West 4th Street Review Online

My Sister’s Undead Cat

Katia Taylor

“Do dogs die when people smoke around them?” Vera tugs my arm down. The eight-year-old girl watches a beagle in the World Trade Center subway station. Its owner, a stocky businessman, is smoking a juul.

“I think dogs are like people,” I say, “over many years, they can get very sick and die from the smoke. But it’s not like one dog sniffs smoke and dies on the spot.”

“Oh,” Vera replies. “Did you hear what Katia said, Natalia? Dogs are fine.” Natalia, Vera’s classmate and friend, smiles up at me in relief. The beagle is safe from imminent death. The little girl wraps her arm around Vera’s as we walk up the stairs into the construction fumes of Fulton Street.

“Our uncle smokes,” Vera continues, always ready to divulge what she views as family gossip. “Remember when I told you about the cat we had when I was five years old? The big, fat one? Well, we brought it over to my uncle’s house, and he smokes a lot there. So the cat died.”

Wait, what?

“What do you mean, a cat we had when you were five years old?” I inquire with a confused smile, “as far as I can remember, we’ve never had a cat. Or any pet.”

“Yes, we did,” Vera insists, blood rushing into her cheeks. Then she whips around to her friend. “We did, Natalia. Katia doesn’t know anything. We had a cat, a fat cat, and now he’s dead.” Natalia glances at me, then at Vera, then at me again. She doesn’t know what to think.

“Yes, I know you had a cat,” Natalia breathes out, making up her mind. “Everyone knows that. And then you were sad when he died.”

What?

I am tempted to pull out all the evidence that this cat never existed. But then the teacher calls out for silence from the front of the line. The woman in her twenties politely asks all the 2nd graders to pair up, hold hands and walk next to the adults on the Brooklyn Bridge. Then she tells all the field trip chaperones to implore our children about the history of the bridge to see what the students can remember from their social studies class.

Our children. I bristle at the phrase. Even though I’ve been a (much) older sibling for eight years now, I’m still not used to being treated like a parent at times. The fact that my own sister — a person in my own generation — is still in the throes of childhood fills me with bitter nostalgia. Sometimes I wonder if we are all psychologically wired to never be satisfied — with children constantly wanting to be older, and adults wanting to go back in time. It feels like a slap in the face when I’m reminded that I could be a teenage mom in a different world.

“What was the cat’s name?” I suddenly ask Vera, before my negative thoughts begin to spiral.

“I don’t remember,” Vera drags out each word. She’s flustered. Natalia looks confused. I’m disappointed. Suddenly I want to teach my little sister how to become a better liar. If she is going to do it, she better do it right. My first lesson would be: don’t lie in front of someone who knows the truth and will call you out on it. In the spirit of mentorship, I decide to let my sister’s lie go for now.

The sky is overcast, so I make sure Vera’s jacket is completely zipped. Holding onto each other’s hand, we begin our trek down the Brooklyn Bridge.

—

Before my sister was born, my family used to listen to a French opera CD in the car. One of my favorite songs on it was a cover of the musical number Memory. When the first few notes of the song would play, a deep sense of melancholy would nestle in my chest. There was no tangible reason for why it made me feel that way, nor did I understand what the foreign lyrics meant. But I felt as though, for a moment, I was sixty years older — and that transformation was weirdly magical.

Imagine my surprise when I recently found out the original song in the Cats musical is sung by, well, a cat.

The feline character Grizabella was a glamorous star in her past, and now she sings emphatically about her glory days. The memory of that time belongs only to her now, she repeats, and her despair echoes in every vocal tremor. It is beautiful, but also odd. Why must she be a cat? While it might be true that the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber likes cats a lot, many critics of Cats have argued that there is no real reason for the show to be about the animal.^[1]

            I disagree. Cats are among the most peculiar of animals, mysterious and dreamlike. Sometimes one of them can make us feel ancient with its sad, powerful voice (or, more likely, with its athletic capabilities). And — if we really, really want it, a cat can just materialize itself in our memories. 

—

Throughout the day, I wonder about my sister’s nonexistent cat. What color was it? Which room did it live in? What kind of personality did it have?

On the drive home from the elementary school, I ask her why she told Natalia we had a cat in the first place.

