It was three or four years ago, when I was a little kid, and I came tearing down our stairs crying mad after some fight with Pop, that I first met Kate. I plunged out of our door and into the street without looking. At the same moment I heard brakes scream and felt someone yank me back by the scruff of my neck. I got dropped in a heap on the sidewalk.
I looked up, and there was a shiny black car with M.D. plates and Kate waving her umbrella at the driver and shouting: “Listen, Dr. Big Shot, whose life are you saving? Can’t you even watch out for a sniveling little kid crossing the street?”
The doctor looked pretty sheepish, and so did I. A few people on the sidewalk stopped to watch and snicker at us. Our janitor Butch was there, shaking his finger at me. Kate nodded to him and told him she was taking me home to mop me up.
“Yas’m,” said Butch. He says “Yas’m” to all ladies.
Kate dragged me along by the hand to her apartment. She didn’t say anything when we got there, just dumped me in a chair with a couple of kittens. Then she got me a cup of tea and a bowl of cottage cheese.
That stopped me snuffling to ask, “What do I put the cottage cheese on?”
“Don’t put it on anything. Just eat it. Eat a bowl of it every day. Here, have an orange, too. But no cookies or candy, none of that sweet, starchy stuff. And no string beans. They’re not good for you.”
My eyes must have popped, but I guess I knew right that first day that you don’t argue with Kate. I ate the cottage cheese—it doesn’t really have any taste anyway—and I sure have always agreed with her about the string beans.
Off and on since then I’ve seen quite a lot of Kate. I’d pass her on the street, chirruping to some mangy old stray cat hiding under a car, and he’d always come out to be stroked. Sometimes there’d be a bunch of little kids dancing around jeering at her and calling her a witch. It made me feel real good and important to run them off.
Quite often I went with her to the A & P and helped her carry home the cat food and cottage cheese and fruit. She talks to herself all the time in the store, and if she thinks the peaches or melons don’t look good that day, she shouts clear across the store to the manager. He comes across and picks her out an extra good one, just to keep the peace.