Dewey's Nine Lives

On the corner of Chestnut and Floral Boulevard, a block from Lynda’s house, was the Bellerose station of the Long Island Rail Road. It was only a fifteen-minute train ride to Penn Station, but Lynda never went to the City. Maybe once a year, maybe, if there was a Broadway show she wanted to see. Like most people in Floral Park, her life was not oriented toward Manhattan. Most of her friends—even her best friend, who as a two-year-old had pushed infant Lynda in her baby carriage through Bayside—lived in Floral Park now. They had been raised in outer Queens and then migrated a few miles east to quieter streets and a more suburban neighborhood. In that neighborhood, they re-created for each other what Lynda’s family had been in Bayside: a community of support and love. She hadn’t moved far. Not geographically, anyway. The ten-mile circle of neighborhoods where Queens meets Long Island, after all, was Lynda’s world. She was overjoyed to have found her little plot of Americana right in the center of it.

Jennifer . . . well, not so much. She was twenty-three years old, still living with Mom in the house she had grown up in, and she was adamant that she would not move out of the old neighborhood. She refused to pack so much as a toothbrush; in the end, Lynda was forced to pay the movers to pack her daughter’s things.

Chloe and Cookie were worse. Especially Cookie, who was a master communicator. She used pushing, foot sitting, and tripping as a signaling system, and she seemed to have a different meow for every occasion. She had a meow that meant she was annoyed. A meow for when she was happy. A meow that meant Leave me alone. A meow that meant Come here. A meow that said I’d like some, please. A more forceful meow that said I want without the please. And, of course, a gimme, gimme, gimme meow for broccoli rabe. She even had a special high-pitched meow for when she really wanted Lynda’s attention, which sounded exactly like Mom. Lynda wasn’t so delusional to think her cat was really calling her mom. She assumed she was imagining that one. But whenever her friends heard Cookie whining for attention, their jaws dropped.

“Did she say mom?” they all asked.

“It sure sounded like it, didn’t it?” Lynda would say, flushing with pride.

Not this time, though. This time, as Lynda packed for the move, Cookie wasn’t pleading or questioning or kissing up with her “Mom” meows. This time, she was screaming at Lynda.

When moving day arrived, Cookie stopped screaming and disappeared. She had no intention, absolutely none, of leaving that town house. It took Lynda hours to wrangle both cats and shove them into their carrier. Cookie, in frustration, began to bang her head and rub her face on the bars of the carrier door. By the time they arrived in Floral Park, only twenty minutes away, Cookie’s nose pad was torn and covered with blood. Lynda could barely look at her. She felt so guilty.

When she opened the cage door, Cookie and Chloe didn’t even stop to acknowledge her. They ran straight upstairs and hid under the guest bed. Jennifer recovered quickly. Within two days, she met new friends and was right at home in Floral Park. It took Cookie and Chloe a while longer. Except for biological necessity, they refused to come out from under the bed. When Lynda tried to coax them out, Chloe retreated to a corner, and Cookie walked forward a few steps to complain. That was it. For three months.

And then, all was forgiven. Was it a few days after Cookie emerged from under the bed before the complaining stopped? Was it a few months? A year? I’m sure it took Cookie time to adjust, even after giving up her protest, but does it really matter how long? In the end, Cookie loved the new house as much as Lynda did. She loved it so much, in fact, that she couldn’t settle on a favorite spot. For a few weeks, it was the ottoman. She sprawled out there every night while Lynda watched television. Then it was the rocking chair. That lasted about six weeks. Then the top of the sofa, a dining room chair, the corner behind a piece of furniture, her little cat bed at the top of the stairs. Lynda was a quilter, and Cookie had several favorite spots in the new quilting room. For a summer, she fell in love with the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Lynda kept the shelf filled with quilts, which she made as presents for her friends and relatives. She made one for Cookie, too, of course. It had a floral pattern in the middle with alternating pictures of kittens and puppies around the edges. Cookie lay on a quilt almost every day, but she never lay on that one. Why dirty her special quilt, after all, when she could leave fur on something everyone else was going to sit on, too?