by Gwen Cooper
My guess was that Vashti was sending a message. And the message was: I’m not living anywhere without Mommy.
My suspicions were confirmed the next day when Jorge called to tell me he’d caught Vashti in the act of peeing on his stove. Since she had failed to communicate her point the first few times—as evidenced by the fact that she was still with Jorge and not with me—she’d obviously decided to escalate matters. I marveled at the idea of Vashti jumping all the way up to the counter-top stove—Vashti who, to my knowledge, had never once jumped half that height in her entire life.
“I’m sorry,” Jorge told me, “but she has to go.”
“I’ll come get them tonight,” I replied.
Loading the cats into their carriers was never an easy task, but for once Vashti climbed in as eagerly as if she were crawling into my lap. I put Homer in last; since he couldn’t see the carriers, he didn’t run and hide the second they were brought out. He spent his last few minutes in Jorge’s house playing with Jorge’s friends, charter members of the El Mocho fan club, who’d come to see him off. They held small bits of the tuna Jorge hadn’t been able to resist buying high in the air, encouraging Homer to leap straight up and grab the tuna from their fingers. “¡Salta, Mochito!” (Salta being Spanish for jump). As I deposited Homer into his carrier, Jorge’s friends cried, “No, no! The other two, they can go, but El Mocho can stay!”
“You know, he is welcome to stay if that would make things easier for you,” Jorge said.
For a kitten nobody had wanted, the offers to take Homer off my hands certainly seemed to be piling up.
“Sorry, guys,” I said. “They’re a package deal.”
“There really is something special about that cat,” Jorge observed fondly, giving Homer one last rub behind the ears before I zipped the carrier closed around him.
I smiled. “Let’s hope my parents feel the same way.”
The one profitable outcome of this episode in Homer’s life (I use the word profitable loosely, because I practically bankrupted myself repaying Jorge for the damage Vashti caused) was that I was decidedly less anxious about Homer’s ability to adjust to life in my parents’ house. With all the concerns I had for Homer over the years, I never again worried about his ability to adapt to new spaces and new people. Even my parents’ dogs no longer felt like the impassable barrier to Homer’s happiness I had been agonizing over.
For he was El Mocho, The Cat Without Fear.
¡Viva El Mocho!
9 • “Dogs and Cats, Living Together …”
There is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his own parents, and however splendid a home he may have elsewhere, if it be far from his father or mother, he does not care about it.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
PERHAPS SAYING EARLIER THAT MY PARENTS DIDN’T LIKE CATS WAS AN unfair characterization. It would be more accurate to say that my father, who owned his own medical auditing business, wasn’t so much anti-cat as he was staunchly pro-dog. But he was also more sensitive when it came to animals generally than just about anybody else I knew. He was one of those people with an ability to understand and respond to an animal’s emotional state that went beyond simple compassion and seemed almost to be direct communion. Of all the stray, abused, and abandoned dogs that had come through our home over the years, there had never been one—no matter how traumatized or skittish—who had failed to melt into warm affection in my father’s presence, even if that warmth was reserved for my father alone. It was my father I’d always thought of when I’d volunteered at animal shelters, hoping to capture at least some of whatever mysterious ability he had.
My mother, on the other hand, when she was a small child had seen a cat kill a bird. She, too, was capable of deep compassion where just about any animal was concerned, but the trauma of this single act of feline ornicide had left her, as she put it, incapable of emotionally investing in cats the way she could in dogs.
“Cats aren’t loving and loyal the way dogs are,” she’d say. Upon hearing my own cats indirectly maligned in this fashion, I was tempted to ask her what exactly, in her zero years of cat companionship, qualified her to make such an assessment.
Remembering the fruitless dinner-table political arguments of my adolescence, however, I forbore. I considered this forbearance a mark of the maturity I’d attained since I’d last lived with my parents.
