Читать книгу The Question Authority - Rachel Cline - Страница 7

Sometimes I get grief and resentment confused. Also fear and anticipation. It’s not that I don’t know what the words mean, but that whatever it seems like I should be feeling (grief over my mother’s death, excitement about a potential date) is not what I am feeling. It’s been like this since I was a kid, but it’s taken me until recently to put it together: I have a fundamental emotional wiring problem. Is fifty-three too old to be learning new things about your psyche?

The trouble of the moment—what’s keeping me awake on a work night—is the problem of my lost cat. “Lost” is a misnomer; I let him out. I had this idea that by letting him roam I was honoring his essential cat-ness, his life as a hunter and wanderer. Only it’s February and I live in New York City and, even though Brooklyn Heights is a tree-lined neighborhood where you rarely see a car traveling at more than parking-seeking speed, it’s been almost three days now. People have found him before, and called me—he has a tag—but that was only one night away, at most.

Given the timing, it’s likely that my cat-freedom gambit was some kind of hedge against my mother’s death. Adeline died eighteen months ago: three months before I adopted the cat. Prior to her death, I’d convinced myself that she wasn’t all that important to me—that her role in my life was more like that of an eccentric aunt than the woman who’d breastfed me till I was three (or so she claimed). Every single time she saw me, she opened with a criticism (“You look pale.” “What happened to your hair?” “What are you wearing?”); she’d never noticed or admitted that I was fundamentally depressed from age thirteen to thirty-five (when: Prozac); and—adding insult to injury—she did none of what they call “advance planning” for her own demise. She left me not only broke but awash in legal and financial perplexities. I had no choice but to move back into this apartment, the apartment I grew up in, after I’d sold its contents. Maybe by letting the cat roam, I felt better about feeling trapped myself?

In any case, I was proud of my liberated cat, of trusting him to find his own way home—it mirrored the way I was raised. Back then, I was not the only kid around here with an apartment key on the same length of twine as the key to her roller skates. I had a best friend, and a three-dollar-a-week allowance, and—as long as we stayed on the right side of Atlantic Avenue and were home for dinner—we did what we pleased. Beth did, anyway. She was the brave one. But that’s another story.

Tin Man, please come home.