The first cat arrived unforeseen and unhoped for on the windowsill of the house in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and was spotted in the predawn by the mother, who had just started the coffeepot, which gurgled on the counter. This was the era of blue house robe. This was the time of tiny television, also on the counter, which, with black knob, turned on in a small circle that grew to fill the screen in the way a vision might come into focus. The mother, however, was not one to turn on the television. It was the father who bustled down the stairs and farted and turned on the television and ruthlessly blended weight-loss chocolate shakes. The mother, in blue robe, preferred somnolent household sounds like coffeepot, refrigerator, and now the mewing of a cat outside the middle kitchen-nook window. It had half an ear, which was strange and made the cat seem extra prophetic when the mother crept closer to look.
Because the mother had once dreamt of a cat flattened out on the sidewalk. She remembered this dream now. It was a dream she had when she first suspected her husband might leave the family for the younger woman in his office. In the dream, he knelt down wearing a white suit and picked up the squashed cat and handed it to her. What am I supposed to do with this, the mother asked with petulance where there might have been curiosity.
Her suspicions and dreams were oracular, in their way, proving that her worst thoughts were true and everything was against her. Because the husband did eventually leave the family for the younger woman, who, as it turned out, was the daughter of a rural abattoir empire outside of Vinita called Agony Acres. Gifted by the gods in the husband-father’s place, Tabby, the half-eared cat who hung around for a few years after the divorce and then also disappeared one January night, maybe to die, as it is rumored cats do, beyond fence or hedge to lick and suffer alone.
And so we, the remaining women, were left with the dubious inheritance of always suspecting feline prophecy. This suspicion showed itself in different ways. We tended to cross streets rather than pass the rare cat who slinked forward tail-up, as though in need of a pet. We emphatically owned dogs. We believed in the dogs like a god. Or rather, we took comfort in the dogs thinking we were gods, how faithfully they followed us from room to room and sought refuge beside our legs during thunderstorms. Between us and dogs flowed a mutual self-affirmation we were right to doubt–when we admitted to ourselves we doubted it—because when is anything the way you imagine it is. For instance, we claimed to be dog people, but history showed we married and divorced men who owned cats, even though we were, all three, allergic. It seemed that, with cats, there was something to which we could only creep closer. Something we didn’t want to know about ourselves but were also desperate to find out.
The prophecy, however, was a slow reveal. It was thirty-three years after Tabby’s departure when one of the two daughters, me, kissed her third husband and two sons from previous marriages good-bye, flew and then rented a car and then drove to the deathbed of the father who had heart-attacked while tubing the Guadeloupe River with the younger-not-so-young-anymore wife and her rough cattle friends. He did not die that day, but he did eventually go into a nursing home, the heart attack having triggered a stroke that ended in neurological disrepair that required the daughter make tri-monthly visits to the death bed that didn’t die and so reminded her of the Terrible Bed, the one made famous in fairy tales for being the place where heroes are tortured indefinitely by bodiless hands.
On that first trip, after the father’s heart attack, she and her sister descended on the stepmother’s house like avenging angels, ready to help their way into the father’s heart and then make him eat it in regret for the love he rejected. And rejected for what? The stepmother’s house was soulless, as they knew it would be. By soulless, I mean gray furniture and decorative signage with inspirational imperatives like Live, Laugh, Be, and Breathe. By soulless, I mean Agony Acres, the letter jacket from the family slaughter house, on a peg in the white hallway beside the laundry room, this letter jacket being the only personal item in the house, the only revealing item in a house of box store interiors, and yet, terrifying. One of the cuffs was caked with decades-old mud or blood. The jacket had belonged to the stepmother’s father, Jake, years dead of lung cancer and Agony Acres long ago sold and Betty, the stepmother’s mother, dying in a medical-grade bed in the mother-in-law apartment that one entered, mysteriously, through the laundry room. She sometimes, during that first visit, forgot Betty was on the other side of the wall. She wondered if the stepmother, prone to boxed wine, also sometimes forgot Betty was there. The only evidence of Betty in the main house, besides the letter jacket, were her two dogs, hated by the stepmother and provocation for more wine. The stepmother hated the two dogs because she had to care for them and because they scared her ancient cat, whose real name the daughter cannot remember, but whom her father called, affectionately, LittleShit. As in, Come here, LittleShit. Come here, he said, patting his thigh, come talk to the Old Man. The cat, smartly, never went. This evasion made him love the cat more. Too good for the Old Man, he’d say. You sphynx. You lecherous lynx.
The daughter took note.
