Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Inside the tiny kitchen white oil paint, long yellowed, flakes from the walls. Exposed wooden shelves hold Corelle plates. In the middle of the room, a Bakelite dinette set with green vinyl seats scored by claws into patterns like the veins on a leaf. Lavinia shuffles around forking canned Friskies onto two dozen plates.

The gluttonous — Adrienne, Plato, Camus, Ginger, Peter, Wally, Fyodor — dominate the plates while she stands at the sink waiting for Pultwock to go inside, but he seems to have settled in for the duration on his back steps.

When Lavinia’s mother died it was Luke who called. Apparently his phone number was the first on the yellow scrap of paper her mother kept affixed to the fridge with a plastic Virgin Mary magnet. He said a neighbor found her. Lavinia had never thought to ask how the neighbor got in, or who it was, but it flashes to her — Pultwock, of course, even though before today he’s never said a word about Lavinia’s mother. Until this moment Lavinia would have said they hardly knew each other, though that would be nearly impossible with the houses so close, their backyards the only grass for blocks around.

Emily, an all-white stray who regularly disappears for days in the basement rafters, jumps up and butts Lavinia’s elbow. She pets her in a circular motion between the ears, a light touch the skittish cat prefers. “Be patient, Camus is almost done. Can’t you see his little belly swelling?”

On top of the fridge Fritz wails. Lavinia drums the counter. “Come on down, Fritzie. Come on. They’ll be done. You and Em can eat soon.” Fritz meows with increased pitch, a formal complaint against her coldness. “No, you don’t need help. You got yourself up there, now get yourself down.” Nonetheless Lavinia shuffles amid the swirling bodies and offers her arms. Fritz hesitates, then leaps, his claws piercing her shirt and the tender skin of her breasts. She grips him to her.

Several of the cats have clogged tear ducts, so every day she wipes the corners of their iridian eyes free of a brick-colored ooze which, left untended, would stain their delicate faces. She scissors out matted clumps of fur or dried feces caught in errant, long-haired tails. When brawls occur, she applies first aid with a lightning swipe of a damp paper towel and a glob of Neosporin. After Rodeo Roy, a clumsy gray tabby, broke his leg falling between the back of the couch and the wall, Lavinia made a splint out of popsicle sticks and caged him to heal in a kennel fashioned from a cardboard box. For circulation, she cut out the words “Get Well” on one side and “Be Careful” on the other.

Lavinia shoos Peter and Virginia away from one of the plates and installs Fritz, then shuffles through the living room to peer out the front window. The cats, fifteen or twenty at the moment, dominate the furniture like a collection of stuffed toys in a store window. The answering machine is supposed to be on top of the TV, but today it’s wedged behind, knocked off by Lucifer, who crouches on the warm set, which Lavinia rarely shuts off.

She rights the machine. Its light isn’t on, but Lavinia pushes the “play” button anyway, holding the little box as if to coax something from it. What if the light has burned out? No. It’s the same message, unerased by future calls for over a year. “Hi, Mary, look, after what happened today I just don’t think it’s a good idea for the kids to see you for a while. It’s…” Christopher says something in the background, then a child laughs, and Patti resumes, speaking more quickly, her voice lowered. “It’s better if we just don’t come down for a while. Better for Hannah, you know, and maybe, you could just be reasonable , and get rid of some of them. Just some. Not all. Anyway, I have to go. I really do.”

Lavinia lets the tape run out, then rewind itself. Has it really been a year since she’s gotten a message? Working nights, she’s mostly home during the day for solicitors and an ancient aunt who lives in Michigan. Lavinia lays the machine back on top of the TV, next to an old car-wash coupon taped face down. The back reads, If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy. The more one loves, the stronger the absurd grows .

Lavinia returns to the kitchen and looks out the window. Pultwock remains. She watches him as she cracks open another eight Friskies cans. “Do you think he’s ever going in?” she asks the cats. “What’s he waiting for? Rotten old man.”

The last time her daughter-in-law Patti came over, Lavinia put most of the cats in the basement, but while she had her back turned making peanut butter sandwiches, her granddaughter opened the door. About twenty of them flooded up and Hannah leapt into her mother’s lap, clawing her throat.

Lavinia had stood on the porch hollering as Patti fumbled to buckle the girl in the car. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart! Camus said that! Not your crazy mother-in-law. I didn’t say that! Camus did!” Of course, Patti hadn’t read The Myth of Sisyphus , which Lavinia found at a garage sale six months after Carl’s death. She could not possibly have appreciated the significance of the simple truth Lavinia was trying to impart. The cats are alive. What else can she do but feed them?

As Patti drove away, Lavinia spotted old man Pultwock peeping out his front door. “Oh, you’ve never even heard of Camus!” she’d hollered. “What would you know?”

After breakfast the cats settle down to nap.

Poppy, Frank, and Clover curl up on the back of the sofa. Venus, Emily, Moss, and Trevor take over the cushions. Norma Jean’s tail peeks out from beneath.

Rose, Stanley, Pinky, Lucy, and Mabel balance on the window sills, tucked behind the drawn curtains.

Lily, Daisy, Roger, Oscar, Opal, Ruby, Eliot, and Lion sprawl on the floor in the narrow lines of sunshine that break through, turning the brown carpet tan.

Everyone else is either in the kitchen, the basement, one of the two bedrooms off the living room, or the bathroom, a jigsaw of chipped porcelain with a pocket door — no room for swinging.

Lavinia settles into Carl’s recliner, where she can see Pultwock from the side window and keep an eye out for Jason coming around front as well.

If you have four, or ten, or maybe even twenty cats, the sound of their sleeping is silence. If you have fifty or sixty, their breath can be heard, a collective purr rising in the air. Lavinia closes her eyes and listens to the hum, the cats’ breath the song of life, reminding her what it’s like.

She rocks back and forth in the old La-Z-Boy, a blue tweed recliner Carl bought with money he won in the Ohio Lottery. Six hundred and forty-seven dollars. His only winnings in twenty-five years. A dollar ticket every week for twenty-five years comes to one thousand three hundred dollars. Lavinia can’t remember if the lottery always cost a dollar. She is sure that Carl sometimes bet two or three, so either way the money he spent was far more than he got back.

Carl knew that. Of course he did.

Maryann and Ginger jump up and arrange themselves, spooning, one brown-haired, the other red. Lavinia found the girls on her way home from work a month after she found Carl in the basement. Two kittens huddled under a car parked illegally on St. Claire. Nearby, bloody and still, an adult cat. Lavinia wrapped the kittens in her scarf, tucked them inside her quilted black coat with the nacreous buttons, and took them home. They slept on her chest all night and she lay awake listening to the flutter of their infinitesimal hearts, picturing the organ’s incredible precision, its vulnerable red slickness, its mindless, perfect pumping.

Soon, other cats began to arrive. Fritz objected, peeing in her bedroom, first in the corner, then on the bed, finally on Carl’s pillow. But eventually he became accustomed to the influx of strangers, or simply lost track, as Lavinia imagines God does of all of us. “The anonymity of abundance,” she mutters, rubbing the girls’ backs, going against the lay of their fur so that she can feel the prickly spot where each hair joins the skin.