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

by Bob Tarte

  THE REVEREND HAD spoken God’s own truth when he told Linda that Mabel was a lap cat. Concerned that he might hide behind the entertainment center all day and run afoul of Frannie when she came back inside, I sat on the rug and made soothing comments to lure him closer. I had barely begun when he lumbered out and slumped down onto my lap.

  My heart was gratified by his demonstration of trust and affection. My legs held a contrary opinion. As I petted him and he began to purr, the blood pooled in my thighs. Mabel wasn’t fat like Lucy. He was solid, not squishy—a propane tank wrapped in fur. I called Linda into the room to witness this spectacle of an unusually sweet kitty and also to help me back up on my feet, since I had lost all feeling below the knees. As I leaned against the wall struggling to regain my balance, Mabel meowed for more, conveying his judgment that no cat on the planet had ever been so ill-used.

  “There’s an awfully nice big boy,” Linda told him. His answering yowl was unsettlingly strident. She stooped down and started petting him.

  Judging her petting too halfhearted, he butted her calf with his head as a prelude to crashing down onto his side and rattling the floorboards. He glared up at her expectantly. When she slapped his ample rear end appreciably and began to walk away, he yowled an unmistakable, No! A flicker of eye contact passed between Linda and me, but we both pretended we hadn’t heard our newest child utter his first naughty word.

  Linda got the jump on me by exiting the room first. I tried to give Mabel the slip by scurrying upstairs, but he stayed on my trail, bawling as he whisked past a surprised Agnes, then sticking with me as I doubled back and ran down the stairs two at a time. I shut myself inside the bedroom, but the caterwauling outside the door was worse than having him at my feet. I let him in and he hopped up onto the bed, banging into my hip and knocking me off balance. He tossed himself down like a professional wrestler thrown by an invisible opponent. As soon as I touched him, his desperate breathing slowed to a pulsing purr. As soon as I stopped, he snapped to his feet and demanded more.

  “Aren’t cats supposed to be shy and retiring when you first get them?” I asked Linda. I began to appreciate what Reverend Evans and his son had gone through on their fifty-mile trip to our house.

  AGNES TRAIPSED DOWNSTAIRS to snarl at the noise source, received a plea for understanding from Mabel in reply, and raced back up to the safety of my office chair. I didn’t expect any problems between Mabel and Frannie, since Frannie had adjusted easily to living with Lucy and Moobie. But I was wrong again. She turned into a white-and-black bundle of nerves clawing the woodwork and demanding entry to the porch. She pushed through as I opened the door, bounded up on top of her cardboard box, and compacted herself into a defensive posture. When Mabel followed she streaked past him and cringed behind the bed.

  I couldn’t figure out what she had seen in the oversized infant of a cat that could have terrified her. Then I realized it was what she had heard. His meow resembled the stray tabby’s declaration of love during Frannie’s first night with us. Shushing Mabel, I sat on the rug next to the bed and cooed at Frannie, but that only succeeded in pushing her deeper into the shadows.

  AFTER FIVE DAYS of Mabel’s whining, Linda couldn’t take it anymore. She met me at the door in such a state of exasperation that I looked around the porch for a cardboard tube from a nursery. “I talked to Mabel’s owner, Sarah, today. She described him as ‘needy’ and said he’d always been that way. Needy? He’s a basket case. She said he was fine if you just sit and pet him. I’ve got fifty animals to care for, and you can only get so much work done petting a cat all day.”

  “How’s Frannie?” I asked.

  “Frannie’s fine as long as she’s outdoors. I’m stuck in the house. He needs to find some owner who has all the time in the world. I put an ad in the Ledger, saying, ‘extremely friendly, babyish cat, kind of loud,’ and I told Reverend Evans that we can’t keep him.”

  “We won’t give him away unless we find the perfect person,” I said.

  Linda shut her eyes. “The perfect person would be anyone who would take him.”

