Two-Mom Cat Wrestler: The Athena Cricket Betty Friedan Herskowitz Story

“Attie!”

I know what Moobie wants.

“Attie!”

I’ll get up in a minute.

“Attie!”

My Hamilton poster is peeling off the wall. I should do something about that. Phillipa Soo deserves better.

“Athena Cricket Betty Friedan Herskowitz!”

My full name crawls through the hole in the bedroom floor like the ghost of a pissed-off groundhog. I roll to the edge of the mattress and aim my shout downstairs.

“GET THE PILLS READY. I’M ON MY WAY.”

It’s not easy being the only person in the house willing to wrestle a cat into taking her medicine.

The trip downstairs is a gauntlet of hazards and code violations, the result of two determined feminists with too much can-do spirit, and too little money or home repair skills. In addition to the three-inch hole in my floor, there’s a flight of steps with an overhang so low we put bumpers on it, and a corner so blind we had to put up a mirror to avoid collisions in the hallway.

I’m pretty sure either Moobie or Mom bribed the social worker who inspected the place before they were allowed to adopt me.

Assuming you make it downstairs without injury, Mom has disguised her less-than-stellar plastering job with a four-foot tapestry of a multi-colored barn owl that glares disapprovingly at you from the bottom of the steps. She wove it out of alpaca yarn she spun herself and dyed with plants during one of her more creative and less employed years. She calls it, “Ode to Athena,” which tells you something about either her or me; I’m not sure.

Gaia’s Palace is, as my mother says, a labor of something. Love. Maybe community. I grew up in it, so I duck and weave without having to think. I’m not really allowed to have friends over, though, especially after my first kindergarten friend told her mother we had nine cats and no real bathroom.

Imagine trying to explain the concept of a composting toilet to a five-year-old as a five-year-old and you’ll see why I gave up on playdates early.

Moobie (I couldn’t pronounce “Moonbeam” as a toddler, so Moobie she became) is at the kitchen table, a squalling squirm of fur and claws in her lap. From the looks of it, Dottie’s already managed to claw a few holes in the rubber dish gloves that go halfway up to Moobie’s elbows. Dottie howls with dread and indignance. The other cats have fled, fearful that they might be next. I grab the pills from the table and the scruff of Dottie’s neck, jamming the medicine past her tongue.

It’s exactly as violent as it sounds, and I’m one of the only people in the house with the stomach for it. Once we’re sure the pill isn’t coming back up, Moobie releases Dottie, who leaps from her lap then turns to scowl at me, cocking one half-chewed ear in my direction.

“You are so ferocious,” I reassure her in a syrupy voice. “The most terrifying cat in the worrrrld.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Moobie says, looking up at me with a smile before puckering her lips. I lower my head obediently, letting her plant one on me without making her get up. “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

I can hear the smile in her voice as she says it, but the words land in my guts like a loaf of underbaked whole wheat bread. I stand up and try to smile, too.

“Has the mail come?” I ask, aiming for casual. I know it hasn’t.

Moobie shrugs. “Like I’m going to the mailbox in this weather?” She uses her decoupaged cane to gesture to the freezing rain that’s turned our path to Highway 109 into a muddy ice rink. That’s my opening.

“I’ll go check.” I try to act like I’m not rushing as I pull my boots and parka on. The log box next to our wood stove is looking low, so I’ll have to grab what I can from the shed while I’m out. It’s too cold to let the fire die at night these days. At least the holes in the house bring the heat straight to my room..

“Attie, while you’re out there, can you check on the chickens?” Moobie calls. “I’m worried about them.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I doubt I’ll find any eggs though.”

“Not the point,” she replies. “I’d go check on them myself, but -”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“And Attie?”

“Yeah?”

“The fire needs -”

“I know, Moobie.”

“And maybe check the perennial beds, just to see if they need another layer of mulch?”

I sigh. “Anything else while I’m out there?”

“I think that’s it,” she says innocently, like she hasn’t just given me a to-do list that’s bound to have me soaked and freezing before I get back in the house. “Love you.”

I head out, giving the front door a slightly-harder-than-necessary kick to shut it.

I take the long way to the mailbox. At the henhouse, I check to make sure there aren’t any new roof leaks, and that the chickens are their usual ornery, indignant selves. I get a dozen pecks through my jeans for my trouble. The perennial bed, where Mom and Moobie have planted enough garlic to last through several vampire attacks, looks okay to me, and the rain has finally stopped. I’m slipping and skating my way across the yard with a log under my arm when Mom’s station wagon pulls up, only bouncing in a few of the frozen driveway ruts. She’s blocking my view of the mailbox.