“I told everybody,” Vera replies. “What’s the big deal?”

“It’s a lie, and you and I and everyone in this family knows it.”

Vera’s lips purse. In a deeper voice, she states: “It’s not a lie.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not!” she screeches. “We had a cat. I don’t remember its name, but we had a cat, and now you’re just trying to make a big deal out of everything I do and say, like you always do! Why do you have to make a big deal out of everything?”

I don’t know how to respond. For a few minutes, the car is silent and tense.

Confused, my mom in the driver’s seat inquires about the argument. I explain the situation.

“Maybe she’s not lying,” says my mother. “Maybe she genuinely believes that we had a cat when she was five years old.” My sister in the backseat grunts in frustration.

I laugh. It has only been three years since my sister was five; surely, she remembers that we had never had a pet in our lives. She also brags about her ability to lie; honestly, the boy who cried wolf has nothing on her.

“After all,” my mother abruptly continues, “you also believe that you went on that Brooklyn Bridge field trip when you were in 2nd grade, don’t you? I talked to your dad today, and he said that never happened. You were sick that day. So, he took you there the summer of 2007.”

What? For a moment, I refuse to believe that. I feel like I can still recall everything from that day. The field trip worksheets we did on the bridge. The conversation I had with my best friend about how we would construct the bridge with wooden blocks at school. The sunburn I had on my arms at the end of the day.

            I’m about to protest, but I hold back. The truth is, these memories are not very accessible; it’s not like recalling what happened yesterday, or even last summer. There is a thick fog around my childhood memories, so it is entirely possible that I made them up. I might have looked at photos on my school website, and mentally photoshopped myself into the experience. Maybe I filled out those worksheets on another day and talked with my friend in a different place. As for sunburns — that probably did happen on the Brooklyn Bridge, only during the summer with my dad.

When I turn in my front seat to look at my sister, I see that Vera’s brown eyes are red and puffy. She leans on her cheek and looks out the window morosely. It isn’t like her to be so easily upset. Still a little suspicious, I ask what color the cat was.

“Brown,” she mutters. “With white stripes. It was fat, too. That’s all I remember.”

I look for her tell-tale signs of lying: repeating “um” over and over, glancing everywhere but at me, persistent fidgeting with her hands. But she shows none of the signs. For the first time, I actually believe she might be telling her truth.

“I’m sorry,” I say, with genuine guilt. “You might be right after all.”

—

Cheshire Cat, my favorite cat in literature, is famous for asking more questions than he even bothers to answer. He also just likes to be creepy. When the little girl Alice tells him that that she doesn’t want to be around the crazy people of Wonderland, the blue Cheshire Cat smiles its signature disturbing grin. “Oh, you can’t help that,” he says. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad” (90).^[2]

            When my family finally returns home from the field trip, I think about how memories shift, and twist, and evolve. How nostalgia only works because we forgot the bad parts of childhood. How the stories we create are often distorted by our own flawed perceptions of the past (and by our ultimate page count). Maybe, I realize, madness stems from the belief that truth is objective and stagnant. The belief that a nonexistent cat never lived.

            My sister made up the lie about the cat because she always wanted a pet. She talks about it often, and the walls in her room are decorated with photos and drawings of dogs and cats. After months, and possibly years of lying at school, Vera started to believe in a cat in her past. Who am I to call that mad?

            After all, I remember going on a 2nd grade field trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. It might be that my “field trip” happened another time with another person, but that’s not what my memory tells me. Sometimes it is possible to just will things into existence because of how badly you want it. Only, you can only will something to happen in your past, or, I suppose, in your future. The present is not magical in that way.

After the Cheshire Cat answers her question, Alice asks him how he could possibly know that she is mad. He responds: “you must be, or you wouldn’t have come here” (90). Here can only refer to Wonderland, otherwise regarded widely as the psychological world of dreams and flawed memories.

—

A few days go by. My sister barges into my room on Sunday without knocking. Jumping on my bed, she holds a physical photo album in her hands, an odd relic I had not seen in a while.

“Look at this,” cries Vera, jubilant. She opens the red album to a page she bookmarked with her thumb. “There’s a cat in that picture! I told you that we had a cat! Maybe it was a long, long time ago, but we did have one!”

