Big Cats by Holiday Reinhorn

Author:Holiday Reinhorn
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2007-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Several days later, I will talk to my father. He will telephone me and explain that he hasn’t been able to return my repeated calls from Los Angeles because his answering machine is broken. He paid seventy dollars for it, he tells me, and he wants the money back.

“They keep asking me for the sales slip,” he says. “I keep telling these assholes … why do I need that? Obviously, if I have the machine, I’m the owner. I shouldn’t have to prove anything.”

It was a national emergency, I want to tell him, there are pay phones. But I keep my mouth shut.

We exchange stories of where we were when it happened. I tell him how his first wife, my mother, called from Oregon at seven-thirty in the morning, screaming into the answering machine: “There are bombs.”

He talks about the U.S. carriers that made nuisances of themselves off the coast of Yemen, and then the plots of his favorite films. Zabriskie Point. The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson. “That city is hell on people,” he says about New York. “So dangerous.”

“It was my home, remember?” I tell my father. “I lived there for eleven years. In 1993, when the first bombs went off under the Trade Center, I was on a train that stalled under Chambers Street. From the force of the rumbling, and the smoke back at Cortlandt, we all knew it was something bad.”

My father pauses at this, and his voice fades. When I lived in New York, we weren’t talking, and we both know it. Those were the Manhattan years, when an impenetrable, spiraling silence rose up between us. A vast concrete island of resentment. Stories high. Blocks long.

“Nicholson’s a brilliant actor,” my father says quietly. “Just so good.”

We are silent now, and I look out the window at the curtains of light coming down on Los Angeles. It is garbage day tomorrow, and the cans are lined up evenly along the street.

“Should go, Dad,” I say, imagining his cat in his lap, his living room in Memphis I have not ever seen. “Talk to you later.” But my father doesn’t hang up. He begins to speak, then stops midsentence. I wonder for a minute if he hasn’t dropped the phone. When his voice comes on the line again, it is delicate, too fragile, almost, to recognize.

“I was so worried about you when you were little,” he says. “I couldn’t even stand it when you had to go out to sell Campfire candy. I couldn’t stand to let you even walk out the door.”

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