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

by Bob Tarte

  It turned into a nightly routine. Frannie would seek out my company after dinner, dogging my steps like Maynard and begging me to play like Tina. If Tina was in the living room when I flashed the laser pointer, Frannie would fix me with a face that said get rid of that thing.

  A few weeks later, Frannie was waiting for me at the door with calculating eyes as I hung my umbrella on our coatrack. “Sorry, it’s too wet,” I told her, interpreting her attention as a request to go out. “We’re not playing with the bug light right now,” I said when she tried to follow me into the dining room. After I tweaked Bella’s beak and greeted the other birds, I let her lead me into the bedroom for a nap. As I pulled down the shades and shut the door so that no other cats could horn in, she followed the usual procedure of ducking behind the headboard. After a while, she might venture out for her snooze on the floor beside the bed.

  Just as I started to drift off, I felt a thump on the mattress near my feet. I didn’t dare move as she paced back and forth before settling down beside me, close but not touching. Her breathing shifted into purring. The extraordinary moment was as satisfying as it was fleeting. Home from the chiropractor, Linda slammed the front door, launching Frannie off the bed like a bullet from a gun. I didn’t mind. I couldn’t wait to tell Linda what had happened.

  I had squishy, squatty little Tina to thank for deepening the bond between Frannie and me via the grasshopper-shaped laser pointer. And the tiny troublemaker had made Maynard happy, too. Since their meeting over a pile of toppled laundry, they had become friends.

  Every morning, Maynard would march upstairs so that Linda could get a break from whining, and Tina would follow. Viewed from behind as they climbed the steps, Maynard resembled the fully loaded trailer of a lumber truck while Tina gamboled like a chubby lamb. Once in the room, Maynard flopped down on the pillow and instantly fell asleep. Tina planted herself near the window to watch birds flittering through the front yard hackberry tree as she dreamed of escaping outdoors. They were our own Ginger and Gilligan marooned on an island where they never quite received the full amount of attention that they craved.

  I imagined Maynard in a sailor’s cap and Tina in a coconut-shell bra brewing plans for rescue as ukuleles chimed in the background. But never in my sitcom-soaked imagination could I possibly have imagined the big change that was about to come over Frannie.

  Chapter 12

  My Brief Career as a Psychic

  The friendship between Maynard and Tina thickened. For much of the day, they resembled co-workers in different departments sharing the same shift but bothering us independently according to their individual expertise. Maynard dogged our heels whining for a lap to sit on, while Tina cased the tabletops and shelves for breakable items to drop. When it came to the serious business of snoozing, though, our Gilligan and Ginger teamed up. They slumbered together each morning in the upstairs bedroom during Linda’s daily respite from naughty cats. They co-inhabited her study overnight, side by side on a pair of crocheted beds on top of her desk. And each afternoon when I toppled over for a nap flat on my back, while Maynard butted my ribs and threw himself down at my side, Tina delicately arranged herself around the uncomfortable crevice between my ankles. Linda called it Tina’s tuna boat. If Tina tarried in the living room as the rest of us gathered on the bed, Linda would warn her, “You’d better get in here or the tuna boat’s going to leave without you.”

  Frannie didn’t even make it to the gangplank. She would never consider setting sail for the Land of Nod or chasing a glowing ladybug across the rug if another cat’s presence sullied the room. Linda clomping down the hallway might send her racing to the door squeaking to go out onto the porch, which she considered to be her private domain and the next best thing to being outside. Despite her moments of ease with me, she was only visiting and had her bags packed and heaped upon the front sidewalk anticipating her imminent departure. I wished I could discover what her life had been like before she came to us, so I could understand her case of the jitters.

  Linda vowed that she’d try to find out. Innocent souls living up and down the road from us—blameless folks who minded their own business and didn’t bother anybody else—received at least one phone call from my wife asking if they knew anything about Frannie. She even placed a classified ad in the local weekly newspaper seeking information about “a white-and-black cat we’ve had for over a year,” and it sounded so much like a coded message that I resigned myself to foreign intelligence agents tapping our phone. But white-and-black cats were apparently as rare as four-leaf clovers, though nowhere near as lucky, and we never received a single response except for vans with tinted windows parking in front of our house at night.

