Fluffy is boxed and ready to go, so all Lissa has to do is pay the ransom: four nights/five days in the boarding kennel and an unexpected fee for something called “comfort services” that’s a little more than half the cost of a tolerable bottle of white wine. Fluffy, apparently, had licked her front right foot bald and raw and when she started on her left foot, the vet tech had gone ahead and dosed her with a mild sedative. “We tried to reach you,” the receptionist says, pointing to a log. “Three times, as a matter of fact.”
“I’m sorry,” Lissa says. She’s immediately sorry for saying she’s sorry. It’s a bad habit, one she’s trying to break. “She’s not really my cat.”
“Yes, well,” says the receptionist jingling a ring of keys, clearly eager to lock up and go home.
It’s raining when Lissa humps Fluffy out to the parking lot and into the car, banging the box against the door before finally easing her into the back seat. “Sorry, kitty,” she says. This time she means it.
❦
Fluffy had been aptly named. She was thick-furred and gorgeous with kohl-rimmed eyes, a diva of a cat with a disposition that ranged from anxious to haughty. Chuck had picked her out from dozens of shelter cats as a gift for his daughter during what Lissa thought of as his end-of-marriage one-upsmanship, a period of time during which he and his soon-to-be-ex, Felicity, were in an unspoken competition for Millicent’s affection. Adopting the cat had been Chuck’s way of check-mating Felicity, who was deathly allergic to anything with fur. It was also a Chuck thing to pick out a cat much like his wife, beautiful and high-maintenance.
Unfortunately, Millicent had inherited her mother’s allergies. After a miserable night of wheezing and sneezing, Millicent was rushed to the emergency room for a shot of Benadryl; Fluffy was sentenced to the laundry room while Chuck considered his options. The logical thing would have been to return Fluffy to the shelter—something that’s done all the time, insisted Lissa—but Millicent got hysterical when the word shelter was so much as whispered. She locked herself in her bedroom and threatened to jump off the first-floor balcony.
Go ahead! Lissa was tempted to say, but didn’t. She and Chuck were still early in their relationship, that liminal stage of coupledom where rather than assert a position and plant a flag, they’d say, tell me what you’re thinking. Chuck finally admitted that, yes, it was hard sometimes to father a daughter that was the spitting image of her mother down to the hair toss and the glares, harder still when you were maybe a little in love with the woman, sorry, sorry.
“That’s okay,” Lissa had said, even as she was circling the room and scooping up the few items she’d left at Chuck’s: a toothbrush, a nightgown that was currently her third or fourth favorite and some makeup, so she didn’t have to pack a bag every time Chuck said, well, I suppose it’s okay if you stay.
“Maybe it’s best for everyone that Fluffy goes back to the shelter,” she said meanly, to which Millicent only howled louder about loser cats being euthanized and frozen and sold to a local college for mandatory dissection in Biology 101.
“You could say she gave her life to science,” Lissa said.
“Just go,” Chuck hissed and Lissa went. She thought forever and good riddance until Chuck showed up two days later with a bouquet of roses, a box and a proposal, only not the one she’d been hoping for. The box hissed and bucked and was full of Fluffy. The proposal was that Lissa would inherit Fluffy as kind of a stepcat, complete with once-a-week visitation rights. Moreover, Fluffy would be company, a roommate for Lissa, and Chuck, being the dad of the roommate, would chip in support.
“Swell,” Lissa said. “A roommate whose poop I have to scoop.”
What she should have said was, sorry, but no.
❦
Lissa unlocks her apartment door and sets the cat carrier on the floor while she collects the mail that’s piled up in her absence: bills, bills and more bills, some of the bills saying where the hell is the bill you didn’t pay in October? The apartment is far too small, a two-room studio perfect for someone just out of college, but it’s cheap, half of what she’d paid for her toney condo in the ‘burbs. Still, she can’t make ends meet.
Along with bills, there’s a reminder from the mammogram factory that she’s seriously overdue. They’re considerably more cheerful than the bill collectors, their come-on postcard of a perky woman smiling and pointing a forefinger at the camera: Do what’s best for your breasts! Lissa would switch providers if she could, but this is the only facility that always has openings and also very good decaf coffee and magazines in the waiting room. It’s her chance to catch up on issues of The New Yorker, another casualty of the Big Downsize, which is how Lissa thinks of her life in the months since she was unceremoniously shit-canned from the newspaper.