  I had forgotten that placing a classified newspaper ad for a cat was equivalent to casting an invisibility spell on us. All phone calls, mail delivery, and e-mails ceased—except for a sympathetic Nigerian scammer who said he’d take our cat if we took ten of his. None of our friends noticed me when I wheeled my cart alongside them at the store up the street. On the plus side, the Aisle Blockers allowed me unimpeded access to glittering shelves of toothpaste, work gloves, hose fittings, and artichoke hearts.

  While we waited to blink back into existence, we thought we might calm Mabel down by giving him a gender-appropriate name. We had always waited for a new pet’s name to pop into our heads even if it took weeks, but this was an emergency. “Maynard sounds enough like Mabel that he probably won’t know the difference,” I said—and his laziness in between wailing expeditions reminded me of Bob Denver’s work-avoiding beatnik Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis sitcom. So Maynard he became—just in time for a prospective owner to visit. Someone had actually answered Linda’s ad.

  ALTHOUGH MAYNARD’S NAME change hadn’t subdued his existential angst, his whining didn’t trouble Nana, whose old-world brusqueness matched her name. “Is that as loud as he gets? Pfft. That’s nothing. I thought you were talking about loud.”

  “It may get on your nerves when he does it all day,” Linda said.

  “Things like that don’t get on my nerves,” she snapped, raising her shoulders and lurching toward him to the accompaniment of a kissing sound. “I know all about cats,” she swung around to tell me as Maynard hightailed it into the bedroom.

  “Did you bring a pet carrier? We can lend you one.”

  “I came to look at him first, because I was told he was loud.” She looked accusingly at Linda. “I’ll take him. Tomorrow I’ll buy dishes and a litter box, then I’ll come back for him.” I wanted to offer her all the bowls and litter boxes she could carry if she took him now, but I didn’t want to disturb the rhythm of a sale so easily made. “Good-bye, cat,” she said, ducking her head into the bedroom and treating Maynard to another smooching sound. She brought her full mass to a halt on our welcome mat and sought reassurance on one point. “You’re sure he’s friendly?”

  “He’s a big baby,” Linda said. “He likes nothing better than to be petted all day.”

  “Let me see,” she said. As she swept into the bedroom, Linda and I blocked the open door behind us in case Maynard decided to bolt. Draped across Linda’s pillow, he looked especially cuddly-wuddly. “Cats always like me,” she told us. “Kitty, kitty.” She pitched forward onto the bed and thrust her head into his face, grabbing him. He responded just as I would have. He nipped at her hand. “That’s nasty,” she said.

  “He just doesn’t know you yet,” Linda said.

  “You are a very nasty cat,” she told him. “I don’t mind the loud, but I don’t like the nasty. He’s not for me.” As she left, I wondered if every event in her life was initiated and concluded this quickly. It was possible that she had literally been born yesterday.

  “The ad runs another two days,” said Linda. But we both knew this had been our one and only chance. Maynard had flaunted his newly minted masculinity at the worst possible time.

  LINDA WAS SENSITIVE to sounds—not to mention smells, temperature variations, and swallowing any size pill—and Maynard was remarkably, disconcertingly loud. His attention-seeking wails were stolen from the playbook of a toddler in the candy aisle. Still, I was surprised to see my softhearted wife turn a stony side to an animal.

  “I don’t care how we do it, but he’s got to go,” she told me.

  “Don’t you think he’s been a tiny bit better lately?” That earned me the same glare that she gave Maynard. “I think he’s a little bit quieter than when we first got him,” I said. Helping me out, he erupted in a series of yowls. Linda snatched up the washcloths she’d been folding and strode into the dining room, se
eking the comparatively quiet scream of an African grey parrot.

  I was more forgiving. Ever since Moobie had relocated her daytime operations to the back of the closet, Maynard had stepped up to fill the nap gap.

  As I lay on my back, the yodeler crashed down between my arm and ribcage, tail tucked into my armpit. When I awoke twenty minutes later, I hugged the purring hulk against me. “You’re just a regular Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle,” I told him. He gave a clipped yelp and swiveled his ears backward. “Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle,” I cooed a second time. Insulted, he fled the room.

  Later that afternoon, when I returned from my daily trip to the store for some item I’d forgotten to buy the day before—fruit for the parrots, lettuce for the ducks, gingersnaps for the wife—I caught the wife speaking in conciliatory tones to Maynard. “What’s the matter with the great big boy?”

