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

by Bob Tarte

  Agnes was none too happy about her presence, though. She growled at Moobie whenever she intruded upon the ever-changing invisible boundaries that defined Agnes’ territory. Moobie responded like Gandhi, refusing to retreat—especially from the feed bowl in the hall. Upon emptying the dish, she would turn herself into a pudgy cloud and airily pass by the hissing offender.

  I had wanted a cat like Moobie with one green eye one blue eye all of my life, even though I hadn’t known it until she arrived.

  WHEN WE FIRST got Moobie, it had been hard to hold myself back from teasing her about her roly-poly architecture. “Little pink ears, little pink toes, big pink belly, little pink nose,” I used to tell her as I poked her stomach. Just in time for Halloween, I needed a different kind of incantation now, a spell that would make the red spot disappear.

  At the store down the street, I braved the Aisle Blockers and emerged with a roll of magical tape that stuck to itself but not to any of the other elements in the periodic table. It had to be magic, because it consisted of empty space held together by a mesh that was “flesh tone,” according to the packaging, but only if you happened to be a sun-broiled Caucasian.

  I placed a small gauze pad on Moobie’s upper leg as she snoozed on Linda’s pillow. Then I added a few windings of the magical tape, snipping it and smoothing it into place, neat as a bud on a branch. As I sat back to admire my handiwork, Moobie blinked awake, shook off her fog of slumber, and shucked off the bandage as easily as I would pull down a sock on an energetic day.

  I caught her in midair as she hopped off the bed, and I shut the door with my foot. I returned her to Linda’s pillow until I had fabricated a wider bandage. It was far less tidy than my initial effort, because a wide-awake Moobie squirmed a half-dozen times for every twist of the tape. When I had finished, I let her go, and she spun off like a spring that had suddenly sprung. With tooth and claw she did her best to undo my deed, but the bandage held.

  “Sweetheart,” I called, striding triumphantly into the dining room, where Linda was changing the parrot cage newspapers. “I’ve solved the problem of Moobie licking her leg.”

  “You have? How?”

  “Come take a look.” I led her into the bedroom and stood back so she could experience an unencumbered view of Moobie vigorously licking the sore on her leg with my bandage bunched around her foot like a bootie.

  “We should say prayers for her,” Linda suggested.

  “And for me. A special prayer for patience.”

  “CAN WE CARVE our pumpkins after dinner?” Linda asked in a plaintive voice which indicated that I had already put her off as long as possible.

  To take my mind off my troubles with Moobie, I had been busy thinking of ways to spare myself this seasonal humiliation. In the process of trying to come up with an excuse like a sudden wrist sprain, an innovative sculpting method had occurred to me.

  Once we had finished eating, after Linda had mopped the floors and played with Dusty, and I had vacuumed the dining room and given Bella her night-night treat, and Linda had refilled the birds’ water dishes, and I had covered the cages, and Linda had scrubbed the countertop on which Howard the dove had eaten diced spaghetti, and I had minced chunks of chicken and fed them to the cats, Linda brought in her globular pumpkin, and I fetched my elongated ovoid pumpkin.

  As Linda sorted through the jar lids, twist ties, and packets of take-out food chopsticks in the silverware drawer in quest of the perfect knife, I scampered down to the basement and scurried up again with the cordless drill that I had already fitted with a one-inch spade bit. My burst of creative composition was short and sweet. To the music of a soft electro­mechanical whirring, corkscrews of orange-colored pulp spun away and dropped onto the kitchen countertop. Before Linda had even finished sketching out her design, I had already bored four holes in my pumpkin respectively representing the eyes, nose, and mouth. My jack-o’-lantern done.

  “That’s really cool!” she said as I showed her the minimalist face. While my creation literally wouldn’t hold a candle to the classic Norman Rockwell jack-o’-lantern that she soon brought to life, I had avoided the usual drudgery while also managing to forget about the red spot for a little while.