Another envelope, this one forwarded from her former editor, still a friend: a single sheet of paper, 8 x 12, with dIe, baByKiLLer assembled from letters cut from magazines. Lissa had written dozens of columns about a woman’s right to choose, how it was a human right, and after each column, she’d receive a deluge of mail—snail and electronic—most of it telling her bluntly where she could stick her opinions, but a few that were downright threatening. She’d hand the frightening letters over to security, who handed them over to police, who kept files on every potential crazy within several zip codes. She hopes three locked doors and six floors are enough buffer between her and the world of crazy. Except for Fluffy, she lives alone.
Fluffy. Jesus. She’s completely forgotten about the cat who’s been unusually still and quiet. Fluffy is entirely capable of carrying on entire conversations but it’s a little like talking to her elderly aunt Anne, who answers every question with a fresh complaint about how the new neighbors refuse to sweep the junk off the sidewalk so she’s forced to go out at all hours and in any kind of weather to pick hamburger wrappers out of the chain link fence where they’ve gone and twisted themselves. Lately, though, it’s been better than no conversation or the sound of the Julio Iglesias albums the upstairs neighbor plays at top volume whenever she has a man over.
Fluffy, Lissa says, Fluffy I’ve come to free you from that prison, and sets to work untucking each of the cardboard tabs and opens the box to find, not the beautiful and haughty Fluffy but a hefty tomcat with a chunk missing from his right ear and something like a sneer on his face.
Who the fuck are you? she says.
The cat bounces up and out of the box in one mighty leap and settles on the couch, three turns and down onto the warm spot Lissa has left, purring like a furry appliance.
❦
The week after she was shit-canned from the newspaper, Lissa borrowed a friend’s apartment for a long weekend in New York, a kind of spiritual cleansing, kick out the jams, goodbye to the old, hello to the new kind of weekend. The apartment came with a white cat who looked pretty but was, in her friend’s words, “the devil.” In his defense, the cat had arrived with some baggage, having been contested property in a divorce settlement that resulted in him being shuttled between residences in a too-small cage with a towel draped over it to keep him calm, which he never was. Rather, the cat thrashed about from the time he was shoved into the cage until the door opened and he was dumped into a wide-open space with not enough furniture to claw or hide behind. He endured a year of this before a cat-loving arbitrator decided it was in the poor animal’s best interests to be rehomed in a place “where he will be treated like a beloved pet and not a marital asset.” And so his photograph was posted on a rescue site—beautiful, high-spirited cat seeks stable home—where the friend had found him to be, yes, quite beautiful and quite unstable. In the course of a year, the cat had learned not to snarl or hiss and would occasionally climb on the sofa and sit at a discreet distance while the friend watched “The Bachelor.” The friend didn’t want to watch “The Bachelor,” she didn’t even like “The Bachelor,” but it was the only show the cat seemed to like, maybe because he, too, had to be Machiavellian in the way he moved through the world.
Lissa had spent the weekend keeping a respectful distance from the cat, making sure to shut him in his little room each night with repeats of “The Bachelor” playing soundlessly on a loop on the big screen. The third and last night she was there, she’d been awakened by what felt like wet feathers against her cheek but when she turned on the light, there was only the cat sitting at the end of the bed like a lethal loaf of white bread. For the rest of the night, she slept with the covers yanked over her head, figuring that if the cat wanted to eat her face, he’d have to fight for it first.
“Are you going to eat my face in the night, kitty?” she asks now. Strange Cat blinks and chirps what might be a yes, but Lissa doesn’t think so. The cat seems mellow, content to wad himself up on the sofa pillow and study the world around him. She thinks about moving him into the bathroom for safety’s sake, but he looks like he’s planted himself and uprooting him would be more trouble than it’s worth. She leaves him alone, blinking away on the cushion, and goes to bed.
She turns off the light and texts Chuck: I’m home. She can explain about Strange Cat when she sees him tomorrow.
❦
She’d met Chuck in her first month of consultancy, a fancy way of saying, “same expertise, no benefits, and no promise of steady employment.” Before getting shit-canned from the newspaper, Lissa had written a thrice-weekly column that ran on B1—the city section; she was quick to point out, not the women’s section—when absolutely everybody read the city section if only to stay current on the latest homicides and the weird little stories below the fold about giant cucumbers that survived tornados. The column was accompanied by a years-old headshot of her that made her look as glamorous and mysterious as Fluffy. Lissa had enjoyed being a minor celebrity about town, often booked as a speaker for women’s groups or the emcee of charity auctions for various nonprofits that catered to women and women’s issues.
