by Bob Tarte
Still, Frannie wouldn’t allow me to remove the water jug, pacing anxiously once the door banged shut. She wanted the security of a ready exit. So when the tabby stepped over the water jug I lectured him on proper decorum. My macho presence struck fear into his soul for a full twelve minutes, but when he strolled back inside, Linda’s single hand clap drove him out the door for all eternity. He must have discussed his banishment with Saddleback, because after that hand clap, we were never to see them again.
With their departure, Frannie began exploring her new space and found it confining. But she wanted in instead of out. She jumped up onto the picture window between the porch and living room and marched back and forth along the sill while I was trying to follow the narrative intricacies of Hogan’s Heroes.
“That cat’s knocking down my pictures,” said Linda, referring to her blue jay greeting cards that flew off the sill like real birds whenever anyone breezed by.
As Colonel Klink and General Burkhalter discussed the superiority of the German Gonculator compared to the American model, Frannie raked the porch door with her claws. But instead of shooting into the house when I eased the door open, she hurtled over to her box and eyed me with suspicion. “You can’t come in with the other cats until we get you tested,” I explained. “But you can go outdoors if you want.”
I sank slowly to my knees in front of Frannie with a Gatling gun round of pops issuing from my joints and embarked upon a soothing monologue on the subject of disease detection and treatment. I wasn’t just concerned about the possibility of feline leukemia. A discolored strip ran down Frannie’s nose and mouth, and a vet needed to determine if it was caused by illness, injury, or something else.
“We don’t want our new honey to be sick,” I said, leaning over to plant a reassuring hand on her back. As my fingertips brushed her fur, she swatted me away. It was a clawless correction, but just barely. Her flattened ears told me that I had better back off. I retreated to the living room. “Klink, you idiot!” General Burkhalter shouted.
With Frannie only allowing my touch as a side dish to a meal, I wondered how I’d ever be able to pick her up and plunk her inside a pet carrier. I didn’t want to traumatize an already nervous cat. And I shared my sister’s fear of getting shredded. I considered calling Bill for advice but changed my mind. No way was I going to waste my time with him.
BILL’S LINE WAS busy, so I phoned Joan and asked her if she had managed to get her strays to the vet. Things had gone smoothly with the two young cats, she said. Jack had set a cat carrier on the floor with a towel inside, and Milo decided that popping in and out of it and scrunching up the towel was just about the most fun a cat could have. Jack snapped the carrier door shut while he was busy playing. But Carmelita was warier than her brother and didn’t see the charm in a plastic box.
“I had no choice, Bob,” Joan told me. “Jack held a carrier with the opening pointed up at the ceiling. Then I grabbed Carmelita by the scruff of the neck. I’d never touched her before, and I just grabbed her.” She guided Carmelita’s dangling back legs into the open mouth of the carrier, latched the grate, and expressed a few expletives of relief as Jack spirited the pair outside to the Trooper.
The siblings were tested, Carmelita spayed, and Milo neutered. Then they spent the weekend at the clinic. The plan was for Jack to take the mama, Ember, in on Monday when he picked up the kittens, but Ember had a little scheme of her own. On Sunday morning when Joan went out to the porch to check on her, Ember was giving birth to an orange-and-white kitty. Two more babies followed.
“We don’t need more cats,” she told me, but I had stopped listening. Instead I was wondering whether a drugstore pregnancy test might possibly work with a cat. I was superstitious enough to halfway believe that my life had begun to mirror Joan’s. She ended up with three strays on her porch, I ended up with one. Her female cat had given birth to three kittens, so Frannie would give birth to one—or six, or nine, or twelve. Suddenly it seemed more imperative than ever to have Dr. Ziaman examine her.
