Kitty Cornered: How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home

by Bob Tarte

  For more stories about Bob’s cats, please read Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather.

  Kitty Cornered

  How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home

  BOB TARTE

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2012

  To my sister Joan, who is generous enough to have taken in twelve cats, and to my sister Bett, who is sensible enough not to have any.

  Contents

  Ground Floor of a House Overrun by Cats

  Cats of Characters

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Wisp of the Woods

  Chapter 2: Dark Hour of the Walleye

  Chapter 3: Out in the Sticks

  Chapter 4: Fred Mertz Meets the Mummy

  Chapter 5: The Funnel of Happiness

  Chapter 6: The Cats of Winter

  Chapter 7: The Cat You Can’t Do Anything With

  Chapter 8: The War Between the Cats

  Chapter 9: Out of the Weeds

  Chapter 10: Don’t Call Him “Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle”

  Chapter 11: The Anti-Frannie

  Chapter 12: My Brief Career as a Psychic

  Chapter 13: Living in a Walled City

  Chapter 14: Funneled Again

  Acknowledgments and Culpability

  GROUND FLOOR OF A HOUSE OVERRUN BY CATS

  A. Inconveniently placed litter box

  B. Confusing “closed-when-open” basement door

  C. Daily attempts on Bob’s life by Agnes

  D. Decisive battle site in the War Between the Cats

  E. Dining room chair commandeered by Lucy

  F. Frannie’s cardboard carton

  G. Snoozing spot more comfy than Bob’s shin

  H. The funnel of happiness (location approximate only)

  I. Carrots “too old for rabbits” cooked by Linda for Bob

  J. Time-out for Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle

  K. Shredded wallpaper

  L. Sensibly placed litter box spurned by Lucy

  M. Tina’s under-table birdwatching spot

  Cats of Characters

  Agnes: our original cat who wonders where all of the others came from (aka Aggly-wag)

  Frannie: nervous white-and-black stray who insists on being petted while she eats (aka Alfalfa Girl, Ferret Face, Francine, The Little Kitty, Miss Pinkie-Winkie Nose, Sunday School Girl, Feline Trotsky)

  Lucy: snapping crocodile disguised as a “diluted tabby” with a disdain for litter box geometry (aka Fatsy Pats, Lucy Caboosey)

  Maynard: portly tabby on a nonstop wailing expedition (came to us as Mabel; aka Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle, Rand McNally, Harold the Barrel, Face)

  Moobie: aging snow-white cat who sleeps more than Snow White (came to us as Moonbeam; aka “I Want,” Conehead)

  Tina: thorn in Frannie’s side with a periscope tail (aka Teena-Weena, Periscope Girl, Tina Louise, Sis, Lump-a-Bump, Puppet Mouth)

  Introduction

  I had my first encounter with a cat when I was two-and-a-half years old. It didn’t turn out well. My mom had carried me next door so that she could get a closer look at our neighbor’s climbing roses and still keep an eye on me. While she talked to Mrs. Farran, I busied myself by poking an anthill with a twig. Then I noticed the Farrans’ black cat, Fluffy, rolling in the sun on the porch. Before anyone could stop me I lurched over and rubbed Fluffy’s stomach. I enjoyed her promised fluffiness for a fraction of a second before a set of claws raked my arm. My howling ended the visit.

  The incident didn’t sour me on cats. It only made me wary of Fluffy. I was too young to develop prejudices yet, but that wasn’t true of my parents, who held an unexplained grudge against cats. They had no problem with dogs—especially our family beagle, Muffin, who seldom stirred except to bury her head in her bowl. Cats, in contrast, were devious creatures, according to my mother. “You can’t trust a cat,” she said.

  She repeated this for years. My dad backed her up. Finally, I asked him what was so bad about cats, and he told me, “They can jump on you and scratch you while you’re sleeping.” This was as close to spouting superstition as my common­sense father ever came, but I believed him at the time. I was in second grade by then and should have known better. But none of my friends had cats—or if they did, the cats were smart enough to keep out of sight when I showed up. So when I’d see a cat skittering across the street, I never thought of it as someone’s companion. I thought of it as a wild creature like a squirrel or pigeon. A nuisance animal, in fact.

