“No one needs an exterminator for a couple of mice,” Mr. Malkin said. “You just get me a trap today…”
Mrs. Malkin nodded, helped her husband with his overcoat, and kissed him goodbye. “You get that trap,” Mr. Malkin said as he went down the stairs, “and I’ll see that your mouse is caught by night.”
Later that morning Mrs. Malkin called her husband at the office. “You get me a trap?” Mr. Malkin asked right away.
“A trap?” Mrs. Malkin repeated vaguely.
Mr. Malkin thought he detected a strangeness in his wife’s voice. “Is there something wrong?” he asked.
There was a brief silence. Then: “What I called you about,” Mrs. Malkin said, “I was glancing through your desk.”
Mr. Malkin thought swiftly. He had obviously done something wrong; however, at the moment, he could remember nothing in his desk that would offend his wife. “I keep a lot of junk—” he began.
“I know,” Mrs. Malkin said, “there’s a little bankbook.”
“A bankbook?” Mr. Malkin said.
“It’s made out to the name of—let me see.” There was a pause while Mrs. Malkin looked at the bankbook. “Donald Emmett Malkin,” she said.
“Donald Emmett Malkin,” Mr. Malkin said.
“There’s a balance of twenty-nine dollars,” Mrs. Malkin said, “a dollar a week for about six months.”
“Twenty-nine dollars,” Mr. Malkin said. “Well.”
“You’d better see if you can get that money back,” Mrs. Malkin said. “After all, it’s almost thirty dollars.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Malkin. “I had forgotten about it. I’ll get the money back.”
“Who’s Donald Emmett Malkin?” Mrs. Malkin said.
“Just a name,” Mr. Malkin said vaguely. “A joke I had at the time.”
“Donald for your father, Emmett for my father,” Mrs. Malkin said. “You say you’ll get that money back? Shall I leave the book out for you?”
“Yes,” Mr. Malkin said. “It was probably just a joke.”
“Probably,” Mrs. Malkin said. “I saw the mouse, by the way.”
“Frighten you?” Mr. Malkin said.
“I hate mice,” Mrs. Malkin said, “it was all fat and funny. Well, I’ll throw this little book out then, if you’re sure you won’t want it.”
“Sure,” Mr. Malkin said. He hung up with some relief.
When he got home that night, Mrs. Malkin met him at the door. She was wearing her wine-colored housecoat and had her hair sleek and straight down her back.
“I got the mouse,” Mrs. Malkin said.
“In the trap?”
“No,” Mrs. Malkin said gently, “just the mouse. I was too quick for her.”
“For her?” Mr. Malkin was saying as he followed his wife into his study. The mouse lay in the center of the floor, on a piece of white typing paper. The mouse was, too, just the color of the walls. “For her?” Mr. Malkin said with more strength.
“I hit her with the frying pan,” Mrs. Malkin said. She looked at her husband. “I was very brave,” she said.
“You certainly were,” Mr. Malkin said heartily.
“Then I put her on the piece of paper with the broom,” Mrs. Malkin said, “and brought her in here. And I know why she was so fat.”
Mr. Malkin bent over the mouse and saw why she was so fat, and then he looked up at his wife. From the look on her face, Mr. Malkin realized that she was the most terrible woman he had ever seen.
MY GRANDMOTHER AND THE WORLD OF CATS
SINCE MY GRANDMOTHER IS patient, and cats are long-lived, I am not giving any sort of decent odds on the ultimate outcome of their feud; although my money is privately on my grandmother, there is a lot of big dough coming from somewhere on the cats, and I am not one to give anyone a tip on a losing proposition. I can, however, give a brief résumé of the situation up to now, as a constant observer, and I’d like to add that, taking the long view, I have never thought that the cats had the staying power to match up with the old lady. Nine lives, maybe, but not the staying power.
My grandmother is a charming, gentle woman, except for what she does to cats. She is partial to them, too, and grieves constantly over the cruel chance that has chosen her as their natural enemy. She seems to appall them. Since she came to live with us, when my grandfather died, about fifteen years ago, there have been no fewer than forty or fifty cats that have bided their little hour with us, developed their personality scars, and gone. Perhaps it is just that we have gotten used to my grandmother, and it’s too much to ask of a cat.
