SIX
Cookie
“I have never been loved by anyone, not even my daughter or my parents, the way I have been loved by my Cookie.”
This is a New York City story,which maymake youthink it’s as far from Spencer, Iowa, as you can possibly get. But it’s not. In a way, it’s right next door. Because this is not the kind of New York City story you’re used to hearing. It’s not the kind with famous people, crazy prices, arrogant financial tycoons, or glitzy signs for Broadway shows. I admit, there’s nothing quite like standing in Times Square, looking at those glitzy signs. And there’s nothing like walking into Grand Central Station, standing on the upper deck, and seeing the night-sky constellations painted on the ceiling. I was standing near the MetLife Building, just outside Grand Central, when my friend turned to me and said, “You know, before this, I’d never seen a building more than twelve stories tall.” I looked up and the building, which seemed to be tipping over on us, was bigger than the sky. There’s nothing like New York City to make you feel small—or a part of something enormous and splendid, whichever you prefer.
But that’s not New York City. That’s Manhattan. New York City has about eight million people, and apparently only about 20 percent of them live in Manhattan. That’s what this story is about: the other New York. The city over the bridges and past the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Queens, past LaGuardia Airport and the baseball stadium and the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, past even the last stop on the subway lines. This story is about Bayside, a middle-class community near the Long Island Sound, where the traffic is relentless and the houses are crowded thirty to a block, though they still have porches and little front yards. It’s the kind of place a librarian might live in a room of her own, with her cat curled up in a window and sunlight falling on the floor. Which makes Bayside the perfect place for this New York story.
Or at least the perfect place to start, because Bayside is where Lynda Caira’s grandparents settled when they emigrated from Italy to the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1927, they bought a piece of land in what was essentially farm country and built a house. There weren’t many people in Bayside, Queens, then, but anyone who came by was welcome at the Caira table. When the WPA built the Long Island Expressway on the edge of their land, Lynda’s grandmother gave the men free coffee every morning—then paid off the cost of the land and house through the tips she made on her free hot breakfasts. When the expressway was complete, she cooked breakfast for the truckers who stopped by when they saw her light on at 4:00 A.M. Even in the 1950s, when Lynda was born, the house was often full of bags of corn and onions the truckers gave her in exchange for a meal. Often, when Lynda came down for breakfast, she would find a stranger or two at the table. It just wasn’t in her grandmother’s heart to turn anyone away.
When the city divided Bayside into urban lots, her grandmother (who ran the house after her husband’s early death) kept four plots just off a highway exit in the heart of the community. Lynda called it the Farm, because there were a hundred tomato plants, a vegetable garden, a grape arbor, and a small grove of peach, apple, and fig trees. Lynda’s family lived on the ground floor with her grandmother, who made wine and tomato sauce and still got up every morning at 4:00 A.M. to cook. Lynda’s aunt and uncle lived upstairs. Other relatives were constantly around for a visit. In the case of some relatives from Italy, the visit lasted five years, but her grandmother never considered doing anything other than rising early to cook for them all. Lynda’s father’s parents, also Italian immigrants, lived a short walk away. Other relatives were scattered on neighboring blocks. Bayside was filling up with houses, most bought by young families, so the backyard barbeques were always smoking and the streets were full of kids. The neighbors watched out for one another; the shopkeepers greeted the children by name. But the defining characteristics of Bayside, at least for Lynda Caira, were her family events: the large Italian meals, the communion dresses, and the week set aside every August for canning tomatoes.
At fourteen, Lynda went to work down the road at Gertz department store. After high school, she trained to become a medical technician. She got married, moved to a tiny four-room town house in the Bell Boulevard section of Bayside, about a mile from her grandmother’s house, and worked for a local pediatrician. Two years into the marriage, she gave birth to a daughter and gave her the most popular American name of the 1970s: Jennifer.
After seven years of marriage, Lynda Caira got divorced. The divorce was the right thing to do, and she never questioned her decision. Her parents took the news hard at first, but her grandmother, then in her eighties, told her simply, “If this is what you need, then I support you.” With her grandmother’s blessing, Lynda’s “sin” was absolved and, in time, her parents came around. She even kept two of her best friends: her former mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who sided with her in the divorce.
But that didn’t mean the divorce was easy for Lynda’s five-year-old daughter, who was old enough to know her life was changing but too young to understand why. Lynda’s neighbor suggested she adopt a cat to help Jennifer with the transition. The neighbor worked in a bakery, and the bakery cat—despite the health code, cats live in many of the small neighborhood bakeries in New York City to keep the mice away—had just given birth to kittens. There was a runt in the litter, and the mother cat refused to take care of her. If she didn’t find a home, the kitten was going to die.
“Sure,” Lynda told the neighbor. “Bring her home for me.”
The next day, the neighbor arrived with a tiny gray dust ball of a kitten. She was tennis ball-size and fuzzy, with little ears and big green eyes. She even trembled a bit as she stared around the unfamiliar room, her eyes wide with fear. How could anyone push this baby away? Lynda wondered. How could her own mother leave her to die?
They took the kitten. Jennifer, who was over the moon, named her Snuggles. The kitten was too young to be weaned, so Lynda and Jennifer fed her formula from a bottle several times a day. When she got a little older, they spoon-fed her liquids and soft food. Jennifer gave her constant attention. Perhaps a little too much attention, and certainly too much grabbing—she was only five—but Snuggles was nurtured with care and love from the moment she entered Lynda and Jennifer’s home.
She didn’t return the affection. She wasn’t a bad cat; she just wasn’t much of a . . . Snuggles. Some people have preconceived notions about cats: They are aloof and arrogant; they are self-centered; they are loners. Unfortunately, Snuggles fit the stereotype. It wasn’t that she was mean. She never scratched or hissed. She just wasn’t a social animal. She didn’t want to play; she didn’t want to be touched; she wasn’t emotionally invested in Lynda and Jennifer and, quite frankly, didn’t care whether they were home or away. Snuggles preferred her own space.