Be Careful What You Wish For

                               Be Careful What You Wish For

The actual words were just scrambled eggs in my head.  

 It started with, “We need to talk”, the scariest four-word sentence I know.  

I got up from the couch leaving Gwendolyn and Cecily curled up together. Since we got them as kittens a year ago, they’d been inseparable and impossibly cute.  Ann slid into the dining alcove I always considered cozy, but now as I sat down on the opposite side, I felt like a defendant awaiting a verdict. She looked directly into my eyes but with little emotion that I could see. 

“I’ve got some things to think about, and it would be better if you left”. 

The words were delivered in a gentle but firm tone, as if this would be good for me. No recriminations. No accusations. It was hard to respond to. It was like being given a test I was unprepared for; or “the actors nightmare” where you’re on stage in a play you’ve never heard of, so you make up a line: 

“You mean for good?” (You can’t mean that, can you?) 

“I don’t know,” she said. My stomach dropped out, and there was a palpable pain in the middle of my chest. It was warm for November, and I had the fleeting thought that the neighbors, whose house was ten feet away, could hear this exchange through the open window. Something in my brain launched a protective shell around me and prevented me from saying, “How could you do this to me”? I thought you loved me” and “What am I going to do now?” 

It also seemed to prevent me from saying “I love you”. 

Instead I said something like “Give me a chance to find someplace, and I’ll be out of here as soon as I can”.  My head felt like a Cuisinart whirring with a million questions I’d have to answer: 

Where will I live? 

Who should I call? 

Is this really temporary? 

Does she have someone else? 

What will my life look like? 

It’s three weeks to Thanksgiving-what will I do? 

“How long do I have?” I said out loud. 

“As soon as possible would be good”.  

As it was Ann’s house, and I moved in with little more than my clothes and a computer, there wasn’t much room to negotiate. 

“What about the girls?” I don’t remember who asked the question.  

 “I don’t think we should separate them” I said. 

 “I agree, she replied. If you want to take them, you can.” 

 I looked back at the couch. They were curled up so close together that they seemed to blend in to each other. As sisters, their calico coloring looked like a furry abstract painting. How could Ann let them go?  

 In a response that was both instinctive and surprising to both of us, I said, “I will”. Somehow instinctively knew I needed them and wanted to continue to take care of them.

Looking back, it may have been the only part of this narrative I could control.  I wonder if my getting the cats is how a football player feels when he scores three touchdowns, and his team still loses. It’s just that this time, there’s no game next week, and all I feel like doing is sitting in the locker room in my dirty uniform wondering what I could have done to change the outcome. 

 We were living in a house she owned so there wasn’t much to negotiate. I moved in with little more than my clothes, books and personal belongings. She did leave the door open to getting back together, but that was delivered with little conviction. It was a version of “it’s not you, it’s me” but my leaving was not negotiable. In a few weeks I found an apartment in a private home about a mile in away from where we lived. On the day I moved out Ann was not home. A friend helped me with the move and advised me, “check each room, make sure you have everything then close the door of each room behind you as you leave”. It was a sobering exercise.

Six hours later I was staring at all my earthly belongings which were now in a two room basement apartment. I opened the cat carriers so that the girls could start acclimating themselves. They slowly acquainted themselves with new smells and new geography. I laid out their litter box as well as their food and water dishes and went about the task of organizing the outline of my new life as far as my living arrangements were concerned.

As determined as I was to take only what I needed, there were items that after I unpacked them, were clearly not worth taking up space in the little space that I had. So began a series of trips to the garbage cans on the side of the house, past the driveway in which the homeowner’s car was parked. In making these trips to rid myself of excess possessions, I made a serious mistake-one I had never done in my cat’s entire lives. Gwendolyn and Cecily were house cats and I was terrified about them getting out. I would scrupulously make sure they were far clear of the doorway whenever I left the house. Whether it was the stress of moving, or fatigue, on one of my trips to the sidewalk I left the outside door open. As I turned to go back to the apartment, a distance of no more than twenty feet, I saw Gwendolyn dash out of the apartment, and, being obviously terrified, ran under the car that was parked in the driveway.

She was under the middle of the car, too far for me to reach, so I decided to use whatever I could to shoo her out from under the car back into the apartment. However, that would entail leaving the door to the apartment open and I feared that Cecily would bolt outside as well. Reluctant as I was to leave Gwendolyn, I dashed back into the apartment, and scooped up Cecily, all the while fearing Gwendolyn would dash off somewhere else and I wouldn’t be able to find her. I quickly locked Cecily in the bathroom and ran back out with my heart in my mouth. I left the door to the apartment open and crawled under the car with a broom. I swiped it near enough to Gwendolyn that she scampered away and out from underneath the car. Finding herself at the open door she jetted inside. I quickly closed the door behind both of us and said a silent prayer of thanks.