Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  We all started in random spots. Magda with the kitchen, packing up bags of warped cookie sheets and chipped frying pans with the nonstick coating peeling off to donate to whichever local charity took housewares. Nora in the basement, because so much down there was water-damaged and mold-saturated she could just haul it straight out to the Dumpster we’d rented.

  I started in the entryway—the little foyer for people to leave boots and hang up coats—because it was tiny and that made it feel manageable. A shelf ran above the coat hooks where normal people might have stored umbrellas or hats. My father had used the shelf for his collection of flags. You know how if you go to a Fourth of July parade you get a little flag to wave? My father disapproved of the fact that people threw those away when they were done. So unpatriotic! No appreciation for the freedoms here, none, he would grumble as he gathered them up—not just ours, but any he found lying on the ground afterward. Americans who were born here take everything for granted. But it wasn’t like he did anything with them; he just stored them, endlessly, in shoe boxes in the entryway.

  Dad had died ten years earlier. Mom was less compulsive about rescuing flags from the trash, but she didn’t throw anything away either, so of course all the flags were still there. I pulled down the boxes and carried them into the kitchen so I could sit at the table while I went through them. (I was pretty sure they were full of flags, but there might be other stuff we’d want.)

  “What are you going to do with those?” Magda asked.

  “Dumpster,” I said.

  “What? You can’t! Dad would split at the seams.”

  “He’s not here,” I pointed out. The flags were so old that the dye had leached out, leaving faded, brittle gray rags on sticks.

  “You’re supposed to dispose of flags respectfully. Do you want to prove his point about kids born here? ‘No respect! You take your freedoms for granted!’” She imitated the accent he’d never quite shaken.

  “If you want to store them forever, be my guest. I’ll put them in your car for you.”

  “I think the American Legion will take old flags,” Nora said, coming up from the basement with another box of moldy Christmas ornaments.

  I didn’t want to drive them over to the American Legion—did anyone in the entire world actually care if a load of ancient, faded toy flags wound up at the bottom of a Dumpster instead of the American Legion’s flag campfire? And anyway, didn’t they mostly burn full-sized real flags? But whatever: I was trying to keep the peace with Magda, so I loaded them into my minivan, drove them to the nearest American Legion, and abandoned them with a dubious-looking secretary.

  The entryway was also home to a stand crammed with broken umbrellas, an extensive collection of orphaned gloves and mittens, a hat that smelled like it had been peed on by a cat, a bunch of plastic pots of dirt that might once have held house plants, and twenty-six plastic bags stuffed full of other plastic bags. Sorted by type.

  Those were the easy things to deal with because they all went into the Dumpster. Harder: the dozen suncatchers Magda had made from bake-in-the-oven kits back when she was in third grade.

  “Save one of those,” Nora said, passing through with another box. “We can put it in Mom’s room when she gets transferred to a Transitional recovery nursing home type place.”

  “She won’t care,” I said. “She’s never going to care. There was too much damage.”

  Nora snatched the suncatcher out of my hand. “Then give up on her. But I’m putting a suncatcher in her room.”

  *

  II. Nursery Rhymes

  For obvious reasons, our parents liked storage. The living room was filled with bookcases and big cabinet things that had cupboards on the bottom and shelves on the top. Some of the shelves were crammed full of decorative items—knickknacks we’d purchased as gifts when we were little, objects d’art we’d made at school, an enormous brass elephant they’d won in a raffle. The elephant was big enough that a bunch of other objects were tucked under its legs, including another elephant, this one carved out of some sort of decorative stone but also a set of six doll-sized glass soda bottles in a holder and a flashlight you were supposed to clip to a key chain.

  The three of us had reconvened in the living room. The first challenge was trying to decide whether any of the knickknacks were valuable in any way, because of course who hasn’t heard stories about the ugly brass elephant they found at a garage sale that turned out to be made by someone super famous? But the brass elephant said “Made in China” on its stomach, which was a bad sign. Magda wanted the carved elephant, which was fine with me. But then I opened another cabinet, and with a groan of off-key electronic music, out spilled a pile of plastic electronic children’s toys.

  I’d forgotten all about them, even though I was probably the one who put them there. I felt a lurch, looking at them, and knowing Magda was standing right beside me.

  Sure enough, she gasped like she’d been slapped and said, “I need a break,” then strode rapidly out of the room.

  Nora shot me a look. I sighed and started picking them up. “I’d forgotten they were here,” I said. “Anyway…she has a child now. Maybe she’d like some of them.” Probably not, though. I remembered my daughters opening these horrible electronic gadgets delightedly, and how I’d always leave them behind, saying, “Oh, she can play with it here!”

  None of us was fertile. Well, we weren’t sure about Nora; after watching my struggles and then Magda’s, she’d opted to just have a bunch of cats. But my husband Dan and I had tried for years. Apparently I ovulate normally but there’s something seriously wrong with my eggs. They won’t fertilize. The first time we tried IVF, they were able to harvest sixteen eggs but not a single one started dividing. The second time, we got nineteen. Same result. After that, we gave up on having biological children.

