by Amy Gustine
Lavinia lets the tape run out, then rewind itself. Has it really been a year since she’s gotten a message? Working nights, she’s mostly home during the day for solicitors and an ancient aunt who lives in Michigan. Lavinia lays the machine back on top of the TV, next to an old car-wash coupon taped face down. The back reads, If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves, the stronger the absurd grows.
Lavinia returns to the kitchen and looks out the window. Pultwock remains. She watches him as she cracks open another eight Friskies cans. “Do you think he’s ever going in?” she asks the cats. “What’s he waiting for? Rotten old man.”
The last time her daughter-in-law Patti came over, Lavinia put most of the cats in the basement, but while she had her back turned making peanut butter sandwiches, her granddaughter opened the door. About twenty of them flooded up and Hannah leapt into her mother’s lap, clawing her throat.
Lavinia had stood on the porch hollering as Patti fumbled to buckle the girl in the car. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart! Camus said that! Not your crazy mother-in-law. I didn’t say that! Camus did!” Of course, Patti hadn’t read The Myth of Sisyphus, which Lavinia found at a garage sale six months after Carl’s death. She could not possibly have appreciated the significance of the simple truth Lavinia was trying to impart. The cats are alive. What else can she do but feed them?
As Patti drove away, Lavinia spotted old man Pultwock peeping out his front door. “Oh, you’ve never even heard of Camus!” she’d hollered. “What would you know?”
After breakfast the cats settle down to nap.
Poppy, Frank, and Clover curl up on the back of the sofa. Venus, Emily, Moss, and Trevor take over the cushions. Norma Jean’s tail peeks out from beneath.
Rose, Stanley, Pinky, Lucy, and Mabel balance on the window sills, tucked behind the drawn curtains.
Lily, Daisy, Roger, Oscar, Opal, Ruby, Eliot, and Lion sprawl on the floor in the narrow lines of sunshine that break through, turning the brown carpet tan.
Everyone else is either in the kitchen, the basement, one of the two bedrooms off the living room, or the bathroom, a jigsaw of chipped porcelain with a pocket door—no room for swinging.
Lavinia settles into Carl’s recliner, where she can see Pultwock from the side window and keep an eye out for Jason coming around front as well.
If you have four, or ten, or maybe even twenty cats, the sound of their sleeping is silence. If you have fifty or sixty, their breath can be heard, a collective purr rising in the air. Lavinia closes her eyes and listens to the hum, the cats’ breath the song of life, reminding her what it’s like.
She rocks back and forth in the old La-Z-Boy, a blue tweed recliner Carl bought with money he won in the Ohio Lottery. Six hundred and forty-seven dollars. His only winnings in twenty-five years. A dollar ticket every week for twenty-five years comes to one thousand three hundred dollars. Lavinia can’t remember if the lottery always cost a dollar. She is sure that Carl sometimes bet two or three, so either way the money he spent was far more than he got back.
Carl knew that. Of course he did.
Maryann and Ginger jump up and arrange themselves, spooning, one brown-haired, the other red. Lavinia found the girls on her way home from work a month after she found Carl in the basement. Two kittens huddled under a car parked illegally on St. Claire. Nearby, bloody and still, an adult cat. Lavinia wrapped the kittens in her scarf, tucked them inside her quilted black coat with the nacreous buttons, and took them home. They slept on her chest all night and she lay awake listening to the flutter of their infinitesimal hearts, picturing the organ’s incredible precision, its vulnerable red slickness, its mindless, perfect pumping.
Soon, other cats began to arrive. Fritz objected, peeing in her bedroom, first in the corner, then on the bed, finally on Carl’s pillow. But eventually he became accustomed to the influx of strangers, or simply lost track, as Lavinia imagines God does of all of us. “The anonymity of abundance,” she mutters, rubbing the girls’ backs, going against the lay of their fur so that she can feel the prickly spot where each hair joins the skin.
