Superstitions

At 9:00 A.M., she has to phone the caterer about adding two more guests, her landlord about showing her apartment to prospective tenants while she’s away, her office about not calling her while she's on her honeymoon, and the hotel in the Bahamas to confirm there’ll be champagne in the suite when she and her new husband arrive.

Then she’s off to the jeweler’s to pick up the monogrammed cufflinks she’s giving her fiancé. She also has a last-minute meeting at the church with the minister and organist. The vow about “Obey” stays.

“The same vow our mothers and grandmothers used,” Glenn had pointed out. “Tradition is important, I think. It provides a sense of stability in a changing world.” The Wedding March, however, definitely gets the coup de grace. “Corny middle class kitsch,” was his assessment. “My first wife insisted on it and look how that marriage turned out. Let’s have a little something by Handel instead.”

Wendy is also having lunch at Chez Henri with her bridesmaids, and on her way home, she has to stop by the tailor’s to pick up her wedding dress that required alterations because she's lost weight recently.

There is only one other notation: CATS. That afternoon, Wendy is taking her two cats to A Home Away from Home, operated by a woman who, for a substantial payment up front and a hefty monthly fee thereafter, will keep unwanted pets for their remaining lifetime in the vast prairie-like expanse of her downtown Manhattan loft.

“It’s not like I need the money,” the woman had said when Wendy telephoned for information and gasped at the cost. “I've found the only way to get someone’s attention is via the pocketbook. I want people to realize exactly what they’re doing. Believe me, it’s rough on the pets. Why should I make it painless for the owners?”

Glenn says he’s allergic to cats. Since they've been seeing each other, they’ve spent most of their time together at his condo, which is also where they will live after the honeymoon. On the rare occasions he’s stayed at her apartment, she’s had to confine the cats to the kitchen, and even then he'd complained bitterly, chronicling symptoms like a television ad for a cold remedy, although Wendy hadn’t noticed any sneezing or wheezing. His libido certainly hadn’t been affected, either.

“Cat dander is an aphrodisiac,” she’d teased him. “Right up there with ginseng, powdered rhino horn, and the genitalia of certain jungle animals.”

"Very funny," he had replied, not cracking a smile.

The last time Glenn spent the night at her place, Muffin and Ginger had engineered a Houdini escape from the kitchen and jumped on the bed at three A.M.

“Get these bloody beasts out of here,” he'd snapped, bolting upright and flailing. “I think I’m starting to break out in hives.”

Though Wendy promptly removed the offenders from the bedroom, Glenn had been irate. "I'd hate to think I take second place to a couple of animals," he'd snapped.

"Of course you don't," she'd reassured him. "You know you're the most important thing in my life. But if you're really bothered by pet dander, you might try the new medications for animal allergies. I hear they make a big difference, and I can't be the only person you know with pets—"

“It’s obvious you don't give a damn about me," he'd shouted at her, then dressed and slammed out of the apartment.

***

On the day before the wedding, Wendy awakens to mixed emotions and missing cats.

She's glad it's the last day of being single and living on her own. Though she doesn't often admit it because it sounds so unliberated for a modern woman, finding a husband has always been foremost in her mind. Since high school, she has eyed every man she's dated and thought: Is this the one for me? She feels a distinct relief that the game of musical beds is over, that she will no longer have to wonder with whom she's having dinner or sleeping or spending the rest of her life.

It's also, however, her last day with the cats, and that reality spoils her joy in a way that almost frightens her. It doesn't help, either, that with unfailing feline intuition, the cats sense something's different, something's wrong, and have gone into deep hiding somewhere in the apartment. They won't come out for their breakfast or even when Wendy opens a box of catnip. Their fear throws Wendy into a quiet panic.

She hates to admit it, but she’s become superstitious lately. Things that never had meaning before suddenly have assumed strange significance—the weather, numbers, the phases of the moon, colors, coincidences of every sort. Though she keeps reminding herself that she's a general manager for an accounting firm, not a tealeaf-reading gypsy, the list of portents grows daily—and she can't help but interpret the cats' uneasiness as an inauspicious augury.

Wendy collects omens the way chic women collect shoes. It’s good she met Glenn on the first day of spring—a sign of new beginnings. Blue is his favorite color and that bodes well. Blue signifies serenity. They both like pinot grigio, Georgia O’Keefe, gin-and-tonic, Greek food, techno music, tennis. Every coincidence of taste and preference betokens happy times ahead.

She and Glenn are even from the same town in Connecticut, though they didn’t know each other back then. She imagines they must have passed one another countless times. In fact, when they first met, he’d remarked, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” She knows it wasn’t a pick-up line because they were obviously destined to meet.

