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It's Like This, Cat

<h1>13</h1> <div class="tei tei-figure" style="width: 100%; text-align: center"><ANTIMG src="images/image13.png" width-obs="474" height-obs="450" alt="Illustration: Dave and Mary in wind on boardwalk at beach." /></div> Columbus Day comes up as cold as Christmas. I listen to the weather forecast the night before, to see how it’ll be for the beach. “High winds, unseasonably low temperatures,” the guy says. He would. I get up at eight-thirty the next morning, though, figuring he’d be wrong and it would be a nice sunny day. I slip on my pants and shirt and go downstairs with Cat to have a look out. Cat slides out and is halfway down the stoop when a blast of cold wind hits him. His tail goes up and he spooks back in between my legs. I push the door shut against the icy wind. Mom is sitting in the kitchen drinking her tea and she says, “My goodness, why are you up so early on a holiday? Do you feel sick?” “Nah, I’m all right.” I pour out a cup of coffee to warm my hands on and dump in three or four spoons of sugar. “Davey, have you got a chill? You don’t look to me as if you felt quite right.” “Mom, for Pete’s sake, it’s cold out! I feel fine.” “Well, you don’t have to go out. Why don’t you just go back to bed and snooze and read a bit, and I’ll bring you some breakfast.” I see it’s got to be faced, so while I’m getting down the cereal and a bowl, I say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m going over to Coney Island today.” “Coney island!” Mom sounds like it was Siberia. “What in the world are you going to do there in the middle of winter?” “Mom, it’s only Columbus Day. We figured we’d go to the aquarium and then—uh—well, fool around. Some of the pitches are still open, and we’ll get hot dogs and stuff.” “Who’s going? Nick?” “Nick wasn’t sure—I’ll stop by his house and see.” I’d just as soon steer clear of this “who’s going” business, so I start into a long spiel about how we’re studying marine life in biology, and we have to take some notes at the aquarium. Mom is swallowing this pretty well, but Pop comes into the kitchen just then and gives me the fishy eye. “First time I ever heard of you spending a holiday on homework. I bet they got a new twist palace going out there.” I slam down my coffee cup. “Holy cats! Can’t I walk out of here on a holiday without going through the third degree? What am I, some kind of a nut or a convict?” “Just a growing boy,” says Pop. “And don’t talk so sassy to your mother.” “I’m talking to you!” Pop draws in a breath to start bellowing, but Mom beats him to it by starting to wheeze, which she can do without drawing breath. Pop pats her on the shoulder and gives me a dirty look. “Now, Agnes, that’s all right. I’m not sore. I was just trying to kid him a little bit, and he flies off the handle.” I fly off the handle! How do you like that? I give Mom a kiss. “Cheer up, Mom. I won’t ride on the roller coaster. It’s not even running.” I grab a sweater and gloves and money and get out before they can start anymore questions. On the subway I start wondering if Mary will show up. It’s almost two months since we made this sort of crazy date, and the weather sure isn’t helping any. Coney Island is made to be crowded and noisy. All the billboards scream at you, as if they had to get your attention. So when the place is empty, it looks like the whole thing was a freak or an accident. It’s sure empty today. There’s practically no one on the street in the five or six blocks from the subway station to the aquarium. But it’s not quiet. There are a few places open—merry-go-rounds and hot-dog shops—and tinny little trickles of music come out of them, but the big noise is the wind. All the signs are swinging and screeching. Rubbish cans blow over and their tops clang and bang rolling down the street. The wind makes a whistling noise all by itself. I lean into the wind and walk up the empty street. My sweater is about as warm as a sieve. I wonder if I’m crazy to have come. No girl would get out on a boardwalk on a day like this. It must be practically a hurricane. She’s there, though. As soon as I turn the corner to the beach, I can see one figure, with its back to the ocean, scarf and hair blowing inland toward me. I can’t see her face, but it’s Mary, all right. There isn’t another soul in sight. I wave and she hunches her shoulders up and down to semaphore, not wishing to take her hands out of her pockets. I come up beside her on the boardwalk and turn my back to the ocean, too. I’d like to go on looking at it—it’s all black and white and thundery—but the wind blows your breath right back down into your stomach. I freeze. “I was afraid you wouldn’t come on a day like this,” I say. “Me too. I mean I was afraid you wouldn’t.” “Mom and Pop thought I was crazy. I spent about an hour arguing with them. What’d your mother say?” “Nothing. She thinks I’m walking alone with the wind in my hair, thinking poetic thoughts.” “Huh? What for?” Mary shrugs. “Mom’s like that. You’ll see. Come on, let’s go home and make cocoa or something to warm up, and then we’ll think up something to do. We can’t just stand here.” She’s right about that, so I don’t argue. Her house is a few blocks away, a two-family type with a sloped driveway going down into a cellar garage. Neat. My pop is always going nuts hunting for a place to park. Mary goes in and shouts, “Hi, Nina! I brought a friend home. We’re going to make some cocoa. We’re freezing.” I wonder who Nina is. I don’t hear her mother come into the kitchen. Then I turn around and there she is. Holy crow! We got some pretty beat-looking types at school, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a beatnik mother. She’s got on a black T-shirt and blue jeans and old sneakers, and her hair is in a long braid, with uneven bangs in front. Mary waves a saucepan vaguely at us both and says, “Nina—Davey—this is my mother.” So Nina is her mother. I stick out my hand. “Uh—how do you do?” “Hel-looo.” Her voice is low and musical. “I think there is coffee on the stove.” “I thought I’d make cocoa for a change,” says Mary. “All right.” Nina puts a cigarette in her mouth and offers one to me. I say, “No, thank you.” “Tell me....” She talks in this low, intense kind of voice. “Are you in school with Mary?” So I tell her I live in Manhattan, and how I ran into Mary when I had Cat on the beach, because that makes it sound sort of respectable, not like a pickup. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in Cat and the beach. “What do you read? In your school?” she asks, launching each question like a torpedo. I remember Mary saying something about her mother and poetry, so I say, “Well, uh—last week we read ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ They’re about—I mean, we were studying metaphors and similes. Looking at the ocean today, I sure can see what Longfellow meant about the icy....” I thought I was doing pretty well, but she cut me off again. “Don’t you read any real poetry? Donne? Auden? Baudelaire?” Three more torpedoes. “We didn’t get to them yet.” Nina blows out a great angry cloud of smoke and explodes, “Schools!” Then she sails out of the kitchen. I guess I look a little shook up. Mary laughs and shoves a mug of cocoa and a plate of cinnamon toast in front of me. “Don’t mind Mother. She just can’t get used to New York schools. Or Coney Island. Or hardly anything around here. “She grew up on the Left Bank in Paris. Her father was an artist and her mother was a writer, and they taught her to read at home, starting with Chaucer, probably. She never read a kids’ book in her life. “Anything I ever tell her about school pretty much sounds either childish or stupid to her. What I really love is science—experiments and stuff—and she can’t see that for beans.” “Our science teacher is a dope,” I say, because she is, “so I really never got very interested in science. But I told Mom and Dad I was coming to the aquarium to take notes today, so they wouldn’t kick up such a fuss.” Mary shakes her head. “We ought to get our mothers together. Mine thinks I’m wasting time if I even go to the aquarium. I do, though, all the time. I love the walrus.” “What does your pop do?” “Father? He teaches philosophy at Brooklyn College. So I get it from both sides. Just think, think, think. Father and Nina aren’t hardly even interested in food. Once in a while Nina spends all day cooking some great fish soup or a chicken in wine, but the rest of the time I’m the only one who takes time off from thinking to cook a hamburger. They live on rolls and coffee and sardines.” Mary puts our cups in the sink and then opens a low cupboard. Instead of pots and pans it has stacks of records in it. She pulls out West Side Story and then I see there’s a record player on a side table. What d’you know? A record player in the kitchen! This Left Bank style of living has its advantages. “I sit down here and eat and play records while I do my homework,” says Mary, which sounds pretty nice. I ask her if she has any Belafonte, and she says, “Yes, a couple,” but she puts on something else. It’s slow, but sort of powerful, and it makes you feel kind of powerful yourself, as if you could do anything. “What’s that?” I ask. “It’s called ‘The Moldau’—that’s a river in Europe. It’s by a Czech named Smetana.” I wander around the kitchen and look out the window. The wind’s still howling, but not so hard. I remember the ocean, all gray and powerful, spotted with whitecaps. I’d like to be out on it. “You know what’d be fun?” I say out loud. “To be out in a boat on the harbor today. If you didn’t sink.” “We could take the Staten Island ferry,” Mary says. “Huh?” I hadn’t even thought there was really any boat we could get on. “Really? Where do you get it?” “Down at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It’s quite a ways. I’ve always gone there in a car. But maybe we could do it on bikes, if we don’t freeze.” “We won’t freeze. But what about bikes?” “You can use my brother’s. He’s away at college. Maybe I can find a windbreaker of his, too.” She finds the things and we get ready and go into the living room, where Nina is sitting reading and sipping a glass of wine. “We’re going on our bikes to the ferry and over to Staten Island,” Mary says. She doesn’t even ask. “Oh-h-h.” It’s a long, low note, faintly questioning. “We thought with the wind blowing and all, it’d be exciting,” Mary explains, and I think, Uh-o, that’s going to cook it. My mother would have kittens if I said I was going out on a ferry in a storm. But Nina just says, “I see,” and goes back to reading her book. I say good-bye and she looks up again and smiles, and that’s all. It’s another funny thing—Nina doesn’t seem to pay any attention to who Mary brings home, like most mothers are always snooping if their daughter brings home a guy. Without stopping to think, I say, “Do you bring home a lot of guys?” Mary laughs. “Not a lot. Sometimes one of the boys at school comes home when we’re studying for a science test.” I laugh, too, but what I’m thinking of is how Pop would look if I brought a girl home and said we were studying for a test! <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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