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

by Bob Tarte

  My thoughts turned to Lucy and her fate if we didn’t take her. The shelter was a one-way trip for the majority of animals. Only the cutest, friskiest cats and dogs ever made it out of there—not a placid eight-year-old fatty, no matter how affectionate Dave said she might be. I couldn’t let that happen, and I wondered what it meant that I couldn’t let it happen to a cat I had never laid eyes upon. But it seemed like a small enough deed to do for a fellow creature, especially one that might hop up on my lap while I read a Perry Mason mystery.

  I collided with the frozen smile of the hostess at Uncle Sonny’s Italian Villa. I realized that I had made a mistake. My co-workers were in full celebratory mode somewhere else. Acting out of habit, I had decided that because the party had been held at Uncle Sonny’s last year, it would be ever thus. The actual invitation—which I had apparently never actually read—sat in one of sixteen piles of papers on my upstairs office desk. By the time I found it, it would be too late for the party.

  Through wet streets I drove the upside-down reflection of my car back home. After rasping out an explanation, I told Linda, “I don’t want anything. I don’t want any dinner. I just want to go to bed.” I trudged upstairs to the spare bedroom feeling sorrier for myself than usual.

  CURLED INTO A BALL under the covers, I wondered why tiny things tortured me, but this condition wasn’t a recent development. Over the years I had attempted to balance the emotional teeter-totter with prescription drugs. The best pills only took the edge off the anxiety, while the worst ones produced bones-poking-through-my-skin side effects. I had tried meditating but kept falling asleep. Eventually I had come to accept the fact that I was a ridiculous individual.

  As I endured my dark hour of the walleye, Moobie hopped up out of the shadows to keep me company. She had proven to be a faithful companion in times of trouble. On the rare occasions when I broke down in tears over some traumatic event—such as discovering a hole in my sock—Moobie materialized at my side.

  She snuggled up against my leg just out of reach of my finger­tips. The first few times she had done this, I had written it off as a fluke and sat up to pet her—provoking her to slip away. But her fondness for my shin was so consistent that I realized she deliberately chose the spot in order to snooze unmolested.

  I used a trick to lure her closer. Pulling the blanket over my head, I lay as motionless as a frozen walleye until she ambled up and tapped my shoulder with a paw. This wasn’t a request to be petted. It was a test—and I studiously ignored her. Were I to slide my arm out to stroke her, she would migrate back to my lower leg, so I pretended to be asleep. After a few moments of tapping, Moobie flopped down beside my chest and purred off into dreamland.

  Suffering with a cat was always better than suffering without one. The warmth of her body, the rhythm of her breathing, and her sheer physicality provided me with a nice solid anchor in a world that seemed less real than my overreactions to it. I tried imagining the balm of two love sponges clamped against me in sweet unconsciousness—Moobie on my left, and in another twenty-four hours, Lucy on my right. How lovely to be a cat, I thought, and seldom have to think about a thing.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I raced Moobie to the bathroom. Despite her advanced age, she easily outpaced me. I found her up on the toilet waiting for her water dish. We had started referring to Moobie as “I Want” due to her constant demands for one thing or another—and if the one thing wasn’t water, another was. Had she been genuinely thirsty twenty-four hours a day, we might have been concerned. But she was less interested in lapping up her water than in having me serve her by holding her bowl.

  I stood beside her like a sommelier with the dish for her to sample. She dipped a tentative tongue into the front, evaluated the liquid with the fussiness of a wine expert, then leaned forward to harvest the superior ambrosia in the back of the bowl.

  “I can’t go into work today,” I told Linda as I held the bowl steady. “Not after last night.”

  I had started holding Moobie’s water dish to try to discourage the aging cat from jumping up to the bathroom vanity. I didn’t want her to break a leg at the dismount. Despite her arthritis, she still managed the occasional gazelle leap without mishap, but her surest vaults were long behind her. I would discover some months later that this practice was even more dangerous than I had imagined.

  “That wasn’t anything,” Linda said from the bed. “Just tell them what happened.”