The house is closed up, curtains drawn against the heat and Pultwock’s prying eyes. Lavinia parts them and checks. Still there. He has been since the day she moved in, his house crowding toward Lavinia’s like a petulant child who keeps scooting his desk over until it touches his neighbor’s. The house itself has always menaced Lavinia, its peeling paint around narrow windows, its shingles the color of baby poop, some of them hanging loose to reveal a darker, rotting sheathing underneath. One day when she was raking leaves, she looked up at her own house and for a moment mistook it for Pultwock’s. Shabby and menacing in the same way. She felt overburdened, she and Pultwock, the only owners left, expected to hold off the highway bearing down, the crumbling streets with patches of original brick showing through, the charging trains cutting through pebbled parking lots. They called it a railroad yard, but there wasn’t one speck of grass as far as Lavinia’s eye could see.
Lavinia learned that if she kept the drapes closed in the winter, she could go months without seeing Pultwock, but in the summer, he becomes unavoidable, sitting on his porch, blowing smoke through the screen of the window just opposite the one Lavinia wants to open. Her mother told her their houses have identical floor plans, hence his bedroom right across from her living room. A few times she has caught him looking at her at night from this window.
•
Lavinia succumbs to sleep and dreams old man Pultwock is in her bathtub singing “Amazing Grace.” The girls wake her, stretching across her lap, then jump down, square on the carpet stain—a blue-gray shape like a mollusk.
Lavinia gets up and looks out all the windows. No Jason. Pultwock still sits on his stairs. “Bastard,” she mutters. She’d go out to tell him off, except it would only make him more apt to sit on his stoop, spying on her, so she decides to clean the basement instead. As long as he’s there, she doubts Jason will leave the yard.
With some old tennis shoes on and her pant legs rolled up, Lavinia gathers the boxes to carry down. At the top of the stairs, above the light switch, the back of a receipt says, Suicide is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it.
The day after Carl was laid off the last time, he woke up earlier than usual and sat for two hours at the kitchen table looking through the newspaper. He read each employment ad twice, then neatly folded up the paper and said to Lavinia, “Well, you can’t waste a day of freedom. How about a drive?”
Their ’74 Olds Cutlass sat on blocks again—no money for repairs—so they borrowed a friend’s car and drove twenty miles down toward Bowling Green to a farmer’s stand.
What they had they spent on blueberries.
Lavinia made a pie while Carl tinkered with the Cutlass.
Then, after dinner, Carl dropped the pie.
He dropped it, the whole thing, flipping it upside down, right in front of his recliner. He’d been on his way to the front porch to watch the lights of the High Level Bridge emerge from the dusk. “Come sit with me, Mary,” he’d said. “At least we still got the bridge, right?”
Then he tripped. Over what Lavinia has wondered many times.
When he started screaming, “God damn it! I loved that pie. I loved that pie!” and fell to his knees, Lavinia thought he was joking. He had that way, a spontaneous burst of brilliant humor in the face of minor tragedies. Then she saw the tears, the snot, his face blurred by anguish, and all sound stopped. Without sound he appeared ridiculous, as if he were acting out a mime’s routine: grown man kneeling on a dirty carpet plucking furiously at a cat’s endless fur, his whole life dependent on one ruined blueberry pie.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lavinia said, “get a grip on yourself.”
A week later Carl hanged himself from a rafter in the basement. A while after that the city towed away the Cutlass.
Lavinia
shovels soggy newspaper and feces into several garbage bags which she steals from work. She is careful about it, taking only individual bags, never whole boxes. She feels no pang of guilt because she would gladly buy them if she could, if she weren’t already barely paying the heat and the food bill. Suicide nullified Carl’s life insurance.
As she works, she half-reads the quotes written in black marker here and there on the concrete block.
Next to the bare hookup for the washer and dryer: Is one going to die or take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd?
Near the water heater: A whole being exerted toward accomplishing nothing is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.
Above the laundry sink, where Lavinia turns on the water for the hose: I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary victories.
The ten or so cats who had shown interest in her shoveling flee upstairs at the sound of the water. Lavinia squirts diluted Mr. Clean as she goes, trying not to get the furnace wet. It’s shorted out once already from the cats urinating on it and she is still paying for the repair.
