COMMUNITY CATS by Emily Raboteau
The first time I saw the mama she was a gray blur darting under our parked car as I dragged the trash and recycling bins to the curb. This was on a Tuesday night in October, after tucking our boys in bed. The animal moved fast, in a slinking way. I thought she might have been a large rat, or a small possum, or maybe even a figment of my imagination. I was exhausted by motherhood, activism, perimenopause, work. I peeked under our car and saw that the animal was real, a cat, crouching furtively by a rear tire. She looked rather like our tabby cat, Penelope, but with yellow eyes instead of green, and a decade younger, at least. I wondered if she was a stray, or an outdoor cat belonging to one of our neighbors. It did not occur to me to name her. I remember feeling concerned. But then I forgot about her. I had no extra time to slow down and consider the wellbeing of a single cat. A few days later, our twelve- year- old discovered her sniffing around the compost bin we keep outside the kitchen door. He fed her some of Penelope’s food and named her Milk. He loved her immediately, as only a child can love. He wanted to keep her, but I said we could not: she might have a disease, she might belong to someone else. I was sorry to disappoint him, but we didn’t know her story.
We live in a working- class neighborhood in the Bronx nearby the end of the 1 line and the 50th precinct police station. We moved here from a crowded apartment building in northern Manhattan during the pandemic, which was also when we adopted Penelope from an animal shelter, to destress us with her purr from mass death in the surround. We wanted more space. We wished to get away from the highways and the bus depot that gave our boys asthma. But we are still surrounded by highways. Our children must cross them to get to the park, to get to school. Our house sits on backfilled wetlands. That’s one crime. Our neighborhood is plagued by auto- part theft. That’s another.
Our next- door neighbors, Kevin and Krissy, have a sign in their window that says, WE SUPPORT OUR COPS. They are teachers at a Catholic school. The first time we voted in a local election, we ran into them in a church basement, yelling at an elderly poll- worker for getting their party affiliation wrong. Whereas Kevin and Krissy have an American flag hanging from their balcony, we have a pride flag staked in a potted plant by our front steps to support our elevenyear- old son, who is trans. It feels to me that our flags are opposed. If our family had a sign in our window, it would say BLACK LIVES MATTER. What I am trying to tell you is that our territory is unsteady, imperiled, contested. The problems we face are systemic, complex. When it rains, which it does more often as the globe warms, there is flooding beneath the elevated 1 train in the basements of the businesses in the shadow of its tracks: the check cashing store, the pawn shop, the smoke shop, the burnt- out edifice, the dollar store, and the many bodegas, each of which has a cat.
My favorite thing about our house is the back yard. I like tending my little garden. I like looking through the chain link fence on all three sides into the back yards of our neighbors. Because all our back yards have chain link fences, I can see beyond the back yards bordering ours. At times, I am annoyed by Manny, to the west of us, when he talks at me while hanging his wetwash to dry on the clothesline while I would rather be alone. More often than seems reasonable, the college boys to the north of us throw discourteously loud outdoor parties that go on drunkenly into the night. When I find one or two of their crushed beer cans have fallen into our yard, I want to wring their necks. Sometimes I worry that Krissy will spill her politics over 158 the property line while firing up her grill. Such proximity can be trying. At other times when I’m feeling radical with my hands in the soil, I fantasize about ripping out all the fences between us, so that there are no borders, just a stretch of land we could tend together before the waters rise to flood us out. I have wondered at such moments, what is the scale of community at which a societal problem can be solved?
Not long after our twelve- year- old named Milk, our eleven-year- old spied four kittens playing in the back yard. Milk sat in the sun keeping her eye on them from the perch of one of my raised beds. So, she was a mother, like me. Now her story was more complex, and it was impossible not to be involved. The kittens were too cute. One would have to be heartless not to want them to thrive. Our children named them: Lion (because he was bold and had what looked like a mane), Soot (because he was gray), Turbo (because she chased her tail in circles), and Storm (I can’t remember why) – the pitiable runt. We began feeding them and spending more time as a family outside in the yard, to be nearer to Milk and her growing babies, one of whom we hoped to take in: Storm. Soon we discovered that we weren’t the only ones feeding them. So was Krissy, who had her eye on the longhaired one (Lion). The lady who lived alone above Manny opened her window one day and called down to say that she was taking care of them, too. I knew her as “the sunflower lady,” because of the impressive sunflowers she planted in the tree well out front. She had her eye on the gray one (Soot), she said; she’d observed them sheltering in Manny’s toolshed when it rained, and her own name, which I hadn’t been able to recall before the cat family brought us together, was Estelle.
