we live down the street from cat town

Moo Goo Gai Pan was a swashbuckling adventurer who sailed the seven seas carousing and plundering and generally yo-ho-ho-ing it up. At least, that was Pan’s MO according to my father, Harry Gurwitch. If my dad has one talent, it’s the ability to spin a yarn. Pan and his exploits were our bedtime stories during the six or so months in 1967 that our family crashed at my aunt Gloria’s home in Wilmington, Delaware.

I was in kindergarten and had just gotten the hang of buttoning myself into my Wright School for Girls pinafore when my parents packed up Mom’s wood-paneled Chevy Caprice station wagon and drove north from Mobile to Wilmington. We arrived with only the suitcases that fit in the car.

We pulled up to the house and my mother took to her bed in a nylon peignoir set. It wasn’t actually her bed, it was the twin bed with a Snoopy comforter in my cousin Shari’s bedroom, and she didn’t emerge again for several months. Shirley Gurwitch was “in mourning for her life,” to borrow from Chekhov. Aunt Gloria and Uncle Jack folded my sister and me into their brood. My maternal grandmother, Frances, slipped money to Gloria and Jack every week to feed and clothe us. My mother says she still has PTSD from the trauma of having to move back home and in with her sister.

My mother had big little-girl dreams. Her childhood diaries hint at a desire to become an actress, an aspiration that she was too shy to pursue and would not have gone over well with her parents. Whereas my father’s family was colorful and risk taking, my mother’s was unassuming and hardworking. Frances wanted to go into nursing, but only the boys in her family got educations and she ended up a clerk in the county welfare department. My mother’s father, Johnny Maisel, was a movie projectionist. The work was anything but glamorous. The profession attracted taciturn loners who were strong enough to manipulate the heavy machinery and handy with electrical appliances. Johnny so rarely spoke, in fact, that no one realized he had Alzheimer’s until we started getting phone calls from strangers in Baltimore after he’d gone out to get bread and milk in Wilmington.

My mother loved dreaming the day away in the cool darkness of the movie theater, but she only once worked up the courage to audition for a play. “Dinner is served,” she unmemorably announced as Tweeny, a junior domestic worker, in her high school production of the equally forgettable British comedy The Admirable Crichton . It was her debut and swan song.

I recently had lunch with Muriel, who looked up to my mother, her slightly older cousin, when they were undergraduates at the University of Delaware. “Your mother was pretty and studious and I wanted to be just like her.” Muriel became a science and engineering professor at MIT, but by then, my mother had already met my father. She’d represented the Maisels, who could only afford one train ticket, at a family wedding in Mobile. My father was assigned to escort her during her stay. There were lavish parties, teas, and dances, and my mom was seduced by the Southern hospitality.

After graduating with a degree in sociology, she had a brief tenure as a first-grade teacher. My mother has never made it a secret that she doesn’t really like children. She lasted exactly two days. Instead of enrolling in graduate school she threw herself at the tall, dark, and handsome Southerner she’d met in Mobile, not realizing that she was marrying into a family of bootleggers, gamblers, and fabulists. That was just the first of a lifetime of miscalculations.

My sister, Lisa, says we snuck out of Mobile in the middle of the night, which may or may not be an accurate account, but to us kids it sure felt like our life had crashed and burned without warning. In reality, the trajectory was years in the making. There was the failure of an insurance company, the demise of a used-car dealership, and the short sale of a local radio station to a Christian broadcasting group, silver mines that didn’t pan out, then a shady situation that tanked a real estate development in Toulminville, a suburb of Mobile. All I knew was that one day we were tooling around town in Dad’s Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce with the mahogany pull-down trays and the next we were homeless.

Returning to Wilmington penniless broke my mother’s spirit, but my sister and I had Moo Goo to keep us going. Lisa, my three cousins, and I hung on every word that Big Daddy, as our cousins dubbed our six-foot-four father with his booming Southern drawl, told of Moo Goo’s derring-do. None of us recall the piratey particulars other than that the stories bordered on Orientalism and that his adventures ended abruptly with the news that Moo Goo had acquired a lady friend and Dad wouldn’t be able to tell us any more of the story until we were all much, much older. Apparently, we still aren’t old enough, because to this day we don’t know what became of the couple. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered that Moo Goo Gai Pan is a Cantonese chicken and vegetable stir-fry and not a dashing thrill seeker.