  Riding high from my modernist breakthrough, I tried a different approach to bandaging Moobie. Using up the remainder of the magical tape, I swaddled the full length of her leg from her ankle up to just below her shoulder. Refusing to trust the weak molecular bond of the mystery material, I secured the top and bottom with plain old commonplace run-of-the-mill adhesive tape. When I was finished, she did her best to pull off the wrap, but she couldn’t locate a loose end to unravel and had to settle for listlessly burnishing it with her tongue. I triumphantly ushered Linda into the room, and she beheld a cat stymied by human ingenuity.

  “I’m sure glad the bandage worked,” I told Linda by way of bragging just before we went to bed. Moobie had moved her base of slumber operation from our bed to the couch and showed no signs of struggling against the tape.

  “Don’t you think you should take her to Dr. Hedley for a second opinion?” He was the zoo vet who had successfully treated several of our critters.

  “We don’t need to,” I said. “Give this a couple of days, and you’ll see a tremendous change.”

  The next morning I was awakened by a familiar scratching at the bedroom door. We didn’t need an alarm clock with Moobie in the house. She wanted water at the sink or canned cat food—or she simply wanted me up at 5:30 AM in ample time for us to share the 7:12 AM sunrise. But when I opened the bedroom door, Moobie had vanished in the gloom. She hadn’t left without a trace, however. At the spot where she had been standing, she had left the leg wrap as a memento.

  I NEEDED TO get away from Moobie and reconsider my strategy, which is how Linda talked me into leaving the house.

  Living outside of the village limits, we received an average of zero trick-or-treaters each year, which was a lower number of costumed tikes than what it took to please Linda. If the revelers wouldn’t come to us, she would find them among the Halloween decorations in town. Under the dim glow of streetlights, this gave her a chance to see kids dressed as the latest video-game entities wearing heavy winter coats.

  “Should we put the rabbits back?”

  “No, they’re not hurting anything,” I said as Frieda rubbed her chin against a chair and little round Rudy huddled disguised as a coconut. “We’ll only be a few minutes.” I was wrong on both counts, of course.

  “OH, LOOK AT THAT HOUSE. That’s an incredible decoration.”

  Linda, who had been lying flat on the backseat for the sake of her sacrum, sat up and glanced out the window. “That isn’t a decoration, that’s the gas station.”

  I was marginally interested in finding over-the-top Halloween bad taste to rival Christmas exhibit excess, but nobody covered their lawn with phony tombstones or projected the image of a fanged Elvis on the side of their garage, as I’d hoped. The displays were pretty low-key. Flickering orange lights and undulating air-filled jack-o’-lanterns competed with the darkened houses of holiday haters, whose total lack of décor I envied.

  “We might as well give up,” I said.

  “Just one more neighborhood,” Linda said.

  Several just-one-more-neighborhoods later, my warnings about Linda’s ensuing back pain allowed me to zigzag us home again. As we got out of the car, I admired the New Guinean tribal mask aesthetic of my pumpkin. But when we stepped onto the porch, we realized something was terribly wrong. “What’s that smell?” asked Linda. “The living room is filled with smoke!”

  “What did you do?” I demanded as I fumbled the key in the lock, visions of asphyxiated parrots dancing in my head. “Did you leave something on the stove?”

  Linda barreled ahead of me, checked to make sure the parrots, parakeets, and dove were fine, then chugged back into the living room, where the white smoke was concentrated. Frieda hid behind the coffee table with her ears flat against her head. When she noticed th
at I noticed her, she thumped a hind foot to express her dissatisfaction and slunk out of the room at record slinking speed.

  “No, I didn’t leave anything on the stove,” Linda said.

  She propped our light-up ghost in front of the front door to hold it open. I extended a leg to block Agnes and shut her in the basement, since I didn’t think a black cat ought to be running around outside on Halloween. It just seemed like bad luck. As the smoke dissipated, Linda walked stooping, braids waggling like a pair of bloodhound ears, as she sniffed her way to the cause of the combustion. “The carpet’s charred over here.” She went down on one knee. “And the bottom of the bookcase is burnt.”

  “It’s the power strip,” I said. “It melted.”

  She was almost lying on the floor. “The rug is wet right here.”

  “How could it be wet?” Then I remembered Frieda. Out of all the places for her to take a bathroom break, she had decided on the eight-outlet surge protector, causing a massive short. “That’s the last time they’re allowed out while we’re gone.”

