By Jacob M. Appel

Two Cats, Fat and Thin

In fifth grade, we are asked to sacrifice. Our prized possessions must be inventoried and surrendered to
the state.

This is, mercifully, an exercise. I am a sheltered ten-year-old boy in an upscale bedroom suburb of New York City, a community so flush that its grade school teachers must simulate hardship for their students. We have already suffered through a sugarless week in solidarity with the over-taxed colonists of eighteenth-century New England; we have wandered the classroom blindfolded, rendered sightless by a barrage of Confederate bullets. Now we are studying the immigrant experience—or possibly the Holocaust—and each of us has been ordered to bring from home a personal treasure that our teacher-turned-jailor, Mr. G., intends to "confiscate" as the price for our freedom. This crash course in palm-greasing takes place several years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, before the Challenger explosion, before the death of my beloved grandmother—and I confess the details are misty in my memory. (It is also an age of laxer classroom mores, when Mr. G. can still have his young charges massage his shoulders, not because he harbors ulterior designs on children, but because he enjoys having his muscles loosened.) What I do recall vividly is Mr. G. as Kafkaesque bureaucrat, shuffling between our tiny desks on his reconstructed knees, inspecting one boy’s meticulously-labeled coin collection and another girl’s sepia photograph of her great-grandparents in fin-de-siècle Vienna. When he leans down to demand my offering, I gaze intensely into the Formica desktop. I have brought him nothing. I have not even told my parents that he’d asked.

"I don’t have any favorite things," I mutter. "I’m sorry."
"Well, well," says Mr. G. "Nothing will come of nothing."
How can I know he’s quoting Lear? I want to sink my teeth into his fleshy hand.
"Surely, you must have something worth sacrificing," says Mr. G, sporting the perpetually bemused smile that defines his benevolent, leonine face. "Maybe you could bring in something for us later this week."
"All of my prized possessions have been taken!" I snap.
"You’re too late."
This earns me yet another afternoon with the
school’s psychologist.

The prized possessions that I no longer possessed were two miniature rubber cats—one fat, one thin—given to me by my grandmother’s eldest sister. The thin cat appeared hungry and scheming—a synthetic, feline Cassius. The fat cat looked as though he’d just swallowed an obese goldfish. They were not a matching pair, manufactured as companions, but two independent creatures forced into unsought friendship. Neither of them had names. Merely Fat Cat and Thin Cat. Although they’d once been the most treasured objects of my brief existence—at the age of six, I had carried them everywhere, even the bathtub—they lacked any other social or economic value. Unfortunately, our school’s psychologist, a tense, hyper-
analytic fussbudget, got hung up on determining whether Aunt Emma was an aunt or a grandaunt. We never came around to discussing Fat and Thin, so my unspoken anxiety continued to slosh around inside me like battery acid. Even now, I shiver when I recall my private apocalypse.

It was the final autumn of the Carter Presidency. My family was driving through northern Florida en route to New York because, to my mother, every commercial jet was an airborne coffin. She’d been arguing with my father, insisting that a presidential vote for John Anderson would throw the 1980 election to Reagan and usher in nuclear winter. We’d just visited my grandaunt in Miami Beach, the last time we would ever see her. I had my two travel companions, Fat and Thin, securely buckled into the back seat of my mother’s foul-tempered Dodge Dart. I suppose my brother was also in the vehicle—he must have been about two years old—but I cannot be certain. I was too busy making sure that Fat and Thin didn’t grow carsick, and later, that they were tucked under the covers in the gloomy motel room outside St. Augustine, where we’d all spend the night. We’d only entered the room long enough to inspect it—we hadn’t even emptied our luggage from the trunk—but my cats decided to enjoy a nap, a fleeting, indolent snooze while the rest of the family ducked out for breakfast at the local Waffle House or Denny’s. Who was I to insist otherwise? Maybe we also collected seashells and pink coral on the public beach. Or we scaled the ramparts of the historic Spanish fort. I have no reason to remember that breakfast, any more than I recall the events of the day, two months later, on which my father drew me aside, following dinner, to reveal that my grandaunt had succumbed to stomach cancer. It was a morning without omens, all prologue to an unforeseen horror. How could I anticipate that when we returned, joyful and sun-drunk, to our otherwise undisturbed motel room, both Fat and Thin would be gone?

