by Bob Tarte
On my way upstairs to check my e-mail, I scanned the floor behind the litter box and was pleased to find it dry. Then I investigated more closely. Somehow the narrow rim of the upside-down utility tub that I had bolted to the right-side-up one—a channel no wider than a third of an inch at most—was filled with liquid. Yet she hadn’t spilled a drop on the linoleum. Drawing upon incredible natural talent, Lucy had achieved the feline equivalent of Annie Oakley shooting the pip out of an ace of spades while astride a pair of stallions.
I called Linda into the room to show her this once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-witnessed-again feat. “That’s the second time she’s done that this week,” she said.
LINDA WAITED EVERY morning for an overloaded UPS truck, but I had completely forgotten about her pending shipment of landscaping foliage until two weeks later when I trundled in with our mail in one hand and two bags of lettuce for the ducks in the other. “My trees and bushes came,” she said. “Did you see that little tube?”
“I haven’t had time to see anything.”
“That cardboard tube—about twice as fat as a Christmas wrapping paper tube.”
Following her finger, I noted a flattened cardboard cylinder on the floor with shoe prints on one end as if it had been ground under a heel. “That’s one sorry tube,” I said as I took a step toward the living room to snatch the binoculars from my dresser drawer. I had just heard the zee-zee-zee-zoe-zee of a black-throated green warbler and wanted to ogle it before it moved on. But Linda blocked my path.
“That dinky little thing is what all my trees and bushes came in.”
“How many tubes were there?” Only half listening, I considered ducking under her arm and slipping past. We rarely got a single warbler all by its lonesome during spring migration, and I was chomping at the bit to discover who else was in the yard.
“One tube. There’s only one. My trees and bushes are nothing but these.” She held up a stick too miserable to make a decent parakeet perch. “This one says ‘hydrangea.’ Another one that looks identical or maybe even worse claims to be my peach tree, if you can even read the label. They’ve probably got a little office, and when you call in and place an order, they count out some wet twigs from a vat, write out tags, and ship them to some poor unsuspecting person who was expecting beautiful plants.”
“Will that thing even grow?”
“If you’ve got fifteen years.” At the base of the stick she tweaked a tiny vegetative beard swaddled in plastic wrap. “It’s called bare root. The lady on the phone claims that the circular clearly states that all the plants they ship are bare root.”
“What happened to your ‘grandma lady’?” I made another feeble effort to slide by.
“This was somebody mean sounding who said I should have read the fine print.”
“I’d send them back.”
“I can’t. If any of them don’t grow, I can return them, but they won’t refund my money. All they’ll do is send me another stick.”
“I don’t remember seeing any note about bare roots, and I’m sure you would have noticed it, if there was one.”
“You probably need a microscope to read the dumb thing.”
“Do you still have the flyer?” I followed Linda into her study and turned the brochure inside and out. But there wasn’t so much as a mustard seed of a reference to the exchange of cash for soggy twigs. “Granny lied to you,” I said.
Finally at long last making it to my dresser to grab the binoculars, I was primed to find the black-throated green warbler when Lucy’s glum expression slowed me down. She had somehow managed to implicate the dining room chair in her bad mood, and I could sense invisible particles of unhappiness streaming toward me. Suddenly I felt guilty that she had never manifested the slightest glimmer of pleasure in our house. Any other cat would have rolled around in glee at causing her owners the amount of trouble that she had inflicted upon us, but to all appearances we were suffering in vain. “Sweetie, what more can I do for you?” I asked.
In the great scheme of things—measured against a backdrop of war, pestilence, or other cats, for example—she wasn’t so terrible. Moobie and Agnes were hardly paragons of good behavior. Moobie had very occasionally mistaken our bedroom rug for the litter box, and 99 percent of Agnes’ affectionate outpourings were manipulations in the service of scoring a treat. In her favor, Lucy was rarely underfoot, had yet to set a paw upon the basement stairs, and would never consider expending her limited energy reserves by hopping up onto the bathroom vanity for water. She was extremely economical in her begging, too, demanding food with a single curt meow and a wobbling march toward her bowl.