  She explained, “I just got off the phone with Lori Koster.” Lori lived a few miles away and took in unwanted cats, so I concluded that Linda had found him a new home. “She used to have a real pest of a cat who followed her around meowing all the time, just like you-know-who. He suddenly got sick and died, and she ended up missing him much more than she missed her cats who weren’t so noisy.”

  “He does have his nice side.”

  “I’ve been closing him in the upstairs bedroom every morning to keep my sanity. If I forget, he whines and makes me follow him upstairs. It gives both of us a break.”

  Linda called his former owner, Sarah, to let her know that we were keeping him, which is when she learned something about his past that helped seal the deal. “Sarah used to have a second, much older cat named Sam, and he and Maynard had been inseparable buddies,” Linda told me. “They always slept cuddled up with one another. Sam died, and that’s when he got worse about his meowing.”

  FRANNIE BORE THE brunt of Maynard’s attempt to reprise the intimacy that he’d lost. The more she ran away from him, the more ardently he pursued her. She became more jittery than ever, projecting herself across the room if any human or cat came within six feet. Her ears swiveled to track sounds, like miniature satellite dishes. Linda clomping into a room in her usual plate-rattling manner would send Frannie scurrying for cover. Even Moobie’s ghostly glide into a room blasted her nerve endings. But a confrontation between Agnes and Maynard soon eased her fears.

  Maynard had been bleating to hop up onto my lap as I sat at the computer upstairs. Accommodating smallish Agnes on my lap as I tried to peck away at my keyboard was difficult enough. With Maynard, it was impossible. He spilled from my legs onto the desk. “No way,” I said and was on the verge of shooing him downstairs when Agnes beat me to it. Popping out from under the metal typewriter table, she pursued him in a snarling fit of possessiveness all the way down to the first-floor bedroom.

  Frannie witnessed the routing of Maynard from the front hallway. I didn’t know if she possessed a logical facility that most cats lacked or she simply processed what she had seen: the cat who chased her (Maynard) was being chased by the cat (Agnes) that Frannie usually chased. No hen would have tolerated such a breach in the pecking order, and neither did Frannie. The next time that Maynard barged whining into her personal space, a clawed correction sent him toddling back toward the humans.

  AS MAYNARD GREW more secure with us, he scaled down his discontent. Although he remained a “Grade-A” nuisance, he let enough time elapse between his worst outbursts that we could describe him as talkative rather than impossible. As we began to appreciate his boisterous expressions of affection—and snuggly quiet during nap time—we came to view Nana’s visit as a close call that would have robbed us of a friend.

  “That woman didn’t deserve such a nice cat,” Linda said. “I wonder if he knew what was going on and acted bad on purpose.” I doubted it, though I believed with equal conviction that anything was possible with a cat.

  “If only Frannie would notice how happy Maynard is on my lap and take the hint,” I said.

  But his example didn’t convince her to approach me. I consoled myself by remembering Joan’s cat Ember and understanding that every kitty didn’t have to show its love in a touchy-feely manner. I could hug and paw Maynard to my heart’s content—as long as I restrained myself from uttering the dreaded name. Sometimes the temptation was too great to resist.

  Linda was lying on her faux-sheepskin rug on the floor with Maynard plastered against her side as the closing credits rolled to Charlie Chan at Treasure Island. Creeping across the room on my hands and knees, I tousled the big loud log of a cat. “Do you have a special name?” He scrambled to his feet with a yelp. “Are you my Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle?” Right on cue, he tore up the steps and hid under the bed. We figured that he associated the tone of voice with someone in his past getting uncomfortably in his face, a phobia that Nana had accidentally tapped into.

  The insult was forgotten by the following afternoon when he bounded onto the mattress. And as I lay stock-still flirting with sleep, I heard a soft scrabbling beside me on the floor between the bed and wall. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a hint of white and black, but I didn’t dare turn my head. Too shy for actual intimacy, Frannie had substituted proximity by stretching out on the floor for a vicariously shared snooze. It was a huge step.

