Philip named the cat. When it was tiny, he used to throw it up in the air and yell, “Geronimo!” He never threw it hard. Only once Jenny saw the kitten stumbling off looking dazed, and Philip snatched it up and kissed it and said, “I’m sorry.”
What makes Jenny feel pessimistic now is a note from the high-school kid they paid to feed Geronimo while they were gone. The note said, “No cat since Tuesday. I called and called.” Philip—who is learning to read—can’t decipher that reckless high-school scrawl, and Jenny doesn’t tell him. Frank says, “The cat’ll be back.” They’ve all grown fond of Geronimo. They want to believe Frank is right.
The cat has been gone eight days—not four, as Philip believes—when Philip papers his room with drawings of cats, and Frank asks Jenny to come with him to the neighbor. That either of them should suggest this is a sign of how much is at stake.
In the five years since the new house went up on the land bordering theirs, they have talked to the neighbor just twice; once, when the foundation was being put in, they asked if it couldn’t be dug somewhere else—anywhere on the neighbor’s fifty acres where they wouldn’t see it from their kitchen window; and once, across a table at a friend’s dinner party, when they really had no choice.
At first there was much ill will—they wouldn’t acknowledge the neighbor on the road, pretended not to see him in the store or the bank. But that only increased his importance, his claim on their lives, so now they nod and wave. And when Jenny looks out of her kitchen window his house doesn’t register, is not there, is hidden behind some psychic equivalent of an optical blind spot.
The neighbor (they never speak or think of him as anything but “the neighbor”) is a biologist. They tried to see this as a comfort—it could have been a rod-and-gun club next door—until he partly filled in the wetland behind his house to alleviate a drainage problem; herons used to wade there, and in spring, huge flocks of geese would stop on their way to wherever.
The neighbor had a wife when he moved here. Her name was Mercedes. For a while the wind used to carry the sound of them yelling. She was gone by the time of that dinner party—moved to New York, said the gossip. Jenny has often thought that all the resentment they’d focused on the neighbor’s house must have had its effect. In fact, it’s probably true that their real-estate feud didn’t help his domestic life. If things were as bad as they sounded, his wife probably took their side.
The neighbor’s cat, a glossy gray-and-white male, has always felt free to walk on Frank and Jenny’s lawn. At first it made Jenny shudder, like a possum or a wood-chuck, something you wouldn’t kill but you didn’t have to like. But finally she and Frank had to admit: it was a pretty cat. It seems possible that at some lonely dinner hour Geronimo went to eat with the neighbor’s cat, though they tell themselves that Geronimo would be home by now, wouldn’t stay there after they’d come back.
They wait until Philip is in day camp. If what’s happened is what Jenny secretly suspects—that the neighbor has run the cat over in his driveway—they would like to predigest the news and tell Philip themselves.
The neighbor answers the door in tennis shorts and a T-shirt. If it were anyone else, Jenny would think he had a handsome, well-cared-for body, but in this case she thinks: Imagine, a guy living alone and keeping his shorts and T-shirts so white.
Jenny makes Frank let her talk; she is less likely, she says, to let all the events of those first few months make the most casual question tense and malignant with strain. She says, “Listen, have you seen a little taffy-colored cat?”
The neighbor claps his hand over his mouth. He says, “Oh, my God, that was yours?” He says the cat was around. He says it was fighting with his cat, and besides, he couldn’t feed another cat, and just at that moment the gray-and-white cat shows up, as if it knows they are discussing it. The neighbor says he’s sorry, he took the little cat and drove it down the road and left it in a field at the very bottom of Cider Hill Road. He thought it could catch mice there.
Frank and Jenny look at each other and roll their eyes. Otherwise, they feel eerily calm. Frank says, “You must be joking.” Jenny says, “That was our cat.” Her voice sounds thin and slightly whiny, like Philip protesting some irrevocable adult decision. The neighbor says, “I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry.” Neither Frank nor Jenny says anything to that. With shrugs and neutral gestures expressing something halfway between “Don’t be” and “You should be,” they turn and leave. The neighbor calls after them, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry.”
