“Both. I mean either,” she says.
The first place we see is a delicatessen, which is about my favorite kind
of place to eat anyway. I order a hot pastrami, and Mary says she never
had one, but she’ll try the same.
“Where could we go on Staten Island?” I say. “I never was here before.”
“About the only place I’ve been is the zoo. I’ve been there lots of times.
The vet let me watch her operate on a snake once.”
This is a pretty surprising thing for a girl to tell you in the middle of
a mouthful of hot pastrami. The pastrami is great, and they put it on a
roll with a lot of olives and onions and relish. Mary likes it too.
“Is the vet a woman? Aren’t you scared of snakes?”
“Uh-un, I never was really. But when you’re watching an operation, you get
so interested you don’t think about it being icky or scary. The vet is a
woman. She’s been there quite a while.”
I digest this along with the rest of my sandwich. Then we both have a
piece of apple pie. You can tell from the way the crust looks—browned and
a little uneven—that they make it right here.
“So shall we go to the zoo?” Mary asks.
“O.K.” I get up to get her coat and mine. When I turn around, there she is
up by the cashier, getting ready to pay her check.
“Hey, I’m buying lunch,” I say, steaming up with the other check.
“Oh, that’s all right.” She smiles. “I’ve got it.”
I don’t care if she’s _got_ it. I want to _pay_ it. I suppose it’s a silly
thing to get sore about, but it sort of annoys me. Anyway, how do you
maneuver around to do something for a girl when she doesn’t even know you
want to?
The man in the deli gives us directions to get to the zoo, which isn’t
far. It’s a low brick building in a nice park. In the lobby there are some
fish tanks, then there’s a wing for birds on one side, animals on the
other, and snakes straight ahead.
We go for snakes. Mary really seems to like them.
She says, “The vet here likes them, and I guess she got me interested. You
know, they don’t really understand how a snake moves? Mechanically, I
mean. She’s trying to find out.”
We look at them all, little ones and big ones, and then we go watch the
birds. The keeper is just feeding them. The parrot shouts at him, and the
pelican and the eagles gobble up their fish and raw meat, but the vulture
just sits on his perch looking bored. Probably needs a desert and a dying
Legionnaire to whet his appetite.
In the animal wing a strange-looking dame is down at the end, talking to a
sleepy tiger.
“Come on, darling, just a little roar. Couldn’t you give me just a soft
one today?” she’s cooing at him. The tiger blinks and looks away.
The lady notices us standing there and says, “He’s my baby. I’ve been
coming to see him for fourteen years. Some days he roars for me
beautifully.”
She has a short conversation with the lion, then moves along with us
toward the small cats, a puma and a jaguar. She looks in the next cage,
which is empty, and shakes her head mournfully.
“I had the sweetest little leopard. He died last week. Would you believe
it? The zoo never let me know he was sick. I could have come and helped
take care of him. I might have saved his life.”
She goes on talking, sometimes to herself, sometimes to the puma, and we
cross over to look at two otters chasing each other up an underwater
tunnel.
“What is she, some kind of nut?” Mary says. “Does she think this is her
private zoo?”
I shrug. “I suppose she’s a little off. But so’s my Aunt Kate, the one who
gave me Cat. They just happen to like cats better than people. Kate thinks
all the stray cats in the world are her children, and I guess this one
feels the same way about the big cats here.”
We mosey around a little bit more and then head back to the ferry. I make
good and sure I’m ahead, and I get to the ticket office and buy two
tickets.
“Would you care for a ride across the harbor in my yacht?” I say.
“Why, of course. I’d be delighted,” says Mary.
A small thing, but it makes me feel good.
Over in Brooklyn I see a clock on a bank, and it says five o’clock. I do
some fast calculating and say, “Uh-oh, I better phone. I’ll never make it
home by dinnertime.”