I stare at the image behind the plastic cover. A little blonde five-year-old girl plays with one brown-and-white-striped cat in an enclosed outdoor garden. I recognize the black table and the grape vines in the back.

“That’s me,” I breathe out, “when I was five.” I brace for Vera’s disappointment.

“What?! That’s so cool. Why didn’t you tell me you had a cat when you were little?” She looks up at me with a cheeky pout. “Did you lie to me?”

“No,” I say, “that was my cat in Russia. That’s a different story.”

“Tell me!” Vera bounces on the mattress.

“Well, it was a nice cat named Marissa. Then she got sick and died. The end,” I summarize.

“Oh,” my little sister frowns.

“I know. It’s really sad.” It’s been years since I’ve thought of Marissa the cat, and I can’t remember playing with her at all.

“Was she like my cat?” Vera looks up at me with innocent puppy dog eyes.

It’s a test. I know it is.

“Well, she didn’t die of smoke,” I say. “But I guess they both liked to swim, which is kind of weird for cats.”

“I don’t remember my cat swimming.” Vera pinched her eyebrows. “Huh. Guess I don’t remember everything.”

—

In order to explain a concept in quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger devised a thought experiment asking what would happen if you put a cat, a flask of poison and a radioactive source in an enclosed metal box.^[3] The answer is simple; at some point, the cat will die when the radioactive source decays and causes a poisonous explosion. However, since the initial decay happens randomly, there is no way to predict when the poison will explode. Until you open the box again, it’s impossible to know the cat’s fate. Therefore, Schrödinger proposes that the cat is, at least to us, both dead and alive at the same time.

But what if the cat, the box and the poison in this case never existed? What if they were completely made up to begin with? In an empirical sense, that would mean that my sister’s cat was also neither dead nor alive. Now that Vera is convinced the cat truly lived, however, she breathes life into the lie. I can’t dispute that, nor would I necessarily want to. After all, I don’t want to get in the way of creativity and imagination, which are just other words for lying.

Should the day ever come that my sister wants to know the truth, then I’ll tell her. I doubt my sister ever will, though. Just like how I remember the Brooklyn Bridge (except not really), she’ll remember the cat too (except not really). Or, she might be too wrapped up in nostalgia to ask.

Until then, that memory is both dead and alive, and as her older sister, I am not about to change that.

Author’s Note

            I originally wanted to write a literary analysis on Angela Carter’s Lady in the House of Love, but I switched topics for two reasons. One, I realized that I had another analytical paper due within three days of this one and writing two analyses did not seem all that exciting during finals season. Two, this story with my sister kept bugging me for some inexplicable reason. It felt like it had the potential to fit the prompt, so I switched.

Writing this creative nonfiction narrative opened up a whole new can of worms because I couldn’t figure out how I wanted to write it. At first, I thought I would take on my relationship with my sister in Yiyun Li’s style, but that fell apart when I realized how awkward it is to write about yourself in the third person. Then I contemplated the crux of this story, which has to do with dreams, flawed memories and cats. That’s when I remembered Carmen Maria Machado’s The Husband Stitch, and how she spliced short familiar stories into a broader tale to drive her point home. I thought about some fictional cats that might convey the theme, and decided to feature Grizabella from the musical Cats, the Cheshire Cat from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Schrödinger’s infamous cat. I liked how all these examples illustrate the weird dreamlike status cats have in our culture, and also in our understanding of dreams and philosophy. I thought these stories worked with the general theme of my sister’s imaginary (but also very real) cat.

My role in this story is a little weird, because all I do is react and prod and react. I think of my part as embodying the uncertainty of the journey in hindsight. I come to the realization that some of our memories are false, due to past forgotten desires, and how that’s ultimately inevitable and okay.

 The greatest challenge I had with this essay was figuring out why I’m writing it, and what I want readers to get out of it. It’s a little all over the place, because the themes vary from my relationship with my sister to a general discourse about flawed memories, and then to fictional cats. I hope I was able to weave these ideas in an organic way, but that’s what I feel the least confident about in this essay.

While writing this piece, I learned how to make a small anecdote seem really big. Also, I’ve never spliced loosely-connected short references into an essay with a broader theme, so that was new. Lastly, I learned a lot about the lore of fictional cats, which, suffice to say, was not what I was expecting when I started this essay.