But not all the signs are good ones and that bothers her, like a wrinkle in a silk blouse or a spot on a white carpet. For instance, there's her engagement ring. Glenn had steered her away from the traditional solitaires and selected an estate piece, a huge opal surrounded by diamonds. “Doesn’t he know opals are bad luck?” she'd thought, horrified. Even the jeweler hadn’t thought it was a good choice. “It’s not a strong stone,” he’d cautioned. “One good knock and it’ll crack for sure.”

It troubles Wendy the ring isn’t new. She wonders how many unhappy hands have worn it. She tells herself that misfortune isn’t contagious, like the flu—then remembers the Hope Diamond and the sorry saga of its numerous ill-fated owners.

A winter wedding isn’t auspicious either—everything dead under that deceptively pretty snow, she thinks gloomily. “The perfect time for a tropical honeymoon,” Glenn had said when he surprised her with tickets to the Bahamas. “I hear there are private beaches where you can go topless and bottomless. You can show off your fabulous new figure. And all-over tans really turn me on.” Wendy foresees peeling skin, blisters in sensitive places, smelly ointments and ouchy, unsexy sex.

Even the weather for the wedding day isn’t promising, with the forecast of a freak winter thunderstorm. That can’t possibly be a good sign—all that thunder and lightning in December, of all months.

Before she runs her errands, she searches one more time for the cats. As she calls their names, she thinks: If they come out, it's a sign that everything will be okay. But after all their years together, she knows they won’t be so easily fooled.

When Wendy moved to New York, “get pets” had rapidly assumed top priority on her to-do list, more vital for survival in the city than having enough cocktail glasses or a pair of Italian pumps or a front door deadbolt. The ritual pas de deux of casual acquaintances engaging in interim intimacies before disappearing into the urban scene caused her to crave a face or two that didn’t change on a regular basis. The cats are the longest relationship Wendy has had in the last twelve years, outlasting an entire address book of numbers she doesn’t call anymore and names with whom she no longer associates a face.

The cats won't come out. Wendy puts on her coat and tells herself: You're acting like a superstitious old woman. If you're not careful, you'll be calling a psychic hotline number and believing every idiotic thing they tell you.

***

When she returns that afternoon, the cats are still hiding. The woman at A Home Away From Home had said to be sure to bring them before four, and it's getting late. In desperation, Wendy pokes under the furniture and in the closets with a broom until she flushes them out. As they wail and flail, she shoves them into their pet transports, slams the lids, and then bursts into tears. Though she knows she’s acting silly, tears still leak down her cheeks as she descends in the elevator with the two squalling cases and the nice widow from Apartment 11A.

“Tomorrow’s the big day, isn’t it?” her neighbor says, raising her voice to be heard over the yowling. “I understand the emotional roller coaster you’re on. The day before my wedding, I was laughing one minute and weeping the next.” She pats Wendy’s arm. “I’m sure you and your sweetheart will be just as happy as my Harold and I were.”

Afraid that if she opens her mouth to speak, a sob will pop out instead of words, Wendy tries to smile and nods mutely.

***

At A Home Away from Home, a charmless woman with hacked-off hair hanging forgotten around a sharp-featured face takes custody of the carrying cases.

“Like I warned you when you called,” she says, “older cats seldom make a good adjustment. They go into a deep depression, stop eating and drinking. They find a dark place to hide and die.” She casts Wendy a withering look. “I want you to understand that. So you won’t blame me.”

Wendy doesn’t recall the woman mentioning that on the phone. “Well,” she says, “I’m sure it will be different with them. Let me tell you some things about them you ought to know—”

The woman shakes her head. “I know everything I need to.”

“Why don't I take them out of their cases? If they see me, they won’t feel—abandoned. They’ll realize this is their new home and think I’ll be back.”

“No.” The woman speaks so forcefully that Wendy winces. “Seeing you would only make it worse,” and firmly steers Wendy out the door.

Standing alone in the gritty grayness of winter street, Wendy feels terribly tired, like a small child at the end of a hard day. She desperately wants a soft lap, and sweet lies reassuring her that everything will be fine, and a little bed just the right size for one. She wishes she could go home again, but she knows no such place exists. Her fiance’s condo is her new home, though it doesn’t feel like it. Over the last twelve years, she’s lived in six apartments, including two with men she was certain she was going to marry but didn’t. Her parents’ big Colonial house in Connecticut where she grew up is long gone, sold years ago after the divorce.

Her father is now retired and traveling around the country in an expensive motorhome with his new girlfriend who's younger than Wendy. Her mother is some rich man’s fourth wife, living at the yacht club in Antigua, where every afternoon she watches yet another sunset bleed like an open wound into the sea while she drinks martinis on a terrace with other women wearing very large diamonds on languid hands and perfect tans on empty faces.