  This all changed when I was in high school and my older sister Joan brought home a gray mass of matter fur from her riding lesson. “I named her Rigel, and I’ll keep her in my room,” she told my parents.

  “Absolutely not,” my mom said. “You’re not keeping a cat in this house.”

  “What your mother says goes,” said my dad.

  Joan bought Rigel a litter box and set it up in a corner near her closet. She wasn’t particularly rebellious, but her will to rescue a needy barn cat was stronger than my mother’s will to keep out the cat. I sided with them against her, as I usually liked to do, but this time I really believed that she was wrong. Taking in Rigel was a betrayal of a family policy—especially from aging beagle Muffin’s point of view. We were in for a surprise, however. Rigel turned out to be a shy and gentle soul who had zero disruptive impact on our lives. About the only time I knew that she was there was when I slipped into Joan’s room to visit her.

  Rigel was so sweet and undemanding that I ended up exchanging one false notion about cats for another. Instead of sharing my parents’ belief that cats were trouble, I decided that they were hardly anything at all, just purring plush toys that wanted to be petted. Even Muffin seemed more intriguing. It never occurred to me that only a person who was duller than a sleeping dog would make such a mistake about a cat. I simply hadn’t spent enough time around cats yet to absorb some of their smarts, or to know that each cat was different, and that some were considerably wilder and more unpredictable than others.

  When Joan married Jack a few years later, Rigel joined Evenstar and Romulus in a three-cat household. When they took in a fourth cat named Tigger, I grew deeply concerned that Joan was suffering the dreadful fate of turning into a “cat lady.” She and Jack had two dogs, too. But while owning a couple of dogs seemed normal to me, four cats struck me as borderline crazy. I figured that you might as well just move out into a hollow log as live in a house where there were twice as many cats as people. What was the point of four walls and a roof when nature had already taken over?

  A decade and some years later, my thinking began to change after I married animal lover Linda. Under my nose at first and then with my approval, our house filled with all manner of birds. For our first Christmas, she surprised me (to put it mildly) with a gray kitten that we named Penny. Before we knew it, stray cat Agnes needed a home. Moobie came next, and her arrival sent me to the store up the street for another litter box. When I complained about my fate to the cashier, she said, “Three of them. You must be a cat person.”

  “Not me!” I told her, as if she had accused me of running a meth lab.

  By then I had long since recovered from my early misconceptions that cats were either devious creatures or as mellow as stuffed toys. There were both, and much more. In fact, they were as complicated as any person that I’d ever met and more intelligent than most people, too. But I refused to think of myself as a cat person. That was going a step too far. />
  I readily called myself a “bird person,” because the term was so amorphous that it didn’t pigeonhole me. A bird person could be anyone from an egg-headed aviculturist who specialized in rare parrots to a redneck with a backyard chicken flock. But the term “cat person” was pretty specific, suggesting a tame middle-aged eccentric who substituted interaction with pets for a healthy social relationship with other people. I resented that whole notion, because it described me perfectly.

  I was able to console myself with the fact that the defining trait of a true cat person was living in an environment that was overrun with cats. We only had three, and the only reason that we had that many was due to a unique set of circumstances that had descended upon us like a dark cloud and could never occur again. At least that’s what I told myself a few years before we ended up with six cats in our tiny house—including a wild child from the woods.

  Perhaps I should have learned my lesson from Fluffy. And perhaps I should have listened to Mom and Dad. But I listened to my heart instead, and that always leads to trouble.

  Chapter 1

  The Wisp of the Woods

  Linda burst into the house in her usual door­knob-through-plaster fashion shortly after I had finished feeding Agnes. The floor bounced like a drumhead as she stomped the snow off her boots. Peering around the corner from the kitchen, I felt grateful that I wasn’t still climbing the basement stairs, or the tremors might have pitched me off where an underfoot Agnes had failed. Linda tossed her boots onto the porch and then shucked off the pair of plastic bread bags that provided the waterproofing her thrift-store boots lacked.