Is it possible that my dad cooked up the Moo Goo stories to help us cope with the stress of living under one roof? Maybe. Was he casting himself as the Pied Piper, a welcome distraction from his new job, a Willy Loman-esque grind of selling Fuller brushes door-to-door? Maybe. Or he was just fucking with us. What I do know is that Moo Goo entered our lives in the winter of 1967 and held us in his sway until we could afford to move into our own apartment.

Poor Mom. Even before our financial troubles, my sister was easygoing and eager to please, while I was born to make her life difficult.

“Your first word was ‘no’ and you never stopped saying it,” is my mom’s characterization of me from the age of eighteen months to this morning.

For too many years to be considered endearingly quirky, I refused to eat anything other than fried chicken, butter, and grape juice. This kind of pickiness is recognized now in the DSM as an eating disorder called “selective eating,” but back in the day the official diagnosis was “a royal pain in the ass.” Exactly how unkempt and unruly I was is something that members of my family never tire of repeating, and heralded the entrance of another outlandish fictional character into our lives.

I think of this as the story called “How It’s a Miracle I Didn’t End Up in a Straitjacket.” Lucky the Leprechaun, the mascot for the General Mills cereal Lucky Charms, stars in one of the most recognizable and memorable ad campaigns of all time. Those magically delicious commercials played over and over on our twenty-four-inch black-and-white TV screen and must have made a deep impression on my big sister. Lisa, seven at the time, calling up skills that would one day make her a successful CEO, decided to come to my mother’s rescue by enlisting the services of my imaginary friend, inspired by Lucky, who went by the name The Little Man.

I was five years old, lying on my bed, doing something patently criminal, like licking S & H Green Stamps and sticking them to my forehead or trying to untangle one of the wads of bubble gum that was always getting stuck in my long hair, when a high-pitched voice introduced himself as The Little Man. That my sibling was hiding under my bed pretending to be a little person who wanted me to eat my vegetables was more implausible than the perfectly reasonable explanation: I was having a conversation with a friendly, if somewhat fiber-obsessed, neighborhood leprechaun. Thus began my relationship with The Little Man. The Little Man came on sweetly but in no time was issuing orders left and right.

Uh-oh , you might be thinking, is this that kind of story? It seems to be headed somewhere it is not going . Still, isn’t it bad enough that my imaginary friend’s idea of a good time was getting me to wash behind my ears or lay out my clothes for school? He was not above bestowing small gifts and rewards for completed chores. If I, say, brushed my teeth, I’d find a piece of candy on my pillow, which would seem to be totally contradictory, but I suppose all in all, it paid off, because I only had three cavities growing up. My sister also taught me to read, an act she refuses to characterize as anything mercenary, but not long after I sounded out Fun with Dick and Jane , notes began appearing from the little guy: Make your bed, set dinner table, put dirty clothes in hamper .

Even though my sister prefers to maintain the fiction that she only wanted to help me, other cousins remember it differently. “Didn’t The Little Man order Annabelle to bring us milk and cookies?” my cousin Robin said at a family gathering last year. Little or not, I was working for the man.

TLM was kind enough to relocate to Delaware with us, and with my mother on “bed rest,” he turned into a real taskmaster. Lisa recruited my three cousins into the act and in any room where I might wander, he’d be lying in wait. Take the trash out! Do your homework! Brush your hair — all the way to the back! a note would read or I’d hear barked in my direction. I can’t for the life of me remember how it all blew up, but I must have been traumatized because I was sent to see someone .

The child psychologist was heavily bearded and stood all of five foot one. He looked so much like how I’d pictured The Little Man that I refused to speak to him. I still wonder if the constant reminders of my slovenly ways turned me into the kind of person who, to this day, if I’m not vigilant, makes a good candidate for Hoarders . Both TLM’s unmasking and Moo Goo’s hooking up with a gal pal coincided with our move to an apartment of our own, but it was the distraction of our new dog that kept me from reporting my family to social services.

“You kids promised to walk the dog and give him baths and you never did,” said my mother and every other parent in the history of the world. Sure, my sister and I didn’t want to actively participate in caring for a new pet, but with an apartment and a pet, it seemed like we were a normal family again.

Petey was a Peekapoo, sort of an also-ran hybrid of a Pekingese and poodle. One of the most prominent features of the Peekapoo is what has been termed its “hilarious attachment” to its owners. Our Peekapoo liked to be with us so much that he preferred to urinate on our feet rather than be separated from us by even a few inches.