Neither parent will be coming to New York for the wedding. Definitely not a good sign, Wendy thinks miserably, as she hails a cab headed back uptown.

***

Wendy postpones going back to her apartment. She buys a bridal magazine at a newsstand and stops by the restaurant on her block for a drink. Sipping a scotch, she checks her Palm Pilot. She hits a button and CATS disappear from the screen, as if they had never existed at all. She thumbs through her magazine but immediately regrets buying it. There’s an article on wedding superstitions and the news isn’t good.

Saturday’s disastrous for marriages—“Wednesday’s the best day of all, Saturday’s for no luck at all.” She shows the article to the bartender. “Everybody gets married on Saturday. No wonder everybody's marriage is so unhappy.”

Then she learns that “to change the name and not the letter is to change for the worse and not the better.” Her last name is Moore and Glenn's last name is Marshall.

When she reads, “The sneeze of a cat on your wedding day foretells a happy marriage,” she pushes the magazine away and signals the bartender for another drink.

***

When she enters the apartment, the first thing Wendy sees is her wedding dress, encased in plastic from the tailor shop and hanging on the coat tree where she’d put it earlier. It is blindingly white like a glacier and studded with beads as hard as hail. It fits her perfectly now, reflecting the twenty pounds she recently shed to please Glenn, who works out at a gym every day and is quick to inform people that he weighs the same as he did in college.

As she walks by, the dress rubs itself insistently against her legs, rustling like dead leaves.

***

Though he’d said six o’clock, it’s seven when Glenn arrives to take Wendy out for dinner.

“We’d better hurry,” she says. “You know how crowded Gino’s gets on Fridays.”

“God, not that spaghetti house, Wendy!” he groans. “Some fettuccine Alfredo and tiramisu, and you’ll wish you hadn't had the dress altered. Anyway, I made reservations at Cassidy’s.”

At the steakhouse, Wendy worries at a Caesar salad and watches Glenn excise chunks of bleedy beef from a T-bone until it’s picked clean as roadkill by scavengers. As they stroll back to her apartment, she admires their reflection in shop windows, shimmering like a mirage against the glassy backdrops of gold jewelry and art galleries and glitzy boutiques—a sleek, savvy couple arm-in-arm on a chic street in a glamorous city. The absolute perfection of their appearance together reassures her. It's a good sign, she thinks. She's seen couples that looked mismatched—one too short or too tall, too thin or too fat—and none of those relationships worked out, she recalls.

Wendy knows she's fortunate to have found Glenn. Her girlfriends remind her of it all the time. “Glenn's got a good job and most of his hair. A great body for forty-something and no STDs. A condo with a view. Only one ex who’s remarried and moved, and no kids—no alimony, no child support, no seeing the former Mrs. at every cocktail party and restaurant. You lucked out, Wendy. You forget what it's like out there. A whole city full of men, and all of them with a sexual dysfunction or a personality disorder or both."

***

When they get back to her apartment, Glenn pours a snifter of brandy and Wendy goes to the kitchen for a soda. As she pops the tab on her diet Coke, she notices the cats' special bed in a corner of the room. She'd made it herself when she'd gotten Muffin and Ginger, using an antique wicker basket and pillows she covered with velvet. The cats have slept in it every day for twelve years. A wave of grief washes over her as she wonders how she could have forgotten to take it with them to A Home Away From Home.

She glances at her watch. “Glenn,” she calls, “I’ve got one last errand to run. Pour yourself another brandy and I’ll be back before you’re done,” and bends over to pick up the basket.

Her fiancé quietly comes up behind her and grabs her hips like handles, pulling her against him.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” he murmurs. “Come on, babe, let’s go do what we do best.”

***

Wendy turns over and glances at the clock on the night table. It’s nearly midnight. “Hey, it’s bad luck on your wedding day to see the bride before the ceremony," she says, and starts to get out of bed. "You'd better go. I'll see you at the altar this afternoon.”

“Since when did you become superstitious?” Glenn stares at her, incredulous.

She almost says, “Since I met you,” but stops.

“Tradition also says that a woman who isn't a virgin shouldn’t wear white, but you obviously didn't care about that one.” He laughs, but he isn’t smiling as he pulls her back and rolls on top of her.

Wendy tries in vain to hide her face from Glenn in the damp thatch of his chest hair as the final moments of the last day dissolve in sweat and spasms, and the first day of her new life inauspiciously begins.

^

Biography

I live on the coast of North Carolina and work as an associate editor for two publications, PopMatters, an online journal of global culture, and The Dead Mule, a literary ezine featuring Southern writers. My short fiction is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Tattoo Highway, and has appeared in Eclectica, Starry Night Review, Megaera, The Distillery: Artistic Spirits of the South, Emrys Journal and The Dead Mule, among others."