  “She may have started the fire,” Linda said. “But she also put it out.”

  FRIEDA’S FIREBUGGING PLUNGED me into a foul mood that was 50 percent depression and 60 percent anxiety. The combination simultaneously drained my energy and overstimulated me. Moobie’s expertise at stepping out of any bandage I concocted didn’t improve my outlook. One day too late for the holiday, I had turned into a full-blown crab.

  As I trudged through the living room, I passed Linda stretched out on her usual spot on the floor atop her faux-sheepskin rug. Lucy was immune to the charms of my wife’s hair and always let her lie in peace. Linda was telling the story of our near immolation to some friend or relative on the phone—or to a grandma lady employed by a shady nursery. “It could only happen to us,” she said. “It’s like something out of the I Love Lucy show.”

  In the bedroom I found Moobie in her usual position on the pillow and decided to wrap her as she had never been wrapped before. I ignored the magical mystery tape in favor of a brand new weapon in my bandage arsenal: a roll of plain old gauze. I wrapped her leg from elbow to shoulder, looped the gauze twice around her chest so that the legging couldn’t slide off under any circumstances. Then I tied both ends tightly.

  “Stop fighting me. I’m trying to save your life,” I told her as she struggled to get away.

  Close to morning, a pang of fear woke me. It started as a clenched feeling in my stomach, spread through my limbs, and made itself at home in my brain, where it stuck to passing thoughts like a huge refrigerator magnet. I obsessed over Moobie, Linda’s back, politics, money, the cluttered upstairs, and whether I had remembered to latch the goose pen door. The worry made me weary, and I collapsed back into sleep.

  The next time I lifted my head, our bed had been transported to an old-fashioned Hollywood soundstage. Propped up on pillows, Linda and I watched I Love Lucy on an ancient black-and-white TV. Laughing somewhat menacingly, Fred Mertz marched around the perimeter of our bed dressed in a white shirt and with his pants hitched high. I was mildly surprised to find him in the room, but I was more perplexed that Ethel wasn’t with him.

  “William Frawley and Vivian Vance didn’t get along in real life,” I told Linda in the dream. “Maybe that’s why she isn’t here.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. Throwing himself onto the mattress, an enraged Fred Mertz clutched me in a bear hug, pinning my arms and growling in my ear. I squeaked out a laugh, hoping that his foolery was part of the show, but he squeezed me harder until I could barely breathe. Finally, the iron grip loosened and I managed to work one arm free, and then the other. Rolling over, I threw him to the floor. Awake at last, I checked the time on my digital watch just to ground myself in ordinary reality.

  Apparently the dream was therapeutic. As Linda slumbered on, I all but floated above the mattress in a state of bliss that an archangel would envy. Liberated from the Fred Mertz side of my personality, I felt refreshed and in my first good mood in weeks. I hadn’t realized just how much tension I’d been carrying around until I had thrown it to the floor. He had been really, really scary. Leave it to my unconscious to skip over all the Hollywood monsters—Frankenstein, Dracula, Shirley Temple—only to terrorize me with a negative projection of myself.

  I CHANNELED THE buoyant Lucy-Ricky side of my psyche as I toiled at the usual morning drudgery, struck by the newness of each experience in my worry-free frame of mind. I paused while emptying the dishwasher to admire the cleanliness of a fork. I spent an extra moment talking to Dusty, calling him “Mr. Bubby” and “the great big bean burrito,” then asked Frieda if she’d started any fires recently. Linda padded into the kitchen to make coffee as I diced grapes and a piece of pear for Bella. “I’ve decided what I want on my tombstone,” I said.

  “Why are you thinking about that now?”

  “I’m not. But I was thinking that I want it to say, ‘He could cut up fruit really small.’ ”

  My lofty mood grew even more elevated when I turned on the bathroom spigot for Moobie and noticed that she hadn’t managed to slip off her Fred Mertz of an iron-gripping bandage. I was proud of my work until she teetered on the toilet. A glance at her leg explained the reason why. I had wound the tape too tightly, cutting off the circulation. Her leg and paw had swollen to almost twice their normal size. Horrified, I scissored off the gauze and checked her over to determine if she needed to be rushed to the vet. Unconcerned, she scrambled up onto the sink, rubbed her head against my chest, and stuck her face under the faucet.