  “I saw that white-and-black cat again,” she told me with the mixture of excitement and disbelief of a child glimpsing Santa Claus. “She was on the edge of the woods kitty-corner from the trailer park, but closer to us than when I saw her the first time I went to the store today, and I better not have forgotten to buy the shredded cheese again.”

  I went back to cleaning Bella’s cage as Linda chugged into the kitchen. The parrot pinched my finger with her beak when I whisked her off the countertop to save her from getting clocked by a sack of groceries. “You have to be a better girl,” I said.

  “I couldn’t see her very well through the trees,” Linda said. “She was definitely after something and headed in our direction.”

  I pictured the stray running in that oddly unhurried but determined feline fashion: erect body, stiffly trailing tail, legs flickering like the frames of a silent movie. She trotted in a straight line toward our house until the honk of a diesel horn sent her scampering off in the opposite direction.

  “She better not come here,” I said.

  Bella squawked to come out of her cage and resume her battle with an ice cube on the countertop. “Shh,” I told her, leaning my face close to hers. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  I loved our three cats, but I was a bird person at heart. Sixteen years ago, Linda had indoctrinated me into her world with an ever-increasing parade of fowl creatures who now lived with us, both inside and outdoors. And I’d discovered, after a long struggle, that I understood birds and their mysterious otherness. The cats had slipped in under the radar while we were otherwise engaged cleaning parakeet cages and making toys for parrots, and I’d assumed that in comparison to birds, they were the tame ones. The ones who basically followed domestic rules. Hadn’t we always learned that cats were “domesticated animals”? I found more to laugh at than lament in naughty behavior from our birds. But I expected better manners from a fellow mammal and not the long stretches of brooding aloofness and general lack of gratitude of our cats. I wanted them either to act more like us or to play the role of cuddly toys, but time and time again they disappointed me on both counts.

  “I forgot the cheese again,” Linda said after pawing through two bags. In a noble, self-sacrificing, wounded tone of voice I volunteered to return to the store for her. But the errant cheese had become an orange badge of honor, and she resolved to retrieve it on her own. Moments later she thundered back into the house, an envelope of arctic cold clinging to her jacket as she kicked off her boots. Fortunately for her good mood—and for the church potluck supper—she had found the cheese inside the car skulking between the passenger’s seat and the door.

  In the kitchen, I watched her stash the cheddar in the crisper, where it was instantly swallowed up by a vegetative tide of “baby” carrots for Rudy the rabbit, hunks of ginger root for my tea, partially filled boxes of margarine sticks, shriveled flat bread, an empty plastic lemon, and, of course, another package of shredded cheddar cheese.

  As I was taking inventory of the drawer, Agnes skittered up the basement stairs to rub against my leg until she had my attention. I turned toward her, and she trotted back down the stairs and stared up at me from the bottom. All I could see in the gloom peculiar to unlit basements was an incandescent pair of sulfur yellow eyes. Even in the full fluorescent light of indoor day, our black cat’s facial features tended to merge into an inscrutable blur, especially compared to her inverse counterpart, the blindingly white Moonbeam, aka Moobie.

  “I think she wants to go out,” Linda told me.

  “I think she’s just angling for another treat.” With Agnes safely planted at the foot of the stairs and out of range of tangling up my legs, I decided to make the descent, despite the futility of it all. To convince Agnes to come inside each evening, I had initiated the habit of rewarding her with a dollop of canned cat food. This turned out to be a huge mistake. She would beg to go out, come in, go out, and come in again several times a day in hopes of earning a spoonful of food, and darned if I wasn’t weak enough to succumb to her sheer audacity.

