Гвен Купер - Love Saves The Day

Josh likes to use this cat bed as a scratching post, exercising his fingers on it without stopping for hours on end. They make a clackety-clack noise and not the clawing sounds that usually come from a scratching post. If he sees me sleeping on it—using it the right way—he chases me off so he can take over and use it the wrong way. So now I come in here to nap lightly for brief stretches during the day while he’s gone. The first few times Josh saw me sleeping here, he told me that my having to stay off it was a “rule.” If I weren’t so tired from not sleeping enough, I probably would have thought Josh giving me “rules” was funny. All cats are born knowing that there’s no point in paying attention to unreasonable rules made by humans. Besides, what humans don’t know won’t hurt them.

I’m able to sleep for a little while, but everything still smells too foreign for me to relax very much. I step carefully from the cat bed to the desk, from the desk to the chair in front of it, and then leap from the chair to the floor. Then I make my way back to the room Laura feeds me in. The room with all the Sarah-boxes.

Laura might not like coming into this room very much, but I do have to admit that she’s very good at keeping to a schedule—much better than Sarah. She feeds me at the same time every morning except on Sundays, which is the only day when Laura doesn’t go to her office. She works in a law office like Sarah, and Laura must do something even more important than typing because the humans in her office need her to do her work just about every second she’s awake. When she comes home at night she brings big stacks of paper with her so she can do even more work here in the apartment. She wears glasses while she reads her work papers, and probably she wears the glasses in her office, too. There are always faint pink marks on the sides of her nose from where they press into her skin.

Laura’s workdays are much longer than Sarah’s ever were, and it’s usually long after dark before she comes home to give me my nighttime feeding. Most nights Josh goes out with friends from his own work, but even so he still gets home before Laura. Sometimes he tells her that he wishes she could come home earlier, and Laura explains how her clients’ businesses would fall apart if she didn’t do as much work as she does, and then her bosses would give her even less work in the future. Getting less work sounds just fine to me, but Laura obviously thinks this would be a bad thing. It seems like the more work some humans do, the more work they have to do, which doesn’t make any sense. But very little of the way humans think about things makes sense to me.

The walls in this room are painted yellow, and the paint in here smells new. The floor is made of smooth wooden boards that have been polished until they shine in the sunlight like water. The first few days I was here, I thought maybe the floors really were made of water, they were so slippery. It took me days to learn how to walk here without my hind legs sliding out from under me if I ran or turned too quickly.

These same slippery wooden boards cover all the floors in the rest of the apartment, and even Laura and Josh slip a little on them sometimes. The other day Laura slid right into Josh as they were walking down the hall, and he reached out and grabbed her before she fell. I would have hated having a human grab me that way, but Laura squirmed and laughed. She laughs at a lot of the things Josh does. Sometimes he crumples a paper napkin in his hand, brings his hand to his mouth, and then coughs—making the crumpled paper napkin fly out. Oh, excuse me , he’ll say. I don’t know how that happened . It looks ridiculous to me, but Laura always rolls her eyes and laughs. This hardly seems fair. When I cough up a hairball for real, Laura doesn’t roll her eyes affectionately while she cleans it up and say, You’re so funny, Prudence!

This room is mostly empty aside from the Sarah-boxes and four dark brown wooden chairs with black leather seats, which live stacked up in one corner. I tried marking just one of the chairs in this room with my claws the way I’d marked our couch in Lower East Side (all I wanted was to make this room feel more like my own), but Laura saw me and said, “ No! No, Prudence!” in a sharp voice. I don’t see why she had to get so excited. She could have calmly said something like, Prudence, marking chairs is bad manners in Upper West Side , and I would have understood her just as well. Maybe even better.

I don’t really need the chairs anyway, though, because the two big windows have sills for me to lie on while I look at things outside. This apartment is so high up that from the windows I can see all kinds of things I never thought about before. Like what the tops of buildings look like. Some of them have black tops, and some of them are white, and some have little brick areas where humans grow flowers and sit outside in the sunshine. A few of the roofs have these giant, pointy-topped round things I once heard Josh call “water towers.” All around us is more sky than I’ve ever seen, and when the sun is very bright and the sky is very blue, I see little squiggly things behind my eyes if I stare at it too long.

If Sarah lived here with me, she would probably carry one of those chairs from the corner next to the window, so the two of us could sit and look out at the sunshine together. She’d hum and stroke my fur while I sat in her lap, and maybe she’d even sing the Prudence song to me until I fell into a deep sleep.

But I’m alone in here almost all the time, and the only music anybody has sung to me since I left Lower East Side is the memory-music Sarah sings inside my head.

I hear a key turning in the lock of the front door downstairs, and from all the jingling I know it’s Josh. Laura must always have her key ready as soon as she steps out of the elevator. I never hear her jingling keys around, looking for the right one, before she comes in.

The sound of Josh’s feet-shoes comes up the stairs, and the faint scent of his cologne that smells so much stronger in the mornings drifts past as he walks toward his and Laura’s bedroom. After he changes out of his work clothes into socks and sweat-clothes, he spends a little while clackety-clacking on the scratching post in Home Office. Then he goes downstairs to listen to music in the living room while he waits for Laura. I hear the muffled sounds of it coming up through the floor of my room.

Most of Josh’s music lives on small silvery disks that go in a different kind of machine than the table Sarah uses to make her black disks sing. He also has a few black disks, although not nearly as many as Sarah. Even Sarah didn’t have more than a few when I first adopted her. Her posters and black disks and the special “DJ” table she plays them on were living by themselves for years and years in a place called Storage. It was only after I’d been living with Sarah for nearly two months that she went out one day and brought them home. It was you, you know , Sarah murmured later, when we were on the couch listening to the black disks together. You brought my music back. I thought I’d lost it forever . I rolled onto my side and purred, because I could tell from Sarah’s voice and hands how much love there was between us in that moment. But I didn’t know what I’d done to give Sarah back her music. Maybe I’ll do whatever it was again. Maybe (if I have to be here that long) in a couple of months Laura and Josh will drive out to Storage one day and come back with hundreds of their own black disks.

Josh likes music almost as much as Sarah. If he’s listening to music and Laura is in the room, he’ll pucker his lips and put his hands on his hips and pretend to strut around. He looks pretty foolish when he does this, but it always makes Laura laugh. Or he’ll take Laura’s hand and put his arm around her waist, and the two of them dance for real. It makes me wonder if Sarah would have liked to have another human to dance with when she used to listen to music in our old apartment.