Frank says, “Can you believe he told us? If I did that, I would never have told. I would have said, ‘What cat? I didn’t see any cat.’”
“You wouldn’t have done it,” says Jenny.
They are home drinking coffee when Jenny finally says, “Of course the truly strange thing is that he should have dropped it off on Cider Hill Road.” That is where Ada lives, where they got Geronimo in the first place, although the field the neighbor means is miles from Ada’s house. “Does he know Ada?”
“I doubt it,” says Frank.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jenny says. “Maybe that cat just wasn’t meant to be our cat. Maybe we should leave it.”
“It’s Philip’s cat,” says Frank.
Frank says he’ll go to Cider Hill and look for the cat. He’ll go after Philip comes home from camp, this evening, after dinner. He’ll take Philip with him.
“I’ll go with you,” Jenny says.
Later, as they are getting into the car, Philip says, “Wouldn’t it be weird if the cat turned up at Ada’s?” Of course they are all thinking that. Philip knows only that Ada is a fairly distant family friend. It irritates Jenny that her son should just say Ada’s name as if it were perfectly normal.
Frank is driving, and as they turn up Cider Hill Road, Jenny has one of those moments of clarity and prescience: she is positive that the cat is at Ada’s. For an instant it crosses her mind that the neighbor has met Ada, knows their histories, that this is at once their retribution and his revenge. But it all seems unlikely—hardly anyone knew about Ada and Frank. Even if the neighbor knew everything—whose cat it was and where it came from and all they had gone through—he wasn’t the type to even let himself consider revenge.
They stop at the first house on the road, nearest the field the neighbor described. Frank is acquainted with the old couple who live there. He sends Philip up to the door, and Philip comes back beaming. “They saw him,” says Philip, and points farther on down the road.
From what they can tell, the cat has made its way along the road, dining at a different home every night. Everyone seems to have been struck by its winning personality. Jenny counts the houses, the nights the cat’s been gone, and remembers the counting games she played as a child: how far in advance you could see you’d be “out.” The cat is at Ada’s, there’s no doubt in her mind, but still for the sake of form they keep stopping at houses, tracing the cat’s progressive dinner up the hill.
Ada lives in a white frame eyebrow colonial up a long drive surrounded by trees; when you get out of the car in the clearing in front of the house, you feel you are being watched. It makes Jenny wonder who would drop off a cat back here. Though Ada says some outrageous things, she has never actually lied.
Three cats play in front of the house, but Geronimo isn’t among them. Frank, Jenny, and Philip walk up the steps; it’s Philip who knocks on the door. No one answers, but Geronimo appears at the window, pressing his face on the glass. Philip jumps up to meet him. Frank steps up and knocks. No one answers. Frank says, “We can’t just go in and get it.” Philip says, “Isn’t it strange that it’s here?”
“Strange is the word,” says his father.
Finally Ada appears. She is wearing a beautiful antique silk kimono. Her hair is down on her forehead, and she pushes it back with her hand. “I am just sleeping,” she says. “Jan is in Boston.” But Philip has already pushed by her and is hugging the cat.
“How the cat came here?” Ada say
s.
Frank seems on the point of telling the story, but something stops him. Instead, he looks at Jenny, who tells the story quickly, emphasizing the neighbor’s villainy. Ada makes clicking sounds and says, “How terrible. How awful. Oh, what a terrible man.” There is a silence. Then Ada says, “Him you never liked. I come home, I don’t know why the cat is here. I think it don’t work out with you, and maybe you drop her here when I am gone.”
“We wouldn’t do that,” Jenny says.
There’s another pause, and Ada sighs. “Well, it could have been sad but is happy. And now you have to come in.”
Ada steps aside to let Frank and Jenny pass. They follow her into the kitchen. Ada’s kimono, and Ada herself, makes it impossible not to notice the body under the silk. Frank is struck—as if for the first time—by how much civilization depends on not seeing certain things and pretending others never occurred. Jenny notices, too, and tries not to see. The only way she survived that time and forgave and kept going was by refusing to let certain pictures enter her head. She and Frank sit down across from each other at the pine kitchen table.
