and warm deep inside. Is this how mothers feel about their children? Nathan will never take you, darling one.
Like the fat one in the movie, I take pleasure in my farts these days. In the old days, I’d let one slip while we were sitting on the couch and laugh, but Nathan was always such a prude. He’d curl his upper lip and say, “Try to be a woman, why don’t you?” It pleased and embarrassed me to make him sit in my stink—but it pleases me more now to sit on the cushions and let one rip with no consequences. The cat twitches her ears—that’s all.
*
Early on Saturday morning the locksmith comes. When he’s finished changing the locks I head out for a long day in the city. I’ll tour the art galleries, have lunch at a charming bistro, see a matinee, and maybe even have dinner out, too, to be safe. I leave my phone at home, “by accident.”
The day doesn’t go quite as planned. I end up browsing in the city’s last remaining large independent bookstore for a full two hours and leave with an armful of books and a searing headache. I’m dying of thirst. I step into the first bar I see, a slick-looking touristy place on the square. The wine is all right—I inhale the first glass and ask for another. Listen to the Minnesotans beside me debating the merits of the Giants versus the Jets. They may as well be at home on their sofas, nursing beers. Why bother coming to the city at all? Just so they can say they’ve been, I suppose. Maybe they hate it the whole time—the crowds, the noise, and the city dwellers’ superior attitudes—and will feel a wave of relief on landing back at home. I stay at the bar until the 3 p.m. showing of Dangerous Game, that same thriller of the actress’s I’ve seen before, still showing at the second-run theater a few blocks away.
The actress has been a prostitute, a private eye, a professor, a surgeon, a soldier, and a veterinarian with a soft spot for rodents. In today’s film she is two things at once: a police officer posing as a prostitute. Hence the unsubtle title. The movie is just barely entertaining—especially on third viewing—moving quickly through all the tropes and twists you’d expect, so my mind is free
to wonder: What will the actress’s children think one day of her on-screen personae? If it were me, I’d feel a mingling of pride and disgust. Pride at her fame and wealth, disgust for a career made of putting on the lives of others. You don’t even know who you are, Mom! How can you tell me to be “myself”? I can hear her daughter say one day soon, burning with adolescent resentment. But what’s it to me? I’ve got my popcorn and a seat in the cozy dark, and today I have the pleasure of confounding Nathan, the quintessential bad guy of my life. My own movie would be titled, Cat’s Cradle, and it, too, would be a blockbuster.
My phone is bright with texts when I get home. I glance at the screen and see that Nathan has filled it with all caps, like a screaming ransom letter. I leave it for morning, still wrapped in the imaginary haze of the movie’s world, still buzzed from my successful day—and possibly the wine. Cat greets me effusively, sweet thing.
*
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING? CHANGING THE LOCKS?? HAVE YOU GONE TOTALLY INSANE? YOU WERE ALREADY HALFWAY THERE, NOW YOU’VE PLUNGED OVER THE EDGE. I WILL GET CAT BACK, BELIEVE ME.
Ha! That seals it. I would never hand Cat over to such a hateful, vindictive person, not in a million years. He would have to break the door down to get her—and Nathan is not a breaking-down-the-door kind of guy. He’s a spineless shit, and his meaningless text-screaming proves it.
*
One thing that nags at me every time I pass the actress’s house these days: a bright pink child’s bike left leaning against the front of their house. In any other garden, this would have been stolen weeks ago. I once left a wooden chair in our front garden after refinishing it, so it could dry—I even hid it by the basement gate, out of sight from most angles. It was stolen overnight. One night! A measly chair! And the actress has the gall, the temerity, the rotten good luck, to leave this shiny, expensive little bike parked in full view for days on end with no consequences. She keeps it there, it seems, to show us how impenetrable her protective shield is, and to remind us how unprotected, how unspecial the rest of us are.
My fingers twitch when I pass the house. I have to fight myself to keep from grabbing the bike out in the open, in the middle of the day.
*
It’s 2 a.m. I’m stepping through their front gate. Windows dark. Quiet. No alarm sounds, no net drops over me. I stride quickly to the bike, grab a handlebar in one hand and the seat in the other and lift it. It’s light—like it’s made of cardboard instead of metal. I run back on tiptoes, the bike held aloft, imagining how this would look from the outside: absolutely ludicrous. A middle-aged woman in all black, stealing a child’s hot-pink bike at 2 a.m.! If it were a movie, I’d scoff. Who writes this crap? I’d say. When I reach my front door, I bend over, breathless. Beginning to laugh. I did it! Part triumph, part absurdity. But the end result: it’s mine.
I store it in the extra room, where it looks ridiculous—and by that I mean: ridiculously beautiful. I leave the door cracked so I can glimpse it now and then. Cat saunters in, sniffs the front tire, and rubs her side against it. “Cat, come here,” I say sharply. She looks at me—her gray eyes wide—and slumps down against the bike tire. Flicking her tail.
The next morning I turn my head ever so slightly as I pass the actress’s house. Nothing has changed—I mean, nothing I haven’t changed myself. I feel a thrill at the sight of their empty garden. Only leaves and plants now, separating them from us.
Nathan again, via text, of course. Not screaming this time. Do I have to get a lawyer after you to get Cat back? She’s my cat—she’s always been my cat. You barely tolerated her. Be reasonable. Think of your allergies. Why would you want to hold on to Cat? I don’t understand it. Please. Let’s settle this like friends.
Like friends! I won’t write back—let him stew—but if I were going to, I’d write: My allergies have magically disappeared. Thanks for your concern!
