It’s like this, cat by Emily Neville (iphone ebook reader .txt) 📕

Illustration: Mary calling from phone booth at Macy’s.

There are some disadvantages to not getting a girl’s phone number. This sort of date I had with Mary for golf on Election Day fell through. In the first place, I was sick in bed with the flu, and Mom wouldn’t have let me out for anything, and secondly, it was pouring rain. Without the phone number, there wasn’t any way I could let her know, and I didn’t even know a street address to write to later.

By the time I got finished with the flu, we were into Thanksgiving and then all the trouble with Kate. Time passed and I felt rottener about standing her up without a word, and I couldn’t get up my nerve to go out to Coney and just appear on her doorstep. I could have found the house all right, once I was out there.

The first week of Christmas vacation the phone rings late one afternoon and Pop answers it. He says, “Just one minute, please,” and I know right away from his voice it isn’t someone he knows.

“Young lady on the phone for you, Dave,” he says, and he enjoys watching me gulp.

“Hullo?” a rather tight, flat little voice asks. “Is this Dave—uh, Mitchell—uh, I mean, with Cat?”

I recognize it’s Mary, all right, even if she does sound strange and scared.

“Oh, hi!” I say. “Sure, it’s me! I’m awfully sorry about that day we were going to play golf. I was in bed with the flu, and then I didn’t know your phone number or....”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she says. “I wondered what happened.”

There’s a slight pause, and I see Pop grinning and pretending to read his paper. I turn around so I won’t see him.

“Where are you now, out in Coney?” I ask Mary.

“No, as a matter of fact, I’m in Macy’s.” Her voice trails off a little, but then she starts in again. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I called. You see, I was supposed to meet Mom here at five, and she hasn’t come, and I bought all these Christmas presents, and I forgot about the tax or something, and this is my last dime.”

She stops. I see now why she sounds scared, and I get a curdled feeling in my stomach, too, because what if the dime runs out in the phone and she’s cut off? I’ll never find her in Macy’s. It’s too big.

“Pop!” I yelp. “There’s this girl I know is in a phone booth in Macy’s and her dime is going to run out and she hasn’t anymore money. What’ll I do?”

“Get the phone number of the booth and call her back. Here—” He gives me a pencil.

What a relief. Funny I never thought of that. You just somehow don’t think of a phone booth having a number.

Mary sounds pretty relieved, too. I get the number and call her back, and with Pop making suggestions here and there we settle that I’ll go over to Macy’s and meet her on the ground floor near Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway at the counter where they’re selling umbrellas for $2.89, which Mary says she can see from the phone booth.

“O.K.” I say, and then I sort of don’t want to hang up. It’s fun talking. So I go on. “Look, just in case we miss each other at Macy’s, what’s your phone number at home, so I could call you sometime?”

“COney 7-1218.”

“O.K. Well, good-bye. I’ll be right over. To Macy’s, I mean.”

I grab my coat and check to see if I’ve got money. Pop asks if I’m going to bring her home for dinner.

“Gee, I don’t know.” I hadn’t given a thought to what we’d do. “I guess so, maybe, if her mother hasn’t come by then. I’ll call you if we do anything else.”

“O.K.,” Pop says.

I go out and hustle through the evening rush-hour crowds to the subway. The stores are all open evenings now, for Christmas, so the crowds are going both ways.

I get to the right corner of Macy’s, and I see Mary right away. Everyone else is rushing about and muttering to themselves, and she’s standing there looking lost. In fact she looks so much like a waif that the first thing I say is, “Hi! Shall we go get something to eat?”

“Yes, I’m starved. I was just going to get a doughnut when I found I’d run out of money.”

“Let’s go home and you can have dinner with us then. But what about your mother? Won’t she be looking for you?”

Mary shifts her feet and looks tired. “I don’t know. Probably if she came and I wasn’t here, she’d figure I’d gone home.”

I try to think a minute, which is hard to do with all these people shoving around you. Mary starts to pick up her two enormous shopping bags, and I take them from her, still trying to think. At the subway entrance I see the phone booth.

“That’s the thing,” I say. “Why don’t you call your house and see if your mother left a message or something?”

“Well....” Mary stands by the phone looking confused and in fact about ready to cry. I suddenly decide the best thing we can do is get home and sit down where it’s quiet. Waiting fifteen minutes or so to phone can’t make much difference.

We get home pretty fast and I introduce Mary to Mom and Pop. She sinks into the nearest chair and takes off her shoes.

“Excuse me,” she says. “I just bought these heels, and it’s awful wearing them!”

She wiggles her toes and begins to look better. Mom offers her a pair of slippers and Pop passes some potato chips.

Mom says, “Poor child, did you try to do all your Christmas shopping at once?”

“Well, actually, I was having fun just looking for a long while. I have two little cousins that I don’t really have to get much for, but I love looking at all the toys. I spent quite a while there. Then I did the rest of my shopping in a rush, and everything is so crowded, and I got mixed up on my money or the sales tax and only had a dime left, and I missed my mother or she forgot.”

She stretches out her toes to touch Cat, who is sitting in front of her. “I couldn’t think what to do. It’s so hard to think when your feet hurt.”

“It certainly is,” agrees Mom. She goes out to the kitchen to finish fixing dinner, and Pop suggests Mary better phone her home. She gets her father, and her mother has left a message that she was delayed and figured Mary would go home alone. Mary gives her father our address and tells him she’ll be home by nine.

We must have hit a lucky day because we have a real good dinner: slices of good whole meat, not mushed up stuff, and potatoes cooked with cheese in them, and salad, and a lemon meringue pie from the bakery, even.

After dinner we sit around a little while, and Pop says I better take Mary home, and he gives me money for a cab at the end of the subway. When Mary gives the driver her home address, I say it over to myself a few times so I’ll remember.

Suddenly I wonder about something. “Say, how’d you know my phone number?”

“I looked it up,” she says simply. “There’s about twenty-eleven Mitchells in the Manhattan phone book, but only one in the East Twenties, so I figured that must be you.”

“Gee, that’s true. You must have had an awful time, though, standing in the phone booth with your feet hurting, going through all those Mitchells.”

Says Mary, “Oh, no. I did it one rainy afternoon at home, weeks ago.”

Well, what do you know.