I hear the door slam. Don’t check the mail. Don’t check the mail. It’s as close to prayer as we get in this house. But I’m too late - the rusty creak of the mailbox door echoes across the yard.

“I’ll get it!” I shout, but even I know I sound ridiculous. I’d run, but that would be both too suspicious and too risky. It’s a long and bumpy ride to the hospital with a busted knee or ankle.

As I near the edge of the yard, Mom shuffles her way around the car, clinging to the door and trunk as her feet slide. Her two tote bags, heavy with files, balance on her shoulders like a yoke.

“Thanks, Attie,” she pants, getting her feet under her. “I saw there was mail, but I don’t have the hands. Be careful, okay?”

Whew. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck as relief floods my cheeks. “Let me help you in,” I say. What the hell. I’ve waited this long. I can wait a little longer.

Mom stretches out her arm and links it through mine, and together, we move across the ice. As we walk, flat-footed, toes pointed out like penguins, I start to tell myself it’s probably a good thing I’m not going to get in. Mom and Moobie need me. Who’s going to help them skate across the yard because they refuse to put sand or salt or even kitty litter down? What if one of them falls?

It’s selfish, wanting to leave them. I should just go to State like most of the rest of my class. If it’s good enough for the school valedictorian, then why do I deserve to spend the next four years studying theater in an actual city with subways and Cantonese food and all the other things that will never happen here?

I'm sure I can handle four more years of being the only Chinese face in my section of Set Design 101. I’m sure college professors don’t ask their students for “the Asian perspective,” when discussing current events, like I’ve got some direct mental link to the Chinese embassy. They’ll probably still ask where I’m from, though. And this time, I won’t have Moobie to phone the principal and call her a “microaggressing neoliberal two-timing skunk face.”

On the other hand, Moobie won’t have ever dated my principal, because colleges don’t have principals, so that’s something.

Mom gives me a hug and a kiss once we get up the steps, and I start the slow trek back across the yard. I’m tempted to just get on my hands and knees and crawl, but dignity won’t let me. It takes me a full fifteen minutes to get to the driveway.

The mailbox is stuffed, and the door is slightly open. It hits me before I even see it - the sight of a too-big envelope sticking out past the edge of the box. Heart in my throat, I cling to the mailbox with one arm to keep my balance, and pull the envelope out.

It’s thick. And heavy. The return address is three states away. This is a love letter filled with promises: Shakespeare seminars. Black box theater. Other Asian students. Life in an actual city with faces I don’t recognize. This can’t be happening. I made it. I MADE IT.

As soon as the joy fills me, I start crying. There’s no way. Even though my summer job paid the application fees, we don’t have the money. I can’t go to private school on a social worker and tarot card reader’s savings. It was so much easier when I knew I wouldn’t possibly make it.

I stuff the padded envelope down the back of my pants and pull my jacket over it, stuffing my pockets with bills and a hefty seed catalog. When I fall on the way back, my college acceptance cushions the blow.

All I want to do is go up to my room and cry some more, but as soon as I shut the door and bend to unlace my boots, Moobie calls me to taste her latest spin on loh foh tong. I think, for half a second, about what it would be like to bring home wood ear mushrooms and lotus root on school breaks, and how happy she’d be. Then I squash that thought with another one - the image of Moobie trying to bring in firewood by herself during one of her flare-ups, hobbling and wincing. That’s enough to shake me back to reality.

“Just a minute!” I pull the envelope out, sit on the boot bench, and open it with numb fingers.

The letter itself is short, but sweet. I want to frame it somewhere Mom and Moobie will never see as proof of what was possible. There’s a thick brochure with information about an upcoming accepted students day that I won’t be able to go to anyway, an acceptance form to sign that will make great kindling when the fire goes out, and a folder marked Financial Aid.

I don’t even bother looking. I hear footsteps coming my way and in a panic, stuff the papers back down the back of my pants, covering them with my shirt. Mom appears in the living room doorway, flanked by three cats. They know it’s almost dinner time. She looks tired - she usually looks tired - but happy.

“Anything good in the mail?” she asks. I hand her the seed catalog and nod toward the bills I’ve stuck on the deal-with-it-later table. She opens the catalog and sighs, smiling at the gorgeous beetle-free zucchini and pages of perfect tomatoes while I take my boots off. “This summer,” she murmurs. “This is going to be the year everything grows.”