As in any self-respecting whodunit, suspicion immediately fell upon the servants—in this case, any of the depleted, middle-aged African-American maids who vacuumed and scrubbed toilets while the Caucasian guests scaled the Spanish battlements and collected pink coral on the beaches. These women had opportunity. They had motive. Who else would pilfer a pair of worthless rubber cats except a mother or grandmother too impoverished to purchase, for her brood, feline companions of their own? That’s how my father explained it to me. I had lots of toys. Most likely, the poor black child who’d been given Fat and Thin had none. Nor did my parents believe there was malice involved in the catnapping. Rather, entering an empty motel room that contained only two rubber cats, the well-intentioned maid probably believed the creatures had been abandoned. So my parents would buy me new cats, they pledged. Better cats. But to hope that Fat and Thin might return home was simply unrealistic. If we pursued the matter doggedly, a blameless working mother might lose her job. What good would that accomplish? Besides, even if it were possible, did I really want to yank these cheap, well-worn toys from the hands of a deprived little boy?

So we continued our journey up the seaboard, past unmarked police cars scanning for Yankee plates, through palmetto thickets blanketed with Spanish moss. We drove by the hospital where, the previous winter, my mother had undergone emergency surgery after dropping a can of tomato soup on her left big toe. Soon the air turned crisp and we crossed the endless brooks and runs of Virginia. Then Delaware, where I was bundled into a windbreaker and rewarded with a sour gumball. And New Jersey, an endless colonnade of chemical drums that looked like giant toadstools. Finally, we were back in New York, passing the playing fields where I would soon master the arts of lollygagging and wearing a baseball mitt on my head. We parked opposite the neighbor’s stone wall—the wall that my brother would later reshape with the bumper of his first car.

But there were now only four of us in the vehicle, not six.
I stared out the windshield at our over-lit house, the carefully timed lamps blazing in the upstairs windows, thinking of that needy boy back in Florida whose toilet-scrubbing mother couldn’t afford to take vacations.
Did I really want to yank Fat and Thin from his deprived little hands?
Yes, I did. Yes, I did! YES, I DID!

Twenty years after the crime of my century—for Fat and Thin are my Great Train Robbery and Lindbergh baby and Manson family murders all rolled into one—I was hired to teach an introductory course in applied ethics at Brown University. Whether by coincidence or subconscious design, much of my syllabus focused on the countless moral questions surrounding property rights: Should my neighbor have to compensate me if she builds a house that obstructs my view? Why shouldn’t private business owners be permitted to discriminate on the basis of race or religion? Who has the most convincing claim to a stolen painting that is subsequently sold and purchased in good faith by an unsuspecting third party? These are the conundrums that try eighteen-year-olds’ souls, during those ephemeral salad days before they start amassing property of their own. When you ask them: Is it ethical for a poor maid to steal a cheap toy for her son from the motel room of a wealthy family, they grapple with the matter quite intensely. On the whole, they tend to be surprisingly forgiving of the well-intentioned and indigent cat burglar. Some even defend the working-class bandit who actually knows that the well-heeled family will return for the toy, yet steals it anyway, comparing the theft to pilfering apples for starving children or swallowing a phone company error in your favor. In contrast, my thirty-something friends—professional, civic-minded couples raising overindulged children of their own—see no ambiguity in the situation. Stealing is stealing. To the last, they are surprisingly lacking in sympathy for the imaginary servant who, in my concocted scenario, makes off with a pair of hypothetical rubber cats.

Why are my Brown students so lenient? I often suspect it is because they have never before considered the injustice of a social system that allows some children to amass toys while others have none. Sure, they are aware of poverty: kwashiorkor and marasmus in the starving, dust-clad villages of the Sahel; hemorrhagic fevers ravaging war-torn swaths of the Congo. The more socially conscious among them feel guilty that they have the leisure to study Gramsci and feminist theory, while millions of their chronological peers work fast food counters in urban ghettos and raise toddlers on food stamps. My students find these inequities fundamentally unsettling, even unjust—though in all fairness, few will devote their lives to eradicating poverty and even fewer, if any, would voluntarily exchange places with their less fortunate brothers and sisters. What my students have never done, however, is reflect upon a life without toys. In a society where mass-produced plastic action figures cost ten dollars apiece, and every middle-class family has a closet well-stocked with such wholesome board games as Monopoly and Risk, my students find "toylessness" as alien as homelessness. They side with the maid because, accustomed to an arsenal of Xboxes and multiethnic Barbie dolls whose shoe collections rival that of Imelda Marcos, they do not see much cost in losing a single toy. When I describe to them the vanished immigrant world in which my grandmother and Aunt Emma grew up, where one home-fashioned rag-doll was handed down like a cache of jewels from sister to sister, they listen with tolerant incredulity. I might as easily be telling them that when I was their age, I hiked fifty miles to school every morning—uphill, both ways—through drifts of year-round snow.

