You Should Pity Us Instead

by Amy Gustine

  But the summer after she turned eighteen, her last summer in Poland, Caroline could no longer look at the river. It had become like her parents—a lonely, menacing thing with a dark, inscrutable surface. And it took a courage she would not have guessed she had, a will that even scared her a little—reminding her as it did of her parents’ steely, stubborn resolve—to board a boat on that same river, a boat which would join a ship that would take her to America.

  The cat did not leave, which, given how Caroline fed him, should have been no surprise. Since Black Tuesday not even an animal could afford to abandon a decent meal for the promise of something better down the block.

  On Saturday her new son-in-law, Dobry, came to rake the leaves. After Frederick became too ill to work, he used to hire out such tasks to homeless men who walked the neighborhood looking for odd jobs. He’d send them off with a generous wage, Caroline’s kielbasa sandwiches, and a dozen pickled eggs. Now that he was gone, though, Caroline didn’t feel safe hiring strange men and making them meals. This left her with nothing to take care of—unless she counted the cat.

  Dobry crouched, sliding his thumb against the tips of his fingers, and made kissing noises to the animal, who trotted up, stopping shy of his reach, and smelled the air appraisingly. Caroline stood at the back door, the screen breaking her face into a thousand tiny diamonds of shadow and light. “I don’t know how to get rid of it. It’s been urinating on my bushes.”

  “Looks well fed,” Dobry said, scratching the hard spot between the cat’s ears.

  “Well, they are predators,” Caroline said, seeing too late she’d forgotten to bring in the plate on which she’d left a smear of butter and ham rind that morning. It gave an odd satisfaction, having something wild, unreachable through logic or language of any kind, decide it needed you.

  In Poznań Caroline’s mother owned a white cat named Silk with blue eyes and an unusually long tail she used the way a ballerina does her arms. Silent and indifferent to verbal commands, the cat perfectly suited her mother, who had gone deaf at the age of four from scarlet fever and talked as if she had a marble on her tongue. She never used sign language because Caroline’s grandmother thought it the recourse of the mentally deficient and had swatted her if she ever so much as gestured.

  Caroline’s father was a chemist. He’d been born with a deformed left arm, the hand a mere nub of tissue just below what should have been his elbow. He had a dog named Atlas—a black and brown shepherd with triangular ears that stayed upright even while napping—whom he’d trained to open doors. At the chemist shop and around town, if her father was carrying something in his good hand, Atlas would grip the doorknob with his mouth and twist, leaving teeth marks behind in the wooden knobs.

  Caroline remembered her mother having all the knobs in their house changed to smooth, metal spheres on which Atlas couldn’t gain any purchase. In retaliation her father had taken all the pens and pencils out of the house, forcing her mother to make herself understood with verboten gestures and futile attempts at proper pronunciation.

  It was only after Caroline escaped to America and had to consider what she herself could expect from life—just another foreigner with a strange accent whose education and family lineage meant nothing—that she had begun to understand the seed of her parents’ bitterness and resentment toward one another. And only now, in the time she’d had to think since Frederick died, had she finally found a single word for it: humiliation.

  The next week the weather grew much colder and the cat began to cry at the back door. One night, when Caroline reached outside with the saucer, it darted inside. She couldn’t find the thing until those glowing eyes gave it away, huddled beneath the dining room table. Caroline moved the chairs out and scolded, “You weren’t invited in. What’s the matter with you?” She clapped her hands and the cat ran. It took several minutes to herd it toward the door and finally out into the dark.

  The next day was colder again. Snow fell for an hour in the morning, then melted in the afternoon sun. The cat sat under the awning on the concrete slab of patio with its paws tucked tight against its body. At the kitchen window, Caroline shook her head. If she had allowed herself to indulge in the fantasy of cats having emotions, she might have said the cat seemed hurt by her treatment the day before. It refused to come onto the porch for its milk, and didn’t meow when she poked her head out. It just looked at her a moment, then sat down, staring across the wet grass to the dark, dirty street beyond the fence.