  We adopted, twice. My daughters are the light of my life and my mother adored them, too, and the second one came to us just as Magda was getting really frustrated about her own inability to conceive. Magda wanted me to stop posting pictures to Facebook, or at least make a special filter and leave her out of it because seeing pictures of children was just too painful.

  Never mind that she’d rolled her eyes over my pain when I was doing the second round of IVF, before she learned that she was also infertile (“Why don’t you just adopt?” she’d asked) and I’d managed to keep from killing her with my bare hands. I refused to create a filter and told her to quit reading my Facebook if it was that painful for her to see pictures of her infertile sister’s adopted children . . . And that was how we wound up not speaking until Nora demanded we shake hands and act civil.

  Magda gave up after one round of IVF. After a long wait, she and her husband have a baby now. (They really, really wanted a newborn infant, while Dan and I were open to kids as old as four. That made it a lot faster for us, not that I’m judging. I mean, you want what you want. Well, I guess I judge a little bit that she’d refused to consider a child who had been drug-exposed because—according to science—”crack babies” are a myth. The two things that damage babies the worst are booze and poverty.)

  So, like I said, she has a baby of her own now. But looking at those toys drove it home that my children got to have a relationship with their grandma and hers never would.

  Mom loves kids, which is why she’d showered my daughters with the sort of noisy plastic crap that only a grandparent could consider cool. She hasn’t stopped—well, I suppose now she’s stopped. But my kids are seven and ten, and the last gift Mom gave them was at Christmas. Lindsey and Elaine had both wanted handheld video-game gadgets, and when I told them no, they tried Grandma. I’d said, “Oh, Mom, please no . . .” but I might as well have been arguing with a wall. Lindsey’s was pink, Elaine’s yellow.

  Magda was not coming back from her “break.” I started bagging up the obnoxious electronic toys for the Dumpster, then wondered if I was morally obligated to pry out the batteries since in theory they could leach toxins. They all requi
red teeny tiny screwdrivers to access the batteries, of course. I dug my multitool out of my purse and started taking them apart.

  “Why do you think we’re all infertile?” Nora asked.

  “Bad luck?”

  “Dad warned me, you know.”

  “About infertility?” I put my multitool down and looked up with interest.

  “Yeah, he said it was a common problem for the ladies of Bon.”

  “Oh, Bon.” I picked up my multitool again. “That’s got to be bullshit. If everyone from their ancestral village was infertile then that village would have died out.”

  “Yeah,” Nora said morosely. “It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, either.”

  When we asked our parents where they’d come from, they always told us they came from Bon. You will not find Bon on a map—at least, I could never find it on a map. Not a map of the former Soviet republics, anyway. It didn’t help that apparently they weren’t sure if they’d come from Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan or somewhere else entirely, just that it was mountainous and Soviet and we were lucky, lucky, lucky to be born American.

  When I was little, my father told me silly stories about Bon. There was one about flying fish, and one about the Monster of the Mountains (it was small, but had fangs that dripped venom and a scorpion’s tail), and one about an evil sorcerer with a wish-granting box, who my father had to outwit in order to get home to his brothers. Those stories, I’m still fond of; there’s a difference between bullshit and folklore.

  But all we could ever get out of them about Bon was bullshit and folklore. Magda wanted to do a big heritage trip a few years back and try to visit their birthplace, and they were utterly useless. They couldn’t even tell us what language they spoke! When Magda asked them to speak some of it into a tape recorder so she could play it to a linguistics scholar and have them at least narrow it down for us, they said they’d forgotten it all, even though Magda and I definitely recalled hearing them speak it occasionally well into the 1980s.

  They didn’t have a single photo or souvenir. They’d come with the clothes on their backs, my father said, and a dream of freedom. (He actually said that. “A dream of freedom,” sometimes with his hand over his heart. He meant it.) I always figured the reason they were such hoarders was that they’d lost everything, coming here.

  “You’d think they’d have wanted to write home at some point, you know?” I said, finally prying out the last of the batteries and bagging them up separately for a recycling bin. “Track down their family members.”

  “Maybe everyone was dead,” Nora said.

  “They were escaping the Soviet Union, not the Nazis or North Korea!”

  “Yeah, it’s weird,” Nora said. “But—I know this may be really surprising and I hate to break it to you—our parents were really weird.”

  *

  III. Ancestral Soil

  I went to visit Mom that afternoon, at the hospital. We were visiting her daily, taking it in turns. Nothing had changed, obviously; if anything had changed, they’d have called. She lay in bed, breathing, not dead, not conscious. Around me, I felt like the hospital was treating her a little impatiently. She was occupying a bed but didn’t really need hospital care at this point. She was just there until they could find a care facility to transfer her to. She’d almost been transferred twice before, but then she’d destabilized, running a high fever and forcing them to call off the move. Each time we’d thought maybe she’d die for real, but nope.

  I took my knitting and sat with her for a while, working on the lace shawl I was making. Knitting is a good thing to bring to the hospital. You feel like if the person did suddenly wake up, you wouldn’t miss it. You’re present for them, but you have something to do.

  Dad died in this very hospital. It might even have been this room. He went the same way as Mom—hemorrhagic stroke followed by a coma. Mom called all of us when it happened and told us to come as soon as we could. Though she also assured us he’d wait until we all got there.

