Cages

After not seeing her for months, V. shows up at the office. V. attended the same “competitive” high school I did, ten years later. Technically, neither of us graduated, but I was short just one physics regents and she dropped out much earlier. It had been years since then when we met, but I could sense her embarrassment so I never asked why. Today, she decided to tell me. She had wanted to take quantum mechanics her senior year, but needed to get further in math so that she would have the prerequisites in time. She decided to audit one of the advanced math classes to prove she could do it. She did all the work, even took the Regents, and at the end the teacher told her she would have had a 90, the highest grade in the class, if she had actually been in the class. Armed with this evidence, she went to see the head of the math dept., a man whose reputation I remembered from my time there, and made her proposal. He refused. And when a couple of years later he did let someone do it, it was a male student. The endemic sexism in math is something I remember well. Stuyvesant was originally an all-boys school, and echoes of that culture remained in 1989, 20 years after the first girls were admitted. The administration was all male, the math teachers were majority male, and the older of the two metal shop teachers was having the girls in his class make dustpans while the boys made CO2 powered rocket cars. Even at super-leftist Hampshire, I was the only woman in the upper level math classes, and I never got invited to the “math folks’ gathering” until our gentle professor took it upon himself. Back to V., hovering in my doorway. She moved on from her high school disenchantment to her rocky housing situation, which leads her to tell me with tremendous guilt that she recently surrendered one of her cats “Steak Sauce,” to the ACC. She has been watching his photo on the website and is heartbroken by how miserable he looks. I pull up the picture and there he is, a scrap of rumpled black and white fur in a cage. The shelter notes are not going to help him get adopted “skittish, needs experienced cat owner” and “best in an adult only household.” I wish she had reached out before surrendering him – with Odie luxuriating in his new home, I have room for one more and it would have been easier to just take him. I emailed my friend Joan, an unstoppable TNR person (and lesbian social worker), who interacts with the Queens ACC a lot. I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping she would offer to have the small rescue she works with pull him, but they’re full like everyone else. So I click “adopt” and start filling in the info – I own my home, I have no kids, my vet info. I put down Joan as a reference, click “whole life pet experience” and write “I know this cat’s former owner and I would have taken him if I’d known she couldn’t keep him.” After I hit submit, the next step is going to get him. The only part of Queens I know is Corona, unless you count the area of Long Island City where you get on and off the bus to visit people in Riker’s. I’m off tomorrow, so I type the date and the address in Ridgewood into the MTA Trip Planner. It’s a total pain in the ass, I have to take the R into Manhattan to get the L and ride that through northeastern Brooklyn to Queens. It says it will take 1 hr and 20 mins though you never know what will happen when you get on the subway. On my way home from work my lower back is bothering me so I get on the elevator where I encounter a white woman, younger than me, with reflective stripes on her navy jacket and a large neon green bike outfitted with delivery gear. “It’s really cold,” she says. “It’s the wind,” I tell her. “It’s 41 mph,” she says, “I checked. I would be working but I’m heavy and my bike was heavy, and it was moving me and if a car had been there….” I don’t know why she feels like she has to explain to me why she’s not working on a frigid Friday night, but she seems to need reassurance that she made the right choice, so I say, “I have seen some bad accidents,” and she nods her agreement. At home I put my arm around Connor while he eats, he eats more that way. When you have a sick cat you try all kinds of things. He eats slowly and I’m thinking about the last two days, the all-out assault on gender affirming care for minors and how this won’t just delay people’s transitions and make them more difficult because they will have developed characteristics of the wrong gender, but how some young people will not be able to live with the agony of gender dysphoria and they will die. I’m starting to tear up so I force my mind to concentrate on what I need to do in the morning to transform my upstairs bathroom into a cat acclimation zone. The basics – food and water bowls, litterbox – and some comforts, a soft bed and a cozy box. There’s not a lot I can do to change the evil emanating from the White House - or even change things for my individual clients – but I can relieve V.’s fear of this cat being put down, and I can get this furry tuxedo life out of a cage to safety.