I remember Flossie, who used to bite my grandmother. Nothing more. Just walk up to my grandmother peacefully, get a firm grip on her ankles, and hang on. For a while my grandmother thought it was just affection, and was tremendously pleased at being singled out for Flossie’s friendship, but then, as Flossie grew older and bigger and her teeth got longer, my grandmother developed a tendency to sit with her feet tucked under her. Finally Flossie began to have kittens, thousands of them, and one day my grandmother was sitting resting her legs by putting them on the floor and Flossie, who my grandmother had thought was safely out of the room, came from under a table with one of her oldest kittens and began to teach him how to bite my grandmother’s ankles. Since it is one of her cardinal principles never to have a cat killed, and never to dismiss one for any but a very adequate reason, my grandmother, who of course had no sort of proof against Flossie, went on sitting with her feet underneath her. However, Flossie finally made her mistake, and one day, in a fine jovial spirit, came running into a room and, mistaking my father for my grandmother, took a sizable piece out of his shin.
After Flossie was gone, my grandmother began to have trouble with the one kitten we had kept, a yellow half-Persian named Creampuff. Creampuff’s approach tended more toward the psychological breakdown. He would leave the room pointedly whenever my grandmother entered, glancing over his shoulder with his lip curled as he left. If Creampuff was quietly eating in the kitchen and my grandmother came in, Creampuff would stop eating and walk out. When this had no effect except to make my grandmother lose a little weight, Creampuff began to kill flies and leave them around. Whenever my grandmother started to sit down anywhere, she would find seven or eight dead flies on the chair. One day I was sitting by the piano while my grandmother played and sang and Creampuff came into the room. He had not seen my grandmother, apparently, and she was delighted to think that he might be ready to make friends with her. “I’ll just keep on singing,” she said to me in a hurried whisper, “and you tell me what he does.” So my grandmother went on singing “I passed by your window,” and I watched Creampuff. He wandered around the room for a while, and then I noticed that all the time he was watching my grandmother out of the corner of his eye. Suddenly he jumped up on the piano bench, just as my grandmother reached “To bid you good morning, good morning, my dear,” and was quavering on the high note. After one pained glance at my grandmother, Creampuff moved up onto the music stand and began killing flies. He waited until they landed on the music and then smashed them. My grandmother, torn between artistic integrity and absolute fury, finally left the room herself, upon which Creampuff grinned evilly at me, knocked the music off the stand, and went out of our lives. I don’t know whatever happened to him; apparently he felt that his work in our house was finished.
After that my father put his foot down, and for a while there were no more cats in our house. Things went along quietly, no internal strife; my mother got herself a little dog, which became very fond of my grandmother, and used to come to her to have its stomach scratched.
Then one day I let a kitten follow me home, and it started again, worse than before. I named the kitten Nick, and since my grandmother was out of town the weekend I found him, he had time to make himself at home and adapt himself to the dog. He appeared to be a dear, lovable little kitten, until my grandmother walked in the front door. “Oh, a kitten!” my grandmother shrieked. “Wuz e a tweet ’ittle ting.” Nick made
a cat noise in his throat and charged. My grandmother, who had been bending over to look Nick in the eye, lost a good part of her coiffure.
From that time on, Nick turned into the prize of all our cats. He developed an attitude toward my grandmother that made Flossie and Creampuff seem like amateurs, and this time my grandmother lost her noncombatant bearing and tore into Nick, giving as good as she got. When Nick found a secret passageway through the furnace gratings that would lead him into my grandmother’s room when she had all her doors and windows closed, and used this passageway to sneak in at night and jump up and down on her stomach, my grandmother filled the bathtub full of lukewarm water and dropped Nick in. Once my grandmother made a cake and left it, freshly iced, on the kitchen table to cool, and Nick walked around the top of it, making a pretty design. That time my grandmother caught Nick and put him under a dishpan turned upside down on the floor, and then she sat beside it and beat on the top with a spoon. It got so none of us were surprised when we would see Nick racing around the house and my grandmother after him with a broom.
