Cat Abuse

The veterinarian who set aside Fred for us and suggested we take a look at her is a nice enough fellow. He even stopped us in the parking lot of his office the day we adopted her, stroked her little head, and gravely informed us, “She’s a good one.”

In our subsequent visits to his office for Fred’s booster shots, however, we’ve been getting his assistant, a pinched-faced middle-aged woman I don’t particularly care for. Every visit starts out with a false note when she looks at the little kitten trying to scramble away from her and says, in the voice that sounds like a creaky old millstone grinding gravel into dust, “Frederica!”

“It’s just Fred,” The Mont will correct.

“Let’s see how you’re doing, Frederica,” she’ll say, ignoring him. Then the interrogation will begin.

I don’t have a problem with the vet asking questions about the cat’s health and behavior. That’s their job. What I don’t like, with this particular woman, is the accompany tone that somehow manages to imply abuse and mistreatment with every syllable, accompanied by the insinuation that the moment she slips out of the room, she’ll be calling the SPCA anonymous tip line to have Fred taken to a shelter. “Does she groom herself?”

“A few times a day,” I’ll say.

“I suppose her mama taught Frederica well,” she’ll murmur, giving my beard and wild hair a look that can only read as, since she certainly won’t be learning grooming from you. “And how is her appetite?” she’ll ask.

“Healthy,” I’ll say, trying to keep it brief.

“Hmmmm.” There will be a long pause while she looks over the cat’s frame. “She is on the lean side. I suppose from all the exercise.” Or the beatings you give her, her tone conveys.

“Oh, she gets plenty of exercise,” The Mont will say, trying to be friendly. “She’s always running around, getting into the Christmas tree. . . .”

“Oh?” The doctor will raise an eyebrow. “She likes the tree, does she?”

The Mont, unaware that the vet is using her Do you know how many innocent kittens are killed by Christmas trees erected by their negligent owners every December? voice, will keep on talking. “Yes, we had to take all the decorations off this year because she kept pulling them off.”

“Is it a metal tree?”

“Well. . . .”

“So she’s ingesting parts of this metal tree?” the doctor will ask, making rapid notes.

What I really want to say is something along the lines of Yes, it’s a lovely uranium ore tree frosted with lead paint and liquid mercury for that extra festive holiday sparkle, but instead I stick to a curt, “No. She does not ingest the tree, or any part of it.”

“Because that can be dangerous,” the vet will say, seeming to hope I’ll give in and confess to thrusting the branches down the cat's throat in an attempt to keep Fred’s lean frame top-model thin.

“Yes, I’m sure,” I’ll murmur, rubbing Fred’s ears. And the doctor, frustrated in another attempt to take away a helpless kitten from her evil and abusive owners, will sigh, jab Fred with a needle, and tell us to come back in another three weeks.

I hate to think what’d she’d say about this morning, when I had to pluck a guilty and gleeful Fred, still trembling with excitement, from the very top of the Christmas tree. She might be a good one, as the real vet informed us, but she’s not a good one.

HEY BUDDY!

During the week and a half that Fred’s been with us, she’s managed with her winsome eight-week-old looks and her pitiful mews to convince the other cats that she’s not a kitty axe murderer. She’s disruptive, it’s true. When she’s in wildcat mode, there isn’t a twitching tail she won’t pounce on, or a crotch she won’t lunge at with fangs bared and claws extended. It’s as if she's a crack assassin trained by the military to go for the ‘nads, particularly when her one of her owners is casually standing around the kitchen, not expecting to find a tiny kitten scrambling up his pants leg.

Sarah, through hissing and growling, has made quite clear her limits when it comes to Fred’s antics. If she’s not in the mood to be used as a grappling dummy, she’ll growl the moment Fred walks into the room. At the same time, she’s also a lot more tolerant of the kitten than she is even of Chloe, with whom she’s lived for nearly a dozen years; even when she sees Fred napping in the crook of one of my arms, she’ll join us on the sofa where I’m working and occupy the other. Yesterday she even hopped up onto the bed where she saw Fred and I relaxing, curled up against me, and allowed Fred to chew on her tail for a good twenty minutes.

