Homer's Odyssey

by Gwen Cooper

  I don’t think Homer cared very much for being groomed by Casey, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter if he was unfortunate enough to wind up trapped beneath one of her large paws, which Casey employed to keep a squirming Homer in place while she licked him “clean” from top to bottom. If I wasn’t there to separate them, a thoroughly rumpled Homer would end up drenched in dog saliva and spend the next half hour indignantly licking himself free of its odor.

  No matter how well you think you understand a pet, there’s always a level on which the workings of their mind remains a mystery. I couldn’t tell you how Casey, who was intensely loyal to our entire family, understood that Homer—a cat—was one of us. But she did. When Homer reached seven months of age and was brought to the vet to be neutered, Casey, according to my parents, sat at the front door and howled for twenty minutes after Homer was taken off in his carrier. When Homer returned, it was Casey who spent two full days guarding the gate that separated her from a groggy, stitched-up Homer. If a car outside backfired or the mailman rang the doorbell, Casey—who had never been anything but affectionate with everybody she’d ever met—raised her hackles and issued a low growl of warning. Whenever Homer turned or whimpered in his sleep during this recovery phase, Casey would yelp an alert, a signal that meant I really ought to check on him.

  It took Brandi a bit longer to warm up to Homer. Brandi had a favorite habit of hiding the dog treats my parents gave her in various corners throughout the house. It was infuriating to her that Homer unfailingly sniffed out each and every one of them with the tenacity of a bloodhound. But Brandi was a playful little thing, as was Homer, and she soon discovered the joys of having a playmate who didn’t tower over her the way Casey did.

  The two of them killed many an hour chasing each other throughout the house, and soon Brandi was even sharing some of her treats with Homer. Her favorite food was baby carrots, and she’d bring them to Homer by the dozen, dropping them at his feet with a wagging tail. She could never understand why Homer’s only interest in the carrots was to bat them around and chase after them. Who didn’t love eating baby carrots? When Homer would fling them down the hall with his paw, Brandi retrieved them with great patience, depositing them in front of Homer once again and even taking a small bite as if to show him what he was missing. See? They’re for eating, not playing.

  Homer’s frequent escapes also brought him into closer contact with my parents. Soon enough, it wasn’t unusual for me to come home in the evening to find Homer purring on the couch next to my mother while she stroked his back and worked on a crossword puzzle or watched an old movie. “He looks so comfortable,” she would say, almost apologetically. “I didn’t want to disturb him.”

  And I would catch my father awkwardly petting Homer—realizing that the way cats like to be petted is different from dogs, and doing his best to smooth Homer’s fur in an even, soothing fashion. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s such a good boy?”

  Homer often brought his stuffed worm along with him when he engineered one of his breakouts, the Bonnie to his Clyde. It became a featured player in his interactions with my father. Homer would toss the stuffed worm up into the air, his head tilted at a slight angle as he listened for the bell in its tail to hit the ground and jingle its precise location. Then he’d pounce on it ferociously, turning onto his back with the worm clutched between his front paws while he kicked at it frantically with his hind legs, as if to indicate the worm was putting up a fierce struggle. Having finally “subdued” the bedraggled thing, he would carry it over to my father and drop it at his feet—sitting eagerly in a posture that suggested he was waiting for my father to throw the worm across the room so Homer could wrestle it into submission and bring it over to him once again.

  “He wants to play fetch with me!” my father would say, as if this dog-like behavior was a revelatory code understood only between the two of them.

  It was during one of these games of fetch, a couple of months after Homer was neutered, that my father turned to me and said, “You did a good thing, you know.” He threw the worm for Homer to catch and, as he watched Homer tear across the room, he said it again. “You did a good thing for this cat.”

  My eyes, quite unexpectedly, filled with tears.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  10 • Running on Faith

  I saw Sisyphus at his endless task, raising his prodigious stone with both his hands. Straining with hands and feet, he tried to roll it up to the top of the hill, but always, just before he could roll it over onto the other side, the pitiless stone would come thundering down. Then he would begin trying to push it uphill again.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  I WORKED HARD OVER THE NEXT YEAR AND A HALF, STARTING OVER again at the entry level career-wise. I worked internships, freelance jobs, low-paying jobs, no-paying jobs, and anything else that had the slightest chance of adding another line of experience to my résumé. To augment my alarmingly slim earnings, I took additional work tending bar at some of South Beach’s more upscale hotels and restaurants—the kinds of places that were likely to close at two AM rather than five AM, granting me a decent shot of at least a few hours’ sleep before once again pounding the pavement the following morning.

  There were moments of great optimism—a three-month freelance gig with one of the most prestigious PR firms in Miami, which I hoped would eventually lead to a full-time position; a job assisting in marketing and publicity for a cabaret series of legendary Broadway stars that ran on Miami Beach. I even helped out with fund-raising events and press opportunities on behalf of some of the nonprofit organizations I’d cultivated relationships with over the years, this time working in a PR capacity rather than an administrative one.

