Love Saves the Day

I was miserable when I saw Sarah’s beautiful hair falling in sad little clumps to the floor, and for the first time I didn’t like Anise very much. But Laura’s reaction was even worse. When she came over three Sundays later and Sarah opened the door, Laura’s face froze. Her eyes widened and got shinier than normal. “Your hair!” she cried. “What happened to it?”

“You don’t like it.” Sarah made this a statement instead of a question.

“No, I just …” One hand moved up from Laura’s side as if she was going to touch the side of Sarah’s head, although it stopped before it got there. “I’m surprised, is all,” Laura finally said. “What made you decide to do something so radical?”

“I was ready for a change. Do you like it?” Sarah almost looked shy. “Anise did it for me.”

Laura made a sound like a snort. “That’s Anise,” she said. “You can always count on her for the little things.” She emphasized the word little.

Laura’s hair looks and smells like Sarah’s, although she spends more time straightening it in the mornings with a loud hair dryer than Sarah ever did. Laura cares about hair a lot. That must be why she got so upset when Anise cut Sarah’s off.

Sarah let her hair grow back long and never tried cutting it short again after that. When Laura visited, her eyes would travel to the top of Sarah’s head and down the length of Sarah’s hair while Sarah chattered at her. I think she was waiting for Laura to notice and say something about it. But Laura never did.

Laura doesn’t usually linger in this room, but sometimes—like now—she’ll spend long, quiet minutes after she feeds me looking out the windows, watching a flock of pigeons on the rooftop of the building across the street. You can see these same pigeons from the tall living room windows downstairs that go from the floor to the ceiling and make up two whole walls of the room. The pigeons are the same color as coffee when you add cream to it, which is an unusual color for pigeons. Other than that, though, I don’t see what’s so interesting about them. But Laura can’t seem to move her eyes away. She even winds a single strand of hair around one finger, the way Sarah always does when she’s thinking deeply about something.

I’ve tried watching the pigeons also, to see what Laura finds so fascinating, but all the pigeons ever do is fly around in big circles for an absurdly long time, and then come back to land on the rooftop. Naturally I hadn’t really expected to see much because pigeons aren’t even as smart as dogs, if you can believe it.

The room is silent while Laura watches the pigeons and I crouch in the closet waiting for her to leave. Upper West Side is quiet in ways that Lower East Side never was. In Sarah’s and my apartment, when the windows were open, I could hear squirrels and large bugs turning in the earth, birds singing while they nested in trees. People would walk along the sidewalk, their voices talking into tiny phones and the sounds drifting up to the third floor where Sarah and I lived. Cars drove past with music flying out of their rolled-down windows to announce that they had arrived. Like the way the man who lives in the lobby of this apartment building calls Laura and Josh to announce when their pizza or Chinese food is on its way upstairs. In Lower East Side, even when our windows were closed, you could always hear people talking in other apartments or water moving through pipes in the wall. Sometimes I would hear loud crack! sounds without being able to tell where they came from. It used to startle me until Sarah explained that it was just our building “settling.”

There are neighbors and cars and birds here in Upper West Side, too, but the street is so far below us that you can’t hear any of its sounds. I never hear people talking or playing their televisions loudly in their own apartments next to this one. Most days, after Laura and Josh have left for work, the only thing I hear is the jingle of the Prudence-tags on my red collar as I walk from room to room. Sometimes, if I’ve been sitting still for a while, I meow loudly and send the sound of it echoing from the walls and ceilings, just to make sure I haven’t gone deaf.

Sarah never liked it when things were too quiet. Maybe that’s why she played music and watched TV all the time. She would chatter and chatter at Laura whenever Laura came over to visit, afraid of the silence she would hear if she stopped because Laura never had much to say in return. Sarah told Anise once that Laura had built a wall around herself with silence. I used to imagine Sarah’s chatter going chip, chip, chip at this wall, even though I couldn’t see where the wall was. It must be different for Laura in Upper West Side, though, because she and Josh talk all the time.