  “What did I do to you, sweetheart? I’m so sorry.” She didn’t require an apology, though—she just required her water. Since her mobility wasn’t impaired, I knew that the condition wasn’t serious and the swelling would soon go away. But I still felt guilty and vowed that my bandaging days had come to an end.

  Over our morning coffee, I told Linda what had happened. “You’re right, she should go to Dr. Hedley,” I said. If the zoo vet could give a hyena an appendectomy—which I presumed was what he did on a typical day—he could certainly help us with a sore on a cat’s leg. “So now we’re right back where we started, back to square one,” I said. “It’s like watching a rerun.”

  “The I Love Lucy show,” Linda said, echoing her remark from the previous day.

  But I had to disagree with her. If my life resembled a bad Hollywood production, it was something far scarier than a sitcom. “Not Lucy,” I told her as Moobie hobbled in. “More like The Mummy’s Curse.”

  Chapter 5

  The Funnel of Happiness

  A most unwelcome sound awoke me in the morning.

  Buf, buf, buf, buf, buf.

  I tended to sleep so lightly that I had bought an oversize watch just for checking the time overnight without my glasses. The dial light allowed me to chronicle the exact second when the creak of a floorboard roused me. I checked it now, plunging the room into an eerie green luminescence. Just as I had suspected, it was too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up and start chopping up fruit. I wasn’t eager to jump-start the day, since I would be taking the white howler to see Dr. Hedley in the afternoon.

  Flump. Flump, flump, flump, flump.

  It was an abrasive, disconcerting sound. If you had never heard it before and didn’t know what it meant, you’d be tempted to pry open your window and make a break for the neighbor’s house. I heard the noise every morning and knew exactly what it meant, and I was still considering bolting into the woods.

  Run, run, run, run, run.

  I tried ignoring it. Surely if I didn’t answer Moobie’s summons, she would tire of beating a tattoo on the drum of our bedroom door. I hoped that Linda might get up and shoo her away, but she had once slept through a car crashing into a tree at the edge of our front yard.

  Dolt, dolt, dolt, dolt, dolt.

  We had tried locking Moobie in the bathroom overnight with a blanket to curl up on, but she generated a wall-piercing wail that even managed to penetrate Li
nda in the Land of Nod. I suggested letting her roam the basement with scads of mice to keep her company and piles of laundry for bedding. But Linda had talked me out of confining an arthritic cat to a space that turned into a cold dungeon nine months of the year. So we were serenaded with bongo solos every morning a few minutes either side of five thirty.

  The accuracy of Moobie’s chronometer amazed me. Whenever daylight saving time kicked in or faded out, I shunted from room to room adjusting clocks and hourglasses, but Moobie would be confused about the time change for exactly one day—the Sunday morning of the change. By Monday morning she had corrected her internal Bulova to clamor for my services at the usual time.

  Come, come, come, come, come.

  Instead of letting her lead me to faucet or feed dish, I decided to simply let her inside the room. In all the years that we’d had her, it was remarkable that this option had never occurred to me before. Chances were excellent that she would relish snuggling up against the boniest portion of my leg, giving me an extra twenty minutes to fantasize about life on a cat-free tropical island. It seemed that I’d succeeded as she parked herself against my shin.

  The next moment she was thumping my head with her timpani-banging paws.

  Time to get up.

  I OFTEN WISHED I had a family physician like Dr. Hedley. He could deliver the worst news with reassurance, and his expertise was encyclopedic. He had diagnosed a microscopic skin parasite with our bunny Frieda that another vet had missed, and he had also performed delicate pancreatic surgery on my sister Joan’s ferret Beethoven. Almost as appealing as his bottomless pit of knowledge was his treasure trove of tales from his decades as a zoo consultant. During routine visits when no critter’s life or epidermis was at risk, he would let me steer him through an archipelago of zoological anecdotes.