In a Cat’s Eye

“Nope.”

“You come over for dinner?”

“Sure. Now?”

“I’d better go back to my room first, on account of I have to freshen up. You wait a few minutes, then you come over, knock on the door, and I’ll let you in. That way we can try out the door.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I guess this is goodbye. Goodbye.”

“Bye, Nancy. See you in a few minutes.”

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I waited about five minutes and then I went and knocked on her door.

“Who is it?” she said, as if she didn’t know it was me. I think she just wanted to be proper and formal about it, to keep everything on the up and up.

“It’s me; Willy.”

She unlocked the keyhole lock and the deadbolt, opened the door against the chain, and looked out to make sure it was me. Then she pulled the chain from the slide and let me in.

“Willy! I’m so glad that you could come.”

“Yeah; me too.”

“Is Stanley out there in the hall?” she whispered.

“Stanley? No. Why?”

“He was out there a while ago. Lately it seems like everywhere I go, there’s Stanley. Then when I look at him he turns quick and walks away.”

I opened the door and looked up and down the hall.

“Has he been bothering you?” I said.

“No, but I think he’s been following me. Poor Stanley. I think he just wants somebody to talk to.”

“I’ve got a feeling he wants more than to just talk. He never talks to anybody. I don’t like him following you around like that.”

“I was in Gladys’s room yesterday,” she said. “I’d left my door open, and when I came back, Stanley was standing in my doorway. He wanted to tell me something but he couldn’t get himself to say it. I said, ‘What is it, Stanley? Tell me,’ but his face turned all red and he just shook his head and left.”

“He had no business snooping around in your room,” I said. “Don’t worry; when I’m done with that guy, he won’t be bothering you.”

“Don’t do anything, Willy. He’s just a lonely man who’s deaf and dumb and shy. He’s overly gentle and sensitive.”

“That’s what he wants everyone to think. It’s all an act. He’s got some kind of an angle.” I stepped back into the room and closed the door.

“The door works so good, I mean, it works so well, now,” she said. She must have been taking grammar lessons from Gladys. “You’re a wonder, Willy. You’re so handy.”

She gave me a bottle of beer. She didn’t open one for herself, because Nancy would never drink beer or anything that had alcohol in it. She said for me to make myself comfortable while she got dinner ready. Mr Winkley was looking down at his cat food, trying to decide if he wanted to eat it or not. I walked around the room and looked at everything. She didn’t have a lot of stuff. A blue Bakelite alarm clock radio on her nightstand and the Virgin Mary statue on her bureau were the only colorful things.

“Statue” maybe isn’t the right word. It was more like what they call a figurine. Nancy’s mother gave it to her just before she died, when Nancy was nine, and I believe that Nancy used to kneel and pray to it every day when she was alone. The figurine was the one thing she cared about the most, and that is why I think of it as a statue, though it was only about the size of a ten-inch pipe wrench.

I don’t know that I saw the statue that night, because you wouldn’t always notice something like that. But like I told the cops, if it hadn’t been there, I’m pretty sure I would have not seen it.

There wasn’t much to see out the window, mostly just the side of another brick building across the alley, but if you got close and looked sideways you could see some trees and grass. Nancy was working at the stove and then she went over to Mr. Winkley who was drinking water from his bowl on the floor. She stooped down and looked at his face, and I couldn’t think why she did that. Then she went back to working at the stove.

We had hamburger mixed in with macaroni, onions, catsup, and potato chips. She said it was her mother’s recipe. Mr Winkley was standing on the table with his head right in my plate, so that it was hard for me to get any. I had to keep pushing him away. We were sitting there eating and she started to pick up her glass of milk, and flinched.

“Did you hurt your arm?” I said.

“My wrist,” she said. “It comes and goes. I don’t even remember when it started, so it can’t be anything. It’s from holding my trimmer knife. I told Mr. Horne and he said he was going to move me out of the cutting department, but he never did.

“He used to be so nice. Then one day I was late coming in to work and by mistake I hung my coat on the wrong rack where the office girls hang theirs and they told him and he gave me a warning. It’s a permanent warning too, so I’ll always be on probation, forever. I’m just a trimmer, that’s all I am.”

“Somebody ought to put that guy’s lights out,” I said.

She put her glass down on the table, and Mr. Winkley stuck his head in it and was lapping his tongue trying to get at the milk. She tilted the glass so he could have some milk.

“Even the girls I work with on the trimmer line were like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ I guess I thought I was some hot … stuff.” Nancy never used swear words. “So now I just try to stay out of everybody’s way.”

She held Mr. Winkley’s face in her hands, and squinted at it. There was something about his face that she kept looking at.

“You should make them get out of your way,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

“My mother always told me,” she said, “that if you were good to people and played your cards right, you could get anything you wanted, but I don’t know anymore.”

“Watch this,” I said. I stood up and grabbed two legs of the table, one in each hand, and lifted the table up over my head. Then I set it back down.

“You’re so strong, Willy.”

She picked up the dishes and took them to the sink. I stayed sitting at the table with Mr. Winkley, and watched her back as she did the dishes. She was a small girl, but she was wearing shorts that were even shorter than she was. She dropped a spoon and bent over to pick it up, and I was trying to think if she looked better from the back or the front, but I couldn’t decide.

She was washing the dishes with her back to me and she said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Her saying that out of the blue struck me, because nobody had said anything about anybody going anywhere. Now when I think about it, she might have meant that her life wasn’t going anywhere; but I don’t know.

“You’re not going away, are you?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t told anybody, but I can tell you because you’re my friend: I’ve been thinking I might get a bus ticket and ride until I see a nice quiet place, like a farm with a red barn and a big field and trees, and a pond with ducks in it; where nobody knows me and I won’t be in anybody’s way. I’ll get off the bus and go up and knock on the door and get a job as a cook.”

I figured she was just dreaming, and she wasn’t really going away.

“You’re a good cook,” I said; “but what about Mr. Winkley? They might not let him on the bus.”

She stopped working on the dishes and spoke with her back to me.