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

by Bob Tarte

  “She can be a real queen bitch, that’s for sure,” he said, laughing—and I assumed that the term queen bitch was a euphemism for “very affectionate.”

  I described Lucy’s toilet troubles. “Oh,” he said, “We didn’t use the litter box I brought you. We used a big plastic box that our Christmas wrapping paper came in. Even then, she overshot it. It didn’t matter much, since her box was in the basement.”

  Reasonable people like Dave would hide a litter box in the cellar or tuck it into a corner of the bathroom. But Moobie was too arthritic to trek down a flight of stairs, and we reserved the only open corner of our bathroom for our feet. So by default I had placed the box on the open corridor that ran along one side of the living room. On the other side of the room where carpet and less sound judgment lay, we put a second litter box for the rabbits on top of an array of plastic carpet runners. At least Lucy had stayed away from the bunny box so far.

  “Any chance your dad still might take her?” When Dave answered no, I experienced a twitch of relief. If we got rid of Lucy before I could get her to like me, I would feel like I had failed. And to some degree I might even miss her, which seemed to speak well for the cat. On the other hand, I had suffered a pang of regret after sweeping Yakkity Yob off my bedroom shelf and cramming him into a drawer. That feeling had quickly passed.

  “What did he say?” Linda asked after I hung up.

  “He misses Lucy. He wants to stop by sometime just to hang out with her.”

  “Good grief.”

  I couldn’t imagine what hanging out with Lucy would entail, unless it involved a bandage and a mop. Dave obviously appreciated a side to her that I hadn’t yet seen. The planetary sphere of cat lay on her back with her legs sticking straight up in the air, ready to box or bite even while fast asleep. If that continent of crabbiness possessed a temperate region, it would take a team of explorers to find it.

  CHRISTMAS WAS LONG gone by now—as far in the past as dry hallway linoleum—and I knew I wouldn’t find a carton of wrapping paper at the store. Even if I did, I’d end up gift wrapping Lucy and plopping her onto a stranger’s porch. The thing to do instead was grab the widest, longest utility tub available, low enough for Moobie to hop into, but high enough to safely wall-in Lucy.

  I reached this conclusion while sitting on the floor with my back pressed against Lucy’s chair. Some cats that balked at being petted still enjoyed human company, so I was treating her to mine. Three minutes ought to be about enough, I estimated. After less than twenty seconds I realized that leaning unprotected flesh in the proximity of her mouth was dumb. I scrunched around sideways to find her studying me. I had clearly moved just in time. We glared at each other for a while. I didn’t feel the love, but I wasn’t giving up. I began babbling about what a good, good girl she was, and how I had never seen anything more attractive than her gray foot with a cream-colored stripe across one fat toe. She wasn’t having it, however. She clunked down to the floor and headed for Moobie’s kibbles as Linda walked in from outdoors.

  “I’m sick of being in this house,” she said.

  I thought of pointing out the irony of her statement.

  “I hate this house,” she said in case I had missed the point the first time.

  It wasn’t the house that she hated as much as a winter that refused to throw in the shovel in late March. How could a woman whose lifeblood came from the sun-warmed Tennessee hills be expected to put up with it? Her relatives in Hanging Limb were at that moment filling their lungs with the scent of flowering trees as bumblebees bumped along unmowed lawns and Nashville warblers twittered from spirea bushes. While the frigid temperatures barely fazed her, the clouds drove her nuts. It could be zero degrees Kelvin outdoors, but as long as the sun shone, Linda’s mood stayed bright. But a Michigan winter could go weeks without revealing a patch of blue sky.

  As Linda yanked off her leaky boots, Lucy defied gravity and vaulted up onto the entertainment center. She wasn’t athletic—she seemed more mineral than mammal—so to witness her leaping to the top of a three-foot-tall structure in a single bound made me realize anything was possible. It brought to mind the old adage “when pigs fly.” Lying on her side, she displayed a light-brown stomach that was so large, it looked as if a second cat was nestling against her.

  “Why don’t you come to the store with me?” I said. “The produce section is lovely this time of year. You could buy more carrots.”

  Two nights earlier, I had asked at dinner, “Are these carrots all right? They’re sort of whitish.”

