Nancy Ludmerer
Chameleon
Two people in one week said I was a chameleon and on Monday morning I woke up and really was one. I didn’t need a mirror. When I found myself reduced to the size of a Meyer lemon, with 360-degree vision and a bumpy greenish physique, I knew. My double bed had been perfect for me and Sandy, the sweet cat who slept with me every night, his body curled into mine. Now that same bed was as immense and forbidding as an iceberg.
I worried, not only about my transformation but about my precarious work situation. I finally had a law job that allowed me to pay the rent and then some. I saw from the bedside clock it was 7:30 am. I had a court-ordered deposition at nine and if I didn’t show, I would be held in contempt. My partner mentor (who wasn’t much of a mentor really) would be furious; I could be fired. Four months before, when I could no longer pay the rent on my studio apartment, I parlayed my law degree from a low-paying Legal Aid job to a law clerk position at a reasonably prestigious midtown firm. My ex-boyfriend telephoned when he heard (how he heard, I’m not sure) for the sole purpose of berating me. I had abandoned our shared ideals, he said, ignoring that he had abandoned me a year before. ‘You’re a chameleon. You blend in, in this case with a lot of careerist money-grubbing law grads.’
‘Adaptability is a good thing,’ I said. ‘You’re turning it into a negative.’ The truth is, I wasn’t all that adaptable. I hadn’t adapted well when he left me. I hated living alone, which is how Sandy–a cat made homeless by the storm of the same name–came into my life.
From the time I was small, whenever we moved from one part of town to another or from one city to another, my parents said it was my job to make new friends. ‘Do I have to?’ I asked at seven and at ten and at thirteen, and they would look at me like I was someone else’s child. Had they not both departed this world, they would not be surprised to learn I was not making friends at the law firm. I was not surprised either. I was a decade older than most of the lawyers in my cohort, who all seemed to know the same people from NYU or Columbia. I had gone to Brooklyn Law School at night. When I told my therapist I was having a hard time fitting in, she asked, ‘What are you, a chameleon? You’re not expected to simply disappear into the woodwork.’
I know what happened to me happened before–at least in literature–to Gregor Samsa, who turned into a giant bug. At first that made me feel less alone. But the more I dwelled on our similarities, the more fearful and unsettled I became. Gregor Samsa perished, freeing his family of the burden his life had become. What would happen to me?
I didn’t want to die. Sandy was eyeing me hungrily. He could chew me to bits; no one would know. I would simply vanish. My new colleagues barely knew me. Legal Aid thought I copped out. My ex certainly wouldn’t care. To say I’d be forgotten was an understatement. My client and the judge would be mad at me for missing my court appearance; soon the case would be reassigned. My mentor would decide he had been right about me all along. My therapist would be perturbed and review her notes. She would bill me for missed visits, eventually resorting to a debt collection service.
None of these people would come to my rescue. Instead, I was at the mercy of a cat, my cherished Sandy, who was no longer snuggled up next to me, but instead was stalking the strange little creature who had invaded his and his mom’s bed.
Sandy, for a cat, was neither very big nor very small: twelve pounds of muscle, encased in soft, pliant, silky fur, mostly white but with orange splotches on his rear and a striped orange-and-white tail. There was an orange spot between his ears, too, which he loved to have stroked.
If only I could reach out and stroke it now.
Sandy’s eyes narrowed into dark broody pits. Without stopping to think, I extended one of my narrow green front feet and touched the orange spot between his ears. He jumped back and hissed. He had never hissed at me before, not at the shelter, not when I put him in the carrier, not when I brought him home. He stared for what seemed like a long time. His green irises glimmered and he blinked slowly, same as when I was human. Then he ducked his head and moved toward me. I stayed perfectly still. He bent his neck forward for a head butt. Now I placed both of my skinny front feet on that orange spot between his ears. How to reassure him this was a friendly gesture? He shook me off, but took one of my feet between his paws and began licking it, grooming me thoroughly and methodically, the same way he groomed my human fingers in the past–nails, cuticles, and joints.
Gradually I felt an odd sensation. Slowly I was expanding. Sandy groomed me and then groomed me some more, all the way back to humanity, back to the flawed human being I was. Sandy recognized I was the creature who had saved him from homelessness regardless what my outer shell looked like. I was the opposite of a chameleon, whatever that might be called. I was his human mother, no matter how I appeared in the world.
I checked the clock by my bedside. There was still time to make it to court. I dressed quickly, filled Sandy’s bowl, and left. At the courthouse I would find my client, defend his deposition, argue my case, win it or lose it.
Who needs to make friends? When the day is over, I will return home–to my home, and Sandy’s. AQ