*
The actress’s middle child, the six-year-old, is riding a brand-new bike down the sidewalk. She’ll soon pass right by my stoop. The bike is bright green, so shiny that it hurts my eyes. I can hardly see the girl’s face under the giant helmet they have her wearing. As usual, the nanny saunters behind, smiling her contented smile. When you take a thing from someone like the actress, she merely replaces it. Before you know it, this new bike will be leaning against the front wall, too, as if nothing untoward ever happened, as if nothing untoward could ever happen again. If I were to take this bike, to try to prove them wrong, the next day a new one would stand in its place. And if I were to take that one, and so on . . . to infinity. I envision all the bright bikes piling up in my extra room, beginning to spill through the doorway into the living room—eventually I’d have to move to accommodate the endless bounty of the actress’s life. I feel a tightness in my chest. I’m out in fresh air, under a cloudless blue sky, but suddenly I find it hard to breathe.
I go inside and masturbate. Angrily. On the worn couch, Cat curled on the floor beside me, undisturbed. When I’m spent, I find my breath again. It comes in gasps.
*
Tonight’s class on Walt Whitman goes poorly. My head feels fuzzy. Like there’s cotton wrapping my brain—squeezing it, even. Maybe it’s Whitman, telling me “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Really? I want to ask. Is there really such balance in the universe? I fumble for words, come out with the wrong ones. Mary stares at me in a sympathetic way, like she’s saying, Don’t worry, the mind goes first as you age. Bernardo keeps licking his lips. Is he high? Or just hot and dry in this stifling room? I tug at my neckline. The students are listless and underprepared. I let them go early, and after they’ve left I wander out to the city street.
At the bar a salesman type with his sleeves rolled up and his collar opened at the neck tries to convince me to fuck him. I’m quaking inside at the thought of fucking someone other than Nathan, but I act the part of the jaded city girl anyway. I tell him I’d do it right there, in the bathroom, if it were clean enough. But it’s not—I know the bar well. I tell him I won’t go anywhere else with him, that’s it, that’s our only non-option, and then I leave him sitting openmouthed, somewhere between a laugh and a scowl, with his half-finished drink in his hand.
*
When I leave the house the next morning I see a used condom in the middle of the sidewalk, right in front of my house. As if what I teased the salesman with happened right here, a woman grasping the rails of my gate while getting taken from behind. When they were done, he just peeled off the rubber and dropped it. Right there, where people walk their dogs and children walk to school and women click by in heels on their way to jobs in needlelike office towers. I feel like someone has left me a soiled prize.
Silence from Nathan. Good. I don’t want to hear his stupid voice, not even via text. I don’t want to hear him wheedling or demanding ever again. I knew he’d let it go, leave the cat to me like a consolation prize. It shows what a cold and heartless prick he is, after all. Leave the useless cat to the barren woman and walk away into your bright new life.
Except: here he is. Nathan. On my stoop. Sitting there placidly, coffee from our favorite neighborhood café in hand. Our usual barista probably served him, gave him a fist bump and asked, Where you been, man? How’s things? Meanwhile, the guy never even seems to recognize me. People have always preferred friendly, chatty Nathan to . . . whatever it is I seem to be. Uptight? Reserved? Unfriendly, even? And now here he sits, on the stoop, looking like he owns the place—which we never did, never could have, not in a million years. Even so, he sits there like a fucking king. The condom from earlier has disappeared—probably tidied up by Mrs. H—and I sullenly miss it. I’m standing in front of the gate, my arms full of grocery bags, feeling my stomach pitch to the ground. Nathan reaches out for the bags, but I set them down instead of handing them over. And stand there.
“Hello,” he says, unsmiling.
“Hello,” I say back.
I saw them fighting once—the actress and her husband. They we
re out in front of their house, alone, facing each other and speaking quietly, but I could tell they were both terribly upset. I passed by. Looked at her face, facing me. Skin a bit red, splotchy even, but not unattractive the way a normal human’s face would be. She just looked flushed with emotion, pretty. Of course.
We stand frozen, facing each other at the stoop. A squat middle-aged woman leads a group of disabled adults by. Some of them stumble, some weave left and right; others walk carefully in a straight line. One man’s face is twisted—in agony or not. “Come on, you guys,” the leader says cheerfully. “Almost there!” One of them moans and for a second I think I may have made that sound myself.
“Can I come up?” Nathan asks. Sharply. Not really asking. I shake my head. He sighs and lets his hands and head drop. “What is it, what do you want from me?” he asks the steps. “Nothing,” I say. He looks back up.
There’s a buzzing in my ears during the conversation that follows. I can’t hear his words or my own. They resolve into a distant drone. I can’t have this, you can’t have that, blah blah blah. We’ve done this before. A million times! Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Goddamn Mrs. H, who rarely leaves her own stoop, shuffles by. Taking a conveniently timed “walk,” though you can hardly call it walking. There’s a lull in our dull roar, and Mrs. H sidles in. “How are you?” she asks Nathan pointedly. He nods, friendly and animated all of a sudden. Public Nathan. Popular Nathan. He stands and walks down the steps toward her, which is also toward me. I shrink back. “I’m fine, Mrs. H. How are you?” he asks warmly. Darling Nathan. Friendly and fun-loving Nathan. “Where’ve you been?” she asks point-blank. Not buying his shit. I’m surprised. I lean forward eagerly. What will he say? “Oh, I’ve been around,” he says lamely. Mrs. H sees me roll my eyes.