“You’re okay,” I told her before breaking outdoors into the sunshine, and she was. Apart from the biting, the surliness, the lack of affection for us, the disdain for our other cats, the chair thievery, the bold incursions into the dining room, and the lousy bathroom hygiene, she was just this side of perfect.
ALONG THE RIVER from the crowns of maples and from leafless thickets I was excited to hear unfamiliar songs. But every bird that I caught in my binoculars turned out to be nothing more exotic than a chickadee, titmouse, or goldfinch, and I swore that some of them were smirking at me.
My neck hurt from supporting my foolish head in a variety of awkward positions, and my back hurt from hauling two fifty-pound bags of poultry feed out to the barn. I took a hot shower and eased down flat on my back on the living room floor in front of the so-called entertainment center.
I felt a house-shaking thud and then the play of paws in my wet hair. I had already let Agnes outdoors to harass chipmunks, and Moobie was snoozing on the bed. That only left Lucy. I made a courageous leap of faith. I reached behind my head to pet her, although chances were excellent that she would bite me. But I didn’t want to turn around and risk spoiling our first moment of shared affection. No nip came as I rubbed the fur around her collar. In fact, as I scratched her neck, she licked my forehead and purred, pushing her face into my hair.
“You’re not any trouble,” I said. “You’re just being Lucy.”
My efforts forcing her to like me hadn’t gotten me anywhere. I didn’t need to sit with my back against her chair and garland her with praises. I didn’t need to pet her when she wasn’t in the mood, shake a mousie toy next to her ear, or drag her around in a laundry basket, either. I didn’t need to bribe her with tuna or let her hide beneath the dining room table. As it turned out, all I had to do to win her heart was to scent my hair with pine tar–based antidandruff shampoo.
This event turned into a daily routine. I’d take a shower after dinner, and with a clipped “mew” Lucy would call me on the carpet, commanding me to lie down on the floor for her evening aromatherapy and neck massage. When she grew tired of inhaling my hair, she would stroll down to my opposite pole, flopping down perpendicular to my feet and hooking a front paw around my ankle. I was expected to stay prone until it suited her to leave. If this wasn’t love on her part, at least it passed for a positive interaction.
Chapter 4
Fred Mertz Meets the Mummy
Although I had gotten Lucy to like me by happenstance rather than by design, I still considered it to be a triumph of my coddling her versus Linda’s commonsense approach. But even a moist-eyed sentimentalist like me would think twice about taking in another cat after living with Lucy, so it was fortunate that Frannie’s arrival on our porch was still months away. As Halloween crept up on us, another cat calamity was beginning to unfold. This time I thought I could stave off disaster by outsmarting one of our cats, though I should have known better.
The trouble started small, as trouble often does. It started small and red.
It started as I wrestled with a bundle of corn shocks that were heavier than I was. They threw me to the ground a few times as I struggled to tie them to a tree. Before that, I had hung a stuffed ghost from the branches and found a light bulb for the plastic pumpkin that winds walloped against our steps each year. I didn’t dislike any of these rituals
so much, at least not compared to the horrors of trying to carve a decent jack-o’-lantern. Linda’s would look like a work of art. Mine would resemble a drawing by a blindfolded child.
I was racking my brain for a way to avoid this embarrassment when a spooky red spot appeared among Linda’s hostas and drifted across the lawn.
“Moobie, you’re not supposed to be outside,” I told her. Our basement door must have failed to close again and she had gotten out.
The red spot near her right shoulder had first shown up as a blemish a month ago. It hadn’t seemed like anything at first. But incessant licking had transformed a pinkish bump into an angry sore that stood out against her white fur like a bright red LED. A few years ago, our big pet rabbit Walter had developed a tumor on his shoulder that had begun as a small red spot. It turned out to be cancer, and it did him in. I was already nervous about taking her to the vet the next day.