In all fairness, the newspaper had shit-canned everybody who’d worked there long enough to make a living wage—a very good living in Lissa’s case—and kept the rookies who continually mixed up your and you’re and they’re, their and there. The rookies lived their lives on camera and appeared to be having a great big ball, especially a kid named Chad who ate a plate of bad oysters one night and basically documented every gruesome moment of his ordeal on Tik-Tok. After the video went viral, the newspaper rewarded Chad with his own column on B1.
After weeks of lounging around in sweats and the same dirty t-shirt, Lissa painted her face and yanked on a pair of pantyhose and responded to an ad from a law firm in search of a “savvy professional with top-notch writing skills, willing to work on a short-term contract.” This is where she met Chuck, one of three interviewers to whom she pitched a half-assed sample marketing plan to “grow their business.” When he called later to tell her she had the job, he asked if she’d like to meet him for a glass of wine. She didn’t want to embarrass him or herself by asking which guy he was—they’d looked identical down to their striped shirts, rep ties, and close haircuts, the woodsy smell of them like a giant pine forest—but she went anyway and got there early so he would have to find her. And when he did find her, she was glad that he was the guy who had nodded and smiled at her mild attempts at humor, the only one who’d looked her straight in the eye.
❦
Waking up in the morning, she feels right away that something is off, different. It takes her a moment to realize that it’s this: For once, she’s slept soundly, a full night in her own bed without being punched or meowed awake by Fluffy, whose reign of terror typically began well before the sun came up. The slightest motion—a turn, a sigh—was Fluffy’s signal to spring up from the pillow she slept on and start to pace and meow, crescendoing eventually to a howl loud enough for the neighbors to hear. One of them had slipped a typed note under her door the previous week asking her politely if she could “keep the early morning noise to a manageable level.” It occurred to Lissa that the neighbor thought she was the one howling in the throes of some early morning sex and she wasn’t sure how to correct that or even if she should. “Dear neighbor,” she should have written, “That’s my cat, you hear, not me. She is loud and hungry and unmanageable.”
She checks her phone: an email from a potential client confirming a lunch date later in the week and a text from Chuck saying he’ll touch base with her after he drops off Millicent at her mother’s: Dinner later? Your place?
6:30? she writes.
Strange Cat is where she left him, snoring and twitching away on the pillow, lost apparently in some kitty dream in which he’s running through a meadow filled with nice, fresh mice. She tiptoes into the shower and washes her hair, something she should have done to get the plane smell out before she went to bed, though Chuck would say she’s imagining things. Planes don’t have smells, he said, and that was their first argument. Sorry, sorry, she said, though he was wrong. Planes smelled of many things: of jet fuel wafting in through the flimsy windows, of the sprayed, teased hair of the seat’s previous occupant who’d leaned against the headrest, of the burned sugar smell of the microwaves and the toilets that gave off a whiff of shit every time someone opened the door, of the little bottles of booze that her father used to drink on his business trips. All that settled into her hair and washing away the smell was usually the second thing she did when she got home, right after checking the mail. But last night, there had been Strange Cat, and her whole routine had been upended by his strangeness, though to be fair, he seems far less demanding than Fluffy.
Strange Cat is meatloafed on the bathmat when she steps out of the shower, though she doesn’t see him at first through the steam and the dim lighting, her bad eyes. But here he is, staring at her breasts and her damp crotch and the stomach that’s plushier than it was back when she was employed and struggled daily into what the woman in lingerie had called “shapewear,” which didn’t shape her so much as suffocate her. Apparently, it was important for columnists, like TV anchors, to look a certain way, though all the public saw was a tiny photo of her head, and even that was airbrushed so that people, when meeting her in real life, would often comment that she didn’t look a thing like her photo. The first thing she did when she was laid off/downsized/rightsized was lock herself in the big stall in the fourth-floor ladies’ room and wriggle out of the horrid shapewear and leave it in a heap on the floor. It had been a write-off, after all, and by all rights belonged to management. Sometimes, she has dreams where she’s being swallowed by a python, and she blames the shapewear every time.
