IT’S BEEN RAINING ALL DAY. ALL THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS ON THE SIDEWALK, humans struggle against the wind with inside-out umbrellas that pull them backward or into the street. Some of them finally give up and throw the umbrellas into trash cans with disgust. In Lower East Side, our apartment was close enough to the street that I could look out the window and see if Sarah was about to walk in. From this high up, though, I can never tell if any of the humans on the sidewalk is Laura or Josh. I don’t know if Laura had any trouble with the little black umbrella she took with her this morning, but she’s sopping when she gets home. “Give me a minute, Prudence,” she says when she sees me waiting for her by the front door. “Let me get out of these wet clothes first.” She leaves little drip-drops of water behind her as she walks toward the stairs.
Somebody left the window open in my upstairs room this morning, and some of the rainwater has spotted the white curtains and dripped inside. I’m pleased to note, though, that while a little water got into one of the boxes Josh moved in here from Home Office, none has gotten into any of the Sarah-boxes, which live farther into the room. It’s more crowded in here than it used to be, but not so crowded that I can’t still throw little things out of the Sarah-boxes for Laura to find and talk to me about.
The air from outside smells like the rolls of new quarters Sarah used to bring home to feed to the laundry machines in Basement, which means there’ll be lightning soon. It also means that the room doesn’t have as much of the fading Sarah-and-me-together smell, but that’s okay. Listening to Laura talk about Sarah is almost as good as breathing in her smell—my own memories of Sarah seem much more real when Laura tells me about hers.
There are times when she doesn’t say much. Once we found a little plastic bag with some old pins—the round, colorful kind that humans occasionally attach to their clothing. Laura picked one out of the bunch and said, “I begged my mother to buy me this Menudo pin after I saw my best friend Maria Elena wearing one.” Then she laughed. “I think I wore it on my backpack for about two weeks before I got tired of it and left it at the store.” That was all she had to say about any of the pins before putting them away again. But other times she’ll tell longer stories, or say things that are more about Sarah than other people Laura remembers, and those are the best times of all.
It bothered me at first, throwing Sarah’s and my old things out of the boxes they’re supposed to be in, because Sarah always said how important it was to keep your past organized. Throwing things on the floor is the opposite of being organized. But if I didn’t show these things to Laura to make her tell me about her memories, then Sarah wouldn’t have a past at all.
Today I found two white boxes while I was looking for things to show Laura—a smaller one and one that’s bigger, like the kind clothing comes in when one human is giving another human a present. When Laura comes to sit next to me on the floor, wearing sweat-clothes, it’s the smaller box she opens first. “Let’s see what you found today,” she says. Her voice, which was hoarse for days after she yelled at that man across the street about the pigeons, sounds normal again. When Josh asked her about it, she told him she was in a loud meeting at work and must have strained her throat. Josh has been so busy with his own work lately that he didn’t narrow his eyes the way he does when he can tell Laura is saying something not-true. Maybe he didn’t even notice how her cheeks changed color. I don’t know why Laura wouldn’t want to tell him what she did, though, because even things as stupid as pigeons deserve to have a place to live—and they spend so much time on that rooftop that it must be covered in their smell by now. Who was that strange man to try to make them leave? I was proud of Laura for defending them, even though it turns out they came right back without her help to where they’re used to being.
The inside of the small white box is lined with cotton fluff. Wrapped into the fluff is something made of a smooth, dark-white material that Laura says is called ivory. The bottom part of it is made up of five long teeth, and the top part is shaped like a fan with all kinds of curls carved into it. “It’s a comb,” Laura says. “My mother had this way of twisting her hair up and holding it with a comb. She looked so elegant and glamorous, I couldn’t believe she was really my mother.” Laura’s face used to get so tight whenever Sarah was mentioned, but now it wears a soft kind of smile. Her voice is soft, too. She holds the comb up to the light and says, “I don’t remember ever seeing this one, though.”
