Chapter 2 #2
I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling. “Hey,” I stuck my finger out and waved it in Silver’s direction. “Come on, do the trick.”
Silver looked away. James stuck out his finger, and she ran to meet it with her nose.
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“She’s known me for ages,” he said. “Don’t take it personally.”
“Do you think she can tell I’ve never met a cat before?”
“Wait, what?” James looked surprised. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know, is that a big deal? I didn’t have pets growing up. And dogs were more fashionable when I was a kid.”
James didn’t say anything. I continued. “I mean, I’ve met dogs before. You run into them all the time on the street. But cats don’t really go outside. It’s actually pretty difficult to meet a cat. You’d have to go into people’s houses.” I began to worry I’d shared too much.
“Wow,” James said. “You’ve never touched a cat.”
We spent some time talking about the likelihood of meeting and/or touching a cat. I began to doubt myself. Maybe I really had touched cats. But when I tried to imagine the sensation, nothing happened inside me. “My mother said pets weren’t worth the heartbreak when they died,” I said.
Silver’s head turned. James, who had been having a good time questioning me until now, took on a sympathetic look. “That’s a bit harsh. And I’d beg to differ.”
Then he waved his finger in the air and Silver returned her attention to him, tottering over and rising on her hind legs like a competition pony plumping for applause.
—
Despite her belief in the unworthiness of pets, my mother wasn’t completely unyielding.
She let me keep a lizard I found in a flower pot when I was six.
After it died, she said, “I told you so.” But she’d overestimated my attachment to the lizard.
I only wanted it because I knew that she kept lizards as a kid, snuck them into the kitchen and fed them strips of dried seaweed when Bill, her father, wasn’t looking.
I cherished these stories about my mother’s childhood, which transpired just a few neighborhoods from mine, nestled against the leafy Little Rock woodlands. She rarely spoke about her past, so I took care to memorize the details.
For my eighth birthday, I begged for a dog.
Instead, my mother gifted me a red woven bracelet with jade beads.
Bill had made it for her when she turned eight herself, her first birthday in America.
It was an ugly thing, gray in places and missing several beads, but I loved the idea of it wrapped around my mother’s then-thin wrist, becoming gross and soft with time.
She clapped when I tightened the string.
We kissed on the lips, making exaggerated smacking sounds the way people kissed in black-and-white cartoons, which we watched that night until we fell asleep, our bodies pressed against each other on the edge of the couch so our necks hurt in the exact same place when we woke.
The next day, she surprised me with a trip to the animal shelter.
I hopped from pen to pen and became enamored with a Labrador while my mother became attracted to a timid runt.
Nobody knew its breed. The runt nosed into her elbow, as if they already knew each other.
With a look of devastated adoration on her face, my mother turned to me.
The Labrador was too big, she said, didn’t I want this poor thing instead?
A bad thing unfurled inside me, grew bigger when I looked into the runt’s pleading eyes.
I said no. It cried when she returned it to the pen, and I was sorry, but the relief of being alone with my mother on the drive home was immense.
—
In the evening, after he was done with work, James went on a run. I admired the force with which he tied his shoes, bunny-ear style. His fingers yanked the ears straight and taut, always holding for a second to solidify the knot.
I had a text from Lou. It was her third time in two days asking for money. I owed her around a hundred dollars for the previous two months’ utilities, but my paycheck was delayed, and my savings had dwindled to the point that if I took out more, my bank would charge me. I messaged back:
Can I have another day? They’re supposed to pay me tomorrow
Until last week, I worked part-time for our university’s law school, a work-study job I started in my freshman year and held up to graduation.
It was remote, paid well for work study, and the labor was mindless.
Mostly I organized documents and skimmed them for identifying material.
After I graduated in May, the university agreed to extend my contract through the summer.
It was unusual, but they were slammed, and I was cheap.
I needed the money, but felt incapable of applying for more serious, real-world jobs.
But summer was over, they’d found a replacement, and they still hadn’t processed my paycheck.
Lou typed for a while before her message came through. She simply responded: ugh.
I put down my phone. It lit up immediately with a new message from Lou.
not trying to be mean. but i know your school gig ended. do u have anything lined up?
I lowered my phone again. Whenever I was confronted with the prospect of finding new employment, my brain itched like it was being poked by a lot of tiny needles.
My fingers rose to braid my hair, something I was good at doing.
I braided my hair so tight and often that sometimes chunks of hair would fall out—only a few strands, though. My hair grew back quickly.
Lou wrote:
do u need help? intros?
I wrote back: No.
I didn’t know why I declined so quickly. I could probably do with some help. My braid loosened, fell apart. She replied:
why? everybody does it katie it’s nbd. do you think you’re above all that?
Did I? If anything, I felt the opposite, that the kind of work Lou and most of my classmates did—art and finance and management consulting—were above me.
Besides, I’d met Lou’s connections. Twenty-two-year-olds who wanted to be senators, children of curators with brownstones in the city.
These people tended to ignore me. I was certain that if Lou and I hadn’t been assigned to live together in our freshman year, we wouldn’t be friends.
Though, four years later, the word friend still felt presumptuous, and I usually defaulted to roommate.
It wasn’t clear which was more appropriate.
She fished my hair out of the shower drain, I knew the shape of her toenail clippings, but we didn’t share much of our lives beyond getting enormously drunk.
“Ugh, Katie.” Lou sent a voice note this time.
“Hang on, I’m about to get home.” I listened to her breathe for thirty seconds before the sound of a door slamming shut introduced a new silence.
“Okay, sorry. I just got home from work.” Lou was an assistant at her uncle’s art gallery.
She often worked weekends and brought this fact up so frequently I couldn’t tell if it actually bothered her.
“I think you sound depressed. And being depressed isn’t a bad thing.
But since graduation, all you do is spend time with James, which is unhealthy, on top of being boring.
Also, who cares about being worthy for a job?
It’s not like my job chose me because I’m worthy of something. I just networked my ass off.”
My fingers moved to reply, but I didn’t know what to say. Lou was talented at expressing herself, and I often found myself deferring to her beliefs. According to her, I had a “shallow emotional manner.” She went to therapy every week and was well-versed in that kind of language.
Another voice note: “Anyway, you can have until tomorrow. But Anna’s getting annoyed. Also, where have you been?”
Anna was Lou’s cousin. She owned an apartment in the Upper West Side and rented it to us for cheap. I replied that I would be with James for the next two weeks, which Lou saw but did not respond to.
Even though I could be shy, I wasn’t particularly insecure until I met Lou.
She moved in the day before I did, so our room was already marked by her perfume (amber, oud) and her belongings, four suitcases of them.
She claimed the bed by the window and covered the wall with a gigantic print of different shades of orange.
When I asked if it was her art, she looked stunned.
It was a Rothko. It was obvious I didn’t know Rothko, but she didn’t explain.
The lack of explanation made it clear to me that I was supposed to know, which was the crucial conclusion, more important even than who Rothko was.
This was college’s best lesson, and Lou taught it to me early.
We didn’t speak until, three weeks later, she shared with me a handle of peach vodka and we discovered we were the same kind of drinker: serious, non-teary.