  When it came to exercising patience, I was less like the sparrow that scrapes its beak against a mountain once a day until the mountain eventually wears down to the size of a pebble and more like a two-minute egg. The animals that I loved the most were the most skilled at pushing my buttons. Dusty could be banging the bars of his cage at mealtime, sending Linda into paroxysms, and I wouldn’t notice. But if Bella merely paced back and forth a few times on her perch, I would shoot up from my chair and tell her, “I just fed you.” I was so tuned into my parrot that her whispers came across as shouts. I felt the same way with Frannie.

  As I fretted about how unfathomable our pets were, I trudged into the bedroom and discovered Maynard kneading Linda’s discarded sweater, face buried in a fold as if suckling from his mother. At that moment I realized that certain aspects of our cats would remain a mystery.

  I WAS READING a book about life on a farm and marveled at how well the author knew her animals. The Long Road Home was a true story about a group of horses that Kathleen Schurman had rescued, but she told the tale from the point of the nonhuman residents of her Locket’s Meadow Farm. I generally didn’t enjoy the anthropomorphism shtick, because I felt it reduced the complexity of critters. This time the personalities rang true, from wild crows to spoiled pet ducks and parrots, and I wished I could learn the author’s observational skills and deal more successfully with our unruly misfits.

  I located Kathleen on the Web and shot her an e-mail telling her how much I enjoyed the book, never expecting to hear back from anyone as important as an author. But she took time out from caring for genuine farm animals—not just the poultry we puttered around with—and told me that she wrote The Long Road Home by sitting quietly in the yard and listening to what the animals were saying. I took this as metaphor at first. But a couple of e-mails later she made it clear that she could actually tune into their thoughts and feelings—and that anyone could do the same thing with a little practice.

  Although I happily entertained lots of far-flung ideas—I’d encountered feline ghosts, and I believed that extraterrestrials probably abducted me but threw me back as way too weird—I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of animal communication. My thoughts constantly lied to me about who I was and about the world around me depending on how tired, nervous, angry, or foolish I happened to be at a particular moment, and I imagined that most people suffered from a similar insanity. So why trust a mental message allegedly from a hen or duck? It sounded even more far-fetched when Kathleen said that she could receive impressions from a pet just by looking at its photograph. But when she offered to do this with a photo of Frannie, I not only immediately suspended my disbelief; I also put it into a trance and sent her the photo.

  Kathleen wrote back the next day. She felt that Frannie was “very sensitive, possibly with a touch of kitty PTSD” despite the fact that the photo I had sent her showed what appeared to be a calm and in-charge cat lounging in the grass. Then she asked, “Do you have an orange-and-white short-haired cat? She’s showing me one, but I don’t know where it’s from.” I nearly fell off my swivel chair. When I replied that this had to be Tina, she said, “I got the feeling Frannie felt she was a thorn in her side. She does say she accepts the other cat, but she isn’t exactly thrilled with her.”

  According to Kath
leen, before coming to us, Frannie had lived in a trailer or first-floor apartment: “But I don’t feel she was in the house much. There was a woman who paid attention to her, and then she was gone. Frannie doesn’t know what happened. She just went away. The people that remained were very sad and functioning on a very low level. She shows me a middle-aged man, kind of heavy, dark hair, no smiles at all. They kept feeding her, but no one gave her any affection. And then they just faded away, at least to her mind, and there was no reason to stay. It’s the sadness that so affected her. It just cuts to her core. She may not have come directly to you, there may have been a few places where she was fed along the way, but nothing felt right to her.”

  The account felt right to me and made me feel more fortunate than ever that Frannie had managed to find us. Whether or not it reported the gospel truth about her origins, the major shadings seemed consistent with her personality and behavior. I liked the fact that it gave me a story where there had only been a void.