That night I carried a saucer with canned cat food out to the porch. To make the entrée especially bewitching I had warmed it in the microwave, though Frannie was still so thrilled by the concept of food without fur that she would have fallen on the treat even if it had been frozen solid. While she was busy scarfing down the chow, I examined the floor around her carton—no partially knitted booties, no book of baby names. Still, I had to be sure. As she licked the plate, I petted her, then I slid my hand down to squeeze her abdomen. I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting to find, but once I had my fingers under her belly I thought I’d see if she would let me pick her up. But she broke free with a whine.
I replenished her dish with a second helping, but she wouldn’t give me a second chance. The encounter had eased my mind, however. She had felt way too scrawny to be on the brink of motherhood even with a litter of equally skinny kittens, and she didn’t shred me during my attempt to pick her up. Those were the positives. On the negative side—the side of the street that I lived on—I fretted that the dark streak on her face might be as troublesome as Moobie’s dreaded red spot.
Frannie reprised her windowsill pacing performance that night while we watched the pig Arnold Ziffel inheriting millions of dollars on an episode of Green Acres. “I’m calling Dr. Ziaman tomorrow morning,” Linda said.
I OFTEN HAD trouble sleeping the first few nights after a new animal had arrived. I would awaken from a sound sleep to thrash around for hours gripped by the “Oh no, what have we done?” syndrome. I experienced one of my worst bouts when we had taken in a parrot named Stanley Sue. This was years before an easily accessible Internet existed for finding out everything about anything. I read all the books and magazine articles about African greys that I could find, and Linda phoned a few area bird owners, but I still felt woefully unprepared to deal with the complex creature who made sobbing sounds in her sleep during her first weeks with us. The same feeling of unreadiness came back to me again with Frannie.
It seemed as if I was hardwired to her anxiety. When she scratched on the door and we couldn’t let her in, I worried. If she ducked outside to harass the local wildlife, I worried about that, too. I worried whether she would get along with our other cats. I even worried when I saw her peacefully curled up on the pillow due to worry inertia.
A few hours before her vet appointment, I went down to the basement to root through our pyramid of pet carriers for the one that would best fit Frannie. Naturally it lay beneath a couple of goose-size transports. As I wiggled it free from the stack, I was startled by a snarling commotion overhead. Agnes’ trademark banshee shriek clashed with a scream the likes of which hadn’t been heard in our house since Linda made pickled radishes.
Linda and I reached the scene of the fight at the same time, but we weren’t able to break it up. We didn’t have to, because a closed door stood between the pair of quarreling cats. Agnes must have gotten fed up with Frannie scratching to come in and tried attacking her through a matchstick-thin crack underneath the door.
After I shooed Agnes away I popped the door open to find a ruffled Frannie holding her ground. She hopped up onto the windowsill and scanned the living room for Agnes. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but the Battle Behind the Door was the Fort Sumter event of what historians would later refer to as the War Between the Cats. We were witnessing the definitive first battle.
I HAD HOPED to take a calm cat to the vet. If I wanted to do that, I’d have to take Lucy instead of Frannie, who whined piteously and clung to her pillow as I tried to pick her up. She cried all the way to the clinic, and though she didn’t match Moobie in volume, her mouselike squeaks stabbed an ice pick into my heart.
I had made an appointment with Dr. Ziaman, but she had been called away on an emergency, so her partner at the clinic, Dr. Post, took her place. It was the first time I had met her, so I wasn’t prepared for her deadpan manner. I wasn’t too surprised when Frannie nestled against my hand when the vet
strode into the room, since I represented the lesser of two evils. I was shocked, though, when she let Dr. Post flip her over like a pancake.
“I’m looking for any evidence that she’s already been spayed. It isn’t an operation that a cat needs to have twice,” she said. Frannie barely moved as Dr. Post checked her ears for parasites. “We’re going to have to hire you to teach good behavior to the other kitties.”
“It’s not like her to be cooperative,” I said. “You must have a special way with cats.”
“You’ll have to tell that to the one that bit me this morning.” She spread her fingers to show me the tooth mark on her hand.
