The Kitty Committee

by Kathryn Berla

  “We’d better go,” Alice said after another half hour. “I told my mom I’d be back by now.”

  “She knows where we are,” I said. “She knows you’re safe with Luke. I don’t think she’ll care if you stay a little longer.”

  “We have to go too.” Carly stood and gave her towel a shake, freeing it of the trampled browning blades of grass still clinging to it. “See you guys soon, I hope.”

  Following Carly’s lead, the rest of us stood like automatons. What would be the point of staying when Carly was gone? The backs of my calves and palms of my hands were imprinted by the pattern of lawn. My cheeks were burning, and only then did I realize I’d neglected to use sunscreen on my face.

  “Yeah, definitely,” I said. “We’ll be back for sure.”

  But Alice said nothing.

  Then Carly folded her towel carefully and draped it across her forearm before picking up her bag. Her figure was perfect without any evidence of cellulite or an uneven tan. Her bikini didn’t sag or pull anywhere. After a day in the sun, even her hair looked shiny and perky in a sleek ponytail.

  “I remember you,” she said, looking slightly downward. She was taller than me then and, even though I’d surpass her in height over the next year, I would always think of her as being the taller one. “You came into Mr. Dix’s Social Studies class by accident on your first day.” She looked over at Maggie as if I was no longer around. “She was so adorable, you should’ve seen her.”

  I was bursting with excitement and confidence on our walk home. I wished I had someone I could talk to about the brewing feelings inside me, but I don’t think I could have articulated it back then, even if I’d had a willing ear. Alice certainly wasn’t interested, that much I knew. She’d been sullen ever since she joined us at the pool and I was angry at her for that but not angry enough to ruin my high.

  “I don’t like that Carly girl,” she said. “I don’t trust her. I think she’s just using you.”

  “Using me for what?” I asked indignantly. What could a girl like Carly possibly gain from befriending a girl like me?

  “I don’t know,” Alice said. “She just—”

  “You’re not making any sense,” I snapped. “And she probably doesn’t like you either since you were so rude and quiet.”

  We walked the rest of the way home in silence. The sun had already begun its descent, but its heat would linger well into the night. When we got to Alice’s house, she peeled off without inviting me in, which would have been our normal routine. I was frankly relieved.

  I suppose I fell in love with Carly that day, although not in a sexual way. Or maybe I’d fallen in love with her the first time I laid eyes on her. The term girl crush wasn’t yet familiar to me, but Carly was more than a crush. And what is love if it isn’t basking in the positive feelings a person bestows on you? Wanting to repay those feelings by pleasing that person in any possible way. Holding that person in the part of your heart reserved for the most intimate and precious feelings. And not wishing to imagine life in any other way.

  If it wasn’t love, I wasn’t equipped to name it.

  SAN FRANCISCO

  The night I graduated from Indian Springs High, Mom and Dad broke the news they were moving to Madagascar where I’d be unlikely to see them for a very long time. Dad was physically recovered but saw meaningful work as the only way to break through the thick wall of his depression. We’d have two months together, during which time they’d help me relocate to San Francisco where I’d accepted a full scholarship from the University of San Francisco. For a person of my means, it was as far away as I could get from Indian Springs, both in character and distance, and that was good enough for me. Mom and Dad were pleased I’d chosen a college with a religious affiliation. That made them feel okay about leaving me behind.

  Although I’d never opened up to my parents in any significant way, losing them like that left me feeling orphaned. Unmoored. Luke was finishing up at Sacramento State with a degree in criminology and the goal of becoming a cop. That reality caused me so much anxiety, I spent many nights strangling my sobs with a pillow to avoid the concerned faces of my parents in the morning.

  And there had been the first letter. A letter back then instead of an email. It arrived at our house when the daffodils were still in bloom, generic block letters spelling out my name on the outside of the envelope. A San Francisco postmark. No return address.

  “A letter for you, Grace.” Dad was surprised. I normally didn’t get letters or any mail at all.

  Even as he handed it to me, I felt the evil of its contents. The malevolence of the ominous block lettering. I shoved it nonchalantly in the back pocket of my jeans and went to the kitchen for a drink, all the while trying to pretend its existence bored me.

  In the privacy of my bedroom, I pulled the sheet of paper from its sheath, blank but for six words.

  “Will anyone cry when you die?”

  At first, it made no sense. It must be a prank, I thought, maybe there’d been a mistake, and this letter was meant for someone else. But then a wave of nausea felled me, and I lay on my bed, waiting for it to subside. My legs trembled uncontrollably. I was cold enough to pull the blankets over me, and yet, somehow, perspiration soaked through my shirt under my arms and down the middle of my back. I checked the note again to make sure I’d read it correctly and then reached for the phone at the side of my bed.

  “What?” Carly answered her private line on the first ring.

  “It’s me. Grace.”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “Because I just finished talking to Maggie.”

  “I got a—”

  “I know. You got a letter . . . Maggie and I did too. ‘Will anyone cry when you die?’ Blah, blah, blah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you should rip it up and flush it down the toilet. Some idiot’s trying to scare us. Someone who’s probably jealous.”

