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

by Bob Tarte

  I walked into the bathroom to find her standing on her hind legs vigorously scratching the wallpaper. While she and Tina had done minor damage to it before, this looked as if we had leased our wall to a gypsum strip-mining company.

  “Frannie’s going to find herself living outdoors,” I told Linda.

  “You wouldn’t like that,” Linda said. But from the look on her face I could tell that she was warming to the idea.

  “She shouldn’t still be acting like the wild woman of Borneo,” I said. “She should be a lot more domesticated by now.”

  “She’s hardly wild. She’s the most pampered cat in the house. And Tina does it, too, blast her little hide.”

  Linda called our handyman, Gary, who recommended covering the bottom twenty-six inches of the wall with a thin sheet of bead board. “I can paint it white and add a piece of trim along the top. It’ll look nice and clean and they won’t be so tempted to claw it.”

  But I calculated that it would be cheaper simply to keep the bathroom door closed twenty-four hours a day. Instead, I spent way too much money on a pneumatic door-closing device. “Give me a call if anything comes loose,” Gary told me after he had installed it, conveying his doubts about its effectiveness. The closed door opened stiffly now.

  “Sorry,” I said as I pushed on the door and the pneumatic cylinder pushed back. “I didn’t think anyone was in here.”

  “Are you talking to me?” Linda asked from down the hall.

  Once local wallpaperer Wilma re-wallpapered our wall, the bathroom problem seemed to have been solved every bit as neatly as our kitchen door problem—meaning neither of them had actually been solved at all.

  MY PSYCHIC RAPPORT with Frannie had long since faded and I hadn’t made any further breakthroughs. Instead of tuning into me she was fixated on competing with Tina.

  One afternoon I found her parked in front of the closed door as Tina crunched on her special kibbles inside Linda’s study. Frannie wanted some of that food. She told me so with the same clarity you would use when communicating with a child. She led me from my upstairs office to the porch, posed at her dish with a well-practiced expression of expectancy, then danced over to rub her cheek against the bag of Tina’s kibbles.

  “Do you want some ‘duck food’?” I asked. Tina hadn’t taken to the taste of her pricey food at first, and when I slipped up once and presented a bowl of it to Maynard, he walked off in disgust. But Frannie meowed delightedly as I sprinkled it on top of her cat chow like a garnish. She attacked her food with gusto. I decided to take advantage of her elevated mood and pet her with both hands. She hadn’t let me do that since she had taken a nap on my chest while I had shingles. But the trust just wasn’t there. She squeaked and bolted.

  The next morning, she raced up from the basement and stared at a saucer of greasy chicken. I normally didn’t let her inside the kitchen/dining room with the birds but made an exception for her breakfast treat when I was in the room. Tina stared longingly at the snack from the other side of the SeeNoScreen. Just to taunt her, Frannie left the chicken untouched and scampered back down the basement stairs. I followed to look for a dish towel. When I returned I found Tina in the kitchen licking the saucer clean. She had finally pieced together Joan’s comments about the SeeNoScreen design and broken into the kitchen.

  Her triumph didn’t take me completely by surprise. Over time the condition of our once proud screen had eroded. It no longer resembled a formidable metallic force field but instead a remnant from the shattered window of a prospector’s shack. The manufacturer had designed the SeeNoScreen to withstand being raised and lowered a few times a day as opposed to every seventy seconds. The constant use had aged it quickly. And the engineers hadn’t constructed the screen according to Linda-proof specs—if such standards of indestructibility were even possible. In spite of her small stature, my wife effortlessly snapped vacuum cleaner handles like twigs, tore the glove compartment out of one of her cars, and wore down shoes while sitting still.

  She didn’t destroy the integrity of so-called durable goods through brute strength alone. She was a walking storage battery for a mysterious subatomic force that pulled manufactured objects backward in time toward a preassembled state of being. Linda’s newest pair of glasses started losing screws and popping out lenses the moment she had first set them on her nose.

  I’d lived inside Linda’s energy field for almost twenty years, and in a turn of cosmic balancing she’d had the opposite effect on me. She had helped me to be as whole as I would ever be.

  DR. POST HAD told me that it would take six weeks before we’d find out if changing Tina’s diet had worked. Her chin started looking better in half that time, and chasing her around the house with a syringe of antibiotics had healed the sore in her mouth. But I still worried about her well-being because I knew a couple of people who would throttle her if she didn’t stay out of their bird room.

  The secret of the SeeNoScreen’s vulnerability spread. Tina had learned to penetrate the barrier by probing it for weaknesses, but Maynard succeeded through head-butting trial and error plus a determination to wail his lamentations from every room of the house. I believed optimistically that I could restore the screen to its former glory through a strategic application of white plastic tape. But mending the bottom and sides didn’t impress anyone except me. I admitted surrender the morning that I raised the SeeNoScreen to find Moobie waiting for me by the refrigerator. The screen now only succeeded in impeding our movement, while providing an effortless portal for the cats.

  Once again Gary came to our rescue.

  Although Linda didn’t use the Internet, she wielded the telephone with a humbling level of mastery. She sweetly bludgeoned the most uncooperative hardware-store clerks into describing in molecular detail any types of divider doors on their premises. One man admitted that he had what Linda was looking for and then spontaneously confessed to having once glimpsed a white-and-black cat in his front yard. Having extracted the maximum amount of information from this now broken individual, she dispatched Gary to pick up a two-panel folding door in his truck.

