It was two weeks after I graduated from elementary school that a big yellow moving van backed slowly toward the front porch of the house next door. My best friend John Grier had lived in that house, and the wide, treeless front yard had been our recreation complex, complete with baseball diamond and ramp for our skateboards. We had been classmates since kindergarten and the only thing that had convinced me I might survive junior high was knowing John would be at my side. But Mr. Grier had been offered a better-paying job in South Carolina, and the day after John and I strode across the elementary school’s gym to receive our diplomas, he and the rest of the family were gone.
When the Gatsons arrived, I could not help but see them as usurpers, for I had believed that as long as the house was vacant the Griers might find South Carolina not to their liking and return. But that option was no longer possible when the For Sale sign planted beside our pitcher’s mound came down. My younger brother Tom and I lay on our stomachs, sharing a pair of dime store binoculars as we peered through the hedge at the Grier’s old house.
“That must be the daddy on the porch,” Tom said, pointing to a heavyset man wearing black-rimmed glasses and, despite the midday June heat, a suit and tie. “He looks like that man on TV running against President Johnson.”
A green Oldsmobile with white-wall tires pulled in the driveway.
“I bet that’s the rest of them,” I said and yanked away the binoculars. A woman sat behind the steering wheel. The back seat was empty, but someone, someone child-sized, was in the front seat.
“Is it a boy or girl?” Tom asked.
“Can’t tell yet,” I said, “but they’re getting out.”
The mother opened her door, a black dress covering her thin frame. Like her husband she wore glasses, though hers were pink-framed and sparkled in the sun like mica. Her lips were bright red and her black hair rose a foot above her head like a huge, gravity-defying swirl of licorice cotton candy. She closed the car door but made no move toward the porch. Instead, she let her eyes sweep across the house and then take in our house and yard as well. What she saw did not appear to impress her very much.
The passenger door shut.
“It’s a girl,” I said, the last word coming out of my mouth like the last air in a deflating balloon. “Looks to be about my age.”
“Maybe she’s a tomboy,” my brother said.
“I don’t think so,” I said, for the girl wore a blue skirt and a white blouse. There were no tennis shoes on her feet or scabs on her knees and a pink bow was tied around her long, brown hair. Like her mother, she wore pink-framed glasses, though hers didn’t glitter. She carried a large, white, nub-tailed cat in her arms. The cat wore pink glasses as well, though they wrapped around its head more like goggles.
“They’ve got a cat that wears glasses,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, playing the role of the worldly older brother.
Tom grabbed the binoculars.
“That thing’s scary looking,” Tom whispered. “Like something on ‘Shock Theatre’ those mad scientists make in their labs. We’d better have as little to do with these folks as possible.” Tom lifted himself to his knees. “Let’s go play with my Army men in the sandbox.”
For a moment I didn’t speak. As a rising seventh-grader I was supposedly too old to be playing with Army soldiers in a sandbox, especially with an eight-year old. But becoming a seventh-grader was a source of growing trauma for me. For months I’d been hearing about eighth- and ninth-graders whose major motivation for attending school was to slam seventh-graders like me into lockers as they extorted lunch money. I’d heard about teachers who assigned so much homework it could be weighed on a bathroom scale.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The night of my sixth-grade graduation my parents had presented me with a book called “The Adolescent Male.” “Read it and if you have any questions I’ll try to answer them,” my father said, his nervous tone making it clear he hoped there wouldn’t be. I spent the remaining hours of my graduation night reading with a fascinated horror what hormones were about to do me — everything from acne and blackheads and hair erupting on my face to liking girls to growth spurts and “nocturnal emissions” — and despite the book’s claim otherwise, none of this seemed the least bit normal to me.
“All right,” I said, glad to revert back to childhood for a few hours.
We stood and brushed the dirt off our shirts and shorts. I wedged the binoculars into my pocket.
My brother glanced through the hedge a last time and shook his head.
“Where do people like that come from?” Tom asked.
Part Two
That was a question I could not answer, but the next morning at breakfast my mother did.
“They are from Tallahassee, Florida,” she said. “Dr. Gatson is an optician and inventor. Mrs. Gatson is the former president of a DAR chapter in Florida. Instead of a wedding ring, she has glasses with tiny diamonds in the frames. They have one daughter, Della Ann, who’s twelve.”
My father peered over the sports section of the paper.
“How did you find out all that? It sounds like something you’d read off a post office bulletin board.”
“Mabel called me yesterday. She thought I’d want to know. She feels it’s her professional duty as a realtor to make the neighbors aware who is in the houses she sells.”