  “They were getting too old for the bunnies, so I thought we’d better eat them.”

  I had struggled with her logic as I examined my potatoes. “The carrots aren’t good enough for your rabbits, but they’re good enough for your husband. What about my water? Did it come from Moobie’s bowl?”

  Recalling the carrots didn’t improve Linda’s mood. “I’ve got them on my list.”

  Lucy hopped down from the entertainment center, this time using my hi-fi speaker as a stepping stone and sending it crashing into the wall. “So much for high fidelity.”

  The anticipation of afternoon duck chores may have amplified Linda’s glumness. We suffered more from cold-weather exposure than the mailman, newspaper carrier, and rosebushes combined. When we weren’t chipping ice out of wading pools and dragging a hose outdoors to refill them, we were knocking icicles off sagging pen-top netting and struggling to free barn doors from the grip of the frozen ground.

  While I despised exertion of any description, Linda loved working outdoors in the sunshine. Her favorite job was tending her countless gardens. Worsening back problems had forced her to tinker in them by proxy. She hired helpers for the down and dirty work. But she pulled her weight not only by directing each step of the process but also by maintaining a steady stream of chatter. Keeping the conversation going with Linda was nearly as important to the job as horticultural savvy, and woe unto the helper who lacked the jaw muscles to keep up.

  I knew that gardening would improve her state of mind. But it was way too early to think about the gardens yet, even if I was ready to pitch Lucy out into last year’s rhubarb.

  I DROVE TO the store up the street, parked my car, avoided greeting the greeter, threaded through ladies’ undies, and arrived in the whereabouts of housewares barely realizing that I had made the journey. I had moved on from my preoccupation with Lucy to obsessing about Linda. When bad things happened, such as illness or pet injury, she rarely lost her head, while I rarely got out of mine. She was my rock, my support, my rock collector, my knickknack hoarder, my tofu braiser, my pet pamperer, and I couldn’t stand seeing her upset. Although I couldn’t bring out the sun for her, I could bring home a better litter box. I owed it to her. At least I owed it to the floor.

  In the utility tub section, I discovered a daunting variety of tub widths, heights, and depths. I needed to set one in the aisle and walk around it in an approximate Lucy frame of mind, while staying upright to avoid arrest. But my access to the tubs was thwarted. The Aisle Blockers were out in full force. These were members of a secret organization whose mission was keeping shoppers away from the items they wanted to buy. Usually the Aisle Blockers operated alone. Sometimes they worked in pairs. Once during the holidays, I had witnessed a phalanx of five masterfully clogging up the store entrance.

  In front of the tubs, two carts walled off the litter box–size containers. Next to the carts, two women stood chatting, completing the barricade. “Excuse me,” I said, taking a step toward the tubs, but the Aisle Blockers didn’t even glance at me. “I just need to get over here. Only for a second.” Failing to get a response, I touched one of the carts, hoping to roll it backward ever so slightly. Without interrupting her monologue, the Aisle Blocker hooked her fingers on the cart, preventing me from budging it.

  I trudged off to the pet department and spent several moments gazing longingly at the covered litter boxes, which Dave had assured me Lucy would never use. Even though she would
readily enter a brown paper bag that he would leave out for her on the floor, the privacy of a covered toilet was out of the question. It was probably just as well. Even the largest model appeared too compact for Lucy’s generous proportions.

  By the time I returned to housewares, the Aisle Blockers had rolled off in search of fresh prey. I picked out a roomy utility tub with shallow sides and decided to bring home a toy for Lucy. A fishing pole–type gizmo with a springy wire looked promising until I noticed that the lure at the end consisted of two large feathers. Training Lucy to attack a birdlike object when we had several examples of the real thing in our dining room just felt like a bad idea. I chose a pickle-size, catnip-filled stuffed mouse instead and was about to toss it into the shopping cart, when I made a closer inspection of the rodent’s attractive brown-and-black-streaked fur. It looked a little too much like our rabbit Rudy’s coat because it was made from rabbit fur. I searched for an alternative, hoping I didn’t run into a toy shaped like my hand.