  This time, though, she didn’t step outside by as much as a toenail. I opened the basement door, and a blast of Michigan air hit us like a frozen anvil. She pivoted, raced to her dish, and shot me her best “you might as well feed me” look. I scooped her up in my arms, rubbing her face in an attempt to rustle out a facial expression that I could see. I squeezed her and received the bleat of a crabby sheep in response. “I just fed you fifteen minutes ago,” I said, putting her down next to her empty bowl.

  But I failed to exercise necessary vigilance on my ascent. Just a few steps away from the kitchen landing, Agnes inter­vened between my foot and the stair. I pitched backward trying to avoid her, my hand attempting to latch onto the nonexistent railing which I had been intending to have someone else install for years. Slamming my shoulder against the wall saved me, but I had come so close to falling that I felt the cold, clammy fingers of the cement floor reaching for the back of my skull.

  Oblivious to my close brush with the reaper, Linda said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the white-and-black kitty shows up at our back fence.”

  I didn’t give the matter a single neuron of attention. Once or twice a year, cats materialized in our yard only to disappear as soon as I opened the door and tried to engage them in conversation about how they needed to do something productive with their lives. These fleeting and possibly mythical creatures didn’t much interest me, and a cat a mile away that I hadn’t even glimpsed was completely off my radar, especially when we had a cat of homicidal bent literally underfoot.

  “It’s probably not a stray,” I told Linda. “It probably lives with some long-suffering family at the trailer park who didn’t realize what they were getting into when they took in a cat.” I directed this last remark at Agnes, who had returned to the gloom of the basement to glare up at me from her bowl.

  IN THE POST-POTLUCK DAYS that followed, as Linda rattled back to the store for soymilk, or to the post office for stamps with pretty flowers on them, or to the dime store for plastic wading pools for our pet ducks and geese, she saw the cat in ever-increasing proximity to our home. I feared that it was only a matter of time before the kitty would stumble onto the secret messages that other strays had left in the woods to guide more strays to our doorstep. In a language of scents and signs that only felines could decipher—an old mouse skele
­ton here, the heavily scratched bark of a sapling there—the cat calligraphy would tell her that in the blue house between the river and the road lived people who would shower her with food and affection—two softies whom even the dullest-witted critter could effortlessly wrap around its little toe.

  Food and affection she would get, assuming she was just stopping by for takeout and not intending to reserve an inside table. We already had three cats, and we definitely didn’t need a fourth. Agnes, Moobie, and our most recent acquisition, Lucy, gave us more trouble than our other fifty-some pets put together. I kept telling myself that their good qualities more than outweighed the negatives—just as I also imagined that our parrots were mild mannered and our geese as quiet as falling snow.

  I hadn’t grown up loving animals. In fact, I had been diffident to my boyhood beagle, Muffin. But marrying country gal Linda Sue seventeen years ago flipped on a switch that had been so deeply embedded in the whorls and dead ends of my fractured psyche that I’d never even dreamed it existed. Two of our first pets were profoundly unsuitable for companionship with humans. When we weren’t besieging their previous owners for advice, we were trying to eject them from our lives, until we discovered that we had fallen hard for them. Belligerent bunny Binky and the Mussolini of “pocket parrots” Ollie relentlessly bossed us, but their sparkling personalities filled our house with jagged light.

  My brother-in-law soon brought us a Muscovy duck that his co-workers had been pelting with stones. So more homeless quackers and consequent backyard pen expansions followed. Then came a quartet of geese abandoned in a roadside ditch, an increasingly affable succession of rabbits, African grey parrots, parakeets, doves, hens, and cats, not to mention the orphan songbirds that Linda raised and released each summer.

  Though I might call any of them “baby,” I never thought of our animals as surrogate children. I was the infant of the house, whiny, weak, helpless, crabby, and frequently in need of a nap. I was still trying to learn resilience from our pets, since the smallest bantam chicken was stronger, smarter, and more emotionally balanced than I was. But the best that I could muster was an extra smidgen of patience. I needed it to deal with the parrot who had devoured the dining room woodwork or the goose-size duck with the vice-grip beak who thrived on chasing us around the barn.