  The rest of the day Caroline tried to forget about the cat, and when she looked out around four o’clock, it was gone.

  The last summer Caroline lived in Poland, after she’d finished school, her mother began a list of men—old men, young men, all rich men. She wrote them in her large, calligraphic script right across the printed text on pages torn from her father’s books, then stuck the pages to the walls in Caroline’s room with a paste made from flour and water. If the men were older, the rituals of questions and answers were private, passed among friends who knew friends who knew the man in question. If the men were Caroline’s age, her mother would invite their mothers for tea.

  In July, during the hottest part of the summer, her mother didn’t allow anyone to open a window because of the flies, so when these women came, they sat in the formal parlor with the still air like a warm, moldy cloth across their faces.

  The visits were an effort for Caroline’s mother, requiring all her attention and focus. Her words were practiced, nearly identical from tea to tea, lady to lady, and they were few. While the other woman talked, Caroline’s mother had to stare at her mouth to read her lips. Some people seemed to take offense at this, though they knew the reason. Hence there were long awkward silences in which the mothers would turn and smile at Caroline as if she were a picture on the mantel, and that was the face Caroline put on, the one she held for portraits, a mindless smile with fixed, wide eyes. Once in a while a boy’s mother would deign to ask Caroline a question, but she was always careful to answer while looking at her own mother so her lips could be read. As she talked, she studied her mother’s gray eyes, flecked with blackish-blue, the color of bruises before they turn, and tried to figure out if the narrowness was the study of pleasure or disgust.

  During the meeting her mother would stroke Silk, who lay stomach down across her lap, paws dangling over her knees. At the end of the meeting, if things didn’t go well—which mostly they did not—her mother would snatch the paper she’d written the man’s name on off Caroline’s wall, ball it up and slip it up her sleeve.

  After her mother began the husband search, Caroline’s father came into her room and stared at the papers. “My prospects,” Caroline muttered. “Mother did it.”

  Her father nodded, then peeled one of the pages off the wall and licked its back. “That’s the good flour,” he said with disgust.

  Caroline never heard her father talk to her mother about the papers on her wall, the flour, or anything else. He rarely spoke to her at all. Dare Caroline allude to this, he scowled and shook his head. “Why would I do that? How do I know what she thinks I’m saying?”

  After the husband search began, her father began to move through the house as soundlessly as her mother, as if he didn’t need to fidget with locks or open doors like the common man, as if his useless arm were like a fin to a fish, letting him slip through the world silently, effortlessly, on his way to somewhere else. And just as quietly, he would open every window in the house to let the flies in. For hours afterward her mother stalked the floor, swatting with a magazine or newspaper, Silk trailing behind, pawing at the black corpses. One time Caroline’s mother broke her favorite vase. It was the only sound, that cracking china, all evening long.

  After Caroline had children of her own and their noise filled the house, she realized she had often felt as though she didn’t exist in her parents’ bitter silence and that the invisibility had seduced her. She didn’t want to contradict it. Sometimes her own girls would jump when she came into a room b
ehind them. “Mother,” they’d complain, “why can’t you make noise like a normal person! It’s like having a snake in the house.”

  By the end of the week the cat had forgiven her and come back up to the porch for its twice-a-day milk and scrap of food. Caroline’s neighbor, Mildred Putramack, must have been watching her feed it all along. She came out on her porch. “Giving something to an animal, huh? Not enough food for us, even.”

  Caroline was not unaware of her good fortune—a generous pension from Frederick’s company and a patent on a glassblowing technique he’d invented. The house was paid for and her needs had shrunk as she grew older. Shopping had become more a chore than a pastime. Recently she’d gone downtown to buy a new pair of hose and seen men on the courthouse lawn in pup tents, others sitting on stools selling handfuls of pencils, bushels of apples, and ears of corn.

  Caroline stood up straighter. “There’s been mice around. Seems like a sensible way to get rid of them.”

  Mildred huffed. “I’ve not seen any mice around my stoop.”