  I found a wooden stick with a small plush squid on the end and stood quietly for a minute, taking inventory of our pets. Nope, no squid. This one was definitely safe. Even better, it was downright attractive. The fuzzy tentacles tickled the hair on my arms and sent pleasant chills throbbing through my body when I dangled it against my skin. I couldn’t keep my fingers off it and hoped that the security camera wasn’t focused on me. I had to have it. I plucked a rabbit fur–free mousie off the shelf so that Lucy would have something to play with, too.

  I BUMPED THROUGH the front door with the utility tub, hoping that the new litter box would improve Linda’s mood. I heard squeals emanating from her study.

  “Sweetie, one of my pen pals sent me a flier from a nursery. They’ve got every type of tree I’ve ever wanted, and they’re not even expensive.” I knew this to be a relative term, but next to a photo of a tiny humanoid presumably named Smithy who was dwarfed by a monstrously spreading chestnut tree, a diminutive price beckoned. “You can hardly buy a flat of impatiens for that. And they’ve got hydrangea, peach trees, cherry trees, flowering dogwood . . .”

  “Good, good, good,” I nodded to a litany of plants, trees, and shrubs, grateful for the change in indoor climate as I backed out of the room.

  “And listen to this,” she said, while I was still within earshot. “They’re located in Tennessee. They might know some of my relatives. I can’t wait to call and talk to them.”

  While I was happy that she had scored a shot of artificial sunlight, I wondered where she would possibly plant any of it. Thanks to our proximity to the river, two-thirds of our property was underwater each spring, so that only left the mowed confines of the yard. I was fine with walling us away from the rest of the world, but I still hoped to be able to walk out to my car without having to hack through the foliage.

  I replaced Lucy’s litter box with the brand new tub. Then, I freed the mousie toy from its protective packaging and with a look of wild excitement on my face vigorously shook the toy a few inches from Lucy’s head. “What’s this?” I asked her. “What’s this?” She lifted her head up. “Get it,” I hollered, “get that thing!” and flung it across the room so that it clattered against the opposite wall.

  I had succeeded in capturing her interest. But it wasn’t the mouse that fascinated her. The manner in which she stared at me suggested that in all of her years living with Dave and in her few months with us, she had never witnessed any behavior so absolutely and utterly foolish. Nothing even close.

  I gave the other toy a halfhearted try, bouncing it up and down and dangling the tentacles in front of her face. I pretended to be undaunted by her rejection, but I wasn’t squidding anyone.

  ALTHOUGH THE NEXT day didn’t get off to a promising start, Linda’s good humor held steady. It was an overcast Saturday, and as I trudged inside from morning animal chores I heard a tussle in the kitchen. An overturned can lay on the linoleum at the base of the refrigerator. The pressure-fit plastic lid, which hadn’t withstood the pressure of impact, had rolled under parrot Bella’s cage. With hearing finely tuned to recognize the distinctive characteristics of tuna-packed-in-oil slopping across the floor, Lucy had materialized to lap up the chemical spill.

  “How did you get in here with the door closed?” Linda said to her.

  “I guess I let her in before I went outdoors.” It was my latest ploy to get Lucy to like me. Snoozing under the dining room table was her latest gesture of defiance toward house rules, and I was helping her get away with it. “She doesn’t even look at the birds.”

  “The other cats might, and when she gets in, Moobie and Agnes think they have a right to be in, too. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already shut this door. And since when are the cats eating tuna?”

  “It’s just an experiment,” I said. I had been hiding the tuna can in the basement refrigerator but must have slipped and put it upstairs with the regular cat food instead. Although Linda had the reputation of being the softie when it came to animals, I was the one who spoiled the cats. I figured that bad behavior would go away if I just made a cat a little bit happier, even though years of keeping cats hadn’t produced a shred of evidence that this was true.

  “I couldn’t keep her out of here yesterday,” she said. “I’d chase her out, and she would scuttle away making this teeny, tiny little ‘mew’ as if I had offended her, but she doesn’t stay offended like other cats. Two minutes later, she comes marching right back in again, as if she’s got every right to be there. She doesn’t even try to sneak. She comes barreling right in. Hi, here I am.”