A blood test brought the good news that Frannie was negative for feline leukemia, but the streak on her face wasn’t easy to diagnose. I have a pair of scars on my upper lip as a result of a bite from a friend’s husky, so I wanted to suggest to Dr. Post that our mutual marked lips indicated that Frannie and I had shared numerous incarnations dating all the way back to Atlantis.
“It could be a deep infection,” Dr. Post said. “Or we might be dealing with a food allergy. We’ll treat it as an infection first and see if it clears up.”
She sent me home with an oral antibiotic and the unhappy prospect of having to hold Frannie and squirt it down her throat twice a day. I held out a faint hope that a cooperative Frannie might emerge from the carrier instead of a skittish, stubborn cat, but she immediately sought the protection of her cardboard box.
FRANNIE HADN’T BEEN giving us more trouble than we could handle yet, but Linda had a solution. A woman at the store up the street had mentioned that she needed to get rid of her chickens and had decided to give them to a neighbor who would turn them into roasters. Befriending a woman at a busy supermarket who wanted to dispose of her poultry could only happen to Linda. It gave me yet another excellent reason to use the automated checkout lanes.
“Please scan your first item and place it in the bag,” the computerized voice might urge me, but never, “Please pick up the first hen and place it in your car.”
I didn’t feel too put-upon adding what Linda’s new friend Janet had described as a few hens to our flock, but due to a long-standing grievance against alarm clocks, mechanical or biological, I balked at taking her rooster. And the notion of acquiring another large aggressive bird gave me pause, since Linda’s parrot Dusty enjoyed stalking my stocking feet. I knew roosters that were capable of worse.
“Teddy doesn’t bother anyone,” Janet told Linda, and the fact that the barn was far out of earshot during my morning, afternoon, and nighttime sleeping hours helped Teddy’s case. So we agreed to visit Janet and round up her purportedly small flock.
The opportunity to grab hens provided me with a welcome break from my now twice-daily ritual of grabbing Frannie. I’d clutch the struggling cat to my chest, and Linda would pry open her jaws and dose her with medicine. But Frannie never got used to the procedure; even after three days, when I picked her up she squeaked in shock as if nothing like this had ever happened to her before. Fortunately her selective memory meant that she returned to her normal pet-me-while-I’m-eating self right away.
Janet’s cramped henhouse was about as roomy as the interior of Linda’s Ford Escort. This seemed to argue for a minimal number of hens, but she pulled one bird after another out of there, like clowns from a circus car. I stuck my head inside and observed that she had divided their quarters into compartments that essentially turned a coop for egg layers into an egg carton for hens. “Their quarters were supposed to be a whole lot bigger,” she said. “The Bosnians who built it read my plans wrong and converted my inches to centimeters.”
“Let’s put Frannie in the house and move the chickens to the porch,” I said. “They’ll think they’re in the Taj Mahal.”
“It would be a whole lot more peaceful than having Frannie there,” Linda said. It was a logical assumption, because our own chickens had never caused us any trouble. We didn’t expect that these would be any different, though they did look rather strange.
“What’s wrong with their feathers?” I asked Janet as I slid the carrier containing Teddy into Linda’s hatchback.
“They’ve picked at each other a little bit. The missing feathers will grow back.”
I hoped that they didn’t try to pick at me. That was Frannie’s job.
WE IMAGINED JANET’S sardine-can chicken flock luxuriating in the spaciousness of our barn. But once we released them, they huddled in a corner behind the stairs, arranging themselves in a chicken coop–size rectangle. When I slogged outside after dinner to dole out treats, the rectangle of hens expanded slightly as the first handful of bread pieces and kale hit the floor. I tossed some greens in front of my feet. Victor commandeered the food, greedily gobbling it up and launching his bulk at any duck or chicken that dared to intrude upon his bounty. The hens advanced when I distributed treats toward the center of the floor, except for Teddy, who seemed to lack the hunter-gatherer skills of the females.
“The new hens are still nervous,” I told Linda back at the house. “I hope they get over their shyness.”