It’s Chloe, though, that Fred really likes. Whenever Chloe walks into a room where Fred is pretending to nap, Fred’s enormous ears will perk up, levitating the rest of her head. Hey buddy!, you can practically hear her say. What’s going on? Hey buddy! Hey, buddy, buddy, buddy! Hey! Hey buddy! It’s your buddy, buddy! What’re we doing, buddy! What’re you doing? Hey, buddy! Let’s do something! Hey, BUDDY! HEY BUDDY! Then they’ll be off, shooting across the house with a skittering of their claws on the living room wood, followed by the thuds of their bodies colliding into the furniture, rasslin’ like wildcats. Chloe mostly loves it. When she doesn't, she hops up onto one of the high places as yet inaccessible to the younger cat, letting Fred gaze at her adoringly.

Yet I think my favorite times with Fred—other than the moments she’s sleeping and purring and not requiring me to figure out what trouble she’s causing—are mealtimes. Fred eats with such lip-smacking, zesty gusto that it’s impossible not to laugh. Especially when she looks up at me, food decorating the fur around her little mouth, blinking with such gluttonous happiness that it’s clear she’s saying, OH MY GOD YOU GUYS HAVE THE BEST FOODS I HAVE EVER TASTED IN MY LIFE!!!

Way too much cute

My last two and a half days have been pretty much kitteh-centric. There’s a lot of work involved in introducing a half-pound scrap of fur to the household. We’ve had to make sure she’s shuttled to the litter boxes in the basement every few hours, to pry her off the curtains, and to rescue her after she’s made heroic leaps onto the slippery tops of my pyramid-shaped glass panel lamps. There’s been a considerable amount of following her around to see exactly what trouble she’s going to try to get into. When she’s not in the room, I feel as if I’m straining my ears in a constant attempt to figure out where she is and exactly what she’s playing with.

Both yesterday and Sunday evening I was wiped—I mean, lying on the sofa, knuckles scraping the floor, eyelids drooping at seven-thirty plumb tuckered out. But we’ve made a lot of progress. Fred knows where the litter box is, now, and how to get there on her own when she needs. She’s able to navigate on all three stories of the house and find people in it instead of mewing pitifully like she’s Little Orphan Kitty. And last night she had her first open-door bedtime in the grownup person’s bed, a test she passed with flying colors. So maybe I won’t feel quite so exhausted, the rest of this week.

This morning I was sitting on the john when Chloe trotted into the bathroom. She’s always been a bathroom cat; when someone is in there, she’s right beside them, begging for water from the faucet or attempting to open the cabinet doors and investigate their contents. As usual, Chloe walked into the little room with a welcoming cry and a squinch of her eyes. Almost immediately, like a deranged feline Jack-in-the-box, Fred popped her head from my pants, where she’d been making a hidey-hole in my underwear. Chloe recoiled in horror, hissed involuntarily, then sat back on her haunches when she realized it was only tiny little Fred. Glaring at me, she let out a disgusted, adolescent huff. It was as if I could almost hear her growling to me, “Jesus christ, that kid is everywhere!”

(And no, I don't intend to turn my journal into Kitty Picture Central, but my household has experienced a critical cuteness overload in the past couple of days.)

Oh hai!

Her name is Fred. She’s seven weeks old. And she’s been with us since Saturday afternoon.

God, I’d completely forgotten how tiring kittens can be. It’s all bounce bounce bounce attack invisible dust on the floor claw her way up the drapes to the top drop down to the chair below run like crazy chase her tail bounce bounce pounce on the cat toy zip from the living room to the den and back again and hunker down and waggle her behind threateningly at Chloe before ending up back on the sofa.

Then, without warning, her head will grow extremely heavy and drag her down into a sudden nap.

Minutes later, she’s up again, bouncing and running and zippling and leaping and clawing her way through the house like the Tasmanian Devil, a little whirlwind of fur and hoise and wild eyes.

She is a very sweet kitten, a lap cat whose favorite spot to rest is on one of our chests, or perched on our shoulders. When she’s affectionate, she’s fond of butting her head against our faces and purring furiously. She has proclaimed the cat food we server in the kitchen absolutely deliskusk, and makes sure we know it by licking her chops loudly after every trip to the kitty buffet. She sleeps through most of the night, purring loudly in a tight ball by my face.

So far, there’s been an uneasy detente between Fred and the older cats. They scrutinize her constantly and have a tendency to growl when she comes too close, but they’re not actively beating her up. And last night, all three of them lay on the bed with the Mont and me while I was chatting with my dad on the phone—Fred purring in between us, Sarah purring on my chest, and Chloe at the foot of the bed in a doze. After a mere twenty-four hours together, I’m declaring the progress good. Even if today, Fred’s pleasure lies pretty much solely in hiding places and leaping out at Chloe whenever she passes.