  But there were also days when I felt profoundly discouraged. Full-time PR positions in Miami weren’t as plentiful as I’d hoped, and my short-term jobs tended to end as soon as the project I was working on did. Sometimes I told myself that the whole idea of a career change had been a foolish one, that it was obviously impossible for me to start over and actually be successful, even in the very narrow terms by which I would have defined success (i.e., being able to pay rent on a smallish, reasonably well-located apartment). I seemed to have nothing but friends of about my own age with exciting careers and great apartments, who had assistants and expense accounts or who were making down payments on their first condos or houses. There were times when I arrived home so exhausted I could cry, with nothing more to show for my day’s efforts than the bag of catnip I’d picked up on the way home for Scarlett, Vashti, and Homer.

  Homer, by now, had officially transitioned from kittenhood into a full-grown adult cat—although he’d stopped growing around the time he was neutered at seven months, weighing in at a slight three pounds. Homer wasn’t short so much as he was narrow and delicate of bone structure. He was lean and sleek, and he walked with a sinuous, leonine grace. When carrying his stuffed worm, Homer would clamp his jaws around what would have been its neck, allowing the rest of its body to dangle between exquisitely formed, exquisitely tiny front paws, making him look like a very small and very dark tiger dragging home a fresh kill. His fur was always groomed to such a high gloss that he seemed to cast light instead of a shadow. Lying in a patch of sunlight, its blackness gleamed cobalt. In repose he was like a sculptor’s vision of the archetype of a cat, chiseled in perfect black marble.

  He was still active to the point of hyperactivity, still in love with running in circles and bouncing off the walls, causing my mother to refer to him affectionately as “a little goofball.” He still loved to leap, climb, and explore. But whereas he used to do these things with the reckless imprecision of one who might miss his mark but doesn’t care, Homer now moved with the supreme physical confidence of one who knows that falls and failures simply aren’t possible—like a ballet dancer who, after years of training, doesn’t have to think about how to land flawlessly.

  It was Homer’s confidence that, in my most disheartened moments, also ma
de me feel the most ashamed of myself. Wasn’t Homer the cat who wasn’t supposed to be able to do anything? To meet new challenges or be independent? Wasn’t he the one who’d inspired me once with his willingness to climb as high as he could without knowing exactly how high he was going, or how he would get back down? Every leap Homer took was a leap of faith. Homer was living proof of the adage that fortune favors the brave, that just because you couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  I remembered how, when I’d met Homer for the first time, I’d been impressed with the idea that it was possible to have something within yourself that was strong enough to persevere no matter what. It was an idea that kept me going, even when professionals in my chosen field told me that I had the wrong kind of background and not enough experience, and that despite having a talent for the work, it would be years before I’d land the kind of permanent position I was hoping for. I would struggle against a feeling of panic—if I couldn’t support myself doing this, and I couldn’t support myself doing what I’d done before, then what was I going to do? Screw that, I would think grimly, and there was comfort in the thought. Nobody could tell Homer what his potential was, and they can’t tell me.

  One of the best things I could do to advance my own cause was to make new friends and network. Who knew where word of a great job opening might come from? But I sometimes hated meeting new people during that time. I never liked to admit that I was living with my parents, and the further disclosure that I had three cats (I had friends who delighted in adding this tidbit to my verbal curriculum vitae) drew looks of amazement. Three cats might not sound like a lot to any die-hard pet person, but among people my own age in a place like South Beach I was an eccentric. “Three cats?” people would say. “Three, really?” Even my closest friends sometimes referred to me as “the crazy cat lady,” and I could tell that newcomers were mentally deciding there was nothing less sexy than a twenty-seven-year-old girl who lived with her parents and was, apparently, some kind of fanatical cat collector.

  “Well, the first two were planned,” I’d say in a breezy fashion. “The third one was an accident.” This naturally led to descriptions of Homer and his “special circumstances,” always to an enraptured audience. Inevitably, they would ask if Homer could get around on his own, whether he was able to find food and litter, and then they’d speculate about how unhappy an eyeless cat must surely be. Some would even add, probably not meaning to be unkind, that it might have been better had Homer been put to sleep as a kitten.

  Something inside me would flare up at such displays of ignorance, but ignorance was better fought with education than anger. “He’s a terror,” I would tell these people, with enormous pride. “You’ve never seen such a sure-footed ball of energy in your life.” I had vowed not to be the person who talked too much about her cats, not wanting to be the crazy cat lady people suspected me of being. But as soon as I had recounted one of Homer’s adventures, listeners wanted to hear more, and then even more.

  I tried to remain upbeat during this period in my life, although it often wasn’t easy. Homer could sense when my mood was down. He always paid such close attention to the sound of my voice, listening for the slightest changes in pitch and cadence, and he knew the difference between how I sounded when I was happy, and how I sounded when I was only pretending to be. He didn’t scamper about the way he normally did, choosing instead to rub his face hard against my chin and neck or curl up with me in a spoon position, burrowing as tightly as he could into my midsection, as if he knew my core was where I felt the most hollow. “If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t be in this mess, you know,” I’d say, only half joking. Homer would crane his neck around to lick my nose with his raspy tongue, purring all the louder.

