Ugly

I hadn’t wanted to raise the cat my roommate didn’t deserve. The free one she picked up on the side of the road from a box that read FREE kittens in black sharpie where she resigned its mewling siblings to God knows what fate. The one with the scraggly black hair and watery eyes in its smooshed face. When it breathed, it wheezed. In the middle of the night, it made hacking sounds and would claw at the carpet, back hunched, like it was about to upchuck a lung, but nothing ever came up.

An abomination of evolution. A creature that shouldn’t exist but man made because he could.

“We’re not allowed to have cats,” I said when she brought it back to the apartment. No litter. No food.

“Pft. People let pets live in their apartments all the time. The landlord’s never around and whenever maintenance comes by,” she shrugs, “we’ll hide him.”

But Doria worked downtown at a glitzy magazine with crazy hours and late-night cocktail bar hops while I, working on my master’s thesis on the Anopheles gambiae, Africa’s most prolific malaria-spreading mosquito, and its affinity for limburger cheese, had a short commute from the desk in my bedroom to the refrigerator and back again.

By proxy, it became my cat.

“What’s its name?” I asked Doria one morning.

She shrugged. Then said with certainty: “Precious.”

Fuck that. I decided to call it, “Ugly.” Cats don’t know their names. I could call it anything; it only came running when I shook its bag of kibble.

Ugly wasn’t a lap cat. It wasn’t a play cat. It only purred when it shit. And when I took it to the vet, because while I had never owned a pet, it seemed important to establish a medical record, I learned he was a she.

“Isn’t that how the masculine norm crumbles?”

The veterinarian didn’t laugh.

Mostly, Ugly and I kept to our devices. Sure, she relied on me in a sort of symbiotic kind of way, but I hadn’t wanted a cat, and I wasn’t going to change my tune the moment one was foisted upon me.

Then Doria was fired from her glitzy magazine job. Given the classic: We’re moving in another direction, she decided she was moving back home to Buffalo. Her mother was allergic to cats.

“I guess we have to get rid of the cat.”

I looked at Ugly, smelling of poo, sitting beside me on a coach pillow. She blinked at us. It wasn’t clear to me why we had to do anything. Ugly had never been our cat.

“Nah. I’ll keep her.”

Doria blinked at me. “But it’s my cat.”

I blinked at Doria. “You just said you were going to get rid of her.”

The apartment was roomier and quieter without Doria.

For better or worse, I had more time to focus on Ugly. I became obsessed with the idea that she was bored. That cats weren’t meant to spend their entire lives in a two-bedroom studio apartment in Queens. But I didn’t want her wandering the streets either. What if the local youths threw rocks at her? What if she didn’t come back and days later on a walk to the library, I saw her, crushed flat in the street, head open, plucked clean by crows?

I couldn’t get another cat. I barely liked this one.

I decided to buy a leash and harness.

I’d seen a woman walking her cat in Astoria Park once. It’d looked insane. A spectacle. Someone every few feet had stopped her to ask: “You know that’s a cat, right?” And they’d laugh and laugh.

I didn’t want to be laughed and laughed at, but Ugly took precedence.

I took Ugly to Astoria in a mesh backpack with a flat bottom so she could breathe. I wrestled her out of it and held her between my thighs while I snapped her into the black harness with artsy renderings of the solar system printed on it. I feared someone would think I was torturing her; she yowled and clawed like she was being tortured.

No one cared.

For twenty minutes, she crouched in the grass, tail twitching, every passerby making her eyes go wide.

“That’s a cat,” a little boy stopped to say.

“I know.”

His mother pulled him away with a glare like Ugly was a pitbull. Maybe it was the annoyed look on my face when I said: “I know.”

A pigeon landed not far from Ugly. She wiggled her butt, ready to pounce. When she did, she learned about the constraints of leashes and watched forlornly as the pigeon flew away. She was braver after that. She stopped to sniff a mushroom. She hissed at a passing terrier. She leapt onto a tree and hung there, claw-deep, surveying her domain. We stopped at a bench where she curled up and took a nap.

I sat there, a little bored, exposed knees red and chapped in the direct sunlight, wishing I’d brought a book.

A man with The Idiot by Elif Batuman tucked under his arm stalled in front of the bench. When it became clear he was not moving along, I had to shield my eyes from the sun to look up at his face.

“Do you mind?” he gestured at Ugly asleep beside me.

I looked around at the other benches, seeing them all occupied by other parkgoers with more conventional park companions like their children and strangers feeding pigeons.