My father’s face disappeared into the paper again as he spoke.
“The neighborly thing to do would be to go over there and find out about them yourself, instead of depending on Mabel Abernathy’s gossip.”
“That’s exactly what I plan to do,” my mother said, “now that they’ve at least got the movers out of the house. I’m going to make an apple pie and the boys and I will take it to them this very morning.”
Tom and I stared at each other as if our mother had announced an unexpected trip to the dentist’s office.
“Don’t give me that look, you two,” she said. “You’re going and you will be friendly and polite. If they invite us in, as I’m sure they’ll do, don’t touch anything and if they offer us something to drink don’t slurp.”
“But Dad doesn’t have to go,” Tom whined.
“I was thinking this might be a good morning to go to work with Dad,” I said. “I’ve always wondered what he does all day.”
“I’ve been wondering that too,” Tom said.
But my mother quickly made clear that what my father did all day at work would be kept from his sons a while longer. Two hours and one pie later we were on the Gatsons’ front porch.
“Don’t slouch,” our mother said, using her free hand to ring the doorbell.
The daughter answered the door, the white cat cradled against her chest exactly as it had been yesterday.
“Well,” my mother said, “I believe you’re Della Ann. I’m Mrs. Hampton, your next-door neighbor, and these are my boys Vincent and Tom.”
Della Ann said nothing. She and the cat just stared at us through their pink eyeglasses.
“Who is it, Della Ann,” a female voice asked from the back of the house.
“It’s the neighbors, mother,” Della Ann shouted. “They’ve got some kind of pie they want to sell us.”
“No, no,” my mother said as we heard footsteps come toward us. “I’m giving it to you, dear. To you and your family as a way of welcoming you.”
“What kind is it?” Della Ann asked.
“Blackberry,” my mother said.
“Yum,” Della Ann replied. She looked at the cat. “Kittymus Angel and I love blackberries.”
My mother did not have a chance to respond to this comment before Mrs. Gatson appeared at the door. She took the pie from my mother’s outstretched arms, and after a few awkward seconds, asked us if we’d like to come in.
“I’m still unpacking in the kitchen, but we could talk while I’m doing that,” Mrs. Gatson told my mother. Then she turned to Tom and me. “You children have a seat in the living room,” Mrs. Gatson said. “You’ll just be in the way in the kitchen.”
“Yes,” my mother echoed. “You boys talk to Della Ann.”
If I had known at the time this would be the only chance I’d ever have to see the inside of the Gatsons’ house, I might have been more observant, but my main memory is of sitting beside my brother on a couch and wondering if the girl and cat that were in the chair opposite us were somehow conjoined in the same manner as Siamese twins. Della Ann said nothing. I said nothing. The cat said nothing. It was my brother who finally spoke.
“How come your cat wears glasses?”
Della Ann looked at my brother as if he were feeble-minded.
“The same reason people do. To see better. Princess Kittimus has the best eyesight of any cat in the world.”
My brother considered Della Ann’s comment a few seconds before he replied.
“Well, if he can see so great how come a dog could catch him and bite his tail off.”
“Princess Kittymus is a manx,” Della Ann said indignantly, “and manxes don’t have tails.”
“My brother didn’t mean anything by it,” I said to Della Ann. “He’s eight years old. He doesn’t know much about cats or anything else.”
And that was the extent of our conversation. The rest of the time we simply sat, my brother and I in one corner, Della Ann and Kittymus in the other.
A few minutes later my mother came out of the kitchen, her lips pressed in a grimace unsuccessfully trying to be a smile.
“It’s time to go, boys,” she said.
Part Three
In the next few days the details of my mother’s kitchen conversation with Mrs. Gatson emerged in comments meant for my father but overheard by me as I eavesdropped. Evidently, much of the talk between my mother and Mrs. Gatson had been an extensive list of what our family should do to be suitable neighbors. The list included a better job of trimming the hedge on our side, no noise after eight p.m., and, most important of all, going to Doctor Gatson for all our optical needs. My mother informed Tom and me as well that Mrs. Gatson had requested we not play in her yard unless invited.
“There goes our baseball field,” I told Tom. “Now what are we going to do the rest of the summer. Our yard’s too small and John took the skateboard ramp with him.”
“Play with our Army men in the sandbox, I guess,” Tom said.
“Wow,” I said. “What a great summer this is turning out to be, playing in a sandbox with my eight-year-old brother.”
