Duty of Care

Molly Cat has vanished.

I mean, Whoosh! She disappeared.

Iggy’s new heartthrob brought her dog over Thursday night, & all I can think is that the dog freaked Molly—although Heartthrob was actually pretty respectful of the cats, kept the dog on a short leash.

To the best of my knowledge, Molly had never seen a dog before, & Molly & Mabel are very skittish, shy animals.

I have searched everywhere in the house, and to my immense shock, Iggy searched everywhere in the house—I returned from NYC yesterday to find Iggy sifting through one of the cat boxes, trying to determine if any of the cat shit was new. “I’ve looked everywhere,” he told me. “Looked in every drawer in every room. I even went up into the attic. You think you’d hear her meowing if she was trapped somewhere, right? She’s a pretty vocal cat. But no, nothing.”

“She must have gotten out of the house,” I said.

“But how?” he said. “The door wasn’t open.”

But some door must have been open. Because the only other explanations for the vanishing act are (A) that Molly dematerialized into another time/space continuum or (B) that Molly was abducted by aliens, both of which seem unlikely.

If, on the other hand, Molly is outside, the probability is high that she will turn up in a couple of days. Cats rarely roam more than 1,500 feet from home.

I feel more guilty than heartbroken

Like I failed some fundamental duty of care.



On Thursday, lots of things were going wrong.

My Belkin powerpack stopped charging again.

Then my phone wouldn’t charge using the regular charger.

I felt weird & shaky—not sick per se but off.

Lots of other bad things were happening, too. Not major bad—my children were okay, a meteorite didn’t crash to earth & take out my car. But more than minor annoyances. The baddest thing that happened, though, was the missing cat. And I felt bad that I didn’t feel worse.

Did I love Molly?

Love for me seldom registers as an emotion; I’m not good at feeling emotions. Love is an intellectual commitment: I have an ongoing investment in this living creature, therefore I am committed to ensuring they thrive.

Neither Molly nor Mabel are particularly cuddly cats. They don’t sleep with me; they don’t like to be picked up & snuggled. They like me, that much is clear, because they like to hang out around me. And both of them like me to pet their tummies. But the fact that they don’t snuggle means I don’t have the same tenderness for them that I had for Sybyl or Rutger.

When Molly disappeared, I thought, Maybe if I’d felt more tenderly toward her, she wouldn’t have vanished.



Thursday night, I didn’t sleep.

I mean, literally. The brain churn was so intense, I couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t sink into the bliss of no churn, no consciousness.

This was a real problem because on Friday, I had plans to travel down to NYC and hang out with Barbara Angell, in town for a couple of days before flying off to Switzerland to trek around Mount Blanc. The plans had been made months ago; I didn’t see how I could possibly renege.

Somehow, in the morning, I drove myself to the train station, managed to make it onto a train. Once on the train, I felt more & more awful.

Ichabod called. I told him about the missing Molly. “I was so upset, I didn’t sleep. I probably should have stayed home to look for the cat—”

“Either the cat is fine and will turn up sooner or later, or the cat is not fine and will not turn up,” Ichabod said. “Either way, your immediate presence is unlikely to affect the outcome. I think it’s good that you’re seeing Barbara.”

It is always good to see Barbara—though it immediately became apparent to me that I was not gonna be able to carry through on the Exciting Activity I had planned, to wit a visit to the absolutely fabulous New York Botanical Garden (I’m a member), which is doing an Alice in Wonderland show with White Rabbit topiary and playing cards made of flowers.

Instead, I lay on one of the beds in Barbara’s sumptuous hotel room feeling awfuller & awfuller. The expresso I had had with lunch hadn’t put a dent in the awfulness, some unfamiliar compound of intense fatigue & something… wrong… inside my body.

Finally, though, we decided to go for a walk.

Barbara’s hotel was on the Upper West Side, the neighborhood where I grew up and right around the corner from the Museum of Natural History. We walked just as far as Theodore Roosevelt Park outside the Hayden Planetarium when it became suddenly clear what the wrong thing was inside my body: I was about to have explosive diarrhea!

“I’ll wait for you here,” said Barbara.

I ran inside the Planetarium. “Do you have a bathroom I can use?” I gasped.

The security guard scowled at me. “Ticket! You’ll have to buy a ticket.”

“All I need is a bathroom!” I said.

He must have sensed I was serious because after frowning at me for 30 seconds—30 seconds in which I could hear as well as feel my intestines becoming unblocked—he did a precursory search of my handbag and nodded me down the stairs: “To your left.”



Downstairs, there were 2 (count ‘em!) two sets of security guards, on opposite sides of a large hall. I can’t tell you how many times I ricocheted between them, how many minutes that took.

They kept saying, “You have to have a ticket.”

I kept pleading, “Bathroom! Bathroom!”

Finally, one of them said to me, “You are never going to find someone more compassionate than me, but it’s just not possible, we can’t let you in without a ticket. Rules is rules!”

“Look,” I said. “If I don’t get to a bathroom in about 15 seconds, I’m gonna shit on your floor. That’s gonna be disgusting, and you’re gonna have to deploy a lot of resources to clean it up—”

Something about my face convinced her I was serious.



Afterward, Barbara & I discussed the dynamics of the situation.

“It’s the post 9/11 world,” said Barbara. “The simplest acts of kindness must be seen as suspect.”

“I felt so humiliated,” I said. “I mean to lose control of yr bowels! That takes you right back to the shame of potty training. I guess I’m lucky the ordeal took place around you because you still love me, right?”

Barbara laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course.”



We went back to the hotel. Barbara went out for a walk. I lay down on one of the beds and fell into a kind of stupor: I still couldn’t find sleep, but I could ring Sleep’s doorbell.

Iggy texted: Still haven’t seen the cat. She doesn’t seem to have come down here at all. Unexpectedly considerate of him. He is, after all, a dick. Later I deduced that this was around the time he began scouring the house for her.

I recovered sufficiently to go out for dinner, chatter animatedly for several hours. Life & Love! In the final analysis, what else is there ever to talk about really?

And I slept that night.

In the Times Square subway station, I noted my dead grandfather is still trapped in his mural.

And on the train back to the Hudson Valley, I started feeling ill again. So ill, in fact, that I canceled my canvassing plans & did not search the woodsy tangles for Molly. I lay on my couch in that now-familiar semi-stupor. My stomach ached. My back hurt—or was that my kidneys? I felt as though I might have been running a temperature. I wondered if this was some new strain of COVID that bypassed the respiratory tract entirely and set its scope on the intestines. But the COVID tests I had in the house had long since expired, & I felt too feeble to negotiate a trip to the pharmacy (plus, of course, I didn’t want to expose innocent bystanders to maybe-COVID.)

Mabel was very happy to see me and does not seem to miss her sibling in the slightest.



Today, I still feel like shit though possibly not as much like shit as I did yesterday.

Iggy’s very charming friend Nancy is staying for a couple of days. She is a soignée woman approximately my age or a little bit older who spends half the year running a guesthouse in Angola (Africa!) and half the year living in North Hampton, Massachusetts.

“So you’ve moved in with this crazy family,” she said.

I laughed. “Your word. But, yes.”

“I met Rahav when he was 18 & tried to sell me an air conditioner,” she said. “Somehow we hit it off & became lifelong friends.”

“Did you buy the air conditioner?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said.