  “Frannie,” I whispered.

  She was gone instantly, but the glow of her presence remained.

  Chapter 11

  The Anti-Frannie

  As I complained to Linda about a recent snubbing from Frannie, I saw myself writ large in our big baby of a cat. Even more embarrassing, I started to view all of our cats as feline personifications of my shortcomings. Moobie’s incessant wanting, Agnes’ crabbiness, and Lucy’s sense of entitlement made me feel like the protagonist in a kitty version of The Pilgrim’s Progress, with fresh lessons on how not to live lurking in every litter box.

  Frannie’s stubbornness had set me off when I couldn’t find her as a storm of biblical proportions rolled in. The talking moose weather radio had fibbed that the afternoon would be partly cloudy. When the fully cloudy sky turned a sickly yellow, Linda hurried in from the backyard. I stood in the basement door hollering for Miss Ferret Face. The first blast of wind sent our pair of $4.99 plastic lawn chairs cartwheeling across the lawn. Thunder crackled in the distance. I popped open the basement door a second time expecting Frannie to shoot inside. But she wasn’t there.

  Galloping out in pursuit of a vinyl patio table, I checked for her behind the wheelbarrow and then stuck my head under the pine boughs where she usually hung out. Our geese honked in apprehension. After checking the perimeter of the house, I ran toward the barn into a sheet of gloom, calling for her all the way. “Frannie! You’re going to get wet!” Our neighbor’s gravel driveway came alive, spattering me with mud as the waterworks erupted. Leaves tore loose and swirled in the air. Branches clattered above my head. I started toward the river but was driven back by a wind that nearly picked me up off my feet. At that point, I couldn’t have seen or heard Frannie if she had been trotting along at my heels.

  Linda and I met at the basement door, where we performed an impromptu Three Stooges routine trying to get into the house at the same time. She had also been shouting for Frannie and was even more soaked than I was. “I’m worried about her,” I said.

  “Oh, you know cats,” she said. “They manage to find shelter somewhere and come out after it stops raining without a wet hair on their bodies.” As I hung up my jacket, I glanced down to see Frannie lying on a pile of bedding next to the basement refrigerator. She had never been outdoors at all.

  “You heard us calling you,” I scolded. “Over and over and over again. You could have come out and let us know that you were okay.” Frannie treated me to her innocent kitty blink and didn’t stir from the bedding.

  “Can’t we have just one normal cat?”

  “That is normal for a cat,” Linda said.

  I thought of what Bill Holm had told me the last time I groused to him about how crazy and complicated Frannie was. �
�That’s because they’re people, only smarter. They know us better than we know them, and a lot of them have a sense of humor. They’re exactly like us minus our useless mental power and thumbs.”

  LATER THAT WEEK, Linda called to me from the porch. “You should see this sweet little kitty. She’s barely older than a kitten, but she’s already a mother.” I was catted out. I had no intention of heaving myself to my feet, crossing an entire room, and poking my nose into the porch to look at a cat that didn’t belong to us.

  Pastor Larry from Linda’s church had phoned with an odd request. He had driven twenty-one miles from Ionia to see a movie with his son and daughter-in-law, Nicole, who fostered cats. Before enjoying Buck Benny Rides Again, Steamboat Bill, Jr., or whatever it was that was playing, they had planned on dropping off a mother cat and her kittens for shots at the vet down the street. But Dr. LeBlanc put the youngsters on his scale and determined that they didn’t weigh enough yet to get poked with needles. So Pastor Larry asked Linda if we could take the cats for a couple of hours while they watched Song of the Thin Man, My Man Godfrey, or possibly Bringing Up Baby.

  “I don’t like the idea of them sitting in the carrier the whole time,” Linda told me. “But we’re not supposed to let them out. They haven’t been tested for anything.”

  “I’m not looking at them,” I said.

  She trotted back out to the porch to check on the cats and returned to continue a running commentary about how precious they were. “The mother keeps looking at me with the most appealing expression. She has this peaceful and gentle demeanor. Come see her. She’s just the picture of feminine grace and tenderness.”