But the cat doesn’t seem to mind her fat stomach and saggy boobs; in fact, he’s looking at her the way a Catholic might experience the Sistine Chapel, like she is beautiful and holy at the same time. She’s reminded of her college boyfriend, Jimmy Nelson, who told her often that she was smart, she was beautiful, she was perfect and she heard it all as lies. She was lazy, she ate movie popcorn every night for dinner and chased it with cheap white wine and she should have been treated that way instead of something precious and breakable, an ancient and gorgeous sculpture. After college, Jimmy had made a jillion dollars in Silicon Valley doing some high-tech thing after which he became a humanitarian, according to the obit in the Alumni Deaths section of the college newsletter. He’d died during an expedition to the Amazon, something to do with the rainforest and the indigenous people who lived there. Maybe Jimmy’s been reincarnated as Strange Cat who’s purring away on the bathmat. He has an appealing, tidy way of sitting where he tucks up his tail and folds all four feet underneath him so he looks like a fat cloud that’s landed in the middle of her bathmat.
No, she says to herself in the mirror. No, she will not keep this cat that belongs to someone else.
The cat looks up at her and chirps. With his fang tooth, he looks like he’s smiling.
❦
Unlike Fluffy, this cat will eat fish and shrimp. Fluffy was persnickety that way, devouring grilled chicken one morning, ignoring it the next. Lissa would implore her to eat, remind her of the cats roaming the streets right now who would be grateful for such good food, but Fluffy would have none of it. The morning minuet, Lissa called it: one step forward, one step back. Please, please, please.
The food has been sitting on the shelf long enough for the can to be a little dusty but well short of the expiration date. She made sure to check that because on top of everything, she doesn’t want to poison and maybe even kill a cat that doesn’t belong to her, the lawsuits unimaginable! How would she explain to the owners how it happened, how their cat was spunky and happy one minute and dead the next? She imagines the reverse situation: what if it happened to Fluffy? How would she feel? She remembers a day not long after Chuck brought a caged Fluffy over, how in the night, Fluffy had pried open the cupboard under the sink and ate one and a half dishwater pods and threw it up in a horrid mixture of half-digested kibble and soap bubbles before Lissa was able to chase her down and stuff her into the cage and take her to the vet where she was pronounced: “fine but terminally curious.” Lissa was stuck with a $623.11 bill for emergency services that Chuck hasn’t yet reimbursed her for. Since then, she’s fastened rubber bands to the cupboard handles, which Fluffy liked to strum as a mournful accompaniment to her frantic, hungry meows.
The cat finishes the last scrap of shrimp and fish and lets out a dainty belch. He settles on the kitchen rug and sits blinking while Lissa rinses the can and the dish. When she refills the water dish and sets it on the floor, he dips an exploratory paw into it before leaning over to slurp. Lissa loves how the cat drinks—quickly and efficiently, all business, the way her father used to drink. Drink but never be drunk, he used to say when he was drunk, which was pretty much every day for the last years of his life, the Irish antidote to the cancer that was quietly eating him from the inside out.
“Never get drunk,” she tells the cat who—come to think of it—looks a little bit like her father did at the end, the lopsided smile even as he was dying. It’s good, he said and died before she could ask what was good. She’d spent hours and hours with her therapist kicking around what it could possibly be, the therapist tactfully steering her toward why she needed to know and whether Chuck’s indifference was a way of replacing her father and his indifference.
“Are you good?” she asks the cat, who’s lumbering around the apartment, sniffing at things that must reek of Fluffy, but he appears not to notice or even care. He settles finally on the hardwood floor in a patch of sun and stretches out. From the back, he looks like a discarded muff, the kind of fur thing a woman might have worn to the opera back in the horse-and-carriage days of oil lamps and anguish—days when women sat silently sewing or writing letters and men did what they’ve always done: smoked and drank and hung out together. No wonder women went to the opera—how satisfying it must have been to listen to women howling their lungs out at decibels that shook the crystals in the chandeliers overhead and getting applauded for it, too. Screaming for all of them really, a millennial’s worth.
❦
At noon, she calls the kennel and gets a recording telling her that everyone is off today and having a lovely time doing weekend things, but they REALLY, REALLY want to take her call, so please leave a message at the beep, and her call will be returned in the order received during regular business hours. Lissa is always skeptical of this; how does a machine keep track of “order received”? But she waits for the beep, which is long and loud, and states what the problem is: That she was somehow given the wrong cat last night and didn’t realize it until she was home again that it was the wrong cat, one that’s bigger and fatter and male. “If you could call me back, I’d appreciate it,” she says.
She presses the button to end the call and notices that the cat is looking at her sadly. “Somebody might be looking for you,” she says.
The cat seems to understand. He puts his chin on his feet and stares at her with big, hopeful eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I really am.”
Her cell phone dings with a text message, the fart noise Millicent had put in on the sly. Lissa and Chuck had talked about it long into a sexless night, him excited and insistent that Millicent’s prank was a turning point in their relationship. Didn’t she see, he said, that if Millicent felt comfortable enough to play a joke on her, she accepted her in his—in their—life?