Our Petey was a barking hairball who collected everything in his path. Leaves, twigs, crumbs, even bits of poop were regularly found clinging to his scrawny body. His smashed-in Pekingese nose was often runny. He was a hot hairy mess, but that didn’t dampen our enthusiasm for him, or so I thought.

In 1972, my father landed a business opportunity in Florida. It was the beginning of a story he hoped would be titled “How We Got Rich.” He rented a house for us in a gated island community in Biscayne Bay where the archbishop of Miami, deposed Nicaraguan dictator Somoza, and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes owned compounds, and estates had names like Casa Tranquila and Palacio del Eden. One of the island families kept the guardhouse stocked with ice-cream sandwiches— as many as you wanted, for free —for kids walking home from school. My father was one of those dads who was always producing quarters from behind your ears, but this was his best trick yet. The only thing was, the lease didn’t allow for pets. I imagine that this was something of a relief to my mother, who along with not liking children was never really a pet person, and it must have seemed like a good way to soften the blow to tell my sister and me that Petey would join us later. His flight kept getting delayed. Then his flight was canceled. A few times. Flights from Wilmington to Miami were surprisingly unpredictable. A month after the move, the letter arrived.

Dear Annabanana and Leelee,

I am fine, I miss you, but I will not be joining you in Florida. I am living with your dad’s secretary, Caroline. I have had such a good time staying here that I don’t want to leave. I have become Italian and I love spaghetti. We have it a lot!

Love,

I’ve always assumed that my parents really did give the dog to Caroline, Dad’s secretary, even if the provenance of that paw print was rather sketchy, but as I type this page, it’s clear: that canard was as much of a fantasy as my elfin overlord or the swashbuckling stir-fry.

Over the years, I worked Petey into countless comedy sketches and television appearances, much to my parents’ mortification. I swore to myself that if I ever had children, I would never, ever, ever “Petey” them, which is why I was surprised that when my son asked why he didn’t have a sibling, I assured him that he did.

“I don’t know how to break it to you, but our cat, Stinky, is actually your sister, Amelia,” I told Ezra when he was about the same age as I was when The Little Man befriended me.

Wide eyes.

“We put her in a cat costume for Halloween and the fur grew over the zipper.”

Wider eyes.

I wasn’t consciously coming up with this fabrication. It could be that I am a pathological liar, a diagnosis marked by chronic fictionalizing, something I freely admit I am guilty of. During my actressing years, I regularly testified to fluency in several languages with which I have only a passing familiarity and to being able to carry a tune, which makes me just plain ridiculous, as both are so easily disproven.

Is it possible I was engaging in the kind of teasing that you don’t get when you’re a singleton, or feeling guilty for failing to give him a sibling? Maybe. Ezra had endured years of surgeries to correct anomalies associated with a congenital birth defect and I thought it would be beneficial for him to be a big brother, but I couldn’t muster the energy for another child. Or maybe I was just fucking with him, relishing that ineffable jolt of pleasure you get when you test just how far you can stretch the truth with your children.

I can’t say that my son believed that he had a sister named Amelia any more than he believed in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, but I delighted in watching Ezra’s eyes light up with the spark of imagination, or terror, as he’d feel for the zipper. I’d like to say that was as far as I took that story, but it’s not. When Stinky the cat died, I couldn’t let Amelia go as well—that would have been tragic—so Amelia had to be sent Elsewhere. Sometimes I’d say she was recovering from an unspecified illness, but I eventually settled on her being at boarding school, which had the added benefit of a veiled threat along the lines of We could send you away too if you don’t [fill in the blank] and was just plausible enough to keep Ezra guessing. It worked. Over the years, Amelia’s notoriety has only grown.

One afternoon, when Ezra was in ninth grade, he and a group of his friends marched in tandem into my home office.

“Where is my sister, Mom? My friends don’t believe me,” Ezra demanded.

“She’s at a boarding school in Canada.”

“Prove it.”

I picked up the phone and dialed a number at random. As luck would have it, I’d phoned a social services center in Quebec. It was after hours and we reached a recording in both English and French that sounded enough like what I’d just described that the teenagers screamed with a kind of mad glee. Even I entertained the idea that I might actually have a daughter.

I sighed. “See, she’s in Canada and has gone native. If you want to speak to her, you’ll need to learn French.” I threw up my hands in feigned exasperation and exited for dramatic effect.

