The white cat is hungry, almost emaciated. So it eats, eats when she comes home with it. “Damned animal torturer,” Maj-Gun establishes at the newsstand about the French family in the Glass House when Susette comes to the newsstand to buy more cat food that same night because all of the grocery stores are already closed and she tells Maj-Gun everything in broad strokes.
Personally Susette does not care that much about the summer family on the Second Cape having abandoned the cat: actually, deep down inside, she is happy. To suddenly have the little white kitty, it is almost like a gift and at the newsstand with Maj-Gun she is suddenly gripped by a great eagerness to show it to someone.
“But come and see it then!” she exclaims and before she knows it she has, in other words, invited Maj-Gun to her home. And then Maj-Gun immediately forgets everything else, lights up and says, almost devoutly, humbly, yes. “You have to give me the address,” she adds later with a small laugh, but still happily so that it does not sound like it would sound otherwise, like a dig because Susette has never asked Maj-Gun to visit her before, during all the years she has lived in her own apartment on the hills north of the town center.
“Oh! Are you still in your pajamas!” Maj-Gun howls when she rings the doorbell that following Sunday, during the morning, not particularly early, certainly at the appointed time, Susette has slept through her alarm. “I’ve come to look at the kitty! Here is my contribution!” Maj-Gun, who purposefully pushes her way into the apartment, has a chocolate swiss roll and ice cream with her and a one-pound package of coffee as well as some family magazines from her newsstand, throws herself down on the love seat in Susette’s tiny living room and immediately starts speaking expertly about everything she knows about various cat breeds and their particular oddities in accordance with what she has read in some magazine “Cat’s World” despite the fact that she is, after all, which she still gets to point out in the same sentence, “really a dog person.”
“Must have a little bit of rag doll in it,” Maj-Gun determines. And clarifies: “Rag doll. A rag doll. One of those soft ones. Loose joints. Can easily be confused with characterlessness.” Lifts the cat up into the air in order to demonstrate: and yes, indeed the animal hangs limply and loose limbed, folded double in her grasp. But so, finished with that demonstration, she throws the cat away again, back on the floor with it—as if done discussing this and moving on to other things, things that are more important, more important things that she has on her chest and that certainly, in her opinion, are the real reason for her visit, naturally, in addition to, as a guest you don’t diet, drinking coffee and stuffing herself with as much chocolate swiss roll as possible.
Like, for example, the magazines she has with her then. “Family magazines.” Which Maj-Gun underlines so you can hear that she has thought out everything she is going to say ahead of time and cheered herself at the shrewdness in it:
“Magazines for the entire family. It can be informative to read about what the rest of mankind is up to, don’t you think?”
With reference, of course, to their mutual solitary situation in that regard.
Humorously said, but still, the smile that Susette has had ready at the corners of her mouth freezes, ebbs out, and she suddenly stops in the middle of everything. Because in exactly this moment it is as if it hit her with full force. That humbug. Maj-Gun, everything. And not because of the talk or even because of the cat, which Maj-Gun pretended to be interested in at the newsstand but which she is now barely paying attention to when she is actually here, rather everything she knows about it. You understand that THAT is not meant so seriously, as usual Maj-Gun’s know-it-all attitude of the well-known type that, in and of itself, could sometimes even be entertaining to listen to at the newsstand.
Maj-Gun who knows everything, so to speak, and establishes: the one with the other and the third. My statements, and notes, chosen pieces in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings” that she loves to quote from. Urbanely, as it were, occasionally superior too—and very sure of herself even if often later, almost always, it turns out that she was wrong.
And how wrong Maj-Gun is: it did not start in the newsstand or even with the skateboarding film that did not turn out to be a young adult blockbuster either, which Maj-Gun persisted in claiming when they were going to go out and get some fresh air among their peers after a difficult and strange time in the house in the town center. Nah, simply originates from the beginning of time, that incorrectness, from the cemetery, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, all of that.
Everything with which Maj-Gun had gotten hold of the wrong part of the stick. About her and her mother for example, the flowers on the Graves of the Forgotten, as if there had already been something crazy about it to begin with. Stood and hissed “the Angel of Death” at Susette at the water hydrant in the stone grove when her mother had been out of sight, wearing that silly mask, “Buhuu aren’t you afraid of me?”
But if you then much later, so to speak, when the water had flowed under the bridges and you had more of a will of your own, for example in the newsstand, personally ventured to hint to Maj-Gun about everything she had been wrong about, just something completely normal, even in joking, then Maj-Gun would instantly become grouchy and snap:
“Well! You’re probably lying too.” And of course put you on the defensive. “What do you mean?” Maj-Gun has started tallying. “First, The Sea Captain. Your father. Back in school. When we were little. YOU said that he was a sea captain. AND second…” And then of course you were forced to stop listening, it is not possible to discuss things with Maj-Gun when she is in that kind of a mood, putting her own spin on things, it just gets worse, leads nowhere.
But still, nothing of that NOW, here, in the apartment, not even important. Just the following, so simple. That here for once you have gone to Maj-Gun as one friend to another and been beside yourself about a cat you had just gotten as your own and wanted to share your happiness with her, with someone. But Maj-Gun who, as soon as she has commented on her commonplace knowledge, “rag doll,” has just brushed the cat aside as if what was coming out of her mouth was so much more important.
Humbug. And Susette feels the anger pulsating inside; so angry so angry like she has never been before.
Even if you cannot see it on her, because she does not say anything, does not move a muscle.
But it has become quiet for a few minutes during which Maj-Gun, with her feelers, registers that her joke was not appreciated, maybe she can hear that it is not as funny as she thought it would be. But immediately, in the next moment, she pulled herself together and so to speak discovered the cat anew. Carefully lifted it up in her arms again, burrowing her face into its fur. “Joking aside,” blinking a bit roguely, eyes narrowed through the cat hair, “you can find a lot of almost fat-free recipes in them, for single people too.”