The Cat's Pajamas

The small kitten lay on the pillow between them.

At last, watching the sunlight in the window, she said, “Did the cat move either way during the night to indicate which of us it was going to belong to?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “The cat didn’t move. But you did.”

TRIANGLE

1951

SHE TRIED THREE DRESSES, and none fit her body. They belonged, in that moment, to someone else. Excitement changed her color so it went with none of her clothes. The glow so expanded her slender flesh that everything seemed corseted. Then the powder spilled to the floor like snow and she painted her lips upside down and blinked in the mirror as if she had seen a ghost.

“My land, Lydia.” Helen stood in the doorway. “He’s only a man.”

“He’s John Larsen,” said Lydia.

“That’s even worse. His hair doesn’t fit his head, his arms are too long, his mouth is thin, his eyes are like a squirrel’s, and he’s only up to here.”

Lydia was crying. She sat watching the tears in the mirror.

“I’m sorry,” said Helen. “But he’s such a fool.”

“Helen!”

“You’re my own baby sister, that’s all.”

“I think he’s God.”

“Don’t cry anymore. Anyone you say is God is God. It’s just with our folks dead, I’m mother now, I want things right for you. I’ve had enough men experiences to know they are foolish liars, the whole bunch. Right out of the carnival—apes, clowns and calliope tooters.”

Lydia was in a summer dream. “I think he’s kind, handsome, and good. He tips his hat on the street to us. He’s never come to our house before, has he? Never said boo. And then, suddenly, calling me on the phone today, saying he’d like to drop by for an hour to see me. I cried all afternoon, I was so happy. I’ve wanted him to call for years. I’ve seen him in front of the United Cigar store ever since I was sixteen years old, that was twenty years ago, and always wanted to stop and say, I love you, John, take me away from all this, be mine. But I always kept walking. And, do you know, once in a while, in recent years, when you and I walked by, it seemed there was something in his eyes, as if he were noticing me too. But he always smiled and tipped his hat.”

“Men teach each other tricks like that. A front like a palace, and all outhouse and stucco behind. Put your face back on and wear something green to go with your red complexion.”

“I didn’t mean to cry it red.” She looked at the old mouth on her wadded kerchief. “Helen, Helen, was it like this for you, ten years back, when you loved Jamie Josephs?”

“My bedclothes were cinders every morning.”

“Oh, Helen!”

“But then I found he was playing that shell game you see at circuses. He asked me to bet everything on a hunch. I was young. I did. I bet that if I spent of myself freely, when the time came I’d know where to find him. But the time came and I lifted up one of three shells and Jamie wasn’t there. He’d moved his little act up the street, and out of town on the Skokie Limited. I wonder if any woman ever found Jamie?”

“Oh, don’t, let’s be happy tonight!”

“You be happy by being happy. I’ll be happy by being cynical, and we’ll see who’s happiest in the long run.”

Lydia painted a new mouth and made it smile.

IT WAS A TENDER EVENING IN SEPTEMBER, the first smoky fire starting in the maples around the old, softening house. Lydia floated in the cavernous living room, lights out, only her face a pink lamp, so she could see him far away, like a figure in a melodrama, before he turned and rustled the leaves crisply on the front sidewalk. She heard him whistling an autumn song, down the street. She hurried over her speeches, and suddenly the words were a crumpled series of started but unfinished letters to her own spirit and flesh, heaped and blown about her mind. She started to cry again, and this made the precious words run and blur, the polite stage instructions to her hands and feet threatened to be lost forever. She stopped the process by slapping herself, once, on the side of her face. Now he was walking up the steps to the silent house, now he sounded the silver doorbell, taking off his straw hat, which was a trifle late for the season, and clearing his throat three times, a customer demanding service from an inattentive clerk. He muttered under his breath, as if he too were shuffling the lines of his part, abysmally.

“Good evening!”

As if a gun had gone off in his face, John Larsen fell back from the door. Staggered by the sound of her own voice suddenly exploded from her mouth, Lydia could only sway in the doorway until the man out there found his smile and used it. Then, somehow, she opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.

“It’s such a nice night,” she said. “Let’s sit in the porch swing.”

“Fine,” said John Larsen, and they sat in the shadowy vined, secret porch swing, away from the gaze of the town. He helped her elbow into the swing, and where he had touched was a brand that smoked and ached and promised to leave a scar for the rest of her life. She sat down dizzily, and the world moved this way, that way, she thought herself sick and then discovered it was the swing taking her up and down and this man still silent, wretchedly turning his hat in his hands, reading the size tag with his s

mall eyes, reading the label and the old price-insertion. The hat sounded like a piece of wicker furniture in his lap. He kept reaching into it to find his first speech and then, in confusion, looked as if he might get up and bolt the evening. Somewhere between the sidewalk and here he had lost his notes.