Occasionally, of course, a student will take the side of the wealthy family. I recall one particular girl—a sharp-thinking beauty, well on her way toward professional school and civic-minded childrearing—who had already learned not to tinker with the rules of social organization. What about the boy whose toys were stolen? she wanted to know. What if those were his most beloved possessions? What if they’d been given to him by his grandparents on their deathbeds? I admired her eloquence, but I also sensed her passion was not personal—that she had never actually lost anything of value. Think about what being victimized like that could do to somebody, particularly a small child, she urged her skeptical classmates. For all you know, that kid will never get over his missing cats. For all you know, taking those cats away ruined his entire life.

I won’t claim that the loss of Fat and Thin ruined my life, but their disappearance certainly changed it. Even today, I am a far more cautious—even suspicious—person than I might have been if not for that episode. I am particularly careful not to leave shopping bags in my car while I run a few additional errands or an attaché case at a restaurant table when I visit the rest room. I never loan out my door keys, not even to a close friend or relative for a matter of seconds. When I travel, I phone my home answering machine at least once a day—not principally to check my messages, but to assure myself that my apartment building hasn’t burned down. And every morning, if I’m staying at a hotel, I pack up all of my belongings and stash them inside the trunk of my car. So while I give generously to charity and even to panhandlers, no slippery-fingered room cleaner’s toddler will ever acquire a stray sock or a ballpoint pen at my expense. Of course, even without the St. Augustine massacre, I might have grown into a thoroughly maladjusted adult. Hitler and Stalin could still have proven butchers, notwithstanding loving childhoods. What I can say with confidence is that not a day passes during which I don’t actively fear being robbed of what I care about most deeply: not tangible objects, but friendships and loved ones. I imagine psychiatry has a label for this walking dread. That is why I don’t see a psychiatrist.

Another consequence of this traumatic incident has been my long-standing discomfort with the housekeeping staff at hotels and motor lodges. The winter after Fat and Thin disappeared, I slammed the door in the face of another African-American motel maid—this time on the resort island of Sanibel—and nearly shattered her nose. The woman, a plump battleaxe with a solitary gold tooth, accused me of racism. My prejudice, of course, was of a different sort. Alas, my parents, who had long since moved beyond the previous autumn’s horrors, forced me to apologize. Later that week, my father drove our rental car through the shanty towns where the cleaning staff lived, so that I might witness the corrugated zinc roofs and the undergarments drying in the open air. Yet, what most interested me were the dozens of young children, scampering among the chickens and guinea fowl. I scrutinized them carefully, wondering if one of these boys might somehow have acquired Fat or Thin from a cousin who lived further upstate. I had long ago given up hope of recovering both of my cats. My deal with the cosmos was that if one of them returned home, I would behave irreproachably forever. Many nights, I lay awake in bed, trying to determine whether I would prefer the jovial, fun-loving Fat or the wise, worldly Thin. I was trapped forever in my own micro-version of Sophie’s Choice. Whatever the outcome of my fantasies, I ended up sobbing myself to sleep.

I am self-aware enough to recognize that while stealing may be stealing, the loss of the rubber cats was far more than merely the loss of the rubber cats. My aunt had died, after all—or my grandaunt, to please the sticklers. Even at the age of six, I understood that this was the ultimate of all calamities, a disaster so unspeakably horrific that we pretend the suffering is bearable and struggle on with our lives. Many people close to me have died since that evening when my father explained that we wouldn’t be visiting Miami Beach anymore, but I’ll never shake the genuine terror I felt when he revealed the true course of human events. I’d been introduced to the ghastly secret that separated the adults from the children: Homo sapiens were like rubber cats. You could return to your motel room one night to find them gone forever.

My aunt was one of six siblings, all deceased, only two of whom produced biological children. One brother, Harry, eloped with a non-Jewish woman and was banished from the life of the family forever. A second brother, Morris, traveled by train to California at the end of World War II—and his children, in perpetual exile, are prosperous restaurateurs in Los Angeles. While I think of Emma’s sister, Ida, as my grandmother, she is technically my mother’s stepmother. (My biological grandmother discovered a lump in her breast in 1953 and was sent home from the hospital to die.) The comedian Jerry Lewis is a distant cousin, as was the stage actor, Bert Lahr, but neither Lewis nor Lahr’s son, John, have answered my multiple letters. I mention all of this to emphasize how few visitors come to Aunt Emma’s gravesite at Mount Ararat, in Queens, where she is buried alongside her parents and thousands of unfortunate strangers. When I visit, on a warm autumn afternoon nearly twenty-five years after her death, the markers are overrun with desiccated vines and thorny creepers.