  Sometimes it’s possible to know two completely contradictory things at the same time, and to believe with equal certainty that both of them are true. I knew that I loved Homer to an extent that frightened me, that if somebody could wave a magic wand and give me a million dollars tomorrow in exchange for Homer, I wouldn’t so much as consider taking the deal.

  But I also knew that I’d ended up changing my life for him far more than I had anticipated the day I adopted him. I wanted a life with Homer—a life that afforded him absolute safety and freedom in a home of our own. But I also wanted to have the kind of life most of the friends my age had, the kind that was only semi-responsible—where I paid my bills on time and was conscientious about my job, but beyond that was just a kid in my twenties, throwing parties in my apartment and dating a succession of inappropriate, but nevertheless entertaining, men.

  Perhaps that was why, on occasion, I lost my temper with Homer. If I came home after an eighteen-hour day, for example, to find that he’d broken some treasured knickknack I’d placed on a shelf I’d believed too high for him to reach; or if I discovered that he’d tossed half a bowl’s worth of cat food from its dish into the water bowl—food I’d paid for out of the virtual nothing I scraped by on after putting money into savings for the home we would someday have, food that was wasted and that clotted up the water so Scarlett and Vashti had nothing to drink all day.

  My parents, still half convinced by Vashti’s shenanigans that I wasn’t changing the cats’ water frequently enough, would sometimes sneak into my room while I was out and refill the water bowl for them—never remembering to place it far enough away from the food bowl to prevent these incidents. “You have to separate the bowls,” I’d remind them, in a tone I meant to be patient but that, when I heard it aloud, sounded anything but. I emphasized the word separate and held my hands wide apart, as if I thought visual cues were the only way to drive this point home.

  I never yelled at Homer, not wanting to squander the currency I had in being able to stop him in his tracks if he was about to do something dangerous. If I raised my voice too often, about things he couldn’t understand and that weren’t related to his safety, my authority would, I knew, eventually diminish.

  And even at my angriest, I realized he hadn’t known he was doing anything wrong, that he was only engaging in the antics I loved him so dearly for most of the time. He couldn’t help it if, when exploring a shelf he’d never climbed up to before, he couldn’t see that he was about to knock something over and break it. When he was bored, he couldn’t sit at a window and watch the world go by the way my other two cats loved to do. Climbing furniture or listening to the sound of food hitting the water kept him entertained, and who was I to begrudge him that?

  I never yelled. But when he came bounding over, overjoyed that I was finally home, I would push him brusquely aside. “Why do you have to be so hyper all the time?” The tears of frustration that I knew were too ridiculous to allow myself were nonetheless audible in my voice.

  Homer didn’t understand, but he was perceptive enough to realize I wasn’t happy with him at moments like these. He would hang his head and edge toward me meekly, pawing at my leg with a series of anxious mews. Nothing put an instant damper on all Homer’s joyous high spirits like sensing that I was displeased with him.

  Seeing how crushed Homer was always made me feel like a monster. I would relent within a few minutes, reaching down to rub him under his chin and behind his ears. As soon as I touched him, he would crawl into my lap and all over me, unable to purr or nuzzle enough to indicate how ecstatic he was that we were friends again.

  “It’s not easy being a parent, is it?” my mother said, with a healthy dose of irony, upon finding us in the midst of one of these reconciliations.

  “No,” I agreed ruefully. I looked up at her. “I guess I didn’t always make things easy on you and Dad, did I?”

  My mother smiled. “No, you didn’t,” she said. “But you got better.”

  My parents had fallen hard for Homer by this time. I would hear my father on the phone with friends and business colleagues, boasting of Homer’s latest exploits. “And he’s blind,” he’d add at the end of each anecdote, as if he were positive the person on
the other end had never, in all his born days, heard of anything so extraordinary as a blind cat who could play fetch or find his way to a can of tuna located all the way at the top of a kitchen counter. My mother loved to compare Homer with her friends’ cats. He has so much more on the ball than Susan’s cat, she would say, referring to some cat-owning acquaintance of hers. Susan’s cat never knows what’s going on.

  “Your father and I always say that if anything were to happen to you, and you couldn’t take care of the cats anymore, we would take Homer,” my mother informed me, out of nowhere, over a Sunday breakfast.

  I furrowed my brow quizzically. “Like what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” my mother replied. She buttered a piece of toast. “I’m just saying if, God forbid, something happens …”

  “If something happens like … what?” I repeated. I tried to envision the calamitous accidents and life-threatening illnesses my mother was so obliquely referring to.

  Or maybe she meant that I might decide Homer was too much trouble, that I might not want to take care of him anymore. Perhaps she and my father were doing that thing parents do—trying to relieve me of a larger responsibility than I should, in their minds, have to cope with at this point in my life. Maybe they were attempting to give me a graceful way out.

  In my own childhood, my parents had often snapped at me or lost their tempers in ways I had found inexplicable and bewildering. Sometimes, I thought, you could end up resenting someone in direct proportion to how important it was to you to make them happy. The resentment was second only to the devastation you would feel if you lost that someone altogether.

  Homer and Casey were sitting a few feet away from the breakfast table, side by side, at rigid, rapt attention. They tried not to appear conspicuously as if they were begging, but they were obviously hopeful that a few table scraps might find their way over.