Joyce Newcomb

Blue eyes meet blue eyes. I stare at the white cat displayed in a Salem, Massachusetts, antique store and fall in love. I need that cat. It is April, 1943 and my world is topsy turvy.  I am six years old, 1000 miles from my home in Glencoe, Il., and missing my real cat. A strange boy is sleeping in my bed. Worse, the family living in my house is allergic to cats.  Our milkman stepped up to rescue Tommy Whiskers, but Tommy jumped out of the milk truck and disappeared.

When my father was ordered to the Naval base in Marblehead, my mother rented our house, packed a few suitcases, and drove my two sisters, me, and Wave, our boxer, to Massachusetts to live in a tiny house reserved for officers. We will live with my dad until fall.

I’m sent to the local school to finish first grade. Sitting next to the cloak room at the only available desk, I might as well be a coat. At recess I wander around a paved play yard fenced off from the boys’ yard, completely alien from my school. The girls play jacks. I don’t know how. School becomes torture.

Which is why I am not in school on this day. Instead, I am in Salem with my mother and sisters, tramping through the House of Seven Gables, learning about witches, and wandering through an antique store, where I see the cat. It costs five dollars. I have two quarters. Mother makes up the difference with a loan I can pay back by minding my baby sister.

The cat comes home with me. From then on, it sits in every house I inhabit. Although battered from too much loving and a few falls, the cat now holds up books. It still makes me smile.