Done mopping, she washes the mop and reads the quote above the sink again, wondering what souls become contaminated with.
As the floor dries, Lavinia breaks the boxes down flat, then spreads them out to cover the concrete. Their purpose is to reduce sweeping and mopping. At the next cleanup, Lavinia hopes to just pick up the boxes and chuck them in the garbage.
Some of the cats prefer the carpet to the newspaper, so Lavinia has cut several pieces out of the back bedroom and brought them down here. She scrubs each of them with a wire brush, then drapes them over the pipes to dry.
Standing on an old chair to reach a pipe, she reads the rafter Carl used to hang himself: Revolt gives life its value.
After climbing down, she begins to shred the newspaper.
An hour later she emerges from the basement. Pultwock is finally gone. Of course, Lavinia thinks, that asshole. Now Jason may have slipped away. She grabs a can of tuna-flavored food, the most pungent of the varieties, and goes as quickly and quietly as she can out the back door, wondering as she sneaks around her own yard just how old Pultwock really is, how much longer she’ll have to put up with him.
She calls Jason’s name, crooning “kitty kitty kitty,” and waves the can of food back and forth at the height of a cat’s pining nose. Nothing. She walks out front, still crooning, and glances up and down the street, first toward the High Level, then the Amtrak station, and finally past Pultwock’s, to the end of the street, where cars race overhead on the interstate’s enormous concrete arches. Even the train tracks must look like ants in marching formation from up there.
Lavinia turns left, away from the interstate toward Newton, where twenty-year-old cars list at the curb around the corner from The Rusty Tavern. On hands and knees she peers under each one, regretting she owns no flashlight, yet believing Pultwock is wrong, that Jason will recognize she is his savior and come out of his own accord.
Because Lavinia has always understood that cats strike out from the familiar in a circle, next she scouts the alley behind her house, where there are never any newspapers in the The Rusty Tavern’s dumpsters, then trudges downhill toward the Amtrak station.
In the train yard, no attempt is made to shield the tracks. Lavinia walks right past where the chainlink fence simply ends—no gate, no purpose—and begins to call for Jason, a crack in her tired voice. Kneeling in the stone-pocked dirt to peer under cars, she begins to cry, thinking that Camus is full of shit. He claimed, There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Sure.
Lavinia searches for over half an hour, going east from the station, trudging along the tracks, panning for the slightest movement in the bushes on the far side. Then she returns to the station and heads west. A dirt parking lot with several cars sits in the V formed where the tracks cross. Lavinia is getting back on her knees to look under these cars when she hears a faint meow. For a fleeting moment she thinks it’s him, then realizes the meows are too high, too strained.
The kittens are in an ancient Bonneville. Lavinia presses her face against the hot glass, hands cupped on either side of her eyes. It must be over a hundred in the car. A mother cat lies in the back seat. Lavinia tries both door handles, but the car is locked.
She could go home and look through Carl’s tools. He might have something she could smash the window with, but the kittens would likely get injured and she might be arrested. Lavinia croons to the three tiny, blind balls of fur, “It’s okay, I’ll get you out of there. Just hold on. Hold on.” The kittens crawl back and forth over their mother, pulling at her dry teats, kneading her belly.
Lavinia begins to cry again as she runs toward Pultwock’s. Shortly after they moved in, Carl locked his keys in the Cutlass and old man Pultwock used a slim jim to get them out.
Before Lavinia gets a fist up to knock, he opens the door.
“I need to borrow your slim jim.” She’s stopped crying, but her eyes tingle and she can feel the stretch of her swollen face.
“Why?”
“I need to open a locked car.”
“You don’t have a car.”
“I know, Walter. Can I borrow it?”
“You don’t have the touch,” he says and disappears into the house.
“Walter!” Lavinia is about to go inside when through the haze of the screen door she spots a picture on Pultwock’s end table of a woman who looks very much like her mother holding a dog.