I needn’t have worried. The next night, the shrinking violets hung back in the shadows as I flung food in their direction. But as I lobbed a few chunks of bread toward Victor, six of the balding hens swept in from the gloom and vacuumed up the crusts right under his beak. Victor’s bullying tactics proved too slow for the hyperactive, tattered chickens. Then, egged on by Teddy’s rallying crow, the hens launched one lightning-fast foray after another, swooping in wherever a crumb of food hit the floor. I switched to scattering treats in the widest possible arc, hoping that the hens couldn’t be in all places at once. In the midst of their feeding frenzy, Teddy launched himself at me with spurs outstretched. Pawing the straw with his feet like an enraged bull, he started to come at me again—until I bopped him in the head with a plastic pitcher.
“How were they?” Linda asked as I returned to the house.
“They’ve formed a gang,” I said. “It’s Night of Living Dead out there. I was lucky to get back in one piece.”
“Well, they’d better shape up, or they’ll find somewhere else to live.”
“Take them back to the supermarket. You saved your sales slip, didn’t you?”
THAT SATURDAY WAS THE night that we would let Frannie into the house, and I was nervous. “Don’t expect miracles,” Linda said as she put the plates on the table.
For the umpteenth time, I repeated the story of how cooperative Frannie had been with Dr. Post and how this was a sign of good things to come. “And I’m sure she’s been in a house before,” I said as Linda passed a bowl of pasta salad. “Or she wouldn’t be begging to get in. I’m sure she’ll do okay.”
Actually, I had grave doubts about the ability of a rambunctious cat to slot into a house where nothing much ever happened. But I figured that the sheer dullness of our lives would numb her into placidity. The process might take time, but we would make it work, I decided. Linda seemed to be thinking similar thoughts as she stared at nothing and chewed. “What do you think?” I said.
“I’m glad I made my own pasta salad instead of buying it at the store,” she said. “They use one of the cream-based sauces that can kill you.”
After assuring myself that no lethal sauces lay in ambush on my plate, I opened the door for Frannie.
As Frannie made her entrance, Moobie greeted her with a perfunctory hiss that simply indicated, Hello, I’m here. Lucy treated her as she treated Moobie and Agnes, somewhat diffidently, yet whacking her with a front paw as she strayed too close to the monarch’s throne and then challenging her when Frannie attempted to usurp the royal feed bowl. Agnes, however, took umbrage at Frannie’s very existence. She maintained a low growl when Frannie entered the room, the undertone rising and falling depending on Frannie’s proximity. After a while, when she had had enough, Agnes launched herself at Frannie with a fearful scream before retreating to another room.
Frannie hid behind the entertainment center
while we watched TV, pacing back and forth in the narrow slot amid the spaghetti of power cords and cables between the cabinet and the wall. “There goes our picture again,” I said as she jiggled loose a crucial wire during the episode of Mission: Impossible in which the Impossible Missions Force convinced a mobster played by William Shatner that he’d traveled back in time thirty years. I felt thirty years older after I had managed to reattach the disconnected cable and she promptly yanked it out again. Exhausting her role as TV critic, she darted back onto the porch, only to rake her claws against the door as soon as I closed it.
In the days that followed, Frannie had no use for me apart from wanting to be petted while she ate. In her case it wasn’t due to a case of great big fat cat sullenness. She simply had an aversion to people. When an affectionate mood managed to penetrate her, she would press herself tenderly against a door frame, chair leg, table leg, or any leg but mine. When I praised her beauty and intelligence, she would roll over on her side and elongate herself on the rug, urging me to pet her. But if I tried, she would shoot up and run off as if she had just seen my dreadful face through the bathroom window.
“I don’t think she likes me,” I told Linda.
“She’s crazy about you,” she said. “She just isn’t the cat you thought she’d be.”
I had hoped for a nap-time companion in the Moobie mold, a cat that would be undyingly grateful for having been rescued. But Frannie was apparently ambivalent about the whole darn thing.
