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

by Bob Tarte

  “I’m in a really good part of this book and I don’t want to put it down right now.”

  These weren’t simply adorable cats, of course. These were adorable cats in need of a home, and I recognized the danger of getting anywhere close to them. While Linda had already been contaminated by their cuteness, I could still keep my distance so that at least one of us didn’t catch the adoption bug. Unfortunately, the disorder was extremely contagious. As Linda went on and on about what a nice influence a sweet, calm cat would be on Maynard, I caught myself saying, “Maybe if he had a friend, he wouldn’t act so needy.” It had come out of me like a sneeze before I could stop it.

  I trudged out to take a gander at the cat that I had apparently just agreed to take.

  As I reached into the carrier and petted the white-and-caramel-colored cat, I wasn’t thinking about Maynard, who had been howling since I abandoned him and my book. Frannie came to mind. She couldn’t have been more different from the contented and self-assured mother. As the youngster huddled with her kittens, calm as a blade of grass, our Alfalfa girl patrolled the backyard terrorizing the local wildlife.

  “IS THAT EVEN the same cat?” I asked Linda a few weeks later as I slammed and locked the porch door behind me. “That can’t be the peaceful little mother cat.”

  “She’s about as peaceful as the Hardy Boys.”

  The white-and-caramel-colored cat seemed much tinier to me now—a kitten who had given birth to kittens. And her personality had undergone a shocking change. Nicole had kept her for three weeks while weaning the babies, then another two weeks treating her with antibiotics to kill some internal bug. I theorized that the drug must have flipped the poles of the magnetically charged particles orbiting her chromosomes that were responsible for her previous calm demeanor. Linda had a more prosaic explanation; her former placidity was a hormone-induced state that had kept her attentive to her kittens. Once she stopped nursing the babies, she reverted to a maniac.

  “I’m not letting her inside. Frannie won’t mind losing the porch for a little while,” I said without consulting Frannie.

  The kitten’s enormous energy reserves fueled a darting shyness that sent her flying beneath the mound of jackets that disguised our coatrack. Our interactions with her consisted of equal parts examining whatever object she had just knocked off a shelf and cajoling her to approach us. “It’s okay,” I told her in response to the latest teeth-jarring crash. “Linda didn’t need a photo printer anyway.” If I kept up the reassuring chatter from a bench on the opposite end of the porch, she eventually jackrabbited over to absorb a volley of petting before retreating to her hidey-hole to plan the next destructive bit of fun.

  Once we had removed everything of value from the porch except the exercise bike, she occupied her time carving her initials into the front door. Her name had come to me at once. “Teeny-weeny Tina’s up to no good again,” I told Linda.

  “Did you just think that up? You must have heard me call her Tina this morning.”

  I shook my head. “Tina Louise. Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. She’s kind of ginger colored and way too cute for her own good.” That cuteness compensated for a wealth of naughtiness. I hated to admit it, but I no longer considered Frannie to be the most irresistible kitty in the world. Pudgy Tina with her searchlight eyes, lopsided slit of a questioning mouth, and a tail that she carried straight up and crooked forward, periscope- style, was so addictively adorable that I couldn’t keep my hands off her. And that led to problems with Frannie.

  LUCY, FRANNIE, AND Maynard were all nervous when they first came into the house. So I stuck close to Tina as I opened the door. But instead of proceeding cautiously, she immediately made the worst decision possible.

  I bounded behind her as she shot upstairs into Agnes’ territory. A rising growl from across the room stopped her at the landing. Before I could rescue her, Agnes launched a ferocious snarling charge that brought her to within an inch of Tina, but Tina didn’t even flinch. She stood her ground, stretching her neck to get a good whiff of the fire and brimstone hissing from Agnes’ throat. Still growling, Agnes backed away. She turned on her kitty heels and skulked off under the bed trying to figure out what had just happened.

  I wanted to join her. After living with Moobie for so long, I had developed a high tolerance for pestering. With two rabbits and two parrots in the house, I had also developed some immunity to chaos. But Tina created a new flavor of disruption. We needed to watch her constantly to keep her from laying waste to everything we owned.