  Linda was skeptical when I shared Kathleen’s e-mail. “It’s interesting, but I don’t know about her being able to read Frannie’s thoughts.”

  “Then how do you explain her knowing about Tina?”

  “I think she’s probably reading your mind,” she told me, as if that were the most normal thing in the world.

  Thinking about it later, I decided that both of us were wrong. Frannie was the psychic one. She knew that someone in the world would love her, and she had found me like an arrow finds a bow.

  KATHLEEN INSISTED THAT anyone could do it. The difficult part was shutting off the roaring noise of my thoughts and opening myself to faint impressions from Frannie. The easy part was relaxing, though my expertise in this area turned my experiments into naps. I tried choosing a time of day when I didn’t sag with weariness, but such a time of day didn’t exist. One afternoon after waking from a snooze I seemed to be having some success. I received an image of Frannie trotting down a railroad track, and while I realized that I had simply conjured up a cliché of the vagabond life, I stayed with it until Frannie’s path was barricaded by a moose tonguing a salt block. In the finest tradition of Moobie’s slurping grooming sessions, Maynard had interrupted my reverie by licking himself.

  After another interruption, I lost both Frannie and the moose. I shooed Maynard off the bed, but he didn’t disappear completely. If our cats weren’t in the room with us, we had to guess where they might be—except for Maynard, who advertised his whereabouts via self-pitying yowls worthy of a child caught in a heating duct. I had never met another cat who would remove himself to the most distant corner of the house and then complain about his removal. This time he had managed to push his way through the basement door and was bawling from the bottom of the stairs about the raw deal that fate had awarded him.

  He refused to move a muscle when I dragged myself out of bed to call him, except to unhinge his jaw and protest more loudly. He let me chase him around the staircase a few dozen times before turning into a concrete block and cementing himself to the floor. Normally I would have let him stay in the basement, but I knew without having to read his mind that he intended to lurk until I opened the door to cajole Frannie inside, and then he would attempt an escape. I had no choice but to scoop up seventeen pounds of whining cat and carry him up the steps, although my lower vertebrae took exception to the burden.

  The next morning the ache in my back barely bothered me, because it had been overwhelmed by layers of hurt radiating from my neck. And I looked as miserable as I felt. My face was breaking out around one side of my mouth. Groping for an answer that would explain both the pimples and the pain, I surmised that the grueling day-in, day-out stress of a part-time job had caught up with me and jangled my nerves.

  My diagnosis proved to be accurate insofar as my problem involved nerves. An inflammation caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which had lazed around in my nerve endings since a childhood bout of chicken pox, had belatedly come out to play and the name of the game was shingles. I was officially a senior citizen now with or without a restaurant discount punch card. Within three days, I resembled a Batman villain. Stinging blisters covered the left side of my face, while the right side remained as clear as a baby’s elbow, if the baby happened to be a man in his late fifties. But I wasn’t able to launch a crime spree that would bring Gotham City to its knees.

  “It feels like there’s an iron helmet on my head, and every ninety seconds somebody whacks the helmet in a different spot with a hammer,” I blubbered to my family physician, Dr. Bhattacharya. She gave me meds to slow the virus and painkillers to help me sleep. Little did I know that illness could be an aspiring psychic’s invisible friend.

  PRESCRIPTION ANALGESICS AND I didn’t get along. I couldn’t even take some over-the-counter pills without ending up under the counter. But slabs of pain sent me hurtling to my bottle of Vicodin. I wolfed down two or three—who was counting?—and dumped my sorry self into the upstairs bed to spare Linda a night of seismic mattress shocks as I flinched, shuddered, and groaned. After a while the ouchies continued on unabated, but I experienced them from the opposite side of a cottony wall. Gradually my body melted into the sheets and my untethered brain began to gravitate toward Frannie.

