They wanted everything, and we could only give them so little.
I heard the rustling; soon they would see through our grubby lies. Our pathetic attempts to shove them off to sleep at 9:00 PM so we could have sex. Our insistence that more than half an hour of TV a night during the week would curdle their brains. My attempt to convince the boy not to do Little League simply because I didn’t like the other parents. They would recognize our lameness, our failure — and theirs — to live forever.
“When am I going to die?” the boy had already asked.
We mumbled, looked away, scratched our legs.
“When?” he asked, searching our faces.
Soon, in a big huff, they would pack up and move out. Trailing stuffed animals, baseball cards, My Little Ponies, the objects that they had coveted and which, at seventeen, would make them feel naive and small. They would head off armed with rock posters, black T-shirts that boasted scary sayings, green hair. They would think they were starting anew! They would have better lives than we did! Soon they would be disappointed by sex, or thrilled by it; soon they would feel things — sexually, emotionally — that we never had. Or they would feel less. We believed we had beat out our own parents on this score, but there was no knowing, really. No one said. We lay in our bed, the sheets damp with the chemical smell of spermicide, breathing hard.
“I don’t like your toes,” my husband said. “How they rub against me.”
“Why?” I asked, alarmed.
“I don’t know. I’m just not a fan of them.”
I contemplated this. What was this new change? Should I be understanding? Or mad?
The cat sat there, a gray and hairy beast.
“I love you,” said the cat.
Did the cat love me? Or — more likely — did he just want dinner? I had forgotten to give him dinner. I felt bad about it, but not that bad. He was so fat his stomach dragged against the ground.
If the cat was saying I love you, and he was saying it to me, what was my responsibility to him? Did I have to pet him more? He seemed to need nothing. He awoke several times a day, stretched, checked his food bowl, trotted to the front door, went out, came in, and over and over. He had been allowed into the house because he was the one with no longings.
The rain began to bang against the house. The cat sat there, with immense patience.
“Was that the cat?” my husband asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“He can talk now?” asked my husband wistfully.
“He said, I love you.”
“To you or to me?”
I said, trying not to brag, “I think he said it to me.”
“How do you know it wasn’t to me?”
“I just assumed,” I said.
Cutie was apparently done speaking. He would just gaze upon the wreckage.
“Why couldn’t it be me?” I asked.
“Who did you say it to, Cutie?” my husband asked the cat. “Me or her?”
The cat stepped forward. My husband petted its head. Now he was pandering. Cutie rolled over on his back. He was large; his gray fur smelled of wet grass; there was a leaf stuck to his underside. He was a wild animal. We had innocently invited him into our home. We had even joked to the children that he was the third sibling. They liked that, someone they could push around. “He is your furry brother,” we said. But he was really no better than a possum or a rat. He assumed the fragile mantle of a household pet, nibbled politely at the kibble, rubbed against your legs, posed adorably with a ball of yarn, but up close, he smelled of damp earth, and his hot breath had the metallic undertone of blood.
He rolled on the bed, his legs trembling, splayed out, in a shameless erotic display. His belly was pale pink, rimmed with translucent white fur.
What did he feel when he watched us?
My husband petted him. “It was me, wasn’t it,” he murmured. His arm was covered in curly hair. He looked brutish. He was sexier now than when we first met, when he was just thirty, a raw-faced boy. Why didn’t he like the way my toes rubbed against him? What other mistakes would we find in each other? But we loved new things, too. My husband had put a freshly washed plate into the cabinet with a tenderness that moved me. In what corner had he found this gentleness in himself? Would he find other things to love about me? We were peculiar mirrors for the other, and we were each long, stubborn walls; the pressure of marriage was trying to crack through them, to own the gorgeousness that we believed lurked inside. It was a lifelong task to distract us.
“What do you want, Cutie?” I asked. “What? Tell us.”
We wanted an answer. The pressure in the room was unbearable. Nothing would break it, not speech, not sex, not sleep.
Cutie writhed under my husband’s hand and then nipped at my wrist.
He was prone to this sort of casual savagery.
“No, Cutie!” my husband said. “Be nice!”
This was what we were used to — it was comforting, actually. We were more frightened by the idea of the depth of his feelings. Cutie meowed, a regular catlike sound.
“Ignore him,” my husband said, now annoyed.
Cutie leapt off the bed.
Credits
“Reunion” appeared in Ploughshares, Fall, 2007.
“Theft” appeared in The Harvard Review, Spring, 2005, and was reprinted in Best American Mystery Stories 2006.
“Anything for Money” appeared in Zoetrope All-Story, Fall, 2001, and was reprinted in Zoetrope All-Story 2, 2003.
“The Third Child” appeared as “The Visiting Child” in Granta, Fall, 2005.
“The Loan Officer’s Visit” appeared as “The Visit” in The Harvard Review, Summer, 2012.
“Refund” appeared in Ploughshares, Summer, 2005, and was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXI, Best of the Small Presses, 2006.
“This Cat” appeared in Narrative, October 2013.
“A Chick from My Dream Life” appeared in The Iowa Review 1992 and was reprinted in Pushcart Prize XVIII, Best of the Small Presses, 1993.
“Candidate” appeared in Ecotone, Spring, 2007, and was reprinted in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2008, and also in Astoria to Zion: Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade.
“The Sea Turtle Hospital” appeared in StoryQuarterly, February 2014.
“Free Lunch,” under the title “Sent,” was one of Narrative magazine’s “Top Five Stories of the Week” in 2013.
“For What Purpose?” appeared in Guernica, October 2014.
“What the Cat Said” appeared in The Harvard Review, Fall, 2008.
Acknowledgments
Enormous thanks to those who supported these stories over the years, in so many ways, especially: Christina Thompson, Don Lee, Adrienne Brodeur, David Hamilton, Paul Lisicky, Bill Henderson, Meg Wolitzer, Tom Jenks, Olga Zilberbourg, Ian Jack, ZZ Packer, Andrea Barrett, Martin Espada, Otto Penzler, Scott Turow, Danzy Senna, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Douglas Soesbe; to Eric Simonoff and Claudia Ballard for constant belief in my work and guiding these stories to a good home; to the wonderful team at Counterpoint Press, especially amazing editor and life coach Dan Smetanka and dynamic publicist Megan Fishmann; and, with love, to David and Meri Bender, Suzanne and Aimee Bender, Natalie Plachte-White and Michelle Plachte-Zuieback, Frances Silverglate, Sean Siegel, Perrin Siegel, Margaret Mittelbach, Jennie Litt, Jenny Shaffer, Katherine Wessling, Timothy Bush, Amy Feldman, Hope Edelman, Deborah Lott, Eric Wilson, Rebecca Larner, Rebecca Lee, Dana Sachs, Malena Morling, Virginia Holman, Sunny Xuemei, and Norma Varsos.