  We had recently gotten rid of our entertainment center, replacing it with a squatty cabinet that held our new flat-screen television. The baby shoe of a base that supported the TV didn’t inspire confidence, but in the earthquake-free zone where we lived, it seemed stable enough. We weren’t located in a Tina-free zone, however.

  I was keeping one eye on a Sherlock Holmes movie and the other eye on Tina, when she jumped up onto the cabinet and stalked back and forth between the TV and the wall. Our TV wobbled and shuddered as she nudged it, providing the nail-biting suspense that Dressed to Kill lacked. No sooner had I shooed her off than I heard outraged squawks from parakeet Harvey. I found Tina crouched beneath Bella’s cage deciding which bird to target next. She couldn’t do much damage beyond scaring them, but I worried that if she got too close to Dusty she’d get her nose nipped through the bars.

  Remarkably, our other cats ignored our birds. Frannie seemed to understand that the birds were under our protection and pretended they didn’t exist. Moobie and Lucy were too fixated on packaged food to look for it on the wing, Maynard only wanted to be petted, and Agnes spent her time cultivating grudges. But once Tina discovered our easily spooked parakeets, she became obsessed. She quickly learned to exploit the weakness of the door that safeguarded our birds—because technically we didn’t have one.

  Connecting the front of the house to the kitchen/dining room where the birds lived was a short passageway that contained the door to the basement. The passageway was so narrow that when you opened the basement door too far, it bumped the opposite wall. We had learned to use this design flaw to our advantage by forcing the basement door open enough that it jammed against the plasterboard and blocked the passageway.

  The system had worked fine, but it was darned inconvenient. Closing the basement door could mean three things in our house. It could mean closing the door to close off the basement, or opening the door to close off the bird room. And it could also mean shutting a completely separate door in the basement that led out to the backyard. Woe unto us if our lives ever depended upon accurately executing the command: Quick, close the basement door! We would just stand there and perish.

  Tina constantly tested the door to see how firmly it was wedged against the wall. If I had closed off the passageway via a halfhearted shove of the door, a few thumps would open it. If the door was seated too tightly for her to budge, she’d wait for someone to open it and dart through.

  We did our best to keep her occupied with other things besides birds. Linda found a dust-covered toy mouse under the dresser, rinsed it off, and tossed it to Tina. She batted it around until it disappeared, then resumed her vigil outside the bird room. I bought another mouse at the store up the street, and it pulled a vanishing act within a few hours, too. Back at the store, I discovered that a sympathetic manufacturer sold fuzzy mice in packs of twelve. “Get that mousie,” Linda would cry, breaking one out of the package and heaving it against a wall. After springing for a few more twelve-packs, we learned why our bookcase had started listing to the right. Tina had packed the small space beneath it full of toy mice.

  THE ATTENTION THAT we lavished on the new kid wasn’t lost on Frannie. She all but abandoned the living room for the basement. In spite of my attempts to shower her with extra attention, she even refused to let me pet her at her feed dish. Outdoors, to pay me back she doubled down on her bird hunting, forcing me to set up another loop of fencing in order to save the birdbath from being a bull’s-eye.


  One afternoon she alarmed me by tussling with a squirrel beneath the pine tree. Mr. Nutkin emerged unharmed from the opposite side, leaped to the top of the pump house, and shimmied up the hackberry tree. Frannie lingered under the boughs. Before dark she limped inside and hid behind the bed.

  “Is your leg okay?” I asked her. My solicitations had the predictable result of urging her to hobble deeper into the shadows.

  The next morning, Agnes, Moobie, Lucy, Maynard, and Tina each received a dollop of canned cat food, while I spoiled Frannie with a minced portion of the greasiest chicken dark meat I could find. She wouldn’t even raise her chin to glance at it. Later she limped past the food to use the porch litter box, ignored my enthusiastic praises as she bobbled by me, and concealed herself back behind the headboard. Lucy tried to reach Frannie’s chicken, but Tina scrabbled over her and scarfed up the food. A suddenly animated Frannie rose up on all fours and hissed.

  “She seems to be in a lot of pain,” I said. “I’d better take her to the vet.”