That my parents were willing to take the four of us in, despite their antipathy toward cats, was a testament to how much they were willing to do for me—even though we weren’t as close at that time as, perhaps, we could have been. It wasn’t so much that there was any overt hostility between my parents and me; but, where some of my friends had drifted with seeming effortlessness into adult relationships with their parents, my own parents and I were still figuring it out. I often thought I heard a distinct grown-up-talking-to-a-child tone when they spoke to me—and, as it was uncomfortably close to some of my own darker insecurities about myself, I resented it accordingly.
More than anything else, I wanted to make them proud of me. But it didn’t seem as if I’d done much in my post-college life thus far to inspire pride, unless you counted one major failed relationship and being broke enough to require my moving back in with them.
But my parents were willing to take the four of us in, and they were even willing to divide their house into “cat zones” and “dog zones.” Casey, a yellow Lab mix, and Brandi, a miniature cocker spaniel, had been with my family since I was a teenager. They were always giddily thrilled whenever I turned up at my parents’ for a visit, following me closely and looking doleful if I so much as walked past the front door, anticipating the moment when I would leave and not return for days or weeks. If I spent the night, the two of them would pile into bed with me, as they’d done when I was still in high school.
Once I’d been living in my parents’ house again for a week and change, the novelty of having me around wore off a bit and they weren’t so apt to follow me everywhere. This was something I’d counted on; conflicting demands on my time and attention from the dog and cat camps wouldn’t engender the kind of mutual goodwill I was hoping for.
But I realized there was only so far diplomacy would go. Cat/dog animosity was at least as old as history itself, and neither my cats nor my parents’ dogs had ever been called upon to share quarters with members of the opposing faction. Remembering the dictum that “good fences make good neighbors,” my parents and I retrieved the folding wooden childproof gates from the storage spot they’d occupied since my younger sister and I were toddlers. “I knew we’d end up using them again,” my mother said, although not without tossing me a glance that added, Of course, I thought we’d be using them for our grand-children.
The gates attached to the walls with suction cups and reached about waist-high on the average adult. We put them up where a hallway split off to my bedroom and another bedroom, connected by an adjoining bathroom—effectively creating a three-room apartment that the dogs would be unable to access. I conducted a rigorous cleaning—trying to eliminate as much anxiety-inducing dog smell as I could—then installed cat beds, scratching posts, litter box, and food and water bowls. The cats’ new home was complete.
“What do you guys think?” I asked the cats when I brought them in for the first time.
Scarlett and Vashti crept forward cautiously from the safety of their carriers, noses to the ground and ears at full attention. Casey barked in the other room, and they immediately scrambled under the bed. It was two hours before I could get them to do more than peek their whiskers out through the bed’s eyeleted dust ruffle, a relic of my preteen years.
Homer was unfazed, however. His ears flicked momentarily at Casey’s barking, but he was more interested in exploring what was in front of him. Homer had never encountered anything with the texture of the ’70s-style shag carpeting in my childhood bedroom. He spent a few minutes stalking carefully through the carpet strands that reached halfway to his chin—a black panther in per
fect miniature prowling an electric-blue savanna. Once he realized the superior traction carpet afforded, far better than the hardwood or tile floors he was used to, Homer took off at a run, racing in blurred circles around the room and bouncing off walls and furniture like a rubber ball fired from a slingshot. Yippee! Look how fast I can go in here!
“He’s a little nut, isn’t he?” my mother, who hadn’t been able to resist a quick peek, observed.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
• • •
DESPITE SOME OF the concerns I’d had before moving in, my parents didn’t unduly interfere with my day-to-day activities. I did tend to let them know, as I was walking out the door, where I was going and approximately when I’d be back, but it was a level of basic courtesy that I would have extended to friendly roommates. The majority of my friends still lived on South Beach, and there were inevitable late nights, but my parents refrained from asking intrusive questions.
What I hadn’t counted on ahead of time was being on the receiving end of their parenting advice when it came to the cats.
