Even when Lynda went outside, Cookie sometimes slipped out with her. Lynda tried to stop her, of course, but Cookie was smart. She hid behind the door, then rushed out as Lynda walked through, usually with a garbage bag in her hand. Once outside, Cookie would run. Lynda would drop her bag and chase after her, yelling for her to stop. Halfway down the block, Cookie would decide she’d gone far enough. She’d stop, turn around, and wait for Lynda to snatch her up. Then they’d walk slowly back to the house, Lynda telling her baby to never, never, ever do that again, and Cookie rubbing against Lynda’s chin as if to assure her, Don’t worry, Mom, I would never go too far from you.
For some people, it might have all been too much. But Lynda’s life was busy. After her divorce, she became the general manager of her family’s catering business. The business was embedded in the community of Bayside, supporting and being supported by the family and the friends who had sustained Lynda over the years. She worked fifty hours a week, even before an administrator at St. Mary’s Hospital for Children asked if she would donate a catered Christmas party for the nurses. She was so impressed with the hospital that the next year, in addition to the nurse’s party, she organized and catered a forty-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser. The first year, she raised more than twelve thousand. The next year, she convinced a soap opera star to attend—many of the soaps filmed a few miles away in an industrial part of Queens—and doubled the attendance and donation. Soon, she was raising more than fifty thousand dollars a year with her February fund-raisers and being written up in Soap Opera Digest as a favorite charitable event for daytime stars.
When she wasn’t working, she was at home preparing dinner, cleaning up, helping with homework, and trundling her young teen off to bed. Her parents would bring her armfuls of homemade spaghetti; her friends would take her out for movies and shows; but most of her time was devoted to Jennifer.
“You know how it is,” she told me. “It was all for my daughter. Everything I did was for her.”
I did know. When Lynda Caira talked about her life as a single mother, I remembered my own days of working fifty hours a week at the library. I remembered the weekends with my friends and the warm embrace of my family, how sheltered and supported I felt. I was happy. I had my own life. But that life, in a real way, was devoted to my daughter, Jodi. When I was working, it was to give her a better life. When I went to school to qualify for my director position, it was with the goal of making enough money to send her to college. Every moment, whether I was pounding away on a term paper alone in the library or trying to convince Jodi to clean up her filthy bedroom, I was thinking of my daughter.
And I know what Lynda means when she says that Cookie was there for her, because Dewey was there for me, too. Whenever I felt tired or frustrated, Dewey jumped on my lap. Whenever I wondered if the effort was worth it, or if I was making the right choices, Dewey forced me out of my funk and into a game of chase. Every morning, Dewey stood by the front door of the library and waited for me. When he saw me coming, he waved—and whatever was bothering me flew away. Dewey was here. He was waving. The world was good.
Cookie did that for Lynda. Whenever she came home, whether it was from a long day of work or a night out with her friends, Cookie was waiting on the ottoman near the front door. Every time, she followed on Lynda’s heel like a dog, waiting for her to put down her bags, straighten her things, and bend down to pet her. Lynda couldn’t resist. No matter how often it was given, she always enjoyed Cookie’s attention. She never held it against Snuggles, who continued to be standoffish. She never expected it from another cat. This devotion was something special, she realized, something that was Cookie’s alone.
Cookie loved fresh laundry, warm from the dryer. Lynda let her curl up in the basket at every opportunity. She couldn’t bear to kick Cookie out, so she often washed each load of laundry two or three times. (That’s what she told me the first time, anyway. Later she admitted, with a laugh, that she never rewashed.) Cookie was picky about pillowcases. Every time Lynda changed a pillowcase, Cookie jumped onto the bed to test it with a nap. If she didn’t like the new fabric, she’d whine and step off, waiting for Lynda to change it. Which, of course, she always did.
