the cat came back
George is about an hour from Chicago, the cherubs and I can’t wait to go get him from the airport. He’s been gone long enough. We all did what we needed and wanted to do, a grand time was had by all, but the littlest one said it best the other night: Our family works better when we’re all together.
I found this section in my fiction journal the other day, and it raised an interesting question. Though the passage is definitely based upon a very real scene, it is also certainly fictionalized. I can’t remember any more what’s real and what’s invented. I’m sure I know a couple of people who could tell me.
I watched carefully that afternoon. You stood there, in the back bedroom, between the bed and the window. He sat in front of you, the back of the dining room chair snuggled up against the once-green silken curtains, yellow now in an uneven pattern of squares and rectangles, left behind like souvieners from the windows they once hung to protect. I imagine that you see the pattern while you stand there, lining up in your memory the window panes from the house on Dewey. Ah. The House On Dewey is how I see it in my mind, in all caps, that front sitting room decorated with the first money your mother made when she went to work in the travel agency. She had shepherded three teenagers successfully through the fifties and sixties. The girls married well, but not too well. You were mired in the heartache that was uniquely yours to create. The wicked phase of the Prodigal Son.
“They moved,” you told me that night in Orlando when we sat side by side on an opricot leather couch in a hotel lobby, “and didn’t tell me where. I got out of the cab there in the middle of Dewey and paid the guy with my last five bucks. All I wanted was a glass of water and a long, long nap. But the doors were locked, even the screen. I leaned over the railing and pressed my nose to the front-room window, cupping my hands to keep the light out, I squinted hard and felt the cold glass against my nose. They’d quit it and me and everything and I had no idea what to do next.”
“A neighbor, Mister Wallace maybe, came by watering his roses. ‘They’ve gone,’ he told me, ‘A couple days ago.’”
That was all you needed, you told me. The beginning of the beginning. Though he wouldn’t let you use his phone, Mr. Wallace lent you a dime and you used the pay phone. You called your father in his office. You asked for help.
I watched you lean over him there, in the back bedroom. You were so careful, so respectful, gentle. You held his chin in your left hand and the electric razor in your right, chattering away in that quiet and reassuring way you have.
“Just a little move, pops,” you said, “just so I can see for a second. Don’t want any stray hairs hanging around to tickle your girlfriends. I always hate that, when I shave in the morning and then I’m sitting there mid-afternoon, trying to talk on the phone and then I rub my hand against my cheek and I find that I missed a whole section of beard and then I can’t stop touching it, thinking about it. I always get a little embarrassed,” you say, though I know you are almost never embarrassed, “like when I have spinach in my teeth. Of course you won’t have spinach in your teeth,” you chide him, “because you never eat your vegetables. What’s that about, pops? Tilt again for me, just a second. There, right like that.”
Back to work on the short stories tomorrow, wrapping up the Wolfhound/Tabby Cat piece first, then my sweet little filmmaker along with the power scenes from Keeping Score. I expect the shorts to finish before Detroit so I can come back in April ready to put my head down and finish what I’ve started.
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