Don't touch the meat

The thing about my food phobias is that they make perfect sense.

I’m not talking about simple food dislikes, such as my aversion to liver or to lima beans (better known as Hemorrhoids of Satan). I don’t mean not liking sweet and sour anything. (I mean, what’s the point, there? It’s usually all sweet and not at all sour.)

I’m not even talking about my inability to eat a dish that contains—pardon me while I shudder—peas. Peas that must be removed one at a time and stacked at the plate’s side, while everyone else stares at me while they chew. I’m sorry for the pea lovers out there, but I find the things insidious.

No, I’m talking about actual culinary events that, when then moon and stars misalign and cause disaster, or when destiny catches up to punish me for my misdeeds, causes me to recoil from the plate in front of me as if I’d been served a healthy, glistening portion of Hannibal Lecter’s leftovers.

Case in point: ketchup juice. And of course, its condiment cousin, mustard juice. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re making a sandwich. You’ve perfectly toasted two slices of bread and you have ready the turkey or what have you, the lettuce, the thinly-sliced tomatoes, the salt and pepper. But before you slather the browned bread with all your sandwich ingredients, you reach for the bottle of mustard, turn it upside down, squeeze . . . and then you discover with dismay that your perfect toast is now covered with the thin and runny snot-colored liquid that’s accumulated on top of the mustard. It’s no more appetizing when you’re anticipating a hamburger and you squirt reddish, vinegary ketchup spooge all over the pristine bun. Not even vigorous shaking can always prevent it.

Food chemists of America, please prevent this travesty. What are we paying you for?

When I go out to the first meal of the day with friends, I am always roundly mocked for my second and more debilitating food phobia. Usually before the order actually arrives. Here it is: I cannot stand—I cannot stand—for maple syrup to touch my breakfast meats. There, I’ve admitted it. I’m a breakfast food segregationist. Let them stay separate, but equal. But just make sure that they’re separate, first and foremost.

I regard with abject horror the encroachment of a pool of syrup from its stack of pancakes upon a few innocent slices of bacon. What did the sausage do to deserve being covered with something so sticky and sweet? All it wanted was to be delivered to the table with its crispy, seasoned goodness intact. There’s nothing inherently wrong with syrup. I like it on the pancakes or the French toast or the crunchy waffles. I like it very much indeed. I just want to scream, however, when I see the stuff spreading past what should be its boundaries. Rather than let a drop sully the meats, I’ll perch them precariously at the plate’s edge, or remove them entirely to the little dish with the toast. I’ve even been known to make a sanctuary for them on a neatly-folded napkin, all while my friends watch me in amazement.

“It all ends up in the same place,” they’ll point out. As if I haven’t heard it before, or as if it’s an entirely new concept. I know it all ends up in the same place. I know it all ends up in the same place! Maybe I’ll just remind you that it all ends up in the same place next time I invite you over for dinner, buster, and serve your pumpkin pie and salad and lasagna freshly liquified from the blender, after I’ve make you spit in it several times. I mean, all that’s going in the same place too, isn’t it? Huh? HUH?

So. Like I said. The thing about my food phobias is that they make perfect sense. Y’alls are just plain weird.

Catalogs

It struck me last week that I was almost criminally indecisive when it came to selecting a college. I don’t know why it took me, what, twenty-six years to realize what a pain in the ass I must have been, but there it is.

Like any other middle-class parents—and maybe even more so because they were college professors themselves—my mother and father began obsessing about my college years early. When I was roughly twelve, they began shuttling me to the dozens of extracurricular activities that would look good on my college resumé. A year later, they were plotting how to get me through high school in three years. And by the time I was fifteen, I was seeing some kind of freelance counselor who specialized in matching bright students with the perfect colleges.

I’d actually forgotten about that counselor until something dislodged a cupboard door in my cranium the other day and a pile of university catalogs came tumbling out. It was those very catalogs that I’d had to take home in huge, heavy stacks. After asking me obvious questions like, “Do you prefer small, intimate classrooms, or large classrooms with lots of students participating?”, or “How important to you is the coeducational experience?”, the counselor would grab armfuls of the things into a Richmond Public Library book bag and I’d cart them home to look over. “It’s your decision, after all,” she’d tell me.