Of course I can’t talk and tell Laura so, but I remember seeing this comb. Sarah showed it once to Anise. She told Anise that Mrs. Mandelbaum had given it to her years and years ago, to give to Laura on her wedding day. She wore it at her own wedding, Sarah said. She said it was only fitting that Laura’s “something old” should come from her. Sarah told Anise she’d thought about giving it to Laura the day she got married, but ended up losing her nerve because Laura always got so upset whenever the Mandelbaums were mentioned. Anise looked sad for Sarah, and she told her, You can’t spend the rest of your life waiting for a perfect moment to say the things you want to say. You have to do the best you can with the moments you actually get. It’s funny—when I think about the Sarah I remember and compare her with the Sarah in Laura’s memories. I remember a Sarah who always knew exactly the right thing to say to me. Laura remembers a Sarah who talked and talked but never said the thing Laura really wanted to hear.
Now she puts the comb back into the little box, and puts that back into one of the big Sarah-boxes, although not the one I found it in. As the days go by Laura seems to be organizing the things we look at together. Some go into boxes with things she probably wants to keep, like this comb, and others go into boxes of things she’ll bring to Trash Room someday, like old ordering slips from Sarah’s record store, or the funny little drum on a stick with strings attached.
The bigger white box I found is trapped shut with clear tape, and Laura has to slide her fingernail around the edges to get it open. There’s lots of crinkly tissue paper (perfect to play in!), and inside of that are tiny clothes, far too small for even the littermates to wear—little knitted sweaters and hats, tiny denim jackets covered in silver safety pins and neon-colored spray paints, and teeny skirts and dresses and ripped T-shirts decorated to match the jackets. The sweaters have the very, very faint aroma of another cat, along with a bit of Sarah-smell and another scent that’s probably what Laura smelled like when she was younger.
“Oh God.” The look on Laura’s face is amazement. “Mrs. Mandelbaum knitted these sweaters for my Cabbage Patch Doll. And Anise made her these little rock-star outfits.” It’s when she says Anise’s name that I notice something like anger dart behind Laura’s eyes and fade again, just as quickly. “I told my mother to get rid of these when I was eleven.” She laughs a little. “I insisted, actually. I wanted her to know I wasn’t a baby anymore.” Laura’s smile is wobbly. “I can’t believe she kept them all these years.”
I put one paw tentatively on Laura’s knee, waiting to see if she’ll make any sudden movements—or try to stop me—as I crawl into her lap to get closer to the little sweaters. I rub my cheeks and the backs of my ears so hard against them—trying to get rid of that other cat’s smell and also trying to get that little bit of Sarah-smell onto me—that the clasp of my red collar gets stuck on a thread and Laura has to untangle me. Once I’m freed I rub my head on the sweaters again, trying to re-create some of that good Sarah-and-me-together smell. Laura begins to massage her fingers gently behind my ears. Closing my eyes, I lean the side of my head into her hand and purr. She cups her hand and runs it from the tip of my nose all the way down my back in a good, firm way that makes the skin under my fur tingle.
Suddenly we hear the jangling of keys downstairs that means Josh is home. Whenever he comes home this late, it’s usually because he’s been meeting with the humans who live in that building above the music studio—collecting their stories, he says. We hear his footsteps coming up the stairs, and Laura moves the white box top so that it mostly covers the little clothes that aren’t underneath my head. In another moment Josh is in the doorway with speckles of rainwater all over his jeans, saying, “Hello, ladies.”
Josh still comes in here sometimes to look through Sarah’s black disks. It doesn’t bother me anymore when he does this, because he always washes his hands first and treats them so respectfully. He’s looking for music that got recorded at that studio, I heard him tell Laura. Sarah has hundreds of black disks, so it’s taking him a while to get through all of them. He never touches things in the Sarah-boxes, though—the ones that don’t have any black disks in them—like Laura and I do.
But now he’s not here to look through black disks. He smiles like he always does when he sees Laura in here with me, looking at Sarah’s things, and tells her, “I picked up a tuna sub at Defonte’s, if you want half.”
“How did you know I was thinking about cold tuna for dinner?” Laura asks, smiling back at him.
Josh leans his shoulder against the door frame. “You know, it’ll be our anniversary in a few weeks. We should do something grand.”
“Not too grand,” Laura says.