  “I’ll never hear the end of it. I’ll walk out into the warehouse, and Randy will say, ‘Find your way up here all right? I can probably find you a GPS to borrow.’ If I stay home, everyone will think I was sick.”

  When Moobie wasn’t obsessed with water, she was begging for canned cat food. Sometimes she couldn’t make up her mind which of the two she preferred. Intercepting me in the hallway, she might veer to the right into the bathroom—or she might swerve to the left into the dining room and onto another decision fork. Should she plant herself in front of the refrigerator angling for a treat, or should she amble toward the side door to go outside, eat grass, and throw up?

  “What if someone asks why you weren’t there?”

  I hadn’t thought things out that far. “I guess I’ll make something up.”

  “You can’t do that. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Maybe I can say I had a nosebleed that lasted all night.”

  Linda’s silence indicated her disapproval.

  Suddenly bored with the water bowl, Moobie headed for the refrigerator, intent upon back-to-back treats. I followed, but she turned on her kitty heels, trotted back into the bathroom, and requested another session with the water bowl. I wondered how she could turn such modest pleasures into the high points of her day.

  But I hadn’t yet met Lucy, who would flourish without a single overt joy in her life, although biting us probably came close.

  I STRAGGLED INTO WORK, bracing myself for the in­evitable peppering of questions and keeping the nosebleed excuse tucked in the front part of my brain. But to my immense relief, nobody mentioned the party. Everyone was too busy with the Christmas rush, so I hadn’t had to make anything up.

  Shortly before dinner Dave arrived at our house with Lucy in an undersize pet carrier that exaggerated her enormousness. As Lucy’s massive face peered at me through the grate, I felt like Jack after having climbed the beanstalk. Surely the first time she stood up straight, she would uproot our house and carry it around on her back. The illusion of monumental proportions lessened once Dave ejected her from the carrier, and she nervously sniffed our sectional couch. But it returned when he pulled her food dish from a plastic bag. The purple dish was far too tiny even for our dwarf rabbit, Rudy, and it probably would have starved our parakeets. I wondered how she had attained her ample girth as I pictured her wedging her tongue into the bowl to extract the single kibble that would fill it to the brim.

  While I crouched down to let Lucy sniff my hand, Dave reached into the bag a second time and whisked out a litter box that was approximately one-third the length of his cat. I briefly considered using it as her food dish, since it appeared brand-spanking-new. Weeks later, I would learn from Dave that Lucy never used this or any other pet store litter box. By that time, I had learned from personal experience that Lucy and basic toilet hygiene didn’t coexist.

  “She’s got a brush, too,” he told me, and I strained my eyes as he extracted the microscopic object from his jacket pocket. “Brush her a few times, and she’ll be your friend for life.”

  “Do you do it one hair at a time?”

  “Oh, she loves being brushed. Don’t you, Lucy?” She looked glum as he poked a flap of fat that hung down from her stomach. I vowed then I’d never tease her and earn that grim expression—squinty eyes, flattened ears, and puffed up cheeks—but this turned out to be her usual face.

  Despite the initial unfriendliness you would expect from any new cat, she seemed promising as a companion from the standpoint of sheer bulk. We needed a big fat huggable cat. Once upon a t
ime, Moobie had filled the bill. But she had shrunken with age, turning from a walking ottoman into a tottering doll pillow. I thought about giving Lucy a welcoming squeeze, then changed my mind when she tried to wriggle back into her cat carrier. I wasn’t sure I could have gotten my arms all the way around her, anyway.

  Affecting a hunched-down armadillo posture, she scuttled upstairs. I found her under the bed, her camouflaging earth tones betrayed by a sullen stare.

  Back downstairs, I told Dave, “I don’t think she likes it here.”

  He lit up in a laugh. “She hid for two weeks when we first got her.”

  “It’s hard for a cat to get used to a new environment.”

  He laughed again. “She’s just being Lucy.”

  “Did you go to the Christmas party?” I asked.

