The Barker Street Regulars

to get it to move was to offer affection. As soon as I reached out to pat it, it dove off the desk and disappeared. I’d cleaned the litter box that morning. The odor lingered like the grin of the Cheshire cat.
    After proofing and printing the rave review —The Domestic Dog: Its Origins, Behavior, and Interaction with People edited by James Serpell—I dashed to the post office counter at Huron Drug, where I mentioned the cat to six people who weren’t interested. At the Fresh Pond Market, I pounced on a promising-looking adopter, a psychotherapist friend of Rita’s whose shopping cart held a bag of cat litter. Sounding offended, she said she was buying the litter to absorb oil that had leaked around her burner. In self-congratulatory tones that reminded me of my own when I talk about my dogs, she said, “Besides, I’m allergic to cats.”
    The part about the oil may have been true, but the smug bit about the allergy struck me as a pitifully inadequate effort at a local form of status seeking. In normal places, when someone asks how you are, you’re supposed to say fine, right? What’s mandatory among Cambridge psychotherapists is a volley of complaints about physical illness, mental distress, or both, preferably accompanied by tips about traditional and alternative remedies that others might try should they, too, luck into the same maladies. Lower back pain is now passé, as are Achilles tendinitis, chiropractors, and acupuncture. Depression is still worth your social while, but the prestigious new class of afflictions now sweeping the Cambridge psychotherapeutic valetudinarian community consists of allergies. Out with pain! Out with sorrow! In with sneezes, blotches, watery eyes, gastrointestinal symptoms, or, best of all, diffuse sensations of discomfort accompanied by heart palpitations, difficulty in breathing, and a radical drop in blood pressure, a syndrome preferably triggered by pervasive and unavoidable allergens like air and water, for example, that cause no reaction in ordinary people, but reserve their provocation for the ultrasensitive and ultraspecial. A Cambridge psychotherapist with nothing better to brag about than an undistinguished allergy to something as unimaginative as cats was probably suffering from such low self-esteem that she’d soon regress to lower back pain. The cat, I decided, deserved a better home than this woman could provide.
    “They’re worse than dog people,” I was saying to Rita a half hour later as we sat in my kitchen. “At least we have ribbons to show for our wins.”
    “She’s a perfectly nice person,” Rita replied in defense of her colleague. “It’s just that her practice is down. She’s been hit hard by managed care.” That’s Rita’s allergy: health maintenance organizations, the demise of private practice. “It’s too bad she didn’t want the cat.”
    “If she’s going to be out of work, it isn’t too bad at all. Besides, her oil burner leaks. Her house could catch fire. And I don’t want the cat exposed to environmental toxins. You want some coffee? Tea? Are you done for today? You want a drink?”
    “Yes. My six o’clock canceled. Speaking of my clients, you remember the one whose dog is lost?”
    With my head inside the refrigerator, I said, “Still lost? I’m really sorry. Maybe I can think of something... But let me get you your drink. We have Nut Brown Ale, Sam Adams, and Kevin’s Budweiser, and there’s white wine here, but it’s been opened. Scotch? Gin? Absolut?” Absolut vodka is what therapists here started to drink at about the same time the allergy fad began. It’s possible that they’re all, in fact, allergic to Absolut. Its main appeal, if you ask me, is that it permits Cambridge therapists to play mugwump: It looks as clear and pure as mineral water while packing ten times the wallop of imported wine.
    I poured an Absolut for Rita and a Bud for myself. There you have us: her silk blouse, good wool suit, stockings, pumps, rings, earrings; my jeans, running shoes, and a faded blue sweatshirt and new white socks decorated with black paw prints, deliberately, that is, bought that way, not, for once, embellished by Rowdy and Kimi.
    Settling myself at the table, I apologized to Rita for having been so unresponsive to the problem of her client’s lost dog.
    “You weren’t unresponsive,” Rita said generously. “She found the material you gave me very supportive. She’d already called a lot of shelters and dog