Moobie slipped through my hands as I reached down to grab her, evading me with unexpected nimbleness considering she was now fifteen years old. Being out in the wild had a transformational effect on the most staid and chair-bound house cat—excepting Lucy, of course, who only lumbered out to sleep in the sun. Moobie and Agnes changed into wild-eyed primal creatures once they received an unfiltered jolt of the outdoors. They became hunters, but it was more than that. The outdoors energized their contradictory impulses, making them by turns furtive and at ease, bold and awed, madly affectionate and more disdainful of people than usual. The effect was just short of supernatural, but it really was nature, pure and simple.
A lithe and fluid Moobie skimmed the ankle-deep fallen leaves as I plowed through them at her kitty heels. She passed through the fence while I fumbled with the gate, then bounded up the steps of the side door, begging to go indoors.
FEW EVENTS IN life caused me more stomach-churning trauma than driving a pet to the vet. Our animals never acted as if they appreciated the honor of a jaunt in my Ford Focus, though a goose had patrolled the backseat with flapping wings and seemed excited by the trucks that passed us on the freeway. Our most macho African grey parrot squeaked pitifully in the car, and while our rabbits never uttered a syllable of complaint, they busied their front paws scratching furiously at the carrier, trying to dig their way back home. But it was always the cats that made the biggest fuss.
Moobie howled constantly on the short trip to see our kitty vet Dr. Ziaman. No amount of wheedling, cooing, or clucking noises would reassure her. Her cries were so loud that a man in a pickup truck pulled onto the shoulder waiting for an emergency vehicle to go by. “You’re okay, honey. We’re almost there,” I told her as I poked my fingers through the front grate of her carrier. She rubbed her face against them and was quiet for a few hundred yards.
Moobie and I traded psychological spaces once we were inside the building. I was the one who wanted to howl. Waiting rooms have never failed to unnerve me, even for nothing more life threatening than a haircut. The minutes perched on a hard-backed chair in Dr. Ziaman’s lobby ticked by with the slowness of a glacial epoch. There were two ways to cope with the waiting room blues. One was wearing the ink off a magazine as I flipped back and forth through the same few pages. The other was staring at a spot on the wall until the rest of the room dissolved around me.
At least these particular walls provided a bit of seasonal stimulation. Colorful cutouts depicted a black cat curling its body around a jack-o’-lantern, whose carefree smiling face I never could have carved. A bat flapped close by, sharing airspace with a spider. The cardboard ghost had frightened himself over nothing. I couldn’t help noticing that he had my weak chin and pointy nose.
I reached inside the carrier and extracted Moobie with the idea of comforting her, though I was actually trying to comfort myself. I wanted to knead her fur between my fingers, feel her squirm on my lap then settle down, and hear her purr. But she refused to settle down, and the purring part was out of the question. She thrashed her legs until I managed to squeeze her back inside her carrier. Even as I resolved not to worry about the red spot, an unruly chunk of my brain decided to revisit every unhappy pet diagnosis I had ever received.
A vet tech rescued me, directing me to an examination room for another wait between frozen clock hands. Dr. Ziaman’s voice in the corridor lifted my spirits. When she walked in, she lit up the examination room with so much cheerfulness, I marveled that she didn’t snuff me out like a candle, leaving only a wisp of smoke where I had stood. Hopping off the counter, Moobie headed for the nearest corner of the room and compacted herself to the diameter of a saucer. She was typically unperturbed around people but distrustful of the veterinary profession. I didn’t imagine that the dog yips and wall thumps from the room next door were helping to put her at ease.
“Moobs, what’s going on?” she asked. “How are you, Mr. Tarte?”
Briefly but vainly hoping I’d been the “Moobs” so enthusiastically addressed, I activated Mr. Tarte’s skinny arms to scoop the cat up off the floor. She suddenly didn’t mind being held as an alternative to being set down on the examination table. I pointed out the red spot on her upper front leg.
“Well, it looks like cancer, but it would take a biopsy to make sure,” Dr. Ziaman told me. “If it is cancer, she’ll need to get it removed.”