Within a week Dr. Gatson had opened his optometrist’s shop downtown in an abandoned Shell service station. Because he was the only optometrist within twenty miles, he quickly developed a clientele, and just as quickly people began to notice a pattern — everybody who went to Dr. Gatson had a vision problem. People who read every letter on the chart were assured this meant nothing, that glasses were needed and needed as soon as he could grind them in what had been the oil change pit but was now his “lab.” And it was always glasses, never contacts, for Dr. Gaston told his patients that extensive research had proven to him that contact lenses actually peeled off part of the eyeball each time they were taken out.
If patients already had a vision problem, they were diagnosed with a second, hitherto uncaught, eye problem, usually requiring extensive use of eyedrops Dr.Gatson also made in his lab. He urged his patients to bring in their pets, telling them that in Florida, animals wearing glasses was considered no more unusual than people wearing glasses.
“The man’s a quack,” my father said one night at the dinner table. The Gatsons were now the primary topic of my parents’ dinner conversations, and they no longer seemed to care if Tom and me heard their comments or not. “Someone’s going to call the Better Business Bureau on him before long, or maybe the FBI to come shut him down. The old folks don’t know any better than to believe him. Seems like every time I see someone over sixty they’ve got their heads tilted up so they can squirt Gatson’s medicine into their eyes. He could be using acid out of some of those old car batteries dumped behind his office for all they know.”
“It won’t be too soon for me,” my mother said. “She called me today. She doesn’t approve of where our garbage cans are. I almost asked her if she’d like to have one put over her head.”
“I may make that call myself,” my father said, “because this thing is getting out of control in this town. It’s like something out of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ People I thought were everyday, normal people are turning into nut cases. Just today I saw three cats, two dogs and a mule wearing those supposed ‘animal glasses.’ Tom Jenkins told me at the post office that Mildred Humphries had a pair made for her cockatoo.”
My father shook his head and stared at his empty plate.
“It’s scary,” he said. “There’s no other word for it.”
Meanwhile, Tom and I had our own problems with the Gatsons, specifically with Princess Kittymus, who had proven that she was, despite my earlier theory, not attached to Della Ann after all. Every morning and evening the cat appeared alone, the pink goggle-glasses making her look like she had just stepped out of a Saturday morning cartoon instead of the Gatsons’ back door. Princess Kittymus would slowly place one paw on the ground, then raise and shake it as though indignant that mere grass and not a plush red carpet lay beneath. It wasn’t long before Tom and I noticed our sandbox, which was placed right next to the hedge, had a sour reek to it, and when we dug foxholes and caves for our soldiers we often scooped up more than sand.
“Your cat is peeing and pooping in our sandbox,” Tom shouted over the hedge when he spotted Della Ann in her back yard one morning. “You keep that mangy old thing out of our yard.”
Della Ann, who had been twirling a baton, let it drop to the ground and glared at Tom.
“Princess Kittymus is doing nothing of the sort,” Della Ann replied. “I bet you’re doing it yourself. You must not be able to see well enough to know the difference between a sandbox and a bathroom. You need to see my father and get some glasses.”
Della Ann reached down to pick up the baton and her glasses slipped off. She raised up, the glasses and baton in her hand. It was as if she had been wearing a hood on her face instead of glasses, because for the first time I saw how blue her eyes were, how high her cheekbones, and the light spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“So are you going to do anything about it or not, Della Ann” Tom shouted as Della Ann placed the glasses back on her face.
“Princess Kittymus wouldn’t go into a yard nasty and grown-up as yours,” Della Ann said. “She’s very particular about her surroundings.”
“So why does she live with you?” Tom shouted back.
Della Ann raised her baton as if she contemplated throwing it.
“You’re an obnoxious little brat. You ought to act more like your brother,” she said, pointing the baton at me. “He at least tries to be nice.”
That said Della Ann turned her back to us and resumed twirling the baton.
“Why are you looking at her like that,” Tom said after a few seconds.
“Like what,” I said, my eyes still fixed on Della Ann.
“All googly-eyed. Like you actually like her.”
At that moment the opening sentence of the second chapter of “The Male Adolescent” rose in my mind like a newspaper headline: One of the first signs of entering adolescence is a new appreciation of the opposite sex. I felt a sudden urge to check my face for acne and stubble and the front of my pants for emissions.
“I can’t stand her,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Tom. “And if she won’t do anything to keep that cat out of the sandbox you and me will.”
And in the next few days that is what we tried to do. Whenever we saw Princess Kittymus near the sandbox we tried to nail her with a rock, but as soon as we showed ourselves and began to rear back our arms, the cat vanished into a hole in the hedge. Nevertheless, it was clear from the ever-thickening reek in the sandbox that the animal was staying away only until Tom and I were out of sight.