“How many first anniversaries are we going to get?” he asks her. “And I’m talking about dinner out. Not a week in Paris.” He looks at her hopefully. “Come on. We haven’t gone out for a great meal in a long time, and I’ll still have a couple of weeks left of my severance.”
He says this like it’s good news, although from the deepening frown on Laura’s face, she doesn’t think the same thing. But all she says is, “I’ll be down in a minute for the sub.”
Josh walks toward their bedroom, and Laura throws the little clothes back into their white box, then tosses the whole thing into one of the Sarah-boxes. “You must want dinner, too,” she says to me. Scratching some of the shedding fur on the bottom of my chin, she adds, “And maybe a good brushing later on.”
I look back at the Sarah-boxes for a moment. But then—thinking about my dinner and tuna and a nice, long brushing—I follow Laura down the stairs.
Josh never used to talk about his work very much, but now he talks about it whenever he can find somebody to listen. Laura usually wrinkles up her forehead and changes the subject. Or else she says things like Mm-hmm or Really in a way that doesn’t sound like she wants Josh to keep talking about it. But the littermates ask him lots of questions. Josh brings them here one day a week to help him organize his papers and stuff them into envelopes. I usually help, too, by scattering the papers onto the floor to make sure there aren’t any rats hiding in them—I’ve been extra cautious ever since we found that rat in the Sarah-boxes, even though it turned out to be a fake. Josh isn’t always as grateful for my efforts as he should be, though. He acts frustrated and says, “Ah, Prudence, why are you doing this to me?” while arranging the papers back into a tidy stack. But you can tell how happy and relieved the littermates are, when they laugh and praise me for all my help. Occasionally Josh, acting like he’s doing me a favor, will crumple one piece of paper into a ball and toss it for me to practice my mice-fighting with. Although the littermates have invented an irritating “game”—called Keep Prudence’s Paper Ball Away from Her—and they toss my paper ball back and forth to each other over my head, yelling, “Keep away! Keep away!” until, finally, I jump high enough in the air to smack it away from them and take it downstairs to under-the-couch.
Having the littermates here one day a week is more disruptive than it was having Josh around five days a week after he first lost his job. They have a hard time doing the sensible things cats (and older humans) do, like sitting in one spot for stretches of time, thinking important thoughts, and watching Upper West Side through our windows. Their constant movements disturb the air around me and make my whiskers tickle. And they always fight with me for my favorite napping spot on the couch. Josh and Laura have learned that a cat’s preferred sleep area is her own property and should be respected. But the littermates will plop themselves down on my spot even if I’m already sleeping there, which means I have to wake up from wonderful dreams of green grass and Sarah’s singing so I can scramble away from their lowering backsides before I get squashed. Even when I chuff and growl at them, they ignore me. You’d think that such young humans would be grateful to have a cat instructing them in proper manners. But never once have they said to me, Thank you, Prudence, for trying to teach us how to be polite. If it weren’t for the lure of rustling papers in Home Office whenever they’re here, I would stay away from them all the time.
They’re better behaved with Josh, though. Maybe that’s because he’s so patient and gentle with them, the way Sarah always is with me. (Although I’m more deserving of gentle patience than the littermates.) If they’re sitting at the little table in Josh’s office, they’ll even raise one hand in the air before asking him questions. I think this must be a good-manners thing that gets taught to young humans. It’s surprising to me that the littermates have been able to learn anything that’s good manners. But I’ve never seen any fully grown humans put their hands up before asking something, so obviously somebody trained the littermates to do this.
“Uncle Josh,” Robert asks with his hand in the air, “how come the people who live in the apartment building have to move away?”
“They don’t have to—yet,” Josh tells him. “There are rules that say how much money the people who own the building are allowed to charge people for living there. Now they want to change the rules and make the building so expensive that the people who live there won’t be able to afford it anymore.”
“That’s what happened to us.” Abbie’s face looks solemn. “When Mom and Dad got a divorce, we couldn’t afford to live in our house near Nana and Pop-pop anymore. We had to come live in an apartment because Dad stopped giving Mom money.”