I know what she means. Our little patch of dirt is one of the most garden-unfriendly lots this close to the Mississippi. Through years of patient tending and Moobie’s endless research into soil treatments (hello composting toilet) they’ve managed to eke out a decent share of hardier plants. Mom never gives up hope. But this place will never look like the promises of a seed catalog.

As I kick my boots off, Mom heads back to the kitchen ahead of me. I stop to check the fire on my way, decide it can wait when Moobie calls me again. I scoop up Dottie, who has decided to forgive me for force-feeding her medicine, and head into the kitchen, wondering why I can’t smell the soup yet. I’m about to tease Moobie about it when I realize what’s waiting for me and stop in my tracks, nearly dropping Dottie.

There’s a cake. Knowing Moobie, it’s carob-ginger whole wheat surprise, but it’s a cake. With frosting. Moobie doesn’t believe in frosting. But there is frosting. And there’s not enough room on the cake to fit all the letters, so it read CONG RATS ATTIE. And Mom is smiling at me like she does when even one flower breaks through the front yard, and Moobie is whooping, “Didja think we didn’t know, sweet cheeks?”

I sit down and try for a full minute to make words. “How did you know?”

Mom rolls her eyes. “Brochures for eight different colleges that all happened to be in the same city? Come on, sweetheart. We’re old, not dense.”

“Besides,” Moobie adds, “you mailed your application from the post office.”

“So you wouldn’t see it in our mailbox!”

Moobie looks smug.

I groan, dropping my head in my hands. Of course. The post office. “Pat told you?”

“Exes-turned-best-friends tell each other everything, Attiekins. I thought you knew that. Imagine my surprise when she called last week to ask if we’d heard any news yet.”

“You weren’t supposed to know.”

Moobie’s face turns serious. She reaches across the table and grabs one of my hands. Without looking, I reach my other one towards Mom, who runs her thumb over mine and squeezes.

“Why not?”

My face feels hot. “We can’t afford it.”

Mom snorts. “We can’t afford anything, Attie. But we never let that stop us. If that big envelope is what I know it is, we’ll figure out a way. We always do.”

“But I can’t,” I wail. “If I leave, you’re going to fall and break your hips and die, and the cats won’t get any medicine, and the chickens -”

“Screw the chickens,” Moobie interrupts, completely serious. “If chickens are the price of my daughter’s dreams, then let’s coq-au-vin the lot and be done with it.”

I glare at her. “You’d do that to Tammy Cluckworth and Aleggsandria Occasio-Corteggs?”

Mom pats the back of my hand. “When we say we’ll figure it out, we mean it. Did you see how much financial aid they’re giving you? I assume you forged my signature on the forms.” She’s right and she knows it, but she doesn’t sound mad.

I shake my head. “I didn’t want to look. I was hoping I wouldn’t get in.”

Moobie snorts. “Liar. Open it up.”

I pull the papers out from the back of my pants and unfold them on the table. Mom’s eyes grow bright when she sees the official acceptance letter. I pull out the financial aid folder and open it. I know exactly how much it should cost. I’ve had the number branded into my worries since I sent the application.

The words, “full scholarship,” don’t even register because there’s no number. Moobie whoops and raises her fists in celebration, the cat on her lap falls to the floor and shrieks, and Mom swears more in one breath than she has in my entire life.

I’m unable to do anything besides whisper, “Oh my goddess,” over and over again. The cats mill around my feet. Dottie jumps up onto the table and sits on my scholarship. “Who’s going to torture you with medicine now, little cat?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Moobie and Mom say in unison, with more than a little exasperation. That makes me smile.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

“Huzzah!” Moobie cries.

“How did you bake a cake in twenty minutes?” I finally remember to ask.

“Oh,” Moobie waves a dismissive hand at the cake. “I made it last week and stuck it in the freezer. We won’t be able to cut it for another hour or so.”

That tracks. I’d bet the frosting’s got tofu in it, too.

Author's Note: the author is neither Asian nor an adoptee. The author engaged the services of a compensated sensitivity reader, who reviewed this piece for inaccuracies and microaggressions. The choice to make the protagonist a Chinese adoptee stemmed from the culture and time period in which the story is set; during the early 1990s, US citizens adopted over 2,000 Chinese girls. Some of these girls were adopted by "single" mothers who withheld their lesbian partnerships from the international adoption agencies and Chinese government. This story, while primarily about a young student's internal conflict over leaving home, draws from the ramifications of those policies and that wave of adoptions.