Each time I missed the cat with a rock, each time I caught a whiff of Princess Kittymus’ emissions, I became more and more frustrated — frustrated beyond reason, because the cat quickly came to represent to me everything new and unwelcome in my life. To make matters worse, one Saturday afternoon “I Was A Teenage Werewolf” was shown on “Shock Theatre.” I watched as, through no fault of his own, an adolescent awoke one day transformed into something snarling and hideous.
“That guy scares me,” Tom said, and quickly left the room, but I stared transfixed at a body sprouting hair like kudzu from every pore, the suddenly bowed upper legs no doubt sticky with nocturnal emissions. At an especially dramatic moment, the werewolf suddenly turned, his face filling our black-and-white Zenith’s screen. I could not help but believe I was looking at a face I would soon see again, not on a TV screen but in a mirror. The creature’s face conveyed such a profound and utter misery that I too wanted to howl.
“I’m going to have to think this thing out and come up with a plan,” I told Tom, and that’s exactly what I did, a plan incorporating every bit of meanness and ingenuity a twelve-year-old boy was capable of. The first thing I did was barter on the pre-teen black market. My classmate David Ross had several shoeboxes filled with fireworks his truck-driver uncle had smuggled across the South Carolina border. Besides strings of firecrackers and sissy stuff like sparklers and bottle rockets, David’s uncle had brought him a dozen of the heavy artillery of fireworks — M-80s. I entered David’s room with three dollars, a 1960 mint-condition Roger Maris baseball card and Tom’s Duncan yoyo. I left with two five-foot-long strings of Black Cat firecrackers and three M-80s.
Getting the materials was easy enough, but having them work the way I hoped was much more problematic. The main challenge was the fuse. There was no way Princess Kittymus was going to let us get close enough to light fuses that were even shorter than her tail. I got a magnifying glass out of my old science kit and climbed up in a dogwood tree across the yard from the sandbox. I placed a firecracker in the sand and tried to angle the sun to light the fuse, but I couldn’t even get a wisp of smoke.
What I needed was a much longer fuse that would light the firecrackers and the M-80s at virtually the same time. After several failed experiments with sewing thread, I found the answer with fifty feet of kite string soaked in gasoline and peppered with black powder before left to dry. Taping the firecrackers to the sandbox’s inside boards would be easy enough, as would be gluing four empty toilet paper rolls together to make an angled tunnel into the sand. Once the fuse lit the firecrackers it would continue through the toilet paper rolls to detonate the M-80s placed in the last roll.
All the while Tom and I had been studying Princess Kittymus’ daily routine from our hiding place in the ditch behind the dogwood. Mrs. Gatson let the cat out as soon as her husband left for work, which was ten minutes before nine o’clock. If it saw no one in our backyard, the cat immediately made its way through the hedge and into our sandbox. It then proceeded to pace the sand on the outer rim, making a narrowing circle until near the sandbox’s center. After a minute of scratching and sniffing, Princess Kittymus then relieved herself.
Part Four
It was the first morning of August before I felt enough preparation had been made. Tom and I were in the yard by eight-thirty, placing the firecrackers and M-80s in the sandbox and carefully laying the string across the grass to the ditch. I held the box of matches I’d taken out of my father’s shirt pocket in my hand as we waited for the Gatsons’ back door to open.
For many of us, there is that defining instant when the world and the planets and stars all align with our lives in one perfect moment of cosmic harmony. It may be a game-winning jump shot that swishes through a net as the buzzer sounds. For others it may be the flawless rendition of a piano piece one has butchered for years, or perhaps the perfect final line in a poem. For me this moment occurred on the first day of August in 1963.
As soon as Princess Kittymus entered the sandbox, I lit the fuse and watched its slow sizzle across the yard to where the cat sniffed and scratched, seemingly oblivious to the firecrackers that laced the inner boards, the toilet roll sticking up like an angled periscope, and, most important of all, the burning string coming closer with each passing second.
I kept expecting the fuse to sputter and go out or Princess Kittymus to see or hear the fuse and scamper away, but as the distance between the sandbox and the lit fuse lessened, the theoretical became possible and then inevitable as the fuse reached the sandbox just as Princess Kittymus lifted her nubbed manx tail and squatted.
“I reckon we’re going to get into a lot of trouble for doing this,” Tom said, evidently, like me, never quite believing our plan could actually work until this moment.
“Yes, I believe we might,” I said and fixed the binoculars on Princess Kittymus.
