by Bob Tarte
Later, as I headed upstairs to my office, she braved the climb to join me. But her Elizabethan collar turned each step into a wall. By trial and error she managed to flop her funnel onto the stair above her and follow with her front feet, only to wind up with the opening of the cone pressed flat against the front of the next stair. Her face was plunged into darkness until it occurred to her to back off slightly and shake her head. A glimpse of the stair above her began the process all over again. It was a painful thing to watch. I held myself back from interfering, deciding that she had to learn to do things for herself. Then almost immediately I relented. She could learn while I was at work when I didn’t have to witness her suffering.
Even on flat, unobstructed flooring, she had a tough time navigating the house. Lacking peripheral vision, she turned too late and collided with walls instead of angling around corners in a slinky feline manner. The cone played havoc with her acoustical perceptions, too. At the rattle of a doorknob behind her, her ears would pivot backward but fail to home in on the noise. She would look from right to left ahead of her instead. I approximated the effect by cupping my hands in back of my ears; the whoosh of air through a furnace duct all at once grew higher pitched and jumped close to my head, skewing my sense of three-dimensional reckoning. Considering how much a cat relied on hearing, it had to drive her crazy.
Despite all this, even from a room away she didn’t have any trouble recognizing the soft plop of a spoonful of canned cat food hitting her bowl. Eating was a problem, though. The lip of her collar bumped against the rim of the bowl, keeping her more than a tongue’s length away from the goodies. Drinking per her usual fashion was out, since I knew her funneled face wouldn’t fit beneath the bathroom spigot. And it wore me out watching her get ready to take a nap. Sleeping meant trying out a dozen positions until one finally struck her as less uncomfortable than the others, until the collar was neither too stretched nor compacted on her neck.
We helped her out as much as possible, carrying her to her destination when we figured out where she was going, lifting her cone off the carpet when she tried to plow a furrow through it, and, of course, holding her food and water dishes—a task which always seemed to fall upon me.
Although she didn’t have to wear the cone twenty-four hours a day, I couldn’t see removing it. Just a few abrasive licks would negate hours of conification, and it seemed cruel to replace the collar once she had enjoyed its absence. It was better that she simply get used to the cone until we could toss it away once and for all.
I BECAME DISTRACTED from my fixation on Moobie when a snowstorm with banshee winds knocked out our electricity. For three days we depended on a sputtering generator for light, heat, water, and toast, and we had to be careful which appliances we ran at the same time, or the generator would cough and threaten to shrug off its mortal ignition coil. The power finally flickered back on, and that was when I noticed a dramatic change in our collared cat. Although the cone still bobbled as she marched across the living room, it no longer dipped down far enough to snag the carpet. And it barely oscillated at all as she trotted up to the so-called entertainment center, where her jar of kitty treats resided.
She had also conquered the stairs. True, she still lurched from step to step in drunken rabbit fashion, flopping her head around like a jack-in-the-box. But when she made it to the top and parked herself next to my office chair in hopes of dispossessing me, I noted a mixture of triumph and entitlement in her that I had never seen before.
She continued to pretend that she couldn’t eat from her bowl unless I held it for her. But later I caught her in the hallway doing her wok-lid impression. She had completely encircled her bowl with the cone and then plunged her face into the food—immersing her in a perfect world devoid of sights and sounds as she crunched away on kibble. But as soon as she raised her head and saw me, she banged her cone against the wall as if I were witnessing the tail end of a terrible accident. She meowed urgently, requesting me to hold her dish.
Moobie hadn’t merely adapted to her collar. She had turned it into an advantage over the coneless beings around her. Lucy and Agnes were intimidated by the catlike being with the weird headgear and gave way whenever she approached, which led to a proportionate increase in boldness on her part. She invaded their territory, taking over a choice sleeping spot on the arm of the couch or sashaying up to me demanding to be the center of attention while I was petting one of them. And while she feigned helplessness at her own dish, she blatantly wielded her cone as a shield while she crunched and slurped their food.