“I don’t think you’re giving them fresh water often enough,” my mother announced one afternoon, a few weeks after we’d moved in. “I checked in on them while you were out, and poor Vashti was standing next to her water bowl making such sad eyes at me. I refilled it for her and the poor thing acted like she hadn’t seen clean water in days.”
I always changed the cats’ water twice daily—once in the morning and once in the evening. And “poor Vashti” was something of a con artist when it came to her water bowl. Vashti was a cat who, oddly enough, was obsessed with water. She loved to hold her paws under running faucets, immerse them up to her shoulder joint in full drinking glasses, and roll around in recently used showers while the tile was still wet. The refilling of her water bowl was one of the high points of her day; the beguiling roll of water caused by setting a full bowl on the ground mesmerized her, and she gave me no peace most mornings until I’d re-created this daily miracle for her.
I was about to explain this to my mother when a new thought occurred to me. “Wait a second—what were you doing with them in the first place?”
“Well, I wanted to say hello to Vashti,” my mother replied. She emphasized Vashti’s name in a way that meant there was a difference between cats, which she didn’t care for, and Vashti, who merited a degree of interest. “I am the one who found her when she was a kitten.”
“Yes, you did.” I smiled. “And you sent her to a good home, one where she gets all the fresh water she needs.”
A few days later, my father piped up with a suggestion of his own. “I don’t think the cats have enough toys,” he said. My father was the kind of indulgent dad who brought new toys home for the dogs every few days, to the point that my parents’ otherwise immaculate house looked like a chewtoy graveyard. “You should buy more toys for them.”
“They’re not like the dogs, Dad,” I explained. “They’re not into store-bought toys.” This was true, with the exception of that stuffed worm Homer still loved dearly. The bag that new toys came in was always an adventure—a large paper bag made an excellent cat fort. The receipt for the toys could be crumpled up into a ball that a cat could bat around and chase. The plastic wrapping around the toys was a bonanza for Scarlett, who loved nothing more than licking plastic wrap. (If a genie were to grant me the wish of the cats’ being able to talk for a single day, the first question I would ask is, What’s so great about licking plastic bags?!) But the toys themselves held little interest for my brood.
“You should really do something about Scarlett,” my mother said once. This was after she had found me reading a book with a purring Scarlett curled in my lap. She’d held out her hand and Scarlett sniffed it. Taking this as encouragement, my mother had attempted to pet Scarlett, who had hissed and recoiled from my mother’s touch so forcefully that her head nearly bruised my breastbone. “Brandi used to be afraid of new people, and look how well she does now.”
“Scarlett isn’t afraid of people, Mom,” I told her. “Scarlett doesn’t like people.”
The problem could be summed up in a nutshell: My parents were trying to dog my cats. Having never spent much time around cats, they tried to take the accumulated knowledge of more than three decades of dog ownership and apply it to these strange new creatures who now inhabited their home. To the extent that the cats’ reactions differed from a dog’s, it was most likely because I didn’t yet have enough experience being responsible for pets.
I tried to weather their input with good grace, but it was hard. I was my parents’ child, reflexively defensive at any perceived parental criticism. I was also my “children’s” parent, bristling instantly at the slightest implication that I wasn’t caring for them properly, or that they were anything other than exactly what they should be.
But the one thing I could plainly see—that touched me, even though I was never very good at articulating it—was that my parents were trying. They were trying to care about the cats, to interest themselves in their happiness and well-being.
I had worried that my parents would treat me like a child. Maybe, in talking to me about being a parent, they were trying the best way they knew how to treat me like an adult.
IT WAS ONLY when it came to Homer that my parents were abashed to offer advice or constructive criticism. This was understandable. The idea of a pet who was blind—and not just blind, but eyeless—was far enough beyond their experience to feel exotic and mysterious. They often observed that, “you do seem to understand him,” and left it at that.