  “Give her a day,” said Linda. We gave her two. When she broke the world’s record for sleeping in one position without moving, formerly held by Moobie, I made an appointment with Dr. Post. The trick was laying our hands on her since she would only leave the space behind our headboard to nibble at her kibbles or use the litter box in the dead of night. I managed to wiggle between the wall and the side of the bed, but I couldn’t reach her. At the other end of the headboard sat a small bookcase. The plan was to sit Linda in its place and have her shoo Frannie in my direction. When I started to twist and slide the bookcase away, Frannie tottered out to the porch. I grabbed the squeaking cat and inserted her into a pet carrier one toenail at a time.

  “LET’S PUT HER on the floor and see how she walks,” Dr. Post said. To my amazement, Frannie trotted around the examination room without a hint of a limp.

  “It was bothering her not even an hour ago,” I told her.

  She picked her up, set her on the examination table, and felt the leg. “I’m not finding any injury consistent with a squirrel bite,” she said. “There’s no sign of a break. She could have a soft tissue injury.”

  “She acts like it’s serious.”

  “How is Frannie getting along with the new one?”

  “She’s not. Tina’s the anti-Frannie. She’s playful, fearless, very outgoing, and she seems happy all the time. Frannie is an extremely serious cat.”

  “And have you been paying a lot of attention to Tina lately?” Frannie sprang down to the floor to emphasize her dislike of any mention of Tina.

  “Do you think she’s faking an injury to get attention?”

  “I’ve heard of dogs doing that,” said Dr. Post. “I haven’t seen it in a cat, but you don’t want to put it past them. I wouldn’t underestimate her ability to get what she wants.”

  WHILE I WAS picking my jaw up off the floor of Dr. Post’s examination room, Linda was balanced on the edge of the bed folding laundry. Most of the load consisted of pathetically tattered washcloths with all of the color beaten out of them after endless hours of birdcage scrubbing and linoleum mopping. Humming a soul-fortifying hymn, Linda had just finished stacking the washcloths into three soft towers rising from the middle of the mattress when Tina bounded up and crashed into them like a child jumping into a pile of autumn leaves.

  “That’s very naughty,” Linda said. But the toppling laundry frightened her and she had already fled the room. Linda tracked her down on the porch. “Did you understand what I said?” The crooked-mouth, wide-eyed stare indicated that the tyke did not and would not take a hint. “People don’t need to play with you twenty-four hours a day.” To underscore the gravity of the situation, she added, “Here, go get your mousie.” When Linda moseyed back into the bedroom to finish the folding, Maynard was sprawled across a divan he had made from the spilled stacks of laundry, looking for all the world like the King of Cat-mandu.

  I popped in with Frannie, who ran behind the bed and hid as soon as I opened her carrier. An unchastened and turbo­charged Tina jumped up onto the bed for another round of wrecking ball. Discovering Maynard on top of the rubble, she recognized a comrade in arms and plopped down beside him. Seeing them together brought to mind a favorite saying of Linda’s: “What one doesn’t think of, the other does.” And it didn’t take Tina long to come up with another bright idea. She had already stolen the house out from under Frannie’s feet. Now it was time to grab the outdoors, too.

  THE ONLY CATS that we allowed outside were the ones that had come to us as indoor-outdoor beings. But Tina flew the coop the Saturday after Frannie’s vet appointment while I was traipsing back and forth between the goose pen and the basement. She must have been hiding behind the furnace anticipating her escape. I had just finished filling the geese’s wading pool and was on my way to shut off the spigot when Tina appeared beneath the bird feeder wearing her usual befuddled expression. But she was anything but confused. As I froze and called her name, concerned that she might bolt, she bolted. So I did what any man would do under desperate circumstances. I howled for my wife.

  I ran around to the front yard, hit the shoulder of the road, and marched the width of our property searching Linda’s gardens for quivering leaves. I hoped that the semitruck that clattered past would send her in the opposite direction even as a cloud of diesel fumes pushed me away from the street. Although the dangers of the woods were less immediate than careening propane trucks, Tina could easily get lost. I had heard of tiny suburban yards that had swallowed pampered house cats whole. They would spend days huddled behind the backyard grille in clear view of the backyard while their owners shouted themselves hoarse.