“Well, maybe,” Lissa had said, too tired to feel either doubtful or hopeful, though it dawned on her the next day after she slept off the cheap red wine Chuck favored, that Millicent had set her up, hoping that the phone would fart in the midst of an important client meeting and ultimately put the kibosh on her chances at nabbing that job.
His text says: Been thinking of your delicious pork chops.
She’d been thinking chicken and biscuits. A green salad and an apple tart for dessert, stuff she has on hand. It’s raining and the grocery store is always a nightmare, especially on Sunday. “I goddamn hate the goddamn grocery store on Sunday afternoon,” she says out loud.
The cat chirps and nods. An agreeable man, she likes that.
❦
The rain has turned to snow by evening, falling wet and thick in dirty curtains, a few inches piled on the ground already. She texts Chuck—Drive safely—and opens the expensive bottle of white wine she bought. After the Big Downsize, she’d convinced herself that the cheap stuff is every bit as good but one sip undoes all that, all honey and silk with none of the vinegar undertone. Something French and too expensive for someone with a half-ass job and an iffy income, but she feels like celebrating: No travel for a week or so and maybe she can work up the energy to finally get rid of the stuff in boxes she’s piled against the wall. Just last week, Chuck asked her, How long have you lived here now? and it’s true: she’s here and not there, sorry, sorry. She needs to move in, move forward.
At 6:15, she lights the candles, slides the potatoes into the oven, and dresses the salad. The pork chops gleam up at her pinkly, the thickest chops from a bin of them. Once they were pigs like the pig in her old condo, Hamilton (Ham for short, ha ha), who wasn’t pink and smooth but white and dingy and bristly. He slobbered on the hallway carpets and goobered up the hardwoods and when he got loose, he ate all the petunias in the planters out front. The condo board ordered his owner to get rid of him or move out and that, apparently, was the end of Ham. They could be eating Hamilton, for all she knows. Also, she doesn’t even like pork chops very much, to tell the truth. Chuck does and so she cooks them the way he likes, a little on the pink side with a spice rub featuring a hint of paprika.
By seven she’s two and a half glasses into the bottle of wine and worried. She scrolls Twitter for reports of accidents in the area but nothing involving a black BMW. Chuck’s car is heavy as a tank with doors thick as those on bank vaults, the same silent clunk when they close. A snowbank wouldn’t stand a chance. She’s thinking about calling the local hospitals when she gets a text from Chuck: Running late.
By eight, she’s angry. She shoves the pork chops in the oven and sets the timer and helps herself to the potatoes that were roasted too long. They taste cindered, like failure. She’s given up on texting Chuck and has started calling him. Each time she gets his voicemail, the same smooth, “You’ve reached Chuck Mitchell and I really want to hear from you, so please leave a message,” and on the fifth try she’s drunk enough to leave a message saying, You really, really don’t want to hear what I have to say, trust me.
At nine, she opens the second bottle of wine and splashes some into her glass. This one is even more spectacular than the first bottle, crisp and clear as a cold night. She imagines Chuck and Felicity are drinking wine, too, something red and expensive that wraps your tongue in money because that’s the only kind Felicity likes. She’s fixed something vegan because she refuses to eat meat or any part of an animal and Chuck will eat that and compliment her on her cooking and Felicity will pour him a second and a third glass of wine and ask him if he really, really wants to go out in this weather. And he’ll say no and at some point, they’ll drink each other sweet again, cross over into the zone where anything can happen and usually does.
❦
She wakes up to a shift in the bed: Chuck, she thinks. But it’s only Strange Cat standing over her, not demanding anything, food or affection, the way Fluffy would, but staring down at her, looking concerned. He sniffs her elbow and her hip and turns three times and settles in, leaning the full weight of his heavy self against her bent knees.
She pets him on the head and scratches his right ear, feeling for the place that’s torn. She suspects that no one is looking for him and never will, no matter how sweet or pleasant he is. Why bother with mutts when you can have a pedigree? her father used to say. And it’s true. Every man she’s known has wanted a Fluffy, no matter how temperamental and demanding, like beauty is an achievement instead of an accident. Like it’s somehow equated with goodness.
She knows Fluffy will be fine wherever she is. Pretty girls always land on their feet.
Tomorrow she’ll get Strange Cat his own food and water bowls, a soft bed and some catnip mice. She’ll give him a name. Sorry, maybe. That’s a good enough name. ♦︎
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