  As Linda nudged Lucy out from under the table with her foot, Agnes darted up from the basement stairs for an impromptu fight. I carried the squirming black cat into the living room and set her on the couch. The basement and/or dining room door opened and/or closed just long enough for Lucy’s unceremonious ejection. She certainly wasn’t doing anything to advance her standing with Linda.

  MEANWHILE, MY UTILITY tub litter box failed the acid test. “She’s still too big,” said Linda, scrunching up her nose. Just to confirm the identity of the acrid liquid on the floor, she dipped a finger and gave the substance a sniff. Linda had never been squeamish about close interaction with whatever interested her. Once before we were married and were looking at houses, a realtor had been unlocking the door of one that we were about to tour when Linda picked up a stone. Wondering what it might look like when wet, she had licked it.

  The utility tub wasn’t small. If it were any larger, we would have to build a footbridge over it. Clearly the matter required a fresh approach. Returning to the store up the street, I bought a second utility tub exactly like the first one. I cut out the bottom, cut out an opening in the front, and bolted it upside down on top of the original tub to form a perimeter wall that was now twice as high. It would keep the floor dry as long as Lucy didn’t stand with her rear end oriented exactly toward the opening after she had stepped inside. I didn’t regard the upside-down tub’s lip as significant, but I would learn otherwise.

  As I was performing tub surgery in the basement, I heard Linda merrily chatting on the phone upstairs. I could usually guess from the subject matter which one of her friends was on the other end, but the broad range of topics from pets to favorite vegetarian recipes stumped me.

  “Who was that?” I asked, once I had set up the improved litter box and coaxed a few syllables of faint praise from Linda.

  “I met the nicest woman at the Tennessee nursery. She sounded like a grandma lady. The postage is the same no matter how many things you order! The postage is still four dollars. Four dollars. She didn’t know any of my relatives, but she has three cats, and she loves the Lord. One of her sons is over there in Iraq.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Linda held extended conversations with the greeters at the store down the street and knew each of them by name. These were the same women who would bid me “Have a nice day” as I was walking out the door and then snap their heads away so sharply to avoid my reply th
at I wished I owned a piece of the local chiro­practic practice.

  “They won’t ship until the weather is warmer up here. About three weeks, she said.”

  I gave Lucy’s new litter box a proud inspection, satisfied that I had been true to my vow. Although I hadn’t succeeded in coaxing even the smallest gesture of affection from her, I had kept the other half of my bargain with myself. Surely I had finally solved our hallway “bathroom” problems.

  IN THE WEEKS that followed, nobody appreciated the warming weather more than Agnes. She spent every moment outdoors worrying rodents and rolling in the weeds. Even though she lacked front claws, she pursued the squirrels up saplings, dozed in the elbow of our redbud tree, and perched on top of a fence post and glared into the dining room at dinner. This last stunt impressed me. It implied a thought process superior to ordinary begging, which merely involved parking herself in front of a person with food. Her fence-topping behavior meant: my sitting in this unusual spot has a meaning for you that is different from my sitting anywhere else.

  To usher in the start of spring, Linda set out a pair of hummingbird feeders and brewed a quart jar of sun tea on top of the picnic table. I hadn’t realized that a connection existed between the hummingbird feeders and the sun tea until I caught Linda making me a glass of tea. “It’s best when it’s sweet,” she said. She tossed in the ice cubes, then sloshed in a shot of hummingbird nectar.

  “It’s just sugar water,” she told me as my eyes popped open.

  “Is this the sugar water the hummingbirds are getting, or is it the sugar water that isn’t good enough for the hummingbirds?”

  When I buzzed into the living room with my ice tea clutched beneath one wing, I noticed Lucy huddled inside the clothes basket on top of our clean laundry. Recalling Dave’s comment that she loved to ride around on things, I dragged the basket across the rug. She hunkered down as if preparing to leap out, one ear cocked forward and the other folded back. Even though she was poised for action, her low center of gravity made her look less like a cat than a cast-iron tortoise. And she remained in her crouching posture as I lugged the basket in the opposite direction. But spinning it was probably too much of a good thing. Round about the second revolution, she tumbled out, indicating offense by licking a hind leg before assuming her seat of judgment on the wooden chair. I couldn’t claim to have delighted her, but the fact that she had tolerated a brief attempt at playfulness gave me grounds for hope.