  By then I didn’t have to ask “Jealous about what?” Carly had long ago provided us with a litany of reasons why we would be the envy of everyone in our school. And their natural target as well.

  “Are you worried?”

  “Of course not, and you shouldn’t be either. Mom’s calling, gotta go.”

  And she hung up.

  I called Maggie.

  “Are you scared?” I asked.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Do you think it has anything to do with Jane?”

  During my first year of college, I lived in a quad in the dorm—two singles and a double. I shared the double with a girl from Walnut Creek named Marybeth who spent most weekends with her boyfriend in Berkeley. The four of us co-existed comfortably as roommates, and I threw myself into general education requirements with an eye on a degree in psychology. I suppose I hoped to find answers or at least a way to explain me to myself.

  In my mind, I’d made a bargain with the universe: take my parents if you must, but then you must also take Carly. And Carly was spirited miles away, thousands to be exact, honing her scholastic reputation at Yale. I would have preferred her to be in Madagascar, but Yale seemed an acceptable alternative. I no longer thought of Carly with a heavy heart laden with love. She was the addiction that I couldn’t quite shake, but day by day, I managed quite well. We didn’t communicate once the entire first semester. I heard news of her only through Maggie.

  Then came daffodil season when all the big changes in my life seemed to occur. Almost exactly a year since the first letter, a second arrived, this one finding me in my dorm at USF, where I thought I’d hidden safely from the world.

  Of course, I recognized the block letters and the generic, square-shaped envelope postmarked in the city where I lived. I should have ripped it into small pieces and tossed them in the dumpster outside our building on my way to class.
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  But I didn’t. I dutifully awaited my punishment.

  “Karma’s a bitch. Are you ready for yours?”

  There was no point calling Carly, but I did. In her typical fashion, she downplayed the whole thing, again belittling the sender and casting foul aspersions on their motives. There was no point in calling Maggie, but I did that too. She had just returned to the clinic in San Francisco, her father told me, sick again. Her mother was with her, and maybe I could visit if I had the time. It would probably do her a world of good.

  Maggie was the one who stayed in Indian Springs after Carly and I left. A semester of junior college before dropping out. And then came the anorexia which her family referred to as the “sickness.” It was doubtful she’d gotten the letter. I wondered if her father had opened it, curious about its strange lettering and lack of a return address.

  I imagined Maggie looking out her bedroom window at the wide ribbon of bright daffodils snaking across her front lawn. Golden trumpets heralding the arrival of spring, mocking her bleak state of mind.

  And then I imagined Maggie taking a stand and refusing to allow a single morsel of food to pass beyond her lips.

  That summer I got a job as a barista at a neighborhood coffee shop. It was one of those places with gold lettering on the windows which blocked most of the street view; tables sticky from decades of use, probably already having seen better days in the sixties; and chairs that yelped in protest at the indignity of being dragged across the old, buckling hardwood floor. Behind the stained marble counter, I normally shared a shift with Carlos, a young man of sunny disposition and compassionate eyes. In the beginning, we covertly sized each other up as romantic potential but settled on friendship. When I first tried my Spanish on Carlos, he gave me the look I would come to know as a substitute for less-kind spoken words.

  “And should I speak to you in Norwegian?” he asked.

  “British,” I said. “And French-German-Swiss.”

  He gave me the look again.

  At the same time, I moved out of my dorm and rented a room in a rundown Victorian where cockroaches fell like rain behind the walls at night. The kitchen smelled like stale cat food, and the kitchen sink blossomed with filthy pots and pans. I used my allotted refrigerator space for single-serve food items sealed against contamination until opened. Surviving kept me focused on everything that didn’t eat away at my soul. And since I was in survival mode, with only my barista earnings to carry me through the summer, I was irrationally calm.

  Normally, San Francisco is cool and foggy in the summer, but on one particular morning the weather was glorious—clichéd blue skies and sunshine, no clouds in sight. I was beginning to recognize the regular customers at the coffee shop, including a slender, sort of scruffy-looking guy with dark, wavy hair, a baby face, and blue saucer eyes. I’d seen those eyes turned on me a few times, but they had quickly looked away. That day, Mr. Blue Eyes glanced up frequently as he stood in line awaiting his turn. He looked like a man with something on his mind. With me on his mind. For a moment, my heart beat icicles as thoughts of Carly and Maggie and the anonymous letters flooded my brain. But when we were finally face-to-face, he simply ordered a drip coffee to go. After he’d paid and was preparing to step aside to wait for his order, he turned back as though he’d forgotten something.

  “My name is Nathan,” he blurted out.

  I was silent, unsure if this was a prelude to something or if the name Nathan was expected to evoke a response.

  “I was just wondering . . .” His blue eyes turned bluer in contrast to the pinkening skin that surrounded them. “If you’d like to get a cup of coffee sometime.”

  Then he burst into laughter.

  “I mean . . . Of course you wouldn’t want to get a cup of coffee. You work in a coffee shop. Sorry, I’m an idiot. Do you have a boyfriend? And if you don’t, would you like to go out to dinner sometime?”

  “Move it, Romeo,” the man behind him snapped. “Some of us gotta get to work, y’know?”