Pultwock emerges from the kitchen, slim jim in hand, and slams the front door. Silently they go down to the station. Lavinia convinces herself the picture is of someone else.
At the car Pultwock grumbles. “Figured it had something to do with the damn cats.” He opens the door and Lavinia scoops up the kittens.
“Check the mother,” Lavinia says. “Is she alive?”
Pultwock prods her roughly with a single finger. “Nope.”
Lavinia doesn’t believe him. She climbs into the car, laying the kittens on the driver’s seat, then reaches into the back, burning her bare arm against the vinyl seats. But as soon as she touches the mother, she knows he’s right. Lavinia retrieves the newborns, eyes only half-open, all three small enough to fit in her cupped palms, and starts back home.
Behind her she hears Pultwock lock and slam the car. He grunts with satisfaction. “Somebody’ll be wondering how the hell them cats got out.”
He catches up to Lavinia without seeming to try. “Thought I was lying, huh?”
“You ran Jason off, why wouldn’t you lie about that?”
“Who’s Jason?” Pultwock says.
“My cat,” Lavinia says.
“Oh shit, he ran himself off.”
At home Lavinia checks the kittens’ rectal temperatures first, glad to see they are within the acceptable range. Then she pinches their flesh and rubs her finger along their gums. Each is a bit sticky, so she sets up the humidifier in her bedroom, shooing out all the other cats, and installs the kittens in a box lined with sheepskin car-seat covers from the towed Olds.
In the kitchen Lavinia warms milk, corn oil, salt, and egg yolks on the stove, then feeds each kitten with a doll’s bottle. Afterward, she massages their genitals with a warm, moist cotton ball and they relieve themselves in her palm. She prefers to do it that way at first, so she can be sure who did what and how much.
Fritz wails in the hall and Lavinia goes out to him, careful to shut the bedroom door where the helpless newborns sleep.
After she washes up, Lavinia goes through the newspapers stacked in the spare room. She’s looking for blank sheets, the ones they sometimes wrap the ad sections in. On each one she writes with a black marker, “Cat Lost. Very Precious. Black with white mask. Reward.”
She posts her signs, stapling them to every light post within a ten-block radius, then returns home and feeds the kittens again before lying down to take a nap. Sliding her alarm to on, sh
e reads a piece of paper taped to the top of the clock: I know men by the consequences caused in life by their presence.
She tries to fall asleep, but Fritz wails relentlessly at the door. Lavinia fights the urge to let him in. What if he attacked the kittens?
A car pulls up. Lavinia thinks nothing of it. Her bedroom is on the front corner of the house. People come and go all day and half the night from The Rusty Tavern.
A few moments later there is a knock. Lavinia sits up and parts the curtains above her bed. No one has knocked on her door in months. Solicitors don’t come to this neighborhood. Rarely do Jehovah’s Witnesses. The last knock was the postman. He needed to verify that a package addressed to her house, but with a different name, was not hers.
A fat woman in a purple pantsuit and a tall man wearing a blue windbreaker stand on her porch. The man faces sideways and on his back, in fancy, yellow letters, it says “The Toledo Humane Society.” The woman sees the curtains move and waves her hand, catching Lavinia’s eye. “Mrs. Simms, we’re from the Humane Society and we’d like to talk to you a moment.”
Too late to hide. Lavinia gets out of bed and stands for a moment to think. The doorbell rings—bleat, bleat, bleat.
Coming out of the bedroom, she stomps her feet like a schoolgirl—left, right, left—and waves her hands, scattering the cats to the back bedroom, the basement, and bathroom, closing each door, then counting the bold stragglers: Maryann and Ginger, Rodeo Roy, Lucy, Genie, Buck, and Fritz. Seven. That’s not crazy, is it? They won’t freak out over seven.
Lavinia opens the door as far as the chain will allow. “Yes?”
“Hello, Mrs. Simms,” the woman says. “We’ve had a report about your home. Some animals that live here.”
“Really? From who?” Lavinia tries to keep her voice pleasant and surprised.
“We’d just like to come in and assure ourselves the animals are well cared for.”