A few days later we were awakened by a sharp rapping at the bedroom door. “What in heaven’s name is that?” Linda asked as we sat up in bed. My first thought was that someone had broken into the house—either a burglar or a woodpecker. Then we heard it again and identified the source. Instead of raking the door with her paws to rouse us, Moobie was using the lip of the cone to bang against the wood. Linda sleepily let her in, and she bounded up onto the mattress toward my pillow, planting her feet on my chest and thrusting her face into mine.
Linda snapped on the light. Inches away from my head, a bright white kitty face swam against a white plastic background, a feline sun burning brightly in a terrible cosmic void—the countenance of a fussy cat goddess commanding tribute from her human subjects. I threw off the covers, shrinking back, fearful that I would tumble, body and soul, into a maw of bottomless desire.
“She actually likes it,” I told Linda with a shiver as we sat on the edge of the bed sipping coffee a few minutes later. I clutched my beloved songbird mug in my hand, but it gave me little comfort as Moobie shot laser-sharp begging looks at me. I had already given her food once and water twice. She was probably holding out for bacon.
“She knows that as long as she’s wearing it, she’s going to be spoiled.”
Howard the dove hooted and cooed from the dining room. The parrots traded morning vocalizations, with Bella struggling to whistle The Andy Griffith Show theme song and Dusty asking, “What does the duck say?” Theirs was a relaxed and innocent world that suddenly seemed far, far away.
“It isn’t an Elizabethan collar. Not to her.” I held my palm in front of Moobie’s face to try to thwart her stare, but she moved two steps, sat down again, and continued to pummel me with her high beams. “It’s her funnel of happiness,” I said.
Chapter 6
The Cats of Winter
Putting the cone on Moobie proved to be a whole lot easier than getting it off her. Quite as unexpectedly as fall turning into winter, moths munching on a favorite sweater, or Lucy finding new ways to overshoot her litter box, she showed poor judgment as her incision healed. We had tried removing her funnel three times since her surgery, but she kept licking the former site of the dreaded red spot and turning the spot red again. So the funnel kept going back on.
As I sat on the couch leafing through a field guide to birds, she hopped up beside me and banged her cone across the pages. Rewarding her with the attention that she craved, I picked her up, set her down on the floor across the room, trudged back to the couch, and continued reading. Moments later she reclaimed her spot and with a few bobs of her head slapped the book out of my hands. I reached into the cone to scratch her ears. Then for the third, fourth, fifth, or sixtieth time that day, I parted the fur on her leg and examined the faint pink hyphen of fully healed flesh where the red spot had once shone brightly. The site had never looked better.
“There’s nothing there but a scar this time,” I told Linda as she breezed by with her binoculars. Sick of the house, she was about to brave the cold and slog down to the river, looking for birds along the way. Back before we were married and long before I ever cared about any animal, she had piqued my interest in birds by pointing out a rose-breasted grosbeak at her cabin up north. I’d been infected with the birding bug, but it took more than the usual nuthatches and chickadees to convince me to abandon the comfort of the house.
“You don’t want to come?” she asked.
As she pulled the bread bags over her socks, I motioned to her to take a peek at Moobie’s leg. “There isn’t even the slightest trace of a sore now. I’m going to take the collar off and she can lick all she wants. She can’t hurt anything.”
Once again I proved to be as accurate as a place-mat horoscope. By lunchtime she had transformed a patch of glowingly healthy pink skin into an unhappy crimson blotch, forcing me to put the collar back on her again.
“Why would you do that?” I asked the giant kitty head, which tried to hypnotize me into shaking out fish-flavored treats. “Absolutely not,” I informed her.
“She’s ruined the fur there,” Linda said as I rubbed my hands together to remove the oily treat crumbs from my palms. “She’ll have to wear that cone until the fur grows back. As long as the area feels weird to her, she’ll bother it.”
“And us.”
SHORTLY AFTER I had refunneled Moobie, the phone rang and I heard my friend Bill Holm’s voice on the answering machine. “I thought I’d dispense cat wisdom, but either you’re out or you saw my name on the caller ID.” I drew a blank at first. Then I remembered. Three or four days ago—an eternity in terms of my limited memory—I had left a message on his machine asking for his advice on the de-coning procedure.
