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.
“Did she say mom?” they all asked.
“It sure sounded like it, didn’t it?” Lynda would say, flushing with pride.
Not this time, though. This time, as Lynda packed for the move, Cookie wasn’t pleading or questioning or kissing up with her “Mom” meows. This time, she was screaming at Lynda.
When moving day arrived, Cookie stopped screaming and disappeared. She had no intention, absolutely none, of leaving that town house. It took Lynda hours to wrangle both cats and shove them into their carrier. Cookie, in frustration, began to bang her head and rub her face on the bars of the carrier door. By the time they arrived in Floral Park, only twenty minutes away, Cookie’s nose pad was torn and covered with blood. Lynda could barely look at her. She felt so guilty.
When she opened the cage door, Cookie and Chloe didn’t even stop to acknowledge her. They ran straight upstairs and hid under the guest bed. Jennifer recovered quickly. Within two days, she met new friends and was right at home in Floral Park. It took Cookie and Chloe a while longer. Except for biological necessity, they refused to come out from under the bed. When Lynda tried to coax them out, Chloe retreated to a corner, and Cookie walked forward a few steps to complain. That was it. For three months.
And then, all was forgiven. Was it a few days after Cookie emerged from under the bed before the complaining stopped? Was it a few months? A year? I’m sure it took Cookie time to adjust, even after giving up her protest, but does it really matter how long? In the end, Cookie loved the new house as much as Lynda did. She loved it so much, in fact, that she couldn’t settle on a favorite spot. For a few weeks, it was the ottoman. She sprawled out there every night while Lynda watched television. Then it was the rocking chair. That lasted about six weeks. Then the top of the sofa, a dining room chair, the corner behind a piece of furniture, her little cat bed at the top of the stairs. Lynda was a quilter, and Cookie had several favorite spots in the new quilting room. For a summer, she fell in love with the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Lynda kept the shelf filled with quilts, which she made as presents for her friends and relatives. She made one for Cookie, too, of course. It had a floral pattern in the middle with alternating pictures of kittens and puppies around the edges. Cookie lay on a quilt almost every day, but she never lay on that one. Why dirty her special quilt, after all, when she could leave fur on something everyone else was going to sit on, too?
Eventually, the seasons changed. The leaves along Floral Avenue burst green, turned golden and red, then blew away in the winter wind. The horses raced around Belmont; the commuter train ran back and forth to the City. Jennifer spent more time with her friends and boyfriends until, eventually, she moved into a house three miles away. In her younger years, Lynda had thought about marrying again. She had male companions, but none of the relationships turned out to be what she wanted. She liked the romance, of course, but she never found anyone she wanted to share her life with.