“This time we drink to the cat,” Ada says. “We drink to it staying home with you where it belongs.” She takes out three delicate shot glasses with deep blue rims and plunks them on the table with a bottle of vodka from the freezer. She and Frank and Jenny clink glasses and drink. No one looks at anyone else. Ada says, “You have been again to the pond?”
Frank says, “What a mess.” And suddenly Jenny is surprised by a strange feeling: she’s glad that the pond is gone. But why should that surprise her? The night everything started between Frank and Ada, Jenny had been in Boston, visiting a friend, and when she got back everyone in the grocery was talking about the drunken teenage kid the rescue squad saved from drowning in Pedersen’s pond. But Frank hadn’t told her, hadn’t mentioned it, and when she asked him, he looked guilty and said, “What kid?” She had seen Frank and Ada talking at parties; it had made her unhappy. And right then she knew—just as she knew today that the cat would be back at Ada’s—she knew that Frank had gone over to Ada’s when he got through at the pond.
Suddenly Jenny feels panicked. She wants to get Philip and Frank and get out. She feels she cannot stand it that the memory of that night is something that Frank and Ada share, and it is different from hers. What she does not know, or want to know, is this:
That night, when Ada opened her door and saw Frank, she burst into tears. When at last she stopped crying and pacing and smoking cigarettes, she told him that she had wanted to see him so badly, she had been almost hoping that something would happen at the pond, that he would have to go there and he would be so close to her house, and he would know she wanted to see him, he would have felt it, and that night he would stop by. When she had heard the sirens and cars, she couldn’t help thinking she’d caused it. But still she prayed Frank would come. Frank said she couldn’t have caused it. And besides, the kid was all right.
There is a long silence. No one seems able to speak. They finish their vodka and Ada pours another round. Then Ada says, “Look. The sky.” Outside, the clouds have turned lavender. Ada and Frank and Jenny gaze fixedly out the window; it is something that’s easy to stare at with more interest than they feel.
Suddenly a voice says, very clearly, “Did you miss me?” And all three of them turn, a little fast, a bit startled—as if they don’t know that it’s Philip, murmuring to his cat.
POTATO WORLD
ALL SPRING I WAITED for something to save me from working that summer. That was how I wound up at Potato World. A sixtyish Frenchwoman named Yvette owned the franchise at the mall. She interviewed me for two seconds and said, “You are my new sous-chef!” My job was to scrub the potatoes and preroast them in the microwave. Ronnie, the counterman, finished them off with the customer’s choice of topping. I was shocked by how many people ordered ratatouille-stuffed baked potatoes; maybe that was because I’d seen the industrial-size ratatouille cans.
Yvette came in at the end of the day to empty the cash register. Otherwise, Ronnie and I were pretty much on our own. Ronnie had a double mohawk: two parallel brushes down his scalp, like a tool for de-icing car windows. When I asked him what the color was called, Ronnie said, “Fiberglass pink.”
Ronnie wore two thin copper bracelets to block the toxins in the potatoes from creeping up his arms. I often wanted to borrow them, but I was embarrassed to ask. The potatoes came in fifty-pound sacks, and each time I reached in, clouds of powdery dirt and pesticide puffed up into my face.
Around lunchtime my boyfriend, Jason, came in, his face still messy from sleep. He and Ronnie and I smoked dope in the back of the kitchen. Jason said, “I’ll say potato world. This whole town is potato world.”
“Potato planet,” said Ronnie.
We had a phone near the cash register that no one ever called in on. So when it rang in the morning, I’d know it was Jason for me. He called on his bedroom phone; he was working on his dreams. He claimed this was his summer job; his mother and father were rich. Jason was into the Iroquois, who told the whole clan their dreams, and an African tribe who encouraged you to go back into your dream and face the tiger that woke you the last time. Jason was experimenting with dream communication; he’d tell me what he’d dreamed and ask if the images matched anything I’d been thinking that morning. His idea was to program himself to dream about eco-disaster and nuclear strikes and then he would dream through them and wake up with a solution. I closed my eyes and let his voice stream over me like rain. I said, “Will you still like me when I turn into a potato?”