  And he did. He waited. We all came together in the hospital room and Mom placed a velvet bag in Dad’s hands; she said it was something from Bon, something that would help him find his way back, and I guess it worked because he died. None of this endless unconscious brush-with-death-and-then-rally stuff that Mom had going on: we gathered, we said goodbye, he went, like someone catching a plane for a one-way trip.

  “Mom,” I said, “we all gathered and said goodbye, you know. You don’t need to keep waiting.”

  I wondered where that velvet bag was. Maybe that’s what Mom needed.

  Bon really was bullshit, though. I wished they’d told me at some point where they actually came from. Now they never would.

  When I’d finished a section of the piece I was knitting, I tucked it carefully back in my bag, kissed Mom on the cheek, and headed out. When I got onto the elevator, to my dismay, there was someone already inside with a little dog—one of the therapy dogs they take around to cheer up patients. I could tell from the dog-sized Comfort Paws vest he was wearing. I avoided eye contact, but the dog tensed and let out a low growl.

  “Idgie!” the volunteer said, scolding. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what’s got into her. Maybe I should take her home.”

  “Dogs always react to me that way,” I said, trying to sound reassuring but not overly apologetic. Sometimes people get really weird about their dogs not liking you.

  This was clearly going to be one of those times. She shot me a look that suggested she thought I was probably a recreational serial killer and got off at the next floor.

  *

  IV. Lay Me Down

  I didn’t want to explain to my sisters why I was looking for that little velvet bag, so I just took over cleaning out Mom and Dad’s bedroom next instead.

  Dad’s dresser still had his shaver and his deodorant and his change bowl, though over time more and more of Mom’s stuff had migrated there to keep his stuff company. The drawers were all still full of his clothes, though. I was taken aback by the wrench I felt when I shook out one of his faded plaid shirts with the shredded cuffs. Would it be ridiculous to keep one? It would be ridiculous. I resolutely packed up a box of shirts and other clothes, and then caved to temptation and rescued one of the shirts.

  The bedroom closet was truly ridiculous: it was stuffed to the walls with garments that had, since being packed away, probably come back into fashion and then gone out of fashion again. The Garfield tie we’d given Dad as a Father’s Day gift in 1984 was in there, stained with coffee, along with a shoe box of handmade gifts we gave to my mother, like a glitter-encrusted macaroni necklace strung on harvest-gold yarn.

  Nora laid claim to all the wool sweaters because she could make felted wool purses with them or something. I carried them in armloads to her car. Magda came out to find me as I was loading up the bags full of clothes and said, “Hey, let me poke through for a second.”

  I stepped back to let her open the bags. She pulled out one of Dad’s shirts, looking a little embarrassed. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s all.”

  When I came back upstairs, Nora was in the bedroom, sitting on the stripped bed, staring at something she was holding in her hand. “This was in Mom’s jewelry box,” she said.

  I sat down to look. It was a disk made from a milky silver metal: it looked old, really old—like something that would have been excavated out of a Viking grave—but there was a swirling spiral shape etched on the front, with a tiny seed-sized gemstone in one corner. At the top was a little loop so you could put it on a chain, but no chain. I didn’t remember Mom ever wearing this.

  “Had you ever seen this before?” I asked.

  “No. Do you suppose it came from Bon?”

  I fell silent, and went and looked in the jewelry box. There was the garnet pendant I’d saved up for and bought her for Mother’s Day when I was twelve, and the pearls Dad had given her for her birthday one year, and the jade beads she didn’t like because they always caught her hair, and various other trinkets s
he’d purchased or been given over the years. I remembered almost everything in here, even the pieces she didn’t often wear. A few times when I was six I’d demanded she lay it all out for me to admire. If she’d owned that milky-silver antique pendant at the time, though, she’d left it hidden.

  It turned out that there were two more items made from the same metal under the coil of jade beads—a ring and an enameled pin shaped like some sort of bird. I’d never seen those before, either. I set them on the mattress next to Nora. “Look,” I said.

  She picked up the ring to examine it. “I think it’s a poison ring,” she said. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, I’m not saying either of our parents poisoned anyone! A poison ring is just the term for a ring with a compartment built in. They used to be called ‘ring lockets’ and most often they held mementos from dead people, not actual poison, unless you were one of the Medicis or something, and I don’t think the Medicis lived in Bon. Anyway—” she handed it to me. “I can’t figure out how to get it open.”

  I could see what she meant by a compartment, but I slid my thumbnail along the edge and found no catch to spring it open.

  “We should show these to Magda,” I said, “and we should probably, I don’t know, have them assessed or something.”

  Nora nodded. Neither one of us wanted to say it aloud: if these came from Bon, maybe they would tell us something about it that our parents never shared.

  *

  V. Palladium

  Despite my impression of antiquity, the jeweler and antique specialist quickly dismissed the idea that these were at all old. The pieces were made from palladium, which wasn’t used in jewelry before 1939. In fact, it hadn’t even been discovered as an element until 1803. It did have some value as metal, though it was worth rather less than platinum. The stone set in the spiral was tanzanite.