  From behind the espresso machine, Carlos gave him the look.

  “Yes,” I said so quickly that I almost wondered if someone was speaking for me.

  “Yes, you have a boyfriend, or yes, you’ll have dinner with me?”

  “Yes. Dinner.” I felt incapable of more than one-word utterances and was well aware I’d have to answer to Carlos’s jabs once this encounter was over.

  He took the coffee that Carlos prepared and walked backward into a table before setting it right, then backing out the door without once taking his smile off me.

  That smile alone kept me going for the next three days.

  Three days later, he returned at his usual time.

  “Is this a good day for you?” he asked once he reached the front of the line.

  I didn’t need to ask for what. “Yes,” I said. “I’m off at five.”

  And at five on the nose, he appeared at the door holding a bouquet of six red roses. His jeans were faded and baggy. He wore workmen’s beige-colored boots and a t-shirt that had seen so many washings I couldn’t decipher its graphic art.

  “Where would you like to eat?” he asked.

  My initial impression was that Nathan couldn’t afford much, and I sure as hell knew I couldn’t.

  “How about pizza?” Even that was a splurge for me.

  So beginning with pizza, followed by hours walking parallel to the Great Highway and Ocean Beach, we spent a rare, beautifully warm evening getting to know each other. We spread out a blanket and sat on the beach, the sand cool from the memory of foggier nights, starlight dusting our shoulders. We talked until the sun rose behind us, and only the prospect of being late for work chased us from that spot and from each other.

  Nathan drove me back to the coffee shop in his old Chevy Nova with ripped red leather seats. He walked me to the door, and only then did he ask for a kiss, which I granted. His breath was stale with pizza and talking and lack of sleep. I knew mine was too. But the kiss—our first. When they say something takes your breath away, it really doesn’t, but this kiss did. Quite simply, Nathan took my breath away and then breathed it back into me in technicolor.

  Carlos was waiting to tease me mercilessly when I took up my position behind the counter.

  “Walk of shame,” he said. “Couldn’t you at least have changed your clothes?”

  “It wasn’t like that.” I bumped him to the side with my hip. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you could’ve at least showered?” He wrinkled his nose playfully then took a lock of my hair in his hands before letting it fall. “Or run a comb through your hair.”

  Carlos covered for more than one sleep-deprived order error I made that day. Somehow, though, I survived an entire day of work without having had a single minute of sleep.

  When I went home that night, my heart was still singing, and my lips felt swollen from longing to be pressed against Nathan’s one more time. My body ached with fatigue and also with desire. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, unperturbed by distressing thoughts.

  I hadn’t felt that kind of peace in two years.

  That first date was followed by others, Nathan always arriving with a bouquet of flowers, even if it was just dandelions he’d found growing in the park. And although I was almost a junior in college, I was still only eighteen—the age at which most kids were preparing to leave the womb of family, and most parents were preparing to cut the cord. That had all happened for me mere weeks after turning sixteen.

  Nathan was a first-year medical student at UCSF. He was almost four years older than me but often seemed younger. He had an interest in psychiatry, although his father, a cardiac surgeon, was trying to steer him into a more lucrative field. The grungy clothes and beat-up car—that was just Nathan asserting some independence from his parents, who lived in the u
pscale city of Palo Alto, south of San Francisco.

  “I can teach you how to be poor,” I joked one day. “If you really want to know.”

  He took me in his arms and kissed the irony from my lips. “How could I ever be poor as long as I have you?” It was rank B-movie dialogue. I knew that but loved him for saying it.

  We spent the gloom of a San Francisco summer mostly hand-in-hand and sometimes in each other’s arms. I was still a virgin. Still trapped by an upbringing I had declared myself free of, but it hadn’t yet declared itself free of me. And something more. I was still reluctant to give myself permission to lead a joyful life. I knew I wasn’t worthy.

  Nathan thought differently, but of course he didn’t know my heart. He had patience beyond anything I deserved . . . for my moods, for my unwillingness to fully commit. Nathan was fully there. He became my tour guide through a world I’d inhabited for years but never really explored. We visited Alcatraz, the once infamous prison now populated by tourists. We ate our way through Chinatown and Japantown and Little Italy in North Beach. Nathan shared his love of movies, mostly foreign and indies. I saw, for the first time, the films of Akira Kurasawa, Satyajit Rey, Fellini, and Bergman. The original Hollywood goddesses—Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford, and Davis—became my new screen idols. Golden Gate Park, Coit Tower, Lombard Street, Pier 39. We hit them all.

  And when we tired of the summer gloom, we ventured out further to Sausalito which was an impossibly magical and equally fantastical world of small shops and fine dining that real people only visited. We explored the Berkeley campus, inhaling its eucalyptus scent and gawking at stately manors. We walked down Telegraph Avenue, purchased knick-knacks from street vendors, and sampled Ethiopian and Venezuelan cuisine, which was more of a stretch for Nathan than me. We pushed further out, through the Caldecott Tunnel to Walnut Creek, where a surprising world of sunshine and summer and triple-digit temperatures thrived thanks to the Oakland Hills that held back the fog.