Josh is putting some papers into a creamy-colored folder, but his hand freezes, the way a cat freezes when she spots something she’s going to pounce on. He looks so wary that I think maybe a mouse managed to find a hiding spot in those papers after all, and I peer around from my spot next to Robert’s chair, checking to make sure I didn’t miss a threat. “Who told you that about your father?” Josh asks Abbie quietly.
The littermates look at each other. Then Abbie says, “Sometimes we hear Mom on the phone, even though she has the door to her room closed.” Robert’s eyes get big and round, like he’s scared of what Abbie just said. “We don’t try to listen,” she says quickly. “It’s just sometimes we can’t help it.”
Josh’s eyes turn sad and also angry. But his voice is kind when he tells her, “You and Robert are lucky that your mom was able to find a good job, and that you have Nana and Pop-pop, and Aunt Laura and me, to help her make sure you won’t ever have to move away again. But the people who live in this apartment building already have so little money, they wouldn’t be able to afford a nice apartment if they had to move. And they’ve been living in their apartments a long, long time. Some of them have been living there since even before I was born.” Abbie’s and Robert’s eyes grow bigger, as if they can’t begin to imagine how long ago that must have been.
“Do any of the people who live there have cats like Prudence?” Robert wants to know.
“A few of them do,” Josh says, smiling. “They’re worried that if they have to move, they might not be able to find a new apartment building that would let them bring their cats with them.”
Well! Imagine that! What kind of crazy apartment building wouldn’t want cats living there? Who would protect them from all the mice and rats if there weren’t any cats? Good luck finding a dog to do that as smartly and thoroughly as a cat can! Just when I think I’ve heard all the ridiculous things humans can do and say, I hear something else that makes me realize there’s no limit to how foolish humans can be.
The next time the littermates come over, Josh’s father drives his car from his house in New Jersey to go out to lunch with them. I dart upstairs to take a nap on the cat bed in Home Office, but when I hear everybody come back, I leap down and curl up beneath Josh’s desk, trying to look as if that’s where I’ve been napping all along. By the time they’ve gotten upstairs, I’m licking my right front paw and using it to wash my face clean in a lazy-looking way, just to make sure they’re completely fooled.
“Whew!” Josh’s father says, and settles himself into one of the chairs Abbie and Robert usually sit in. His face looks paler than I remember it being, and there are little drops of sweat-water on his forehead. “The heat’s so much worse here in the city than where your mother and I live. It’s hard on an old man.”
“Are you all right, Dad?” Josh sounds anxious. “Do you need a glass of water?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” His father waves his hand in front of his face. “Don’t tell Mother I got dizzy,” he adds sternly. “She worries ever since that scare with my heart last year. I’m seventy-five years old, and she still thinks I don’t know how to take care of myself.”
“I’ll bring you a glass of water, Pop-pop,” Abbie says. “Robert and I are thirsty anyways.” The two of them run out of the room (the littermates never seem to walk), and I can hear their footsteps thudding down the stairs.
“So tell me about this work you’ve been doing,” Josh’s father says. “It’s all the kids can talk about these days.”
“I’m only doing a small part of it.” For the first time, Josh seems almost embarrassed to talk about his work. “There are organizations that exist for the sole purpose of preserving Mitchell-Lama housing. I’m just helping a little where I can.”
“Show me,” Josh’s father says. “I’m interested.”
“Well …” Josh pulls together some of the papers he usually gives to Abbie and Robert to put into envelopes. “I’ve been writing press releases and sending them out to reporters at newspapers and different websites, letting them know what’s going on. And I’ve been interviewing all the tenants in the building, collecting their stories. I’m writing them up and putting them together with some old photographs they were able to give me. I think showing that side of the issue might be effective.” He hands the papers to his father, who begins to flip through them slowly.
“I’ve also been pulling together a history of the music studio in the building’s Basement. It’s actually become pretty important in the community over the years. I’m trying to help them reincorporate as a not-for-profit, so they have some legal standing if we’re able to get this to a hearing.” Josh walks out and goes into my room, returning with a stack of Sarah’s black disks. A wisp of Sarah-smell follows them. I have a sudden, vivid memory of Sarah in our old apartment, wearing a long, thin summer dress and standing in front of the shelves where she kept her black disks, saying, I think I’m in the mood for Betty Wright today. What do you think, Prudence? But, just as quickly as the memory pops into my head, it pops back out and goes to where I can’t find it.