With Betty’s dogs in the house, the cat hid harder. In fact, the daughter rarely saw LittleShit, who was always under or inside something, and yet desperately, according to the stepmother, plotting escape. The stepmother created an elaborate system of door openings and closings, basically to mean all external doors were to be closed at all times and all internal doors open at all times, lest the cat get trapped and/or separated from food and kitty litter, which the stepmother combed twice daily on hands and knees, her only act, other than drinking and vaping, of ritualistic devotion. If one were entering or, god-willing, leaving the house, the exit or entrance must be made swiftly and in full awareness of all goings-on at foot-level. Such were the demands of the stepmother.
Whatever, the sister said and closed the guest bedroom door to scroll through local offers on her Bumble account because, during this first visit, the sister found herself single again, however briefly. We joked about three dates before Dad was dead. But he wasn’t dead, not yet. He wasn’t even in the nursing home yet. He was in the recliner, nervously scratching his nails up and down its pleather arms and calling for LittleShit, who was missing again. She’s very upset this time, he said nervously about the stepmother because, despite the stepmother’s hostility, the father loved her. Or lied to himself and called fear and regret love so as not to bear witness to his self-induced misapprehension. He asked without asking that his daughters play along with this delusion and all his many others.
How do you know it’s not just hiding again, asked the daughter, who from here on out I will call Cordelia. They watched outside where the stepmother stalked the crab grass and vaped. It’s bad, he said. It’s really bad. Someone left the backdoor open, said the father, that someone being him, who also disliked Betty’s dogs and often accidentally-on-purpose dreamed up ways for them to disappear. Like that time, before the divorce, when he disappeared down a country road the stray dog the sisters had adopted. A horrible act, the memory of which, later played out in Cordelia’s psyche as a reoccurring dream that went: puppies behind closed door, door never opened, don’t open door now, puppies dead. This, she understood, to be the imaging of her father dropping off the adopted dog and driving away and the sisters not protesting because they were busy and because they understood that’s how things are. And also somehow a prescient image of this visit as it was now playing out, Betty behind the closed door, who did die a few days later, although nobody was shocked because she had been dying a long time. But before Betty died, LittleShit, who had not been lost after all, emerged from the basement. She never goes down there, the stepmother said grabbing the cat without apology because she had just been cursing the sister who dared shower BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR when all doors were to remain open, especially while the cat was missing. And not only showering BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR but also blaring rock music that surely drove LittleShit into unchartered depths. I mean, WHO DOES THAT, the stepmother said.
Cordelia thinks they do that, she and her sister, and the stepmother should somehow know since she is vaguely implicated. The sisters singing songs in the car wrong by heart those years of the lost father. I don’t wanna touch you too much, baby. ’Cause making love to you might drive me crazy. Because the truth is the sisters’ greatest curse, after the cat curse, was that they believed in the lyrics of pop songs. They believed with a spiritual thirst. It was the dumbest part of their hearts and the largest. In fact, this belief in lyrics was their heart. And it was a belief that, in the end, killed them both, although this is not a story about those deaths. That night in the car, somewhere in the darkness on County Line, the sister told Cordelia not to be so into it when she sang. To somehow be not less loud, necessarily, but less emotional. And look at the sister now: shower singing for everyone to hear, although Cordelia knows her sister’s singing is forced levity and she is really low this time, at Agony Acres with stepmother and dying Betty and sick, estranged father, low as she soaps her fake breasts for some baseball-capped blind date who video messaged her this morning from his car with a couple of things he thought she might want to know about him.
Number One, he wants a girl who can laugh.
Number Two, no drama.
So that was the end of the first father visit. LittleShit lost, LittleShit found. The sister blow-dried, put on a thong, eyelashes, and lipstick, packed, and peeled out of the driveway, thus abandoning Cordelia, as per usual, for sex. I won’t go into the teenage summers: stripmall dance clubs where, neon-clad, the sister drug Cordelia inside and then disappeared into parking lots. Against cars, in cars, Cordelia always averted her gaze to the way tree leaves moved in artificial light in the night so as not to see what she knew when she wandered lots looking for her sister. Years later, no different. Badly sexed and broken-hearted after her Bumble date, the sister crossed the state line back to her studio apartment by the river to lick and suffer alone because fuck men. The next day Betty died behind laundry-room wall, the father had a stroke, belched black bile, firemen arrived, the sister texted good-luck, and Cordelia swore, in the passenger seat of the stepmother’s Trans-Am in the glow of the ambulance, never to return to Agony Acres. But she did return, and the sister also returned, time and again, even after the father finally died, still they returned in one form or another to suffer indefinitely the bodiless hands of men who were really just one man, because, despite the cat’s warning, we never learn. The cat keeps the score and we never really get it. We never hear it, our hearts stuffed sick with song.
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