When I told my sister about the latest chapter in the saga of Ezra’s sister, Amelia, she said, “You’re a weirdo,” and, “It’s like magical realism,” and I racked my brain trying to remember if One Hundred Years of Solitude has a happy ending.

“You know, I never connected it to our family,” she went on to say, “but when I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I used to ask my husband to tell me the story of our sons’ births, and if I was really anxious, I’d ask him to tell me about the deals we closed when we worked at the same law firm.”

“You asked him to recount the details of corporate real estate closings?”

“These were really complicated contracts.”

Now who’s the weirdo?

●●●

I THOUGHT ABOUT what she said for weeks, bristling at the notion of promoting anything bordering on magical thinking. I like to believe that I’ve provided my son with a modicum of security and a realistic understanding of the workings of the world.

“You want to be an indie rock star? That’s great, but I hope you like Subway!”

Losing our home didn’t just leave a mark on our mother. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t picture myself pushing all of my belongings in a shopping cart. I am stunned and awed by people’s ability to function in the world. How does everyone do it? How do they manage to make their lives work? How secure are their family’s finances? What kind of secrets are they keeping? I’ll look at a home and wonder what their story is and whether they’ll ever have to get out of Dodge in the middle of the night.

●●●

I ’ VE LIVED IN the same home since my son was born, in the hills of Los Feliz, a neighborhood bordering on the eastern end of the Santa Monica Mountains. With its steep inclines, once I deduced that I could avoid that scorching Southern California sun by exercising at night, I quit the gym and started going on evening runs. A bonus is that the neighborhood is an architect’s worst nightmare. Each home was built with seemingly little thought to the style of neighboring properties. A Spanish colonial abuts a New England colonial. Some are ranch style with xeriscaping and seem appropriate to a desert clime, while others, with their merlons and hoardings, look like they’ve been airlifted from the Scottish Highlands. Others have so many competing designs, it’s a reminder of what they say about makeup: you have to choose between eyes and lips. I lose myself in elaborate fantasies about the people who live in these homes as I run.

When Ezra was in middle school he started joining me a few nights a week. We delighted in rating the hominess quotient of the houses on our route, creating lurid backstories and weaving family mythologies into a tapestry we call “There’s No Place Like Homey Home.”

Neighboring houses that are twins: The lives of the people who live in these houses mirror the lives of those who live next door; they find themselves thinking the thoughts of their neighbors. They must be careful not to meet because when two parallel universes collide, it causes a disruption in the matrix and entropy occurs. ^[1]

Houses with naked porch light bulbs and tinfoil over a window: These people don’t put sheets on their mattresses and eat meals off paper plates, and there’s at least one closet with a cache of empty vodka bottles. The inhabitants are embroiled in a contentious custody battle, so who can blame them for hitting the sauce? There’s a cousin “with issues” living in the back bedroom who only emerges once a day to eat bowls of dry cereal.

Houses with a prefab bump-out bay window in the kitchen: These people have squirreled away money in their IRAs instead of renovating the entire kitchen. Don’t take no for an answer—you should be able to sell them at least two boxes of candy bars for school fund-raisers.

Sometimes our notions have proven to be right. There’s a boxy McMansion on our block that so closely resembles a bank branch, I’ve been tempted to stick my ATM card into the mail slot. A family of bronze deer are posed on the front lawn, although a closer look reveals that their hooves are chained to the ground. We noticed the owners installing more and more elaborate security systems. First they put a metal fence, then they added a locked gate on the driveway, cameras, and bars on the windows. Even the second-story ones. Not long after the bars went up, we read in the paper the house was owned by an Armenian Mafia don. He put in solid-gold toilet seats just prior to getting arrested and sent to prison. The deer were really the clue; those padlocks on their hooves looked a lot like house-arrest monitoring bracelets.

It was while conducting our epistemological investigation of homey homes that we discovered Cat Town. At least, that’s what we call it.

There’s a set of eight historic bungalows known as the Snow White Cottages just down the street from our home. Built in 1932, they’re adjacent to property where the original Walt Disney studios were located, now a food store. The stucco and brick storybook cottages have lopsided, sloping shingled roofs, miniature paned windows, and exposed wooden beams that outline their edges. A shaded, vaguely foreboding, winding path connects the tiny houses. Locals claim that indie rocker Elliott Smith wrote his heartbreaking lamentations in a claw-foot attic bathtub in one of the bungalows. They were featured in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive . One of the animators who worked on Snow White is rumored to have lived there and used them as the models for the dwarfs’ cottage in the film.