“If you look at the liner notes”—Josh hands the black disks to his father and points to some of the tiny word-writing on their cardboard covers—“you can see how many important albums were recorded there. So I’ve been putting write-ups of that together with photos of some of the bands, and sending it to the editors at my old magazine and some of our—their, I mean—competitors. I’ve also created a website and Facebook page for the building, and we’ve been encouraging community residents and owners of nearby mom-and-pops, who’ll eventually be threatened by the same economic factors, to contribute their own stories and memories. And we’ve put together an online petition. We’ve gotten about five thousand signatures so far.”
“Some of these photos take me back,” Josh’s father says. “Your mother and I were buying the house we raised you and your sister in at around the same time this building went up, it looks like.”
“Probably.” Josh smiles a little. “There are tenants who’ve been living there since the sixties.”
His father half closes his eyes. “When a man has lived in one place for fifty years,” he says, “and raised a family there, he doesn’t like to leave unless it’s on his own terms.”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Josh says quietly.
His father opens his eyes. “You’ve put a lot of work into this. It must have taken a lot of time to talk to everybody and do all this writing and research.”
Josh’s face turns a light pink. “I’ve certainly had the time.”
His father sighs and then he sets the papers and photos down on the little table. “I never really understood that job you had. I could see it was making you money, but it never seemed like real work to me. But this is something I understand. Helping people who want to keep their homes, I understand. And all this work you’ve done”—he gestures at the papers—“this is something you can look at and touch and hold in your hands at the end of the day. I’m sure all those people you’re calling now think of you differently because you’re coming to them doing work, not asking for work.”
“It’d be nice to think so.” Josh’s smile is lopsided.
“Trust me,” his father says. “People always respect a man who works hard and saves his money.”
“It’s tough to save money when you aren’t making any.”
“The money will come.” Josh’s father says it very firmly. “It wasn’t always easy for your mother and me, you know. She had to get that job at the jewelry counter so we could send you and your sister to college. But we worked hard and, one way or another, the money always came.”
Abbie and Robert come running back with a glass for Josh’s father. As he drinks from it, Robert says, “Hey, where’s Prudence, Uncle Josh?”
“I think she’s hanging out under the desk,” Josh says, bending over to check. His sideways eyes look into mine. “Prudence, do you want to come out and say hello to my father?”
I don’t, really. But Josh is (finally) trying to introduce me the right way, which means that not coming out would be bad manners.
“Well, hello there, Prudence.” Josh’s father pats my head awkwardly, and I’m relieved when it seems like that’s all he’s going to attempt to do. “Remember Sammy?” he asks Josh. “You and your sister were crazy about that dog. He could chase cats all day.”
I continue to stand there and let Josh’s father pat my head, even though I can’t help liking him a little less for having one of those wretched dogs that thinks it’s fun to chase cats just because they’re not smart enough to think of anything sensible to do. Josh’s father doesn’t know as much about cats as I do about humans, because he says, “I think Prudence likes her Pop-pop.”
Josh laughs out loud. “So Prudence is your granddaughter now?”
“She’s the closest thing you and Laura have given me so far.” His father sounds stern again.
Josh’s smile shrinks. “We’re working on it, Dad.”
“I may be an old man, Josh,” his father tells him. “But I can still remember that if you think of it as work, you’re doing it wrong.”
Josh is in a good mood after his father leaves. He walks around the apartment, humming music under his breath and snapping his fingers. He goes into Home Office and bangs away on the cat bed/keyboard for a little while, but I can tell he has too much energy to sit still for long. Pretty soon I hear what sounds like heavy things being moved around in Home Office’s closet, and then Josh comes into my room, carrying a big stack of black disks. I can tell by their scent that these were never Sarah’s—he must have had more black disks than I realized, living inside the closet of Home Office all this time.
Josh sits cross-legged and starts spreading out the black disks all over the floor, arranging and then rearranging them in ways that must make sense to him, although I can’t tell what the pattern is. I jump on top of one of the Sarah-boxes, to get out of his way, and soon the whole floor is colorful with the cardboard holders for black disks. Then he scooches over to the boxes of Sarah’s black disks, and starts pulling out some of those and putting them on the floor, looking at the word-writing on each of them and then deciding which ones should go where.