At another round of wall thumps from next door, I laid my hand on Moobie’s back. “She’s too old for that. She doesn’t do well with anesthetics. Isn’t it possible that it’s just a mole or wart that’s been there forever, but she’s bothering it now for some reason? I’m thinking that if she left it alone for a while and it didn’t get any worse, she might be okay.”
“We could try that for a few days,” she said, compressing more animation and positive energy into a single nod than I had dribbled into my entire life. “We could try her with an Elizabethan collar and give the ulcer a chance to heal.”
“An Elizabethan collar?” I imagined the classic drawing of Shakespeare with Moob’s face in place of Will’s.
“It fits around her neck and sort of looks like a funnel. Some people call it the satellite dish.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t see putting her through the misery. “What if I tape up her leg to keep her from getting at the boo-boo?”
“I don’t think you’d be able to keep a bandage on her,” she said. “Cats are really good at undoing things.”
I resisted telling Dr. Ziaman that I was far cleverer than any cat; it struck me as too obvious to have to say. But I could be excused my misconceptions since Moobie hadn’t yet demonstrated just how clever she was.
As I ferried the white howler home, I reassured myself that Dr. Ziaman was wrong. Wrong that the little red spot was cancer, and wrong that I couldn’t keep the little red spot of cancer from getting worse by taping it up.
OUT OF THE fifty-some animals that lived in our house and in two outdoor pens, we had paid money for very few. Most had knocked on our front door, tiny cloth suitcase in hand, because they had nowhere else to go.
Moobie had been evicted from Linda’s son Ben’s house because he and his wife supposed that Moobie might be the trigger for their daughter’s juvenile asthma. She stayed briefly with Linda’s mom, who was getting too wobbly to take on a permanent pet. So I drove back from Battle Creek to Lowell with one hand on the wheel, the other hand clapped over an ear, Linda in the backseat, and wailing Moobie in the front. Before I had pulled the key out of the ignition, Linda had already penned an irresistible cat-for-adoption ad for our local weekly newspaper.
We were certain we would find Moobie a good home, which indicated our level of naiveté in the cat rescuing game. If you run a classified ad for a free parakeet, bunny, or even a pet duck, you will definitely get some calls. But if you advertise a cat, it’s as if your phone service has suddenly been cut off. You’ve never been so lonely in your entire life. Just about the time you’ve given up, you’ll get one, and only one, response. But the adoption is doomed to fail. Either your new best friend will turn a nose up at
your cat at the last minute, or you’ll realize you would rather send your kitty to the salt mines than surrender her to such a villain.
Or there may a hyperactive child involved. The woman who professed that she had always wanted a white cat with one blue eye and one green eye sounded promising on the phone. Her soft-spoken manner turned out to be a negative, though. Moobie scooted off to hide as the woman’s two-year-old girl chased her around the rocking chair in our living room while the mom clucked her tongue. The clucking escalated into a sharp expulsion of air as the tyke pursued Moobie upstairs and earned a vigorous growl from Agnes. Seconds later, as the strict nondisciplinarian comforted her sobbing child, Linda told her, “We’ll get back to you”—as in, We’ll get back to you in the next life when Bob and I return as Martian colonists.
We held out hope for a second applicant, putting out the word to everyone that we needed a home for a nice cat. Friends left to learn flamenco dancing in Spain. E-mail acquaintances abandoned their ISPs. Even telemarketers stopped calling for fear that we would ask them. When Linda ran another ad, the happy twittering of songbirds faded into stillness. The river behind our house dried to hard-baked mud. As cobwebs enveloped our front door, the unexpected happened. We fell more in love with Moobie than we did with the notion of giving her up.
She had won us over with her good nature. When I’d walk into the living room after a long absence of, say, twenty minutes, she would be so thrilled to renew my acquaintance that she couldn’t constrain herself to the floor. She’d hop up to the back of our couch to increase her visibility and thus her chances of being petted. She radiated joy throughout our house.
