“The girl with the stringy hair and sunburned arms picked him up and set him down in the midst of his wiggling, crawling, mewing brothers and sisters. He wanted to get out; she wanted him to stay in. The puzzling struggle had gone on all morning in the space between the mailbox and the newspaper rack near the door of the supermarket.”

This excerpt from Chapter 1 introduces Socks and how Cleary uses his perspective in the story. Here, Socks is in a box with his siblings at the kitten sale, which confuses him. Socks is used to Debbie holding him, and he doesn’t understand why she keeps pushing him back into the box when he’s just trying to get her attention like he usually does. This scene also helps explain Socks’s quest for belonging. Before he went to live with the Brickers, he was used to a certain level of attention. Thus, the lack of attention after Charles William’s birth feels even more stark.

“‘Daddy says we should save up to have the mother cat shoveled, so she won’t have kittens all the time,’ answered Debbie.

‘Spayed,’ corrected George. ‘She means he said we should have the mother spayed.’”

Debbie and George speak these lines when a passing woman asks what the children will do with the money from the sale. Debbie’s answer suggests she didn’t pay close attention to what her parents said, likely because she didn’t want to sell the kittens to begin with. The casual way with which she offers the information also suggests she doesn’t understand what spaying a cat means, as she first describes it as “shoveled.”