  All night Caroline worried about what Mildred would be saying to the neighbors. She’s giving meat to a cat when people are starving. Letting filthy animals in her house. Going a little batty living there all alone. The thought of people talking about her made Caroline’s skin feel tight, as if someone were pulling a million strings attached to her million pores.

  The next morning, she began to clean the house. In the last several weeks she’d let her daily chores lapse. Now, the dirt and bits of leaves on the front walk and the sticky film on the kitchen floor inspired a mild panic. She scrubbed the tiles, shook rugs, dusted tables, swept the sidewalk. Then she remembered the windowsills. The first night she heard the cat, she’d pulled back the drape and noticed an accumulation of dead flies and spider webs. Now, as she tugged open each window, it occurred to her the cat may have been out there hours, even days, before she noticed him because she always kept the drapes shut to guard against sunlight fading her furniture. She thought of her daughter Addie, her favorite, who’d confided to Sophie, who later told Caroline, that she didn’t like to bring friends home because Caroline made them nervous. Was she so formidable?

  She left the drapes open. What did it matter if her couch faded a shade or two? And who could guarantee she would live long enough to notice?

  Caroline was cleaning out the refrigerator—the new electric kind she bought just before Frederick fell ill—when Eva and Sophie arrived. They were arguing as they came in the door. Neither seemed at all surprised to see her cleaning, which relieved her sense of being the wrong person in the right body.

  “Mother,” Sophie said, “Mrs. Putramack waylaid us in the backyard. She said you’ve been feeding some cat, a stray.”

  “Is she talking about the cat I saw last time? The black one?” The note of displeasure in Eva’s voice made Caroline angry. She also noted the surprise, remembering the plate and saucer Dobry must have seen.

  “I don’t know what that old woman wants me to do—firecracker it?” After Frederick died last summer, some kids put a stray cat in a cardboard box on the Fourth of July, then stuck lit firecrackers through holes in the box. Addie, who’d been helping Caroline sort paperwork, saw the boys do it. She chased them off, but too late, and came back in crying, saying she wished her father were here, he’d make those boys sorry. Caroline patted her back and looked out the window at the way orange shadows played against the house next door. For several days after that she’d felt frightened and out of place, as if she’d woken up in a world that looked like hers, but upon closer inspection was more like the props to a play, with hidden gears grinding behind paper-thin doors and windows without glass.

  Before the girls left, Caroline said, “I thought Dobry was going to finish burning my leaves,” a more imploring tone in her voice than she’d intended.

  “He’ll come by Saturday, Mother,” Eva said. “I promise.” Caroline never knew whether to take Eva’s kindness as a sign of love or fear.

  Later, Caroline was cleaning upstairs and opened Frederick’s wardrobe. The smell of long-confined cedar filled the air. With the weather getting cold, she knew she ought to take his wool coats and suits to the Salvation Army. She was afraid, though, that one day she would pass a man wearing Frederick’s brown and green checked overcoat and she would—for just a moment—think him still alive, then have to remember that, of course, he was not.

  Caroline didn’t want to marry any of the men her mother had chosen. She resented being discussed and measured like a piece of cloth. She wasn’t something this man was going to wear around his skinny neck. But it felt impossible to avoid the marriage. Where would she go? How would she support herself?

  One Saturday morning—another warm, wet day, the rag on her face—Caroline’s father called her down to breakfast. He sat across from her mother at the dining room table in his undershirt, his short, shriveled appendage in full view. Caroline knew this annoyed her mother, who preferred he keep the embryonic limb out of sight.

  Her father’s arm made Caroline think of dried fruit, baked in the sun until all the moisture had leeched out. After she learned of gangrene, the way it begins at the spot of injury and, if unchecked by amputation, migrates toward the center of the body, it seemed impossible the desiccation would stop of its own accord. She began to study her father’s shoulder and the right side of his neck for signs of wrinkling or flaking skin.