“I think your grandmother’s losing her mind, young woman,” my mother said to me.
“Nick means no harm,” I said.
“Your grandmother’s plotting evil,” my mother said.
When my brother ran the family car into a telephone pole, my grandmother was heard to say darkly that it was plainly more of that cat’s doing, and then one morning the doorbell rang and my grandmother opened the door and a very small yellow bird was sitting on the porch. “What do you want?” my grandmother asked, but before the bird had a chance to answer, Nick, obviously concluding that this was a friend of my grandmother’s, hurried out of the door and captured the bird, which he took away with him. My grandmother, looking very thoughtful, went out and bought a canary in a cage, which she presented to my mother. A few days later my grandmother rushed into the bedroom, where my mother was quietly teaching me how to make buttonholes, and screamed: “Hurry, that cat is after the canary, I always knew it!” My mother and I rushed downstairs, my mother armed with a darning egg, and found Nick on top of the canary’s cage. The canary was swinging back and forth, caroling tenderly to Nick, who was eating the lettuce that my mother had put between the cage bars. My grandmother was staggered for a minute, but finally she recovered herself enough to point accusingly at Nick, who was watching her comfortably, with a little piece of lettuce hanging out of his mouth, and said dramatically: “Didn’t I always say so? A born thief!”
Later on my grandmother went to bed with a cold cloth on her head, and my mother and I settled the question of Nick.
“Young woman, either that cat leaves this house, or I will not be responsible for your grandmother,” my mother said.
“Possibly there is someone I could give him to, someone we don’t know very well,” I said. “Someone who doesn’t come here very often.”
“I’ll speak to your father,” my mother said. We both knew that my grandmother would never allow herself to be intimidated by a cat; either there had to be a good and sufficient reason for Nick to go, or my grandmother would fight it out on her home grounds until something gave. Apparently my mother spoke to my father; the next morning when she went up to see how my grandmother was feeling, she told my grandmother that Nick and my father had had a run-in, and Nick was leaving.
“Give him to me,” my grandmother said. “I’ve been thinking of leaving myself.”
“You want him?” my mother said, astounded.
“Think I’d let a fine cat like that go out of the family?” my grandmother said.
My grandmother and Nick went south for a while; we had weekly bulletins from my grandmother, saying that Nick had run away, Nick had bitten a train conductor, Nick had torn up all the hotel pillows, Nick had fallen into the ocean, Nick had hurt his paw in a fight with a crocodile (this was a subject to which we could never persuade my grandmother to return; she said she didn’t like to think about it), Nick was tired of traveling and they were coming home. They came home, my grandmother vigorous and brown, Nick thinner and looking rather tired.
“Traveling agrees with us,” said my grandmother, “doesn’t it, Nicky-boy?” She pulled Nick’s ear affectionately. Nick purred.
Nick soon afterward died as a result of a run-in with a Chevrolet, and my grandmother got another cat, a sleek black creature with an angel face.
“Tough, isn’t he?” said my grandmother when she brought him home. She had named him Mo after my grandfather. It soon developed that Mo was an eccentric; he lived entirely on salmon and cantaloupe; when cantaloupe was out of season he would eat strawberries. He used to sleep on the stairs, on the top stair but one. This led to a tiff with my brother, who used to come rushing in through the front door and up the stairs as fast as he could, and every time my brother started up the stairs fast, Mo would sit up and yawn just as my brother came to him, and my brother would trip.