Cookie also loved to be in the kitchen when Lynda was cooking. She had a habit, in particular, of sitting on Lynda’s foot while she cooked at the stove. She loved Irish soda bread and pumpkin bread, and Lynda knew to cut Cookie a piece whenever she sliced one for herself. She also loved broccoli rabe, an Italian vegetable that connected Lynda with her childhood, her family, and those summers of homemade wine and kitchen-canned tomatoes in her grandmother’s house. Broccoli rabe looks like stringy broccoli, and its bitter taste is something most Americans choke down and endure. Even many Italian Americans don’t like the bitterness, although broccoli rabe is a staple of Italian cuisine. Cookie loved it. As soon as she smelled broccoli rabe cooking, she ran to the kitchen, stood on Lynda’s feet, and meowed until she was given a bite. Or two. Or three. Lynda never cared. She wasn’t lonely. Far from it. But Jennifer was having more meals out with her friends, as well as court-ordered weekends with her father, and it was nice to have someone to eat with every night.
It got to the point that Lynda noticed not when Cookie was with her but when she wasn’t. If Cookie disappeared for a while, Lynda often walked the town house looking for her. Cookie almost always trotted out after the first few times Lynda called her, but one evening she went missing for hours. That wasn’t like Cookie. It took Lynda a few tours of the house before she noticed the screen pushed out in the master bedroom. She looked out the window and there was filthy, disheveled Cookie trying frantically to climb the wall. She must have accidently pushed open the screen and somersaulted out the window. Fortunately, it was the first floor. Cookie had only fallen five feet. Still, by the time Lynda found her, her claws were broken and her paws were bloody from scrabbling at the rough brick wall.
A few years later, Lynda decided to finish her basement. Jennifer was now in high school, and without the basement, there wasn’t enough room in the little town house for her friends to hang out. The job would take a few days, and the workmen would be going in and out of the house, so Lynda made sure to lock Cookie and Snuggles in her bedroom before leaving for work. On the second day, after the workmen had left, she unlocked the door to let the cats out. Snuggles was sitting on the windowsill, disdainful as usual. But Cookie didn’t come running. And she wasn’t anywhere in the room. As she searched the closet and under the bed, it dawned on Lynda that sly, sneaky Cookie must have slipped out the door when she was closing it that morning.
She called to Jennifer. They immediately began searching the house, calling for Cookie. They looked in the closets, under the sofa, in the kitchen cabinets. No Cookie. Lynda checked the television cabinet and under her quilting supplies. She scoured the construction debris stacked in the basement. She examined the windows, but all the screens were locked. There wasn’t a single place she didn’t search, then search again, then search one final time.
“Ohmygod,” she told me, “I was absolutely hysterical.”
Jennifer was crying. Lynda was worse. Her Cookie had gotten out. The workmen had propped open the outside doors; they had rummaged around all day with drywall and saws and wooden studs. They had clomped and banged. With no way back into the locked bedroom, Cookie would have been terrified. Of course she ran. Why wouldn’t she run? And once she was outside . . .
Ohmygod, she was gone. She was such a baby and Lynda had cured her of all those terrible ailments and she had loved her and they had loved each other and ohmygod, how could she be gone? How could her baby disappear?
“Search one more time,” Lynda told Jennifer.
Twenty minutes later, hysterical and tired and desperately pushing pieces of drywall around the basement, Lynda heard it. At first, she thought it was her imagination. Then she heard it again. The faint sound of feet. Then a meow, very soft and far away. She scrambled through the construction debris, yelling, “Coo
kie! Cookie!” She heard the meow, still far away, like it was coming from the first floor. But how could that be? She had searched and searched and . . . she looked up and there, above her, was a fresh layer of drywall.
“Ohmygod, ohmygod,” she yelled to Jennifer. “Ohmygod, she’s in the ceiling!”
She climbed up on a small stepladder. “Cookie,” she called, banging her hand against the drywall. “Cookie!” She heard the sound of feet running toward her, then a faint meow. Every time she called Cookie’s name, she was answered with a meow from just above her head.
She called one of the workmen. “The ceiling,” she yelled into the telephone. “In the ceiling!”
“What’s in the ceiling?”
“My Cookie.”
“Your what?”
“My cat. She’s trapped in the ceiling.”
She was so hysterical, the contractor came straight over. Sure enough, Cookie had jumped into the partially completed ceiling and been sealed between the joists when the men applied the last of the drywall. The workman cut a hole above the window where the drywall hadn’t been sealed, and together he and Lynda, by banging the ceiling and calling Cookie’s name, managed to coax the kitten to the hole. Suddenly, there she was, Lynda’s little Cookie, peaking over the edge of the drywall. She looked around, as if seeing the basement for the first time, and then leapt down into Lynda’s arms, completely covered with dust and construction debris. Lynda was crying and kissing her, overcome with both horror and relief. Cookie didn’t care. She jumped down and ran off, as if she’d known all along that Lynda would find her.
