Cat Doll

Nami
4 min readJun 16, 2020

All I wanted was a Yoo-Hoo.

We were in the hospital and my older brother was, as far as anyone knew, on the verge of death. He had a brain tumor the size of a woman’s fist, and the surgeons were performing a lengthy operation to get it out.

This knowledge had not yet penetrated my psyche. I knew but didn’t really care. At 10 years old, I’d never known anyone to die except in books and movies. I didn’t actually think my brother was going to die, and so all the kerfuffle added drama to my boring life.

Everyone was too preoccupied to pay any attention to me in the hospital. I sat with the woman who’d come to babysit me there and sulked. She put her hand on my shoulder. “You okay?” she asked in her thick Okinawan accent. Her mind was clearly half elsewhere.

“Yeah,” I said. Then: “I mean, yes, ma’am.” My father, a military man, was extremely strict about never saying “yeah” and always calling adults “sir” or “ma’am.” “Can I get a Yoo-Hoo from the drink machine?” I’d seen one on our way to the elevators.

“Mm, maybe later.”

I sulked some more.

After some time, my mother came down the hallway. Her face looked worn. “Operation still going,” she said. Then, in Japanese, she said something about my father that I couldn’t understand. I didn’t know where he was — at work, I assumed. Yoshi, my babysitter, made a disapproving sound.

“You can take Nami back?” my mother asked, still in Japanese.

“Sure!” Yoshi said cheerfully. She took my hand in hers.

I called after my mother, who was already halfway down the hallway: “Momma, can I have a Yoo-hoo?”

“Not now!”

In the car, I pouted. Yoshi was silent throughout the drive. She played Jehovah’s Witness music on her stereo, which made me even crankier. “Are we going to my house?” I finally asked.

“No,” Yoshi said. “We going my house.”

“Can I play with Bootsy?” Bootsy was her friendly half-Dalmatian, half-Labrador dog.

“Too dark. You can watch the TV inside. Or reading the encylo-peeja.”

I sighed, still thirsty. Yoshi was one of those people who believed in giving everyone water to drink, just water.

Yoshi had only one adult kid, Daniel, so there were no toys to play with at her house. I brought a small stuffed cat with me, but there was only so much you could do with a single stuffed cat when you were stuck in one place for hours.

Yoshi’s son Daniel was in college and I had no idea what college people did for fun, other than look at porn. I knew this because I had found his porn stash in Yoshi’s bathroom drawer once, all of them featuring models with beach ball-sized breasts they had to hold up with their hands. I wondered where pornographers found such women. I’d never seen any like them in real life.

There was an entire collection of Encyclopedia Americana on Yoshi’s bookshelf. I was banished to the living room where they were, while Yoshi cooked. Encyclopedias were fun if you knew what you were looking for. I went down a rabbit hole of looking up sex words like “penis” and “vagina,” piling the thick books up around me in the middle of the carpet.

I couldn’t imagine my parents having sex. Once I’d read a book called The Pigman’s Legacy, where the teen boy protagonist speculated that his parents must have had him by been walking around naked one day until they tripped and fell on each other. I thought this was likely for my parents too.

Lately they’d been arguing about things I didn’t understand. Usually, they fought about money. These latest fights made my mother cry and my father yell, which made me glad I was at Yoshi’s house most of the time instead. I assumed the fights had something to do with my brother’s brain tumor, or the fact that my dad had recently dropped me and my mom’s cats off at a kill shelter.

When my mother finally came to get me, it was around eleven o’clock. She and Yoshi spoke rapidly in Japanese outside while I squirmed in the hot car.

“Tabo okay so far,” my mother said when she finally got into the driver’s seat. She turned the AC on. “I go see him tomorrow. You go Yoshi’s house.”

“Okay,” I said. “What about Daddy?”

My mother made a disgusted sound. “He doing working, or something,” she said. She looked over at me. I was holding my stuffed cat in my lap.

“Where you get the doll?” my mother asked.

“From Gina.”

“Papa’s friend?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed. “You like it?”

“Uh-huh.”

My mother said nothing in response.

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Nami

I’m Nami! I write about autism, comics, and my life— less often than I should, but when I do, I try to make it worth your while.