One day my brother came in through the front door fast, and, suddenly remembering Mo, stopped and looked to see if Mo was there. Mo was. So my brother turned around to my grandmother, who was sitting in the living room knitting a hat for my father, and said that this time he was going to teach that cat a thing or two. Then my brother walked slowly up the stairs and picked Mo up and brought him downstairs and set him on the floor. With Mo sitting at the foot of the stairs watching, my brother walked up the stairs very carefully, and then turned around and walked down. “See, I didn’t fall once,” he said to Mo. He tried it once more, walking up very slowly and then down again. Then he said to Mo: “Okay, watch this.” And he went outside the front door and then slammed it open, running in and up the stairs, and he got halfway up and he tripped and fell flat on his face. Mo sat down below with a serious expression, watching my brother lying there talking to himself. Then, still without speaking to Mo, my brother came down the stairs and turned around and raced up again as fast as he could go, and this time Mo ran, too, and he beat my brother to the top and my brother tripped over him and fell again.
My grandmother came out into the hall and asked pleasantly: “Fall down, dear?” Mo came walking down and followed my grandmother out into the kitchen, where she gave him a dish of strawberries, and my brother put his head through the banisters and lay there groaning until my mother came and picked him up.
My grandmother finally broke Mo’s spirit. She first tied a ribbon around his neck; when this didn’t seem to work, she put a bell on the ribbon. She explained to me that this also made him a good watch-cat; he could not endure having anyone come into the house without seeing if he could do something to them, and if he moved, my grandmother, who was a light sleeper from the time when Nick used to jump up and down on her stomach—my grandmother would hear the bell and come down to get the burglars. This would probably have worked out very well, but unfortunately Mo had a fit because every time he tried to sleep the bell would ring.
My grandmother seemed very put out when Mo died.
“I always used to feel safe with him in the house,” she said wistfully. “Much safer than I did with your grandfather.”
MAYBE IT WAS THE CAR
MAYBE IT WAS THE car. Or maybe it was the tree with elm blight, or the bathtub leaking again, or the laundry being late, or the thought of hamburger again tonight, or maybe after all it was the student of my husband’s who asked me, wide-eyed and innocent, “How is your painting going?” When I told her the only painting I have done in twenty years was the lawn chairs, she stared, and frowned, and said, “But I thought you were supposed to be a painter.” “I am supposed to be a writer,” I told her with a certain tautness. “Funny,” she said. “I always thought you were a painter. What kind of writing do you do?”
“Am I supposed to be a writer?” I asked my husband that evening.
“What?” he said. “I said, am I supposed to be a writer?” “I guess so,” he said. “Why?” “I thought I was supposed to be a painter,” I said.
“I don’t understand anything you say anymore,” he s
aid. “How long till dinner?”
The car is new. It is a tiny English convertible, black and dancing and winsome. The children named it Toro at once because it has a picture of a bull on the steering wheel. I would rather be driving around in Toro than broiling hamburgers again tonight; I left my husband sitting in the living room reading the evening paper and went out into the kitchen and sat on my high stool in the corner and looked out at Toro parked in the driveway. My daughter had broken the zipper in her skirt. The rosebush I had planted by the porch was clearly not going to grow. I am a writer, I said to myself in the corner of the kitchen. I am a writer and here I sit broiling hamburgers. The dog had been down at the brook rolling in the mud again.
In a house with several thousand phonograph records, of all sizes and ages and speeds and degrees of loudness, I own two. One is a record of various music boxes playing. The other is a record of bullfight music. I went upstairs and borrowed one of the children’s record players and brought it down to the kitchen and got my two records and put on the one where the steam calliope plays “The Sidewalks of New York.” “Mother’s gone batty again,” my older son said to his father in the living room. “I wonder what she’ll do this time.”
“Everything,” my husband said obscurely, “is either true or false or one of your mother’s delusions.”
“I wish she’d put on the bullfight music,” my son said. “That calliope makes me nervous.”
“The last time she played bullfight music we had vegetable soup four nights running,” my husband said.
“You ought to take us out to dinner more,” my son said.
“Usually after she’s played the music boxes she goes up and cleans out the linen closet or sometimes she goes and reads the letters I used to write her when we were in college.” My husband’s voice shook.
“I just wish she’d put on the bullfight music,” my son said.
I got off my stool and went into the living room. “Listen,” I said, “am I a writer or am I a middle-aged housewife?”
Just an Ordinary Day: Stories Page 18