Before he left, Lynda made the workman patch the drywall hole and seal every inch of the ceiling. She didn’t care that it was the middle of the night. She wasn’t taking any more chances.
The first bump in Cookie’s life began when Snuggles died. A tumor wrapped suddenly around her heart and lungs, and within forty-eight hours, Snuggles went from seemingly perfectly healthy to gasping for her last breath on the veterinarian’s table. It was over before Lynda realized what was happening.
Soon after, she noticed a tiny, stumbling kitten nosing around her front door. The cat was clearly too young to be weaned, but no mother was in sight, so Lynda started feeding her. She fed her on the front porch for nine months, with no intention of ever letting her into the house. She had Cookie. She didn’t want or need another cat. But after a while, she realized that Chloe—as she named the little runt—was being terrorized by the big hunting dog next door. Several times a day, he’d come barreling out of his house and chase her across the street, barking and rampaging and scaring her half to death. The neighbor didn’t like the situation any more than Lynda did. He worried his precious dog was going to get hit by a car. So he came up with the perfect solution: shoot the kitten with this hunting rifle. Needless to say, Lynda immediately brought Chloe inside and made her a house cat.
Cookie wasn’t happy about this at all. She was six years old, and she was used to having the house to herself. She didn’t attack Chloe—Cookie was not an aggressive cat—but she turned up her nose at the newcomer and refused to pay her any mind. Chloe was a shy cat, the kind with a habit of lowering her head and staring up at you with big sad eyes, and she readily accepted the role of second cat in the Caira household. She seemed to understand that she could live in the house, but only on Cookie’s terms. Cookie ate first. Cookie drank first. And Cookie was not sharing Lynda. That was the line, the one rule that stood above all others. Cookie looked scornfully if Chloe even tried to approach Lynda, and she wasn’t above smacking her once to let her know her behavior was not condoned. And if Chloe tried to jump onto Lynda’s bed? Unforgivable. One foot on the bedspread, and Cookie arched her back and hissed. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but she would have fought to defend that bed because Lynda—Lynda was hers. Lynda was sacrosanct.
Eventually, though, Cookie mellowed. She was a friendly cat at heart, and constant vigilance wasn’t in her nature. She was a lover, a happy-go-lucky companion, and once she knew she was still the love of Lynda’s life, she began to warm up to sweet, subservient little Chloe. Mind you, it took years. Three years to be exact. But in the end, Cookie and Chloe were wonderful friends.
The second bump came a few years later. Lynda had long since settled into a comfortable life: twenty years in her town house, seventeen years as a divorced mom, sixteen years managing a successful catering business, ten years with her beloved Cookie. After twelve years of fund-raisers, she had donated more than a million dollars to St. Mary’s hospital, which used the money to open a traumatic brain injury unit for children—the only such specialized unit on the East Coast. The next year, Lynda organized a fund-raiser for ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which had not only killed her aunt but was now affecting one of the soap opera stars who had been instrumental in helping her fund-raisers: Michael Zaslow. He had been fired by Guiding Light after his condition was revealed, and, as his health deteriorated rapidly, he told his wife that his biggest regret was not being able to see the friends he had made on that show one last time. Thirty-five of those friends showed up to see him at Lynda’s benefit, which raised more than twenty-six thousand dollars. Michael Zaslow died ten days later.
But even as she enlisted the help of her close-knit family and friends, as she always had for a worthy cause, Lynda knew her life was changing. With her father semiretired, the catering business downsized its work space and staff, adding to Lynda’s workload and putting an end to her fund-raisers. Her daughter was growing up and would soon be out on her own. Her grandmother died, and the family sold the house where Lynda had spent so many wonderful afternoons with grapevines, canned tomatoes, and a matriarch who never turned anyone away, from WPA highway builders to down-on-their-luck strangers in need of a cup of joe. It was as if her death closed the book on Lynda Caira’s Bayside, a community that had long ago paved over most of its orchards and grape arbors, and where nobody talked to strangers anymore—much less invited them inside for a meal. For decades the original immigrants had been leaving, squeezed by newer immigrants and refugees from the City, as the locals called Manhattan, looking for affordable places to live. As the century closed on the old Bayside, Lynda Caira cashed out. She sold her town house for more than ten times what she had paid for it in 1973 and bought a three-bedroom, two-story, stand-alone Victorian in Floral Park.