Homer initially inspired more pity in my parents than anything else. The most frustrating fact of life for Homer in my parents’ home was that he was confined to only a few rooms—rooms I wasn’t necessarily in when I was in the house. Homer would sit at the childproof gate and wail piteously if he heard me talking in the kitchen or down the hall.
“Poor baby,” my mother would say, real empathy in her voice. “Life must be so hard for him.”
It wasn’t life that Homer found hard to bear, of course. It was his enforced separation from me and from the other human voices he could hear but never meet. Homer didn’t understand a world in which I was present but not with him, in which there were other people who didn’t exist solely to befriend and play with him.
It wasn’t long into our stay before Homer made his first daring escape from behind the childproof gate. I customarily slid it open just far enough to allow myself entry to or exit from the cat-designated portion of the house. One day, as I was entering, Homer sort of flattened himself sideways and pressed through the mere inches of space between my leg and the wall, like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube. He didn’t get very far that time; being unfamiliar with the layout of my parents’ house, he stopped to get his bearings after only a few feet.
That was the first time.
Homer was impossible to contain after that. I tried to prevent him from squeezing past me by climbing over the gate rather than opening it, but that just gave Homer the idea of jumping over it himself. Vashti and Scarlett could have jumped over the gate all along, but the two of them didn’t especially like to jump—nor were they anxious to encounter the dogs who dwelled on the other side of that gate. Homer had no such compunctions. The only thing holding him back had been his belief that unable to see the gate’s true dimensions, it must have stretched all the way up to infinity. Once he realized its actual height was more like three feet, there was no stopping him.
My parents, as so many before them, were astounded at how quickly Homer learned his way around their home. A sharp right turn out of (or over) the gate brought him into the main hallway. An equally sharp left turn, precisely fifteen full-tilt gallops down, brought him into the living room. A couch to the left of the living room’s entry was flush against the wall and a cinch to climb. Four or five steps along the top of it and he could clamber down behind an end table—wedged in a corner between the couch and a love seat—and hunker down int
o a spot where it was impossible for humans to follow and catch him. Although, while I was reaching for him over and around the couch, it was easy enough to dart through the legs of the end table, up the side of the love seat, back down onto the ground behind me, and off to farther points unknown.
“That cat’s a meshugana!” my mother always said in a kind of wonder upon witnessing Homer’s feats of speed, dexterity, and chutzpah.
“It shouldn’t be this hard to catch a blind kitten,” my father, gasping slightly, insisted after a chase that had taken him all the way down the other main hall, into my parents’ bedroom, under and over their bed, and had finally culminated atop my mother’s vanity.
In this way, it became inevitable that Homer’s daring would bring him face-to-face with Casey and Brandi. Like Odysseus encountering Cyclopes and Sirens, Homer one day came upon these foreign and heretofore undreamed-of beasts for the very first time.
Casey was a fairly large and tightly muscled dog, although also extraordinarily gentle. Upon running into her (literally) for the first time, Homer didn’t hiss and flee the way Scarlett and Vashti did whenever they thought Casey had strayed too close to the gate separating them. Homer puffed himself up as far as his hair follicles would allow and crouched down defensively, his nostrils going wild as he inhaled and processed Casey’s dog smell. What the heck is this thing? His attempt to make himself appear bigger to Casey, who weighed more than eighty pounds, would have been comical if I didn’t realize how scared he must be.
Homer reached out one tiny, tentative paw to touch Casey’s nose and face. I hovered a few inches away, ready to snatch Homer up at the first sign of growls or aggression. Casey sniffed him with great interest as Homer stood stock-still, almost holding his breath. Then Casey’s enormous pink tongue, bigger than Homer’s whole head, descended onto his face. Homer’s facial muscles contracted, and I knew if he’d had eyelids they would have been screwed shut to protect sensitive areas from this sudden assault of rough wetness. Undeterred by his obvious reluctance, Casey began to lick and groom him methodically.