We figured the kittens still needed Milk. But how long until they could live independently? When was it right to divide them, to bring them indoors? October turned to November, and though it was unseasonably warm, we worried about how the cats would fare in the cold to come. Whatever our differences, we had a baseline agreement that the cats deserved to live. But why is it so much easier to act on behalf of endangered animals than endangered peoples? If our neighbors knew our son was trans, would they think him an aberration? Would they accuse me of child abuse for loving him as he is? Would Krissy extend the care to my child that she could offer an animal in need? I had my doubts. I called the shelter where we got Penelope to ask for advice. When I texted them a picture of the kittens frolicking in the fallen leaves beneath Kevin and Krissy’s mulberry tree, I was told they’d grown too old to be domesticated, past the point of socializa- 159 tion. The best we could do, the shelter assessed, was TNR – trap, neuter and release them back into our network of back yards and continue caring for them collectively as a feral colony of non- breeding community cats. They would belong to all of us, and none of us.
At first our kids were upset. It felt to them that I was turning my back. Another disappointment in a lifetime of disappointments. Krissy and I consulted. We each ordered a humane trap. She assembled hers first, then patiently helped me to assemble mine. We lined them with newspaper (hers with the New York Post and mine with the New York Times) and baited them with cans of tuna. Just before Thanksgiving, over the course of two days, we caught the cats one by one, along with a possum, whom we let go. Estelle checked in. We kept Milk and her cowering kittens in a pen in Krissy’s garage where Kevin’s drum kit was stored. He moonlit in a heavy metal band, she revealed. My man was a diehard Metallica fan, I confessed. We rolled our eyes. Meanwhile, the felines were scared, confused by their new circumstance, clawing and caterwauling to escape. Our forearms were crisscrossed with scratches. Our husbands were vocal about the inconvenience, and mutually useless in the scheme.
The solution was messy and imperfect, but it still felt good to work together. Once Krissy and I had captured all five of the cats, we drove them to the shelter where they would be neutered and spayed, and have their ears tipped to signal they didn’t need to go through this rigamorale again. After they recovered from surgery, we were expected to fetch them. The shelter was overcrowded; we were sternly warned against foisting them off. The burden of care fell squarely on us. On the drive back home, Krissy spoke of her belief in the sanctity of life. She praised God we had found a no- kill shelter but wondered if we had overstepped God’s plan in allowing the cats to be fixed. In another context I might have responded defensively to such language. But by this point, I had bonded with my neighbor, if only on behalf of these animals. I told her I believed we’d done the right thing.
Was this progress? Soon after Thanksgiving, Krissy and I returned to the shelter to collect our animals. We’d have preferred to find them homes, to shelter them ourselves. We released them into the shared back yard. The boys demanded to know if they’d survive the winter. I told them I hoped so, knowing this was a dissatisfying answer, but unwilling to lie about nine lives. Sometime in December Milk and her kittens stopped coming around. The boys worried they’d wandered off or starved. Christmas came and went. One week in January 160 was particularly cold, cold enough to freeze the water in the cat dish we left out back, cold like it used to be all winter long when I was young.
Even in the city that never sleeps, we live according to the memory of seasons. We were hibernating instead of solving problems together. I didn’t see Krissy, Estelle, or Manny for that matter, except on the rare occasion we found ourselves dragging our trash bins to the curb at the same time of night. Though we were all concerned about the cats, we attended to our own domains. Then, on the first warm day in February, as if they’d never left, the cats were back. The boys were overjoyed. The kittens had grown bigger and stronger, interested in chasing squirrels. The boys tried to tempt them with treats and string. Milk was still there keeping her eye on them, but from a greater distance. I knew that Krissy was still at work, so I texted her a picture of the family. I was surprised at how eagerly I wanted to reconnect with her, given how fearful I’d been that her beliefs might harm my young. “The cats are still alive!” I wrote. Was this a miracle? So many elements beyond our control were conspired against them. “Praise God!” my neighbor answered.
Emily Raboteau is the author, most recently, of Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” (Henry Holt, 2024).