“You can put it in your lap,” he offered.

“Uh.” Ugly had sat on my lap only once and had bit me every time I tried to shove her off. “No. That’s OK.”

I scooched into Ugly until there was a sliver of spare bench I’d consider ‘man-sized,’ but he leveled a glare at me and didn’t move. I scooched further. Ugly low growled at me in her sleep, but the man finally sat down and opened his book.

“How do you like that book?”

“What?”

“That book. Do you like it?”

“It’s OK.”

“I liked it.”

“What?”

“I liked the book. Humor was a bit dry.” Or autistic, if you asked Doria. No one had, but she’d told the bookclub anyway.

He pinched his shoulders, visibly shrinking, as if willing me to disappear. I tugged on Ugly’s leash. She didn’t budge.

I realized I had to pee and once I realized it was all I could think about.

I poked Ugly who rumbled, upper lip twitching to showcase a pointy incisor. I tugged harder at the leash, embarrassed to be on the receiving end of such a public display of indifference with a cat.

I tugged and tugged until she reached out and scratched the exposed flesh of my thigh then promptly curled back up, tail tossed flippantly back over her nose. “Ow.”

“Is that really your cat?” the man asked, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Yes,” I said angrily.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I’m sure.”

His gaze lingered before he shrugged and returned to The Idiot.

Shame leached through my middle. “Uh. Can you watch her?”

“What?”

“The cat, can you watch her? I have to use the bathroom.”

He hesitated so long I was certain he’d refuse before he said simply: “Sure.”

I headed for the army green cement block that was the restrooms. A spider the size of my fist occupied the corner near the toilet, and it took everything in me to drop my shorts and expose myself to it. The dispenser was out of soap, and when I went to pull down on the lever door handle, it snapped clean off in my hand. I stared down at it, certain the universe was somehow against me.

I jiggled the door but no matter how I jiggled, it remained locked.

I pounded on the door, shouting for help, ashamed that I was stuck in an outhouse.

The spider moved in the corner. I pounded, calling louder.

Sometime later, a maintenance man in a green jumpsuit with a hangdog face let me out.

“Thank you,” I said, out of breath, having forgotten what it was like to have fresh air in my lungs.

He said nothing, stuck his head in and looked around like he had no idea how I’d gotten in.

A small crowd had congregated. I shoved my way through, ignoring the wrinkled noses and whispers: ew, she stinks.

I walked back to the bench to find only The Idiot reader.

“Where’s Ugly?”

He looked up at me, brows drawn.

“What?”

“The cat, the cat’s name is Ugly.” I realized I had never told him.

“You named the cat Ugly?”

I shrugged. This seemed like the least of my worries and none of his business. “Yeah. Where is she?”

“She took off.”

“What?”

“I said she took off.”

I looked around in a panic but there were only stupid children chasing stupid balls and stupid dogs catching stupid frisbees and stupid squirrels climbing stupid trees. No cats of any kind, ugly or otherwise.

“I asked you to watch her.”

“Yes.”

“I asked you and you said that you would.”

“I did watch her. I watched her get up and walk away.”

I couldn’t believe this. I told him: “I can’t believe this.”

“You didn’t come back.”

“What are you talking about? I’m here. Right now.”

“You took a long time.”

“I was locked in the bathroom!”

He didn’t believe me, I could see it on his face. I paced, pulling at my hair.

“English is not my first language,” he said as if it were an excuse, as if watch her could have literally meant watch her and watch her only. And while he did have an accent I couldn’t place, his diction was near perfect. And to undo any grace he seemed to have wanted to build with that statement, he confessed: “I’m not convinced that was your cat.”

I stopped in my tracks, mouth open, gobsmacked.

“You didn’t want to touch it, and once you did, it scratched you. You left it with a stranger. You did not come back—”

“I went to the bathroom—”

“—and you named it Ugly.”

In a stream of curses, I took off at a light jog, searching for this cat I was suddenly very sure I wanted and was solely responsible for whether she lived or died.

“Ugly!” I called out again and again the name I was convinced she did not know. Heads turned. Scowls were thrown over shoulders. I sent up a silent prayer to the universe. I circled the entire park. No Ugly. Until I made it back to the bench where I’d left The Idiot reader.

He was bent at the waist, petting Ugly. “She came back.”

Tears in my eyes, I fell bare-kneed to the concrete and scooped her up wriggling into my arms, and held her against my chest. She’d rolled in something foul. Her fur was matted and sticky with it.

“Maybe she is yours after all.”