We dubbed it Cat Town because we’ve never seen anyone there. Not a single person walking in or out in seventeen years. Only cats padding down the pathways or peering out of one of the narrow windows. How they’ve managed on their own has become an elaborately detailed, slightly macabre story we’ve made up, and when I say “we,” I mean me.

I told Ezra to be careful when passing by because when the cats get lonely they breathe their magical cat breath into the mouths of neighborhood children. The breath casts a spell over them and the kids play with the cats for hours on end. “If you ever notice you’ve lost a few hours, Ezra, it’s probably because you were hypnotized in Cat Town.”

“But how do they pay rent, Mom?”

“Well, when the last human who lived there died, the cats tore into a sofa, took out the filling, and taxidermied her. They control her like a puppet with strings. You know how cats love string? They use the strings like levers, wrapping them around their claws, so she can write out rent checks by hand.”

I’d noticed him rolling his eyes at my more recent demented twists to Cat Town, but then, things took a turn for the transitional. I was running errands in the neighborhood when I noticed that a padlocked metal fence had gone up around the perimeter. I was heartsick.

“I guess we were wrong; there’s no way cats put that fence up. You need an opposable thumb to work that lock,” I said to Ezra when I returned home.

His eyes lit up with that familiar spark of terror or imagination, and he sat me down and calmly explained that the felines of Cat Town suspected that humans were onto them but since the advent of computer touch screens they’d become self-reliant. “See, now they don’t have to worry about writing checks or typing into computers. One of the cats dragged an iPad back to the bungalows with his teeth; a city council cat tapped the screen with his paw and ordered a locksmith. That was a combination lock you saw, wasn’t it, Mom?”

“Well, yes it was, as a matter of fact.”

“The kitties work that combination lock by grasping the dial in their mouths and turning it,” he added, and then bounded out of the house. I was grateful for his crackerjack improvisation and struck with a “What on earth was I was thinking, concocting these lunatic fairy tales?” pang of guilt. This was not the plan—or was it?

I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a family mission statement. I read an article about how Stephen Covey, who authored The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, posited that families should borrow from corporations to create “a clear, compelling vision of what [their] family is all about.” ^[2] Covey’s family came up with this:

“The mission of our family is to create a nurturing place of faith, order, truth, love, happiness, and relaxation, and to provide opportunity for each individual to become responsibly independent, and effectively interdependent, in order to serve worthy purposes in society.”

That is the mission statement of people who would seem to belong to a different species than my family. I have friends who’ve crafted statements that are less ambitious: “We love nature. Our family’s mission is to spend time in the great outdoors and leave no trace.” I was hoping to borrow from the Nike slogan—“The mission of our family is to just do it”—or to use the tagline from Alien as a jumping-off point: “In our family no one can hear you scream.”

My husband and son made merciless fun of me. “You can’t find your keys every morning, and you want to make a mission statement?”

“Yes! It will be good for us. A mission statement works like the unifying theory that Einstein was searching for. He was convinced there was an all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics. A ‘theory of everything’ that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. Once we have that, we’ll know where we came from, who we are, and where we’re going. As I understand it, it hasn’t panned out, but we’re talking about the whole universe, and there are just three of us. Our mission statement will bring the world into sharper focus and surely that will help me locate my keys every day.” They weren’t buying it, but I am my father’s daughter in more ways than I’d like to admit.

I watched from the front door as Ezra’s lanky frame disappeared down the street to meet up with Harmony Tiger Lily or someone else he hangs out with whom I don’t know because he’s seventeen and so independent. Ezra will be leaving us to go to college next year and I’ll still be living down the street from Cat Town. A family mission statement formed in my head: “We’re a family that tells tall tales to add a little magic to our realism.”

The torch has been passed down, as we say about the teachings of the Torah, l’dor v’dor , from generation to generation. Or he was just fucking with me.

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[1] This is also the premise of the J. J. Abrams series Fringe .

[2] A family mission statement is the same kind of mythologizing that motivated the Crusades and inspired international air guitar competitions. How important is it? Historian Yuval Harari writes in Sapiens that creating shared fictions allowed Homo sapiens to achieve dominance over Neanderthals, who didn’t have the brain capacity to conceive of strategies to unite large groups.