^[1] Russo, Robert. “NOTES: In Defense of ‘Cats’, Why You Should See This Iconic Musical before It Closes on

Broadway.” Stage Left, Stage Left, 12 Nov. 2017,

www.stageleft.nyc/blog/2017/11/12/notes-in-defense-of-cats-why-you-should-see-this-iconic-musical-before-it-closes-on-broadway.

^[2] Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Lee and Shepard, 1869.

^[3] “The Physics Behind Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox.” National Geographic, National Geographic Society, 14 Aug. 2013, news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130812-physics-schrodinger-erwin-google-doodle-cat-paradox-science/.

Songs in Her Head

Claire Kowalewski

It hit her like the wind of a passing train.  As if stepping over the bumped yellow line, a few knuckles from death.  Wild unearthly exhilaration is what she felt.  Hold on, she told herself, afraid of floating up and up.  It started with a drink at the bar.  “Rum and coke,” Val said, and Michael handed her a vodka soda.  She glanced at the clear soda, sparkling like something celestial.  Perhaps a divine signal that she was meant to take it, this drink, from him.  A holy Eucharist.  He watched as she swallowed.

They talked for a long time about family and labor.  The kind their fathers did, with calloused hands and sun spots beneath bright orange t-shirts.  Val thought of the gray reflective stripes that cracked after too many washes.  It touched her, knowing that Michael understood those gray stripes too.  They shared the fear of disappointing their fathers who worked to the bone, and other things too (sipping from the same straw, flirtatious glances).  They complained about the simultaneous dissatisfaction and ecstasy of life in the city, of this post-modern condition in which we spin in circles of desire and consumption.  They bonded over the treacherousness of being twenty-something.

Everything Michael said was charged with sex in some way or another.  He touched her wrist and his eyes were dark.  Val felt things boiling inside of her, a white frothing madness.  She was drunk on the way he saw her.  He complimented her and used words like cute, funny, and wild.  He wouldn’t stop laughing at her jokes, he made her seem endlessly interesting and awfully intelligent.  Val felt all the right words slip off her tongue. 

She wanted to sleep with him.

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.  He had a smirking, almost viscous smile. 

Val felt blood rushing to her ears.  “No, I’m not,” she said, smiling up at Michael and sucking on her straw.

She thought of Leo, the one she loved, asleep in her bed with a head cold.  He wasn’t feeling well and decided not to go out with their group of friends, all of whom had left her at the bar.  Her love for him was warm and soft, a constant glow.  He made happy sighs, patted her knee, and kissed her on the forehead when she cried.  Her bedroom was laced with the entanglement of their lives: worn down pillow cases, his piles of clothes in her closet, brown rings of coffee on the window sill, a lingering smell of ash. 

The comforting familiarity with which she pictured Leo was in the place of her once electric infatuation with him.  When he touched her, she could think about it for days after and still feel that rising, helium feeling inside.  She couldn’t eat properly when struck with such excitement.  She sang songs in her head.  They sounded like the faraway crooning of love songs played in the living room, her parents moving slowly together, wine glasses on the mantle. They always left red rings on the wood.  Love is found in circles: glass marks, the spinning of two dancers, widened pupils, the shape of your mouth during orgasm, wedding rings, a record playing in the living room.

It was a whirlwind chaos of pleasure and uncertainty.  The honeymoon period, they call it.  More than that though – a cosmic alliance of time, space, and energy in her chest.  Val believed it to be the height of human experience.

Now she had become accustomed to it all.  They were comfortable.  Their love was weighed down by feeling safe.  Safety, however, brings boredom when stretched out far in time.  She moved through the days like clockwork: foggy mornings, clicking computer keys at her startup job, small talk with Leo over lukewarm takeout dinner, and having sex every once in a while.  Their sex was all push and thrust and the routine mundanity of making each other cum.  To Val, Leo was like a Ken doll, his body all muscles and mound.  A sexless form except on the rare occasions in which they both searched for thrills of the past.  Sex was like excavating for ancient, broken remnants – trying to piece together and recreate something that once was, but can never be again.  They slept each night in her bed, two lumps of flesh on either side.  Rising and falling lungs but no beating heart.  Over and over, spinning off into nothingness.