He said, “There isn’t time for that. We’ll be back in school before then.” As we talked on the phone, I studied the sign above the counter, hand-in-hand smiley international potatoes in serapes and coolie hats. This was definitely not my idea of what a potato was. I was becoming increasingly weird about the potato sacks. There was something about the powderiness, the darkness deep inside—half the time I was positive I’d reach down there and grab a rat.
One afternoon I was steeling myself for a dip into the potatoes when I heard a familiar voice order a giant fries. I looked around and said, “You might want to rethink that.” Though my father looked young and trim, he’d had a giant heart attack. Ronnie looked puzzled until I said, “Relax, it’s only my dad.”
“Who’s My Little Pony?” my father whispered when Ronnie turned his back.
I said, “His name is Ronnie. We’re engaged. You’re not invited to the wedding. What are you doing here?” Though we talked sometimes on the telephone, I hadn’t seen him in weeks.
He said, “I’ve come to lift you up and over Potato World.”
I said, “Go ahead. Try it. Lift me.”
My father said, “The choice is clear. Potato World or Paris.”
When I got home that night my mother said, “Oh, thank God you’re safe.”
I said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
My mother said, “This morning going to work I was walking down Tenth Street, I saw something strange in the middle of the block, at first it looked like one of those pottery chicken cookie jars, then maybe a stuffed chicken, but when I got close I saw it was a live chicken, on the pavement against a building, hardly moving, just blinking very slowly, like it was in some kind of coma, and then I saw that all its tail feathers were off and I thought, This chicken’s been sexually abused, and I felt this cold chill like something awful was going to happen and naturally I’ve been worried all day that it would happen to you. That mall is full of serial killers.”
I thought: No wonder I can’t grab a potato without expecting rat teeth. I said, “I’m not surprised. You should see the awful shit they fry up at Beak ’n Biscuit.”
My mother said, “Don’t say shit.”
I said, “Guess who came in today.”
My mother said, “Charlie Manson.”
I said, “Close. Try: Dad.”
My mother said, “Perfect. The class place to bring your teenage
sweethearts. What’s he down to now? Nineteen?”
I said, “He was alone. He wants me to go to Paris with him.”
My mother was silent. Then she said, “A woman in my office just got back from Paris. She got dysentery from couscous.”
I said, “Be reasonable. Paris isn’t Casablanca.”
She said, “Believe it or not, it cheers me up that you know the word Casablanca.” She said, “I wish you wouldn’t go.” Then she said, “When are you leaving?”
Yvette said, “Oh, Par-ee.” She seemed so excited I asked if she was from there. She said, “No, we are not.” Only then did it dawn on her what this meant for her. She and Ronnie exchanged quick looks, like parents I’d disappointed. I said, “It’s only Monday. I can work through Friday night.”
The next day Ronnie said, “I’m with you. Another week or two here and I’m potato history.”
I said, “Ronnie, you can do better than this. You’re really smart. I mean it.”
He said, “Don’t buy a leather jacket there. They’re all American-made. They export $149 cheesy mall pieces of shit, and they get these retarded French kids to buy them for fifteen hundred bucks.”
I stared dumbly at Ronnie. I couldn’t do the arithmetic. I said, “I didn’t sleep last night.”
Ronnie said, “You look it.”
I’d been arguing with Jason, he’d driven somewhere in the country and we’d sat in his car. Finally, all I could think about was how frantic my mother must be, so we went home and continued it on the phone all night. We kept repeating ourselves. I’d say, “What would you pick: three weeks in Europe or three weeks scrubbing potatoes?” He’d say, “How would you feel: your girlfriend just disappears.” Asking each other to imagine being us made it clear that we weren’t each other, though there had been moments that spring and summer when it had seemed that we were.
When I called Jason to say goodbye, he said, “Fine. Don’t blame me.”
We sat three across on the airplane, my father, Robin, and I. My father had introduced us at the airport. He said, “Robin joined the firm around the start of last year. The guys whose heads we brought her in over are totally pissed off.”
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