Bill either knew more about cats than any other person I had ever met, or he had deluded me as thoroughly as he deluded himself. Right or wrong, he spoke about all things cat with an air of incontrovertible authority, and he insisted that cats were smarter than people. I still hadn’t decided if this was his way of elevating cats or denigrating people. Probably both.
After we had dispensed with the usual unpleasantries, I recapped my problems weaning Moobie from her collar. “Could she be licking her shoulder because she wants to keep wearing the cone?”
“Cats are convoluted beings, but it’s usually pretty easy to tell what they want—and she wants to lick herself,” he said.
“So what should I do about the collar?”
“Get one for yourself.”
“Get what for myself?”
“If the collar makes Moobie happy, it might lift your spirits all the way up to morose. And you might even get Linda to spoon-feed you.” After a few more minutes of enumerating the benefits of a cone, Bill returned to Moobie. “Put a dab of bottom-shelf liquor on the spot. Try Smirnoff’s. She’ll hate the smell, she’ll hate the taste, and she’ll leave her leg alone.”
“Does that actually work? Have you tried it?”
“Have I tried Smirnoff’s? It didn’t keep me from licking my shoulder.”
“Did you try it on your cats?”
“I’ve got better things to pour it on than Zoey or Zippy. But there is a liquid that you can buy to keep your cat from licking itself. I think it’s got ‘sour’ in the name. But it isn’t ‘whiskey sour’ or I’d know about it.”
I SHOULD HAVE done the smart thing and called Dr. Hedley for advice. But I was embarrassed to tell him that three months after Moobie’s surgery we still hadn’t completed the defunnelification process. Instead I decided to consult with my sister Joan, who had owned cats for decades.
At Joan and Jack’s house, I peered out onto the porch and spotted three cats that I had never seen before. “You can look at them, but you can’t go out there,” she said. “Jack can. He practically lives there. And they’re getting better with me.”
I was shocked at the notion of having cats that couldn’t be visited without a special kitty visa. But until the new arrivals had passed a feline leukemia test, they couldn’t join house cats Linus, Winston, Libby-Lou, Finnegan, Max, and Gizmo. “We don’t know how we’re going to get them to the vet,” Joan said. “They’re feral and have never been touched by anyone. The mother cat would shred me if I tried.”
Joan and Jack lived in the city. A quarter of a mile from their house was an abandoned boxcar where the neighborhood strays hung out. A gray adult had been lurking in their backyard teaching two kittens to decimate the local bird population. Jack started feeding the cats and letting them sleep in the garage. But it was getting below zero at night, so he decided to catch them.
The gray-and-white youngster that Jack had named Milo lay on his back under the kitty climber flailing his feet at his caramel-and-white sibling, Carmelita. Ember, a calico adult, watched them from the top.
“I started camping out in the kitchen and checking the live trap every hour on a wireless video camera I bought,” Jack told me.
“You watched them on a video camera?” Linda asked.
“I was afraid that if a cat got caught in the trap overnight, it would freeze to death, because it can’t move around enough inside the trap to stay warm. I caught little Milo right away, and he started crying when I put him on the porch. The gray adult and Carmelita bolted and wouldn’t go near the garage again. So I bought a second trap, put one in the backyard and one in the driveway, and spent a week on the couch getting up every hour. Finally I caught both of them at the same time in the backyard trap.”
I stared harder at the scene on the porch. “I don’t see a gray adult cat.”
“Funny thing,” Jack said. “I ended up catching Carmelita and this cat I’d never seen before. But Milo stopped crying and ran right up to her, so I knew she was his mom, the one we named Ember. I’m trying to get them used to being around people. I bought one of those cheap DVD players, and I sit out there with them watching movies.”
“So you bought a wireless video camera, two live traps, and a DVD player for the sake of three cats that you can’t even touch,” I said.
“And a kitty climber,” Joan chimed in. “Don’t forget their kitty climber.”