—–

Eventually Michael invited Val back to his apartment.  As they walked there, she felt that with every step she was venturing to some place from which she could never return.  His eyes grew more and more wicked and her legs began to weaken.  Outside of his building, the lobby glowed with yellow light and beckoned her entrance.  An oasis of temptation, a hidden garden.

“Mind if I smoke?” Michael asked.  He held a cigarette in his teeth ready to light.  She realized that his wickedness was just an overpowering expression of youth.  He had a sort of juvenile deviance to him, there was no malice. 

“No, go ahead,” Val smiled.  She leaned against the iron fence of his building and looked out at the street, feeling very, very far away and unlike the person Leo knew.

Val was of the disposition that yearning is an inherently feminine trait.  Femininity and its flimsy modern empowerment are no match for loneliness, she believed.  To be a woman is to constantly yearn for more and to live life in a state of eternal incompletion.  That seed is sown in early childhood with whimsical fairytales and made-up stories.  Poor girls, raised on the idea that love will find them.  They gorge on love and sex as teenagers, in television shows and romance novels and, most powerfully, in their dizzy punchdrunk heads.  Love must not only find them but complete them, too. 

Val yearned for a version of Leo not unlike Prince Charming, who worshipped and lavished her with rose petals and gold jewelry, wet kisses and barefoot dances.  She yearned for spontaneity, unexpected sex, meaningful sex, filthy shameful kinky sex.  Standing outside of Michael’s apartment, on the precipice of infidelity, she cursed Leo for being so beige.  He drove me to this, she lied to herself, knowing it was her fault, all her fault, and that if she just went home now all would be forgotten.  But she stayed, feeling the night at the back of her neck and at her ankles, breathing in the smell of Michael’s cigarette smoke.

Most of all, she yearned to plunge into something dangerous.

—–

            Michael’s apartment was gray, black, and white with little variation on the theme.  It was sleek, with sharp corners and lots of empty space.  It was also spotless in a vacant sort of way.  He got it cleaned once a week, he said.  Michael was dominant and mischievous, and she submitted, as if dutifully, to his body’s desires.  Bending and stretching.  Reaching and contorting.  She felt that rush of wind, that feeling of being close to death. 

She woke up next to him, his chest softly rising and a little tattoo on his ribs moving along with it.  Val traced the lines of his jaw and nose, his collarbone, the veins on his forearm.  It didn’t feel like touching Leo.  When you’re with someone for long enough, your body becomes their body.  No one likes caressing their own body.

She crept into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.  Her makeup was streaked black across her eyelids, her hair knotted and frizzy.  Val blinked away the sting in her eyes.

            She stepped into the shower and turned the faucet all the way hot.  Steam billowed in the bathroom.  Val scrubbed her body raw.  She scrubbed the insides of her thighs hard.   Then she stood beneath the water as it scalded her upper back numb and traveled down to her ankles, stinging each notch of her body along the way.  When she stepped out her skin was tight and pink like a newborn baby.  Val remembered the hospital picture that hung on her family’s cluttered fridge as a child, she was red pink and writhing – a creature unhuman with its wrinkles and scrunches.  She longed for that untainted state of being, the sterile hospital green in the background.

            Val thought about newness, softness.  Everyone loves babies because they’re innocent.  She read somewhere that babies are so cute because it makes us protect and care for them.  But unhinged women drown babies in bathtubs, she thought.  The life and death of water, from baptismal font to dirty tub.

—–

            Guilt followed Val home like a slithering trail of snakes.  She opened the door of her bedroom to see Leo, her Leo, watching a movie on his laptop.  He looked up at her and smiled.  “How was last night?  Did you stay at Sarah’s?”

            “It was good,” Val said, swallowing what felt like shards of glass.  “Yeah, I stayed at Sarah’s, didn’t want to wake you so late.”  She plopped down on the bed beside him, her shoulders folding in. 

            “That’s nice of you,” he replied and turned back to his movie.

            “Of course.”

            Val looked blankly into the distance between her and the wall.  She listened to the music play softly from Leo’s movie.  A faraway love song…she could hear it from the past, haunting her with echoes.