Sarah used to do this sometimes, take out all her black disks and spread them over the floors of our apartment. She was always coming up with new ways to arrange them on their shelves—by what year they came out, or by things she called “genre” or “influence.” Once—this is the last way she did it while we lived together—she put them all in what she said was alphabetical order. I can understand Josh wanting to do the same thing with his own black disks, but it’s making me nervous to see Sarah’s all spread out this way without her being here to supervise. Cautiously, I climb out of the Sarah-box I’ve been lying in and try to step into the small spaces between the cardboard covers on my way out, but there aren’t any, really. Sarah would never let me walk on her black disks! The covers feel smooth and slippery under the pads of my feet, but I’m afraid to use my claws to try and get more traction.
While I’m trying to find a good way out, I hear Laura come through the front door. “Josh?” she calls out.
“Up here,” he calls back.
The sound of the feet-shoes Laura wears to work comes clicking up the wooden stairs. Her face seems to draw inward when she gets to the doorway of my room and sees what Josh is doing. “What’s all this?”
“Don’t worry,” Josh tells her, looking up with a quick grin. “I know which ones are mine and which are your mom’s.”
“But what are you doing?” she asks again.
“I’m trying to get a visual sense of which of these were recorded at Alphaville, which ones were influenced by artists who came out of Alphaville, which ones use sessions guys who recorded other albums at Alphaville.” He leans back to rest on his heels and admire his work. “Quite a history for one down-on-its-luck recording studio, huh?”
“It looks like a record store in here,” Laura says faintly.
I don’t think she’s agreeing with him, exactly, but that’s the way Josh must understand it, because he smiles at her again. “You know, some of these are worth real money.”
“Probably.” Laura’s lips thin together.
Josh looks up and finally notices the expression on her face. “I’m not saying we should sell them. I’m sorry if that seemed insensitive. It’s just the geek in me getting excited looking at all this stuff.”
“I didn’t think you were.” I think she means it, but her lips stay thin.
Josh has decided to change the subject, because the next thing he says is, “My dad was here today. We took the kids out for lunch, and afterward I was showing him everything I’ve been working on. What he responded to most was the personal side of the story—the people living in this building who’ll have to move and uproot their lives. I don’t think I’ve done enough with that part of it yet. I was thinking maybe you could help me.”
“Me?” Laura looks completely surprised. “How could I help?”
“Well, the night we met,” Josh says. “You have no idea how moving you were when you were talking about the building you grew up in, and the people you knew there. I know you all had to move when the place was condemned. You have a much better grasp on the emotional side of what these people are facing now than I do.”
Laura’s face draws even further into itself. Little bumps appear in the tops of her shoes as her toes curl up. When she speaks, her voice sounds funny. “What kinds of things do you want to hear?”
“I don’t know.” Josh gives a small shrug. “How you found out you’d have to move. How your mom and your neighbors felt about it. What it was like having to move away from your friends and all those people you’d known for years. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the bad stuff,” he adds gently. “I know you’ve been going through your mother’s things with Prudence lately. That must have jogged some good memories.”
Listening to Laura talk about her Sarah-memories has become one of my favorite things. Leaping into the nearest Sarah-box, I helpfully push something out with my nose and paws. This way Laura has something to start talking about. The plastic bag I spill onto the ground holds tiny white-and-blue ceramic cups called a “sake set” that Anise brought back from a place called Japan for Sarah to keep in her record store. They clink against each other as they roll from the bag and around the cardboard covers scattered on the floor. The floor is so many different colors now from all the covers that it’s hard to see where some of the sake-set cups end up.
“See?” Josh smiles. “Prudence thinks it’s a good idea, too.” His smile turns wistful. “You see me with my family all the time. I hardly know anything about what you and your mother were like together. I’d just love to hear you talk about it.”
They look at each other for a long moment. Then Laura says, “I have to get out of these work clothes.” As her feet-shoes click down the hall, her voice calls back to us, “Let me know when you’re ready for dinner.”