  “Hell, no. I hate those things. I’m assuming you didn’t go.”

  “No, no, no.” I waved my hand.

  Moobie stood at the bottom of the stairs gazing up as if contemplating an ascent, but she turned around and ambled back into our bedroom, where visitor-shy Agnes was probably lurking. “Not to change the subject,” I said, “but did you ever have a nosebleed that lasted all night.”

  “Not last night. Last night I had to rush Christy to the emergency room, because she forgot to take her potassium again. She couldn’t unclench her hands.” He balled up his fists and grimaced like a boxer. “They stuck an IV in her and made her breathe into a bag. That’s why I wasn’t at work today. We were up most of the night. It’s the second time this has happened in two months.”

  “And it actually happened.”

  “Boy, it sure did.”

  Now that was an excuse, I thought.

  As Dave was leaving, I paused at the bottom of the stairs and listened for a sign of activity from on high. “If things don’t work out with Lucy,” I said, “and she doesn’t get along with the other cats, or she never comes out from under the bed, we may have to give her back to you.”

  Dave nodded. “Oh, sure.”

  But he knew as well as I did that we were stuck with Lucy now.

  MY JOB WAS more harried than usual the next day as I churned out a last-minute Christmas sale newsletter. I managed to finish and fling myself out the door before the clock finished striking noon. Back home, Moobie stared at me from the welcome mat as if she had been there the entire morning. Before she could steer me into the bathroom or the kitchen, I sidestepped her and headed for Linda’s study.

  She was seated on an orthopedic cushion paging through one of several knickknack catalogs scattered across her desk. “Do you think Jack would like this frog that croaks at you when you walk past it?”

  “I’m sure he would.” My brother-in-law loved things like that.

  “You don’t think it’s stupid? I never know what to buy anybody.”

  I went upstairs to check on Lucy, who remained under the bed until I filled her bowl for the second time that morning. When she finally straggled downstairs shortly before dinner, Moobie took a wide detour into the bedroom closet, while Agnes made a snarling feint in her general direction before retreating to the basement.

  I searched for a way to approach the subject gently. “Have you been petting her?” I asked Linda. “When I bent down to rub her ears a little while ago—well, it seemed like she kind of nipped me. But I might have just bumped my hand on one of the bed springs.”

  “She bit me this morning out of the blue.”

  We must have been misreading the situation. Lucy was simply suffering from a bout of unease in an unfamiliar house. Surely a cat that we had saved from the animal shelter—especially a cat that Dave had described as “very affectionate”—couldn’t wait to shower us with gratitude. I told myself that it would be just a couple of more days until Lucy’s love for her new owners started to flow.

  Chapter 3

  Out in the Sticks

  Dinner was even more harried than usual. Bella decided to squawk instead of eat, Dusty methodically transferred his veggies into his water bowl, and I had to dash outside to figure out what was upsetting the geese. After we finally covered the cages for the night, I assumed that the drama had ended. But a theatrical sigh from Linda indicated otherwise.

  “What’s this?” she asked, bending down near the litter box. She touched her finger to a circle of liquid on the linoleum, raised the finger to her nose, and grimaced. “Which ungrateful cat peed on the floor again?” she asked Lucy.

  “I bought the biggest litter box I could find this time.”

  “You’ll have to get a bigger one.”

  “They don’t make them any bigger,” I said. “It’s for pet bison. It holds three hundred pounds of litter. That ought to be big enough.”

  Lucy had long ago gotten over her initial uneasiness to disperse her bad disposition throughout our house. In the beginning, she distributed her impressive bulk across the floor smack-dab in the middle of the highest traffic spot she could find, forcing humans, animals, and cross-country buses into a wide detour. After Christmas, she transferred the load to the dining room chair near the front door. Taking over this humble seat of oak, she had turned it into her throne. No one could pass without being subjected to her withering judgment and the frequent slap of a front paw.

  “We’re talking about you, Lucy Caboosey,” I said.