Floral Park was only seven miles away, but for Lynda Caira, it was another world. Bell Boulevard, the main thoroughfare in her old section of Bayside, was crowded with garish signs, electrical wires, and four lanes of honking traffic. Floral Park’s two-lane main thoroughfare, Tulip Avenue, was lined with independent stores fronted by orderly wooden signs: the bakery, the candy shop, the little independent supermarket, the lawyer’s office on the second floor. Founded by a flower seed wholesaler in 1874, who named all the streets after flowers, Floral Park was incorporated as a township in 1908, an occasion celebrated by a white-steepled library at one end of Tulip Avenue and the centennial gardens at the other. Every year, the front lawn of Memorial Park featured a Christmas tree, and a crowd always turned out to watch the lights come on, followed by hot chocolate at the Catholic church next door. A Christmas tree on Bell Boulevard in Bayside, Queens? With hot chocolate? Nevah.
For Lynda, Floral Park was heaven, a tree-lined Norman Rock-well town literally one foot across the line from the messy sprawl of outer Queens. Sure, you had to drive thirty miles in any direction to escape the nonstop sprawl of New York City, but here within that maze of highways and apartment blocks was a tiny patch of middle-class, Midwestern Americana. A place with block parties and green lawns, where children rode bikes while the adults ate hot dogs to the sounds of “Light FM” radio. It was a place where she could hang a “Sunny Days” wreath on the door of her gingerbread-trimmed Victorian and tend purple daffodils and black-eyed Susans in her finely turned flower beds. At the end of Floral Boulevard was a grand schoolhouse, straight from the first decade of the twentieth century. On the far side of
the neighborhood, behind a thin strip of trees and a bird sanctuary—a bird sanctuary!—sat Belmont Park racetrack, home of one of the three biggest horse races in the world, the Belmont Stakes. On summer weekends, the echo of the race announcer was a pleasant murmur behind the hum of lawn mowers and the bouncing of basketballs.
On the corner of Chestnut and Floral Boulevard, a block from Lynda’s house, was the Bellerose station of the Long Island Rail Road. It was only a fifteen-minute train ride to Penn Station, but Lynda never went to the City. Maybe once a year, maybe, if there was a Broadway show she wanted to see. Like most people in Floral Park, her life was not oriented toward Manhattan. Most of her friends—even her best friend, who as a two-year-old had pushed infant Lynda in her baby carriage through Bayside—lived in Floral Park now. They had been raised in outer Queens and then migrated a few miles east to quieter streets and a more suburban neighborhood. In that neighborhood, they re-created for each other what Lynda’s family had been in Bayside: a community of support and love. She hadn’t moved far. Not geographically, anyway. The ten-mile circle of neighborhoods where Queens meets Long Island, after all, was Lynda’s world. She was overjoyed to have found her little plot of Americana right in the center of it.
Jennifer . . . well, not so much. She was twenty-three years old, still living with Mom in the house she had grown up in, and she was adamant that she would not move out of the old neighborhood. She refused to pack so much as a toothbrush; in the end, Lynda was forced to pay the movers to pack her daughter’s things.
Chloe and Cookie were worse. Especially Cookie, who was a master communicator. She used pushing, foot sitting, and tripping as a signaling system, and she seemed to have a different meow for every occasion. She had a meow that meant she was annoyed. A meow for when she was happy. A meow that meant Leave me alone. A meow that meant Come here. A meow that said I’d like some, please. A more forceful meow that said I want without the please. And, of course, a gimme, gimme, gimme meow for broccoli rabe. She even had a special high-pitched meow for when she really wanted Lynda’s attention, which sounded exactly like Mom. Lynda wasn’t so delusional to think her cat was really calling her mom. She assumed she was imagining that one. But whenever her friends heard Cookie whining for attention, their jaws dropped.