  “I see her!” Linda called. She had spotted Tina’s squatty little white-and-caramel-colored body in front of a thicket of weeds. “There’s that naughty girl,” Linda cried in the most complimentary and inviting tone of voice imaginable. The tip of Tina’s periscope tail scanned us for malicious intent, took note of my seething, and disappeared straight into the weeds. In hot and sweaty pursuit I muscled through a wiry barrier of wild black raspberries. The sunlight disappeared as I plunged into an inland sea of ragweed, goldenrod, garlic mustard, and, ironically enough, catnip. Following Linda’s sugary warbles through the uncanny darkness, I ran into an impregnable barrier of pokeweed bushes.

  Striking my emergency match, I barely missed colliding with the college-age version of myself, who muttered his disgust about the sorry, foolish creature that I and/or he had turned into. Before I could defend myself, Linda called, “I think she’s headed for the river.” Pawing my way out of the undergrowth, I plodded briskly toward the water, thinking about the coyotes, foxes, raccoons, stray dogs, skunks, owls, nightjars, and chupacabras that would threaten her if she stayed out all night.

  After a dozen false sightings, we gave up. “She’ll come back when she wants to,” Linda said.

  “If she can find her way,” I said.

  Thirty minutes later, while I was buying a bag of crushed oyster shell for the chickens at the First Prize Feed Mill, Linda phoned to tell me that the incident had ended the way these things always ended. Tina showed up scratching at the side door and immediately darted under the dining room table to bother our birds.

  NOW I COULD return to fretting about Frannie. The next morning as I searched my bowl of grits for a lump that was small enough to pick up with my spoon, I wondered what I could do to ease her anxiety. And I wondered if Linda had grabbed a box of instant mashed potatoes by mistake until I remembered that my oatmeal often had a similar consistency. “We made a big mistake getting Tina,” I said.

  “She’s doing fine.”

  “But Frannie isn’t,” I said. “She’s more soured on people now than when we first got her. She does nothing but hide from me now.”

  “She’s just sulking. Do something special for her, and she’ll forget all about Tina.”

  I got a flash of inspiration. “I wonder if cats like grits.”

  But she
showed no sign of budging from her narrow slot between the headboard and the wall no matter what I did. “That Tina isn’t anything,” I told her. “She’s just a normal everyday cat. She isn’t someone special like you.”

  She whacked my hand when I offered her catnip, so I did what I always did when life offered me a challenge. I slid into bed, turned off the lights, and pulled the covers over my head. I once had a friend who had suffered a mental breakdown. Whenever I visited him, I would sit on a chair in one room and he would sit on the floor in the next room with his back against the opposite side of the wall. It felt like that with Frannie. We were two peas in a pod on opposite sides of the headboard. I kept telling her that I loved her as Maynard bounded up onto the mattress and ploughed into my side.

  Meanwhile we doubled our efforts to keep Tina out of trouble. Otherwise our potted dragon tree would find itself in the middle of an excavation or the ceramic knickknacks on top of Linda’s dresser would acquire the suicidal habits of lemmings.

  I grew weary of fishing fuzzy mice out from under the living room bookcase. Linda tried blocking the crack with a towel, but Tina added “dislodge towel” to her to-do list and I ended up having to extract the towel, too. The next time I visited the store up the street, I cruised the pet supplies in search of a toy that would require minimum effort on our part while subjecting Tina to a maximum amount of tiring activity. A laser pointer seemed like just the thing. I couldn’t wait to show it to Tina, and she couldn’t resist chasing the fiery red dot up and down the walls. But the impossibility of actually catching her prey frustrated her. After a few minutes she whined for her mousie toy.

  I wasn’t ready to give up on my investment yet. I poked the laser behind the headboard and made restless bug movements on the carpet with the red dot. Thrown, dangled, or rolled objects either intimidated or bored Frannie, depending on their size and proximity. But switching on the laser flooded her with joyful light. Still lying down, she thumped the floor with her forelegs and snapped at the dot with her teeth. When the glowing ladybug proved difficult to grab, she followed it into the living room, sending Maynard and Tina scurrying as she scuffed the rug with her claws chasing the light in ever-tightening circles. Rolling onto her side she continued her spinning pursuit, a break-dancing kitty in the throes of ecstasy.