It is amazing how little I know of my aunt. She was born in 1898 and worked her entire adult life as an executive secretary at the Allied Chemical & Dye Corporation. She never married. As far as my surviving cousins recall, she never dated. Most of her time was spent in the company of another single woman named Alice McCarthy, but whether they were merely friends, or romantically involved, is a mystery lost to the ages. What I do remember are visits to her single-occupancy apartment in the old Sherry Netherland Hotel, and how she showed me a paperweight made from glass-encased butterfly wings, and one time she called me on the telephone and I innocently nodded my head to answer her questions. And I remember vividly the evening she gave me Fat Cat and Thin Cat, after a quiet afternoon in which I downed numerous glasses of chocolate milk and she nibbled fruit-flavored baby food, the only meal her esophageal strictures permitted. That is all I remember of my grandmother’s eldest sister. Yet I still love this octogenarian spinster, who is now but a smattering of flashbulb memories in my consciousness, an image of a perpetually impish woman with dimpled cheeks and a penchant for turquoise hats. I remember loving her and I remember her loving me. I still own the butterfly paperweight, one of the few possessions I carry with me from apartment to apartment. Alongside this heirloom, there is always an empty space on the shelf, a final resting place perpetually waiting for Fat or Thin. I am like a war mother, keeping free a chair for her missing son. At some point reason eclipses hope, but the opening must remain as a tribute to the long departed.

Two months after I visited my aunt’s gravesite, I found myself once again on the east coast of Florida for the wedding of a childhood friend. I made the terrible mistake of staying in the Best Western at 1505 Belvedere Road in West Palm Beach—an error I wish to encourage all readers of this essay to avoid. The motel appeared a suitable enough lodging at first glance—not too pricey—although the soda machines didn’t work and assorted household debris floated atop the pool. Lulled into lowering my guard by the lush, subtropical air and the swaying palms, I took the risk of packing only my computer into my trunk and leaving my other belongings inside the motel room while I attended the nuptials wearing a tuxedo. How could I ever have anticipated that the housekeeping staff would confuse the day of my departure? When I returned at two a.m., feeling festive but fatigued to the bone, I discovered that the maid had turned over the room in my absence. She’d taken with her my beach clothes, my toiletries, even the prescription medication that I take before traveling on airborne coffins. To this day, despite my repeated pleas, the motel has proven unable to track down my missing belongings. I will not keep an open space on my shelf for them.

Of course, as a result of this screw up, I found myself with a day to kill on the Florida coast, lacking so much as a bathing suit to wear or a paperback novel to read. Seized with an irrational impulse, I immediately phoned my mother in New York and asked her for the name of the motel where the rubber cats had disappeared. Which rubber cats? she asked. When she finally understood what I wanted to know, it became clear that she possessed only the faintest memory of the entire episode. My father didn’t remember the rubber cats at all. That left me no choice but to drive up the seaboard toward St. Augustine—intent on stopping at each roadside motel. I didn’t care about my recently appropriated toothbrush. I was thinking of my long lost friends.

My plan was to scour the city, making inquiries of desk clerks. Yet what could I possibly ask? Do you recall if I left a pair of rubber cats here thirty-two years ago? Would you mind if I asked your housekeeping staff if they’d stolen my toys? As I drove past the Pelican Island Wildlife Refuge and the Kennedy Space Center, the absurdity of my scheme grew increasingly clear to me. The woman who had made off with my prized possessions would be long since retired. Or worse. Her son might well have a six-year-old boy of his own. Most likely, the motel itself had been purchased by a national chain and then sold off again in a series of complex transactions that might well have concluded with a wrecking ball. The bottom line was that any sane motel clerk would laugh me out of his lobby before I made it within shouting distance of a housekeeper. I would have as much luck convincing Dellwood to put the cats’ photographs on its milk cartons. So I turned my car around and drove back—to my bare motel room, to the life I lead without my childhood toys.

The irony, I realize, is that if I could find the grown man who’d been that deprived child, I would let him keep the cats. Gladly. I can’t say I would have at the age of fifteen or even at twenty-five—but as a thirty-four-year-old university professor, I’ve finally found enough peace in life to forgive the misguided motel maid who did me a small injustice a quarter of a century ago. Honestly, I don’t even want to see the cats again. Fat and Thin are far more vivid in my memory than they could ever be on a stranger’s shelf—or even, for all I know, on his pillow. So what do I want from this man whom I will never meet—this man who probably doesn’t even know that I exist—this man who has never even once asked himself where his mother or grandmother found the toys she brought home from work? All I want is to see who he is—to discover what became of the boy whose mother gave him a pair of rubber cats—one fat, one thin—on a fateful autumn night in 1980. That’s what I want to ask him: Did they change his life as much as they changed mine?