  I tried one of Kathleen’s animal communication exercises. This time the weak video images of a cat on the tracks stayed behind at the station. Instead, thanks to a sense-numbing combination of illness, exhaustion, and modern medicine, a freight train weighted down with absurdly specific imagery scooped me up. It kept playing and replaying for the next hour or so despite my waking up and falling back asleep. I could barely tell the difference between the two states until I finally snapped on the light and started writing down everything that I could remember.

  I prepared to toil through the night describing the epic that had unreeled in front of my closed eyes. Ten minutes and a single steno-size notebook page later, I had reached the end of my need for ink. There wasn’t much there there. I had mistaken intensity for immensity, but the scenes had been so vivid that the backyard with wildly overgrown bushes where Frannie used to live still pulsated around me.

  I had seen the low-pitched roofline of a one-story house with ornamental scalloping around the eaves and windows. A man in his sixties slumped into the yard carrying a basket and wearing a lightweight dark blue jacket with a high school insignia over the pocket. His glumness was so profound that if the sun had been shining, he would have blotted it out. I felt the presence of the river behind him through the trees. When I saw him next he was inside the house slouched upon a recliner against a wood-paneled wall. He still wore the school jacket. He wore it everywhere and called himself “the coach,” but I didn’t get the impression that anyone else used the term.

  I heard him mutter the word Charlene, which was either Frannie’s name or referred to a thirty-one-year-old woman in a white sweater standing in a pile of autumn leaves where the man had dropped the basket. She was an attorney working for a Realtor, and her boss had just transferred her to another city. Although she considered the relocation to be an opportunity for advancement, she was bitter because her manager had relocated her out of spite. She didn’t like leaving Frannie behind, but I didn’t sense a strong connection between them. Both she and the older man seemed emotionally empty with eyes focused on the past. She was tall, thin, and plain faced with short dark hair in a kind of bubble cut.

  I applauded myself for the level of detail I had unearthed until I realized that it couldn’t have come from Frannie. What would a cat know about office politics or a man who still thought of himself as a high school coach? I had just finished reading John Updike’s Rabbit Run and the only nonhuman mind I had succeeded in probing was undoubtedly my own. Popping a sleeping pill, I called it quits for the night and resolved to try again.

  NO LIVING PERSON had a more defeatist attitude toward being sick than I did. In the throes of the vilest flu, Linda wouldn’t miss a beat of her animal chores. “If I’m going to feel bad anyway, I might
as well be doing something,” she would say. That sort of logic sailed out the window whenever I had a scratchy throat and lay stock still in bed waiting for death to flutter down. A more serious illness like shingles required an extra injection of pessimism. I heaped guilt on top of the physical discomfort, blaming myself for having stirred up the virus in the first place. I hadn’t been eating right. Or negative thinking was to blame. God was punishing me for getting crabby with Linda. Or maybe my immune system had completely collapsed. With all these cheery notions buzzing around inside my head, it was little wonder I couldn’t tune into Frannie. My mental radio was plagued by constant static.

  I phoned Bill Holm to tell him that I wouldn’t be available for dinner at the Chinese buffet that week. “Unless I wore a burka, I’d clear the place.” I described the blisters on my face and carped about how I had to keep a washcloth soaked in a bowl of ice water next to the bed. “The itching wakes me up at night and I can’t stand it. I scratch my face and make it worse.”

  “Do you still have Moobie’s Elizabethan collar?”

  “Not that again,” I told him. “You’d have a bad attitude, too, if you felt like this.”

  “It has nothing to do with attitude. You need to wear her cone to keep from scratching yourself.” The idea delighted him. “You’ve got to do it!”

  A lightning bolt shot through my ear on its way to fry my molar, and I used the pain as an excuse to hang up. Bill was right, of course—right about what he didn’t actually say and didn’t even intend to imply, but which I attributed to him based on my principles of self-reproach. I should emulate Frannie, Moobie, Agnes, Lucy, Tina, and Maynard—well, okay, not Maynard—and take events as they came. I needed to roll with the punches, but the taps from life’s index finger knocked me flat before I had the chance. Fortunately for me, psychological relief soon arrived. Unfortunately, it came out of a bottle.