Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

With the door barely ajar, Lavinia reaches in to dispel the cats and grab the baby gate. “Shoo, get, go. Back, you beasts, back.” She’s locking the gate into the opening, hissing at Casey, Wallace, Rodeo Roy, and several others trying to escape when Jason, a sneak with a white-masked face like the killer in the Friday the 13th movie, leaps, passing through her reaching fingers silky, muscular, untouchable, already gone.

A nail protruding from the metal weather stripping gouges Lavinia’s finger. “Dammit, Jason!” She gets the storm door shut, then trips down the stairs, sucking salty, warm blood from her hand.

Jason has stopped, a bit dumbstruck, in the middle of the yellow yard. A rotting privacy fence barricades his route to Newton Street and a thick stand of yews in front of a chain-link obstructs the alley behind, so Lavinia positions herself between her house and old man Pultwock’s, barely six feet apart. “Here kitty kitty, here.” She crouches seductively. “Come on, Jase. I got food in the house.” He plops on his side, turning his black body in the warm grass as she stoop-walks toward him, cooing, “Here kitty kitty, come to Mama.”

Just when she gets close enough to touch him, reaching out with a tentative, inveigling rub of her forefinger and thumb, old man Pultwock’s screen door whacks shut. Jason darts toward the back fence and disappears inside the yews.

Pultwock slaps down his steps in scuff slippers, waving his finger. “Mary, you let that damn cat go! That’s what we need, a mass exodus, a diaspora!”

Lavinia is the name of Emily Dickinson’s sister who liked cats. Mary started to think of herself as Lavinia after Carl killed himself.

She scowls at old man Pultwock. It’s a bad omen, this old man knowing the word “diaspora,” her just learning it last week. She read it in a book she bought at a garage sale about a Jewish woman forced to put her cat to sleep when Hitler forbade Jews to own pets. It struck Lavinia as the most horrible thing she’d ever heard about Nazis. It was one thing to want someone dead, but the capricious, petty denial of even this love? That seems altogether a different class of cruelty.

“I know what you got in there,” Pultwock says.

“Sh!” Lavinia flashes over her shoulder, finger to her lips.

“Let him go. Probably be happier free.” As he leans to peer into the yews, a gap opens in Pultwock’s robe, revealing the inside of drooping, white thighs, like raw chicken on a hook.

“Walter, he’s not going to come out with you there.”

Old man Pultwock straightens up. “Be for the better. What would your mother say to this? You think she’d approve?” He flicks a cigarette nub into the gravel between their houses, where at least fifty others lay scattered like toy infantry after a fire bombing. When Lavinia’s son Christopher was a child he made up whole army divisions from their ashtrays. Carl’s butts were the brown army, Lavinia’s the white. When she wore lipstick, the opposing army became communists.

Lavinia parts the yews, calling “Here kitty kitty kitty, here,” then holds her finger to her lips again and listens, hoping to locate Jason by a telltale rustle, but a train becomes audible just then. The ground vibrates and Lavinia raises her voice, going further along the fence line, toward Pultwock’s yard.

He follows, complaining. “I saw you take my paper on your way to work last night.”

Lavinia clerks nights at a convenient store ten blocks down on St. Claire. “Yep,” she says. “You know I need those.”

Pultwock always puts the papers on the top of his garbage cans, then hauls the cans to the curb, pretending to know nothing about what Lavinia needs.

“I see you got boxes this morning. What’s them for?”

Lavinia has a new plan for the basement, so she brought home several empty cardboard boxes from the store. She’s not surprised Pultwock saw her. He has always made a point of knowing her routine.

To get rid of him, she lies. “I’m using them to pack some things up, you know, clean house.”

“You? Clean?” Pultwock’s saliva trembles on his thin, red lip, one bubble balanced on the tip of a chin whisker. The bubble’s utter unlikeliness, its dogged persistence, galls Lavinia. She imagines grabbing Jason out of the bushes and tossing him — claws fully extended — at that chin.

“Would you please go inside, Walter? Jason’s never going to come out with you here.”

“Shit, I don’t see as he’s going to come out with or without me here. What do you think? He appreciates you? Cats are stupid animals. Now dogs, they’d know what they got. A dog would come back.”

Lavinia returns to her own yard, still stoop-walking to peer into the yews. Pultwock follows. “That dog your mother had, he was something. He could shake hands and if you held up a hot dog he’d dance like a goddamn ballerina.”

Lavinia is annoyed by the mention of her mother’s dog. She took him to the pound after her mother died, mainly because Carl had just gotten her Fritz and they were not getting along.

Lavinia continues to croon for Jason, on her hands and knees now.

Pultwock laughs. “Jesus, Mary, look at you? You think that cat would care if you lived or died?”

Lavinia stands up and brushes off her jeans, belatedly aware of how her rump must have looked from Pultwock’s view. “Shut up, Walter. Just shut up.”

“So you going to tell me why you really got them boxes?”

“I’m sending some things to my son and his wife, okay? The family china.”

“China, uh!” Pultwock guffaws. “You and that girl are on the outs, right? I sure don’t see her come round here after that fight a while back.”

“They’re busy,” Lavinia says. “They’ve got little kids.” Patti was pregnant last time Lavinia saw her. She would have had the baby by now.

Suddenly Pultwock shouts, “You’re moving, aren’t you? That’s what they’re for. You’re moving out!” He says it with shock and anger, as if they were lovers.

Lavinia trudges up the back stairs. “You caught me, Walt. I’m leaving you.”

Just as the door shuts she hears him mutter, “Crazy bitch.”

The corner of Newton and Wade is an island of five houses cut off from the adjacent neighborhoods by the interstate, the Amtrak station, an empty warehouse, a bar called The Rusty Tavern, a boarded-up building still advertising on a wooden sign “Bait and Grocer” in cracked red paint, and a few oddly contemporary businesses — ZZ Graphics, a brand-new post office. On the far side of the warehouse the High Level Bridge rises across the Maumee. Its blue-gray steel is lit all year round with white lights.

Of the five houses on Lavinia’s street, she and old man Pultwock are the only permanent residents. The house on the opposite side of Pultwock is boarded up and the two on the far side of that are rentals, their occupants changing each year, sometimes in the course of a few months.

Lavinia’s mother bought the corner house with life-insurance money from J&M Stamping, where Lavinia’s father worked as a machine operator for better than thirty years. Her parents, Catholics, had ten children, and could never afford to own until her father died. By then all but one of Lavinia’s siblings had moved out. Her brother Luke went all the way to Texas. He made money in the concrete business and built a huge stucco house that reminds Lavinia of a cult compound, with its two wings and guest house clutching a courtyard where he and his wife installed a Jesus fountain. In the pictures they sent, Jesus stands on the middle of an enormous concrete lily pad, hands outstretched, geysers of frothy water shooting from his palms.

Later Angela, the youngest, went to Idaho on a college scholarship and lost touch. Lavinia’s brother Todd moved to Detroit and died of pneumonia in the mid-’80s. As for the rest, Lavinia has argued with all of them over the years, and now that their mother is no longer a common thread, no one bothers making it up.