  Caroline slid into her seat. The dining room table was set with the morning dishes, blue forget-me-nots on a yellow plate. Her teacup was full of orange juice because her mother disliked the way a juice glass interrupted the place setting, and her plate held toast and two eggs, poached, because that was the only way civilized people ate eggs. A cut-glass bowl in the center of the table held blackberry jam. Caroline didn’t particularly like it, but she always ate it because her mother thought jam messy and her father considered it indulgent.

  Caroline carefully ran her knife along the edge of the bowl, and spread the jam on her toast. It was in returning the nearly clean knife to the bowl that a black spot appeared on the table. Her mother’s eyes didn’t move. Her father’s features remained still. The words, when they came, seemed to float in from behind Caroline, as if meant for someone else, someone in the neighboring house perhaps, and only through fault of the wind had they found her. You’ve ruined the tablecloth. She didn’t even know who said them. The words were too distinct to be her mother’s, the voice too high to be her father’s. Caroline looked up and her parents were sipping their coffee. Then, in her marbled speech, Caroline’s mother said to her father, “See, I told you she is making a bad impression. She’s as clumsy as you with that stump.”

  Her father spoke slowly, looking directly at her mother, “Maybe they’re afraid of you.” He invoked an old folk saying. “The deaf cannot be trusted.”

  At the Salvation Army Caroline lay the coats and hats, the suits and shoes with laces tied together, on the desk. “I want someone to have these, someone who needs them.”

  The man at the desk, a face like a well-worn rock, nodded. “Sure.”

  Caroline watched him sort each item into different boxes, the suits folded against all good sense on top of work shirts and canvas pants.

  At home the cat sat facing the door. “What are you doing? Hm? Get away from there, go.” It was the end of October and Caroline thought of Halloween. She’d given out treats when Frederick was well—popcorn balls, cookies, and often, in her neighborhood, pieces of sweet bread or paczki—but after he became ill, she hadn’t felt like it, causing her house to become the target of hooligans who tossed eggs at the front door, or left dog excrement in a bag of fire on the porch.

  This year the expectation of harassment did not trouble Caroline as it had before. Nothing felt as it had when Frederick was dying, or right after he’d passed, the day Adelaide sat crying over the damn cat in the box. Now it seemed instead that the person turning the controls on her found the boys’ petulant punishment amusing.
They wanted their sweets, and this was her sentence for not providing them. Unlike the cat, who’d done nothing, she had refused them a treat. Fair enough. She would simply put gloves on, throw the paper bag away and scrub the egg off her windows. No harm done.

  Dobry bicycled up the walk and around to the back gate about an hour before sunset, the evening cool setting in and Caroline closing the windows and making sure all evidence of feeding the cat had been cleaned up. The animal sat on the concrete walk behind the house where the sun came down hard at sunset, its face turned up to the warmth, the tip of its tail flicking like the tapping fingers of an impatient monarch.

  Dobry raked the few newly fallen leaves into the burn pile while Caroline stood watching from the window. The cat watched too, unintimidated by the crackle of the piles or the twing of the metal rake as it sprung against twigs and tangled grass. Dobry was a good-looking, tall man with wide shoulders and curly dark hair. He was better looking than Frederick, and sometimes, in the secret part of her heart, she was surprised he had married Eva, a girl as plain as Caroline. Once or twice Dobry had said something that gave Caroline the impression he’d intuited her surprise and resented it.

  Of course, he might also resent Caroline because she made no attempt to hide her opinion that Dobry was a disappointment for Eva. What she never explained is that it was his love—not his family’s more recent immigration, or that they’d been farmers in the old country—that disappointed her. Dobry’s feelings for Eva, nearly worshipful in their purity and degree, required no change or improvement, and so Eva would remain like Caroline forever because she’d found someone who would allow her to.

  Caroline made coffee and went back to the door. The cat was gone and Dobry was burning the piled leaves on the far side of the yard, the hose at the ready in case any flames leapt free. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door. “You’re all set.” She noticed that none of her sons-in-law ever called her anything. She wondered if they would simply call her Busia when the children started to arrive.