When the fuse lit the firecrackers it was like exploding dominoes. The outer rims of the sandbox threw up spurts of sand amid a machine-gun clatter. Princess Kittymus sprang from a squat to a spread-feet-apart stance in about one billionth of a second. The hair on her horseshoe-arched back stuck out like porcupine quills, the legs straight and rigid as the legs on our kitchen table. With the sand box erupting all around her, the cat was as stiff and motionless as she would have been after a visit to a taxidermist, unable or unwilling to seek an escape route through the din and thickening smoke.
Even at fifty feet there is a slight lag between sight and sound. A geyser of sand erupted underneath Princess Kittymus followed by a muffled explosion like an underwater depth charge. The cat sailed six feet into the air above the sand box, then seemed to hang between the earth and sky for several seconds — its white fur singed with black powder, the goggle-glasses blown off to reveal green eyes bulging as if on stalks — before Princess Kittymus emitted a long, mournful wail and began her descent.
Then Princess Kittymus was gone, but not before making a new hole in the hedge. I stood so I could see over onto the Gatsons’ property. Through the binoculars I watched the cat run two circles around the back yard before leaping onto the back porch’s screen door. Princess Kittymus hung there by the claws, spread flat against the screen like some kind of bizarre door decoration, yowling frantically until Mrs. Gatson let her inside.
I swung the binoculars toward the living room window, and through the glass I saw Della Ann’s blue eyes looking right back at me. I knew from the look on her face that she had seen at least part of what had happened, and I was instantly scalded by remorse. Acne and nocturnal emissions be damned, I liked Della Ann Gatson, and wanted her to like me.
I lowered the binoculars and stepped through the hedge. I walked up to the living room window, my lips only inches and a plate of glass away from Della Ann’s lips, lips I suddenly realized I wanted to kiss. “I’m sorry,” I said, exaggerating my facial gestures so she would better understand my words through the glass.
That was the first but not the last time I would say those words to a member of the opposite sex; and all too often over the years Della Ann’s response has been more or less their response. Della Ann nodded that she understood what I had said. Then she raised a fist between her face and mine. Her middle finger sprang free, was held rigid a few seconds, and then vanished back into her fist. She turned from the window and disappeared into the kitchen.
Tom and I were sent to bed without supper that night, a punishment so ridiculously light we had trouble looking properly remorseful.
“And I don’t want you boys ever doing anything like this again,” our father said as he led us to our room. “The Gatsons may not be the best neighbors, but we still need to be civil. Besides, I don’t think they’ll be around much longer. Dr. Gatson had a visit from the Better Business Bureau this morning. It seems they’ve done some research. Dr. Gatson has been run out of five different states in the last three years.”
Our father smiled.
“I’d say it’s about to be six.”
A week before school started a For Sale sign sprouted on the Gatsons’ front lawn, and a big yellow moving van backed slowly toward the front porch as it had two months earlier. I watched through the binoculars. I hoped not only to catch a glimpse of Princess Kittymus, who had refused to leave the Gatsons’ house since her levitation act in our backyard, but, more importantly, Della Ann, who had ignored my waves and hellos since the sandbox incident.
But only Dr. Gatson and Mrs. Gatson came onto the front porch as the movers worked. At twelve o’clock the movers took a lunch break, and Mr. and Mrs. Gatson went inside. I crawled a few feet to a small break in the hedge that allowed me to focus the binoculars on the Gatsons’ dining room window. The table and chairs had been taken away by the movers. The Gatsons’ sat on the floor in a tight circle, a platter filled with sandwiches and soft drinks in front of them. Princess Kittymus lay in Della Ann’s lap, a new pair of goggle-glasses strapped to her head. There were a few gaps in her fur, but otherwise the cat appeared to be at least physically if not psychologically recovered. Dr. Gatson lifted one of the soft drinks from the platter, smiling as he raised it toward his wife and daughter as if to toast something, though what — his family, the house, new beginnings — I had no idea. Mrs. Gatson and Della Ann also picked up bottles and made similar gestures, the three bottles finally coming together and touching in the small space they sat around. They then took a drink and began to eat their last meal in that room, in that house, maybe even in North Carolina. And what struck me most was how brave they suddenly seemed, particularly Della Ann, who was about to be whisked away to parts unknown not only to me but probably her as well.
I lowered the binoculars and walked past the sandbox where Tom played and on into the house. I lay down on my bed, my eyes looking up at the ceiling, but what I saw was Della Ann Gatson picking up her baton and pink glasses, and I knew that if I lived a thousand years I would never forget what she looked like at that moment. I would remember it all — the color of her eyes, her hair, her cheekbones and lips. I hoped somehow we would meet again, maybe when I too had to leave this place in the world, as she and John had done before me.
I would miss the Gatsons.