  She was awake and in what passed as a good mood when I approached her chair. She rolled onto her side, curling her paws demurely and letting her eyelids sag in a seductive invitation to pet the lovable kitty’s chest. I grabbed a hind foot instead, rolling her completely over on her back, where she balanced like a beetle that had tumbled off a downspout. She held completely still in that position, purring with half-open mouth, ecstatic that I had eased her into her favorite posture for striking out with her fangs.

  “Why do you want to fight with the people who love you?” The trick was letting go of her foot and jerking away my hand before the snap of her alligator jaws caught me. I won for once, though I counted my fingers to make sure.

  She hadn’t turned out to be the bright addition to our household that I had expected. She reminded me of the Yakitty Yob toy robot that I had begged my parents to buy me for Christmas as a child. By sticking an arm into Yakkity’s back and working the levers, you could make his eyes roll, arms open and close, and mouth move. I figured he would add much-needed color to my anemic personality. But I enjoyed my sky-blue plastic companion for barely a week.

  “You got what?” Alan Jaglowski asked me during fourth-grade recess. “That’s for babies. Tarte plays with baby toys!”

  For the next several months, Yakitty Yob gathered dust on my bedroom shelf as a nagging reminder of my bad judgment. My mother would catch me staring glumly into space in my rehearsal for adult depression. “If you’re bored, why don’t you play with that Yob doll you wanted so much?” she’d say.

  Linda’s growing disappointment with Lucy not only pricked my guilt over having lobbied for the cat, but it also poked this ancient psychological boil.

  “She thinks that as long as she stands in the litter box, she’s using the litter box. She backs up all the way with her rear end hanging out into space. Do you suppose she’s doing it on purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how she thinks.”

  If she was missing her litter on purpose, and there wasn’t a medical reason behind the behavior, it could mean she was unhappy about her living situation. On the whole, she seemed as content as any cat that slept twenty-two hours of the day. But during her waking moments she had never approached either of us with anything resembling affection, and that struck me as odd.

  “You’re not paying the rent,” I told Lucy, wagging a finger at her face from a safe distance.

  “Paying the rent” was how our cats justified staying beneath our roof. Agnes paid the rent with the currency of cuteness. Occasionally, she tossed us the gratuity of letting us pet her and by tagging along when we took walks down to the river. She also snagged the o
ccasional basement mouse. Moobie paid her rent by dint of having one green eye and one blue eye, which I found alternately charming and disquieting. She socked away pillowcases full of rent credit by snoozing next to me, waking from a sound sleep and switching on the purr machine, and by showering us with the coinage of her sweet personality.

  Although Lucy’s large round face verged on pretty, she rewarded my praises with a sucking-on-a-lemon look. In her favor, she had come to us with a pretty pink collar, and as far as I knew, her fangs didn’t carry venom. But the list of negatives was longer. She wasn’t nice. She had stolen a chair. She didn’t like us or our other cats. She barely tolerated the touch of a hand unless her teeth got in the act. And she loved the Tom DeLay episodes of Dancing with the Stars. In short, she was a cat who didn’t even come close to paying the rent, and her litter box misses had put her even more in arrears.

  “I’ll call Dave tomorrow afternoon and see if he had the same problem with her.”

  “And make him take her back.”

  “Okay,” I said halfheartedly, but I had already made a promise to myself. I would do everything within my power to make Lucy like me. And if I couldn’t get her to like me, I would do the next best thing: I’d outsmart her in the litter box department.

  DAVE NO LONGER sat across from me each morning at work. I would have been surprised if he had, since he had taken a new job on the other end of town—a more interesting position that paid better, he claimed. But I knew this was an excuse. The real reason he had quit his job was because he couldn’t bear to face me after inflicting a fat nippy nuisance of a cat on us.

  “She’s doing great. Everything’s just fine,” I told him on the phone in a voice dripping with sarcasm. I had just finishing wiping the floor behind Lucy’s box before Linda could discover the latest mishap. “We don’t even mind that she bites us at every possible opportunity.”