“And I was about to ask your advice,” I said. When I explained Moobie’s problem, Joan told me that Bill had been on the right track after all. “You need a spray called bitter apple,” she said. “It tastes so bad they don’t want to lick the spot. The only time it doesn’t work is if they lick off the bad taste and then keep on licking.”
As we plowed back home through snowy streets, I couldn’t help gloating a little about Joan and Jack. “I’m not criticizing their good intentions,” I said to Linda, “but why would you take in even a single cat that was so wild you could hardly get near it?”
I ADMIRED JACK’S ability to formulate a plan and act on it. I’d spent a lifetime stuck in formulation mode. Linda was the initiator of activity in our house and rarely met a problem that she couldn’t solve by assigning it to me. But in spite of hourly reminders from her, two days after visiting Joan I still hadn’t gotten around to getting the bitter apple spray. Getting it meant having to go somewhere and talk to someone, which violated my ethics of inertia. Guilt would eventually spur me to act, but in the meantime I redeemed myself by rolling off the couch when Linda said, “Agnes wants to go out and I’m busy with Moobie.”
I followed Agnes down the basement steps. Typically she would dash outdoors, linger a scant moment in the winter wasteland, and then beg to come back inside to score a treat from me. Both of us could follow the routine in our sleep. But this time when I threw open the door, the air was so cold that it blasted her into immobility. “Go if you’re going,” I told her when she refused to budge. I retreated shivering to a tiny circle of warmth that clung to the furnace.
She took exactly one step through the doorway. As soon as the dainty little pads on the bottom of her paw hit the ice, she zipped back inside. But instead of heading for her dish to await the spoonful of canned cat food, she raced up the stairs and ducked under the dining room table. Threading herself through a thicket of dining room chair and table legs and past the bird cages, she planted herself in front of the side door. She was certain that the miserable climate outside the basement door was the fault of a collusion between the basement door and me. If only I weren’t so wicked, I would open the door in the dining room and admit her to a dazzling sunlit yard of warm, lush grass brimming with bite-size chipmunks.
&n
bsp; Agnes refused to budge until I waved a hand in front of her face and attempted to back her out of the room. Aggrieved by my unfairness, she bleated underneath the table. I could simply show her the cold hard facts by opening the door, of course, but that meant subjecting Dusty to a gust of frozen air. I kneeled next to the parrot’s cage, tracking his movements out of the corner of my eye, and then I lunged for Agnes—and missed. I straightened up and cracked my head on the table, and as I leaned back to whine about it, Dusty struck at me through the bars with a loud metallic ping that pitched me forward into the table and quieted the chatter of the dining room birds.
“Sorry,” he told me in a perfect imitation of my voice. Agnes still hadn’t moved.
On top of Dusty’s cage lay a folded sheet that prevented him from nipping off the toes of any pet dove or parakeet foolish enough to make a landing pad out of his house during their out-of-cage hours. Shaking open the sheet, I tossed it over his cage as a windbreak and cracked the door just wide enough to prove that winter was winter no matter which portal you entered winter through. Agnes thrust her body past me, but the snow-covered steps displeased her. She fixed me with a glare so vile when she trotted back inside that I was glad she couldn’t speak.
She sprang onto the back of the couch and turned herself into a sour donut—requiring no further services from me.
THE SUBJECT OF the bitter apple came up again as I was in the vulnerable state of pulling on my pajama bottoms. “You’re going to the pet supply store tomorrow, aren’t you?” Linda asked.
After I had adjusted the socks that I always wore to bed, I assured her that I would. “And definitely later in the week if something comes up tomorrow,” I said.
Not long after she had snapped off the headboard lamp and changed from her regular cotton-polyester nightgown into flannel and then back again, switched the space heater on and off, given a nail a few blind swipes with an emery board, and generally flopped around like a halibut on a pier, a horrendous cat scream rent the night. This wasn’t your typical offended-kitty outburst but a piercing shriek of pain that went on and on as I fumbled for my footing, shouting, “Turn on the light!”