I liked the catalogs. I enjoyed looking at their glossy covers and their photographs of happy, pretty students strolling with book bags under impossibly blue skies. I liked the notion that it might be possible for me to attend school somewhere exotic, like New Mexico or Idaho. I enjoyed reading each school’s mission statement that, though largely identical to the next and the one before it, somehow managed to convey the notion that only they could educate me in a manner befitting my industrious mind. And I particularly liked the course descriptions, even of classes I knew I’d never take, like organic chemistry or Russian language studies.

But I didn’t really choose. My parents gave up on the counselor and spent an entire summer driving up and down the east coast to college campuses, where I’d go on interminable tours and glower sullenly at residence halls and not even try to assimilate the differences between campuses. Through some alchemical process—and it’s really a mystery how it might have happened, since toward the end of the grueling ordeal I communicated only through grunts and shrugs—we managed to winnow down the stacks of catalogs to a handful. And from those, I applied through the early admission process to two: Duke University, where my parents had met and where I’d been born, and William and Mary, where my dad had gone to school.

I was accepted to both, and got the letters at roughly the same time, right after my last semester of high school had started. My parents suggested I accept them, and pull out of one when I’d finally determined which one really suited me. “It’s your choice, after all,” they said, over and over again. Since I didn’t want to make the decision at all, that was fine with me. I simply didn’t decided. Graduation came, and I hadn’t picked. The universities began sending my new student orientation packets, and I still hadn’t picked a winner. I even was assigned a dormitory and roommates at each school, and two weeks before I was due to arrive somewhere, I didn’t have a clue where I was going. I don’t even think I was aware that I should’ve been worried.

I can only imagine the hand-wringing that must have gone on behind the scenes. Neither of my parents was exactly a loosely-strung person, especially when it came to education. They didn’t pressure, though. Maybe they sensed what I suspect now: that the act of not choosing was probably my way of attempting to control what I felt was a runaway situation. Avoidance has been my lifelong solution to stressful situations. I dig in, hunker down, and wait for the turmoil to wash away. It really was my choice, after all, and perhaps I wanted to prolong what felt like the only part of the entire affair in which it felt like I had control.

Eventually, of course, I picked. No momentous occasion. I don’t even remember making the selection—which is a little odd, given that years of counseling and planning and plotting and reading and writing and work had gone into that one little nod at the catalog with the colonial brick buildings gracing the cover. I simply shrugged, made a final determination, and showed up two weeks later.

I used to wonder what might have happen if I’d chosen different catalogs—if I’d ended up in New Mexico, or New Hampshire, or Washington State. These days, I know better. I adapt and survive all kinds of climates and situations. I try not to fret about where I’ll end up, these days. What I need to remember is to make my choices before their destinations heave into sight, so close upon the horizon.

Sunbird

Our older cat, Sarah, spends her days following the sun. In the early mornings, after breakfast, she can be found upstairs in the spare bedroom. There she’ll snooze on the corner of the bed that meets the front window, curled up tightly in a ball so that every inch of her body lies within the slanting frame of light streaming through onto the blanket. Shortly after she’ll travel downstairs and from the back of the living room sofa, absorb what light she can there.

By late morning she’ll have migrated to the top of the staircase, awaiting the moment when the sun has moved to the house’s side and a stronger wash of sun floods the stairs. She’ll sleep there until the early afternoon, when I’ll find her beside the refrigerator in the kitchen, stretched out into a long furry line that perfectly matches the narrow split of light extending across the tiles. The rest of the day she’ll spend in the den at the back of the house, trying to stay warm in the weakening patches of light filtering through the maple branches and down through the skylights.

And then at night, of course, she’s sitting on top of one of us for warmth. If I’m on my computer, she’ll be sitting on my chest, purring up a storm. Or else she’ll be curled up next to the Mont, meowing with sleepy irritation if he dares to shift position.
Night before last I had a series of dreams that seemed to last for hours, in which I was having to carry Sarah wherever I went. I lugged her to the supermarket, to a car dealership, and to a dozen other places where my wandering mind took me—and all the while she pressed her chest against mine, her front legs hugging my neck in the way she does when she’s showing affection. Then I woke up and found her sitting directly atop my chest, staring down at me in the early morning light.

It’s a nice life.