  Linda ordered the door at the correct height for our space and as close to the right width as she could find for a one-hundred-year-old house that resisted conforming to building codes. As Gary measured and re-measured the doorway he realized that the only thing square about the angles was the Calvinist farmer who had built them in 1907. Not only was there a full quarter-of-an-inch difference in width between the top and bottom of the doorway, but also enough variation in the height to make the most unflappable track-style folding door literally lose its groove.

  The door required so much reconstruction that Gary had to insert metal rods into the two top frames to keep it from falling apart. To us, it was a thing of beauty, though—made all the more attractive by the vanquished slump of Tina’s body when she discovered she could no longer slip on through.

  With a solid door where none had been before, the house felt more closed in than ever. Tina chomped her kibbles locked in Linda’s study, and the wheezing pneumatic cylinder kept the bathroom door shut. Disliking confinement with people or cats, Frannie sought seclusion on the porch and grew dissatisfied with the mere sprinkling of Tina’s chow on top of hers. “You want your ‘duck food,’ Frannie?” I asked as I added a handful to her bowl. When I shut the porch door behind me, I found Linda standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed.

  “It’s like living in a walled city,” she said. “It’s too claustrophobic. Can’t we at least keep the bathroom door open?”

  So we called Gary back to follow his original plan of covering the bottom twenty-six inches of the wall with a thin sheet of bead board. He painted it white and added a piece of trim along the top. “It looks okay,” he said when he had finished. “It looks clean.” And I was still so elated over our folding door that paying for two bathroom anti-cat measures didn’t bother me. The sitcom of my life boiled down to a series of reruns, though I didn’t yet realize that
we had just entered a season of endless repeats.

  “WE WERE DOING fine for a while. But now we keep forgetting to put all the bowls away and Tina manages to find one,” I told Joan. She had twelve cats now, including one with a food allergy. “How do you keep Winston out of everybody else’s bowl?”

  “We don’t. We feed all of them the same food.”

  I tried to find out as diplomatically as possible if Jack had discovered a uranium deposit behind the garage. But it turned out that he hadn’t fallen into a glowing pit of cash. Joan told me that a local pet supplies megastore boasted oodles of limited-ingredient diets at half the cost of the kibbles I was buying from my vet. I went online and printed out the particulars of a green-pea-and-duck-formula food that the store carried and ran it by Dr. Post, who said that she couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I should have checked with the cats, too. It looked at first like they would rather starve than allow me to save a cent. But once Frannie noticed Tina sniffing the stuff, she decided that she had to have whatever interested her nemesis.

  Even though all of the cats were now eating the specialty kibbles, Frannie still insisted that I go through the motions of sweetening her bowl. “You want some of your ‘duck food’?” I asked, and she squeaked as I sprinkled green-pea-and-duck-formula chow on top of her green-pea-and-duck-formula chow. It made her happy, and compared to the cranial calisthenics of keeping several bowls on or off the floor at the appropriate times, this little piece of coddling required minimal energy. But even as Linda and I celebrated the return of mealtime simplicity, Lucy developed bladder complications.

  I lugged her up the street to Dr. LeBlanc, who had treated her for a urinary complaint a few years earlier. It had returned with a vengeance. “She has a lot of crystals in her urine, which isn’t a good thing,” he told me. “But it’s a condition that responds well to medication.”

  “I’d rather give medicine to a crocodile,” I told him. “She loves to bite.”

  “You’ll be safe,” he said. “You just need to give her a medicated food for six weeks.”

  That meant we had to go on bowl patrol again to keep one cat out of the other cats’ kibbles. “Six weeks?” I said. “That’s a month and a half.”

  “Six weeks for the food that will dissolve the crystals. After that, she’ll need to be on a special maintenance diet for the rest of her life.”

  The phrase “the rest of her life” struck a nerve. I had never thought of Lucy as anything but a permanent nuisance. Back at home I heard myself telling her, “You’ll feel better soon, sweetie,” as I tried to pet her without getting nipped. Having to like her in addition to loving her struck me as an unfair burden.

  WITH A SICKENING sense of déjà vu, we returned to the mealtime regimen that we thought we had sloughed off. The cats weren’t happy about it, either. They resented the loss of their all-day grazing bounty, but none as much as Lucy. Due to her sedentary nature, I figured that the more far-flung bowls in the house would be safe. But once her frequent litter box visits began to trickle off, I would find her upstairs or in the basement eating out of someone else’s dish—or even sprawled across the bench on our front porch with her head lowered into a bag of kibbles.

  Our kitchen door solution, our cat barrier, wasn’t any more permanent. Among all of our cats, Tina and Maynard were the ones most interested in spending time with us. Maynard craved cuddling, while Tina simply wanted to stare at us. When Linda and I ate dinner on the other side of the folding door, Maynard would complain about it—which made him a lot like me. Tina worked at finding a solution—which made her a lot like Linda.

  “Tell me I’m not seeing what I’m seeing,” Linda said one night as the door began to shudder. We heard a distinctive meow that was more insistent than plaintive.

  “She can’t get in here,” I said as I shoveled green beans into my mouth.

  The door quivered with a purposeful rhythm until a crack emerged and a white-and-carmel-colored face enlarged the gap.

  “No chubby little cats allowed,” I told her and shooed her out. “That was a fluke,” I insisted. “She won’t be able to do it again.” Within seconds the middle of the door buckled and a pair of owl eyes pierced my tattered optimism.

  Tina came and went between the rooms at will until I dug out the baby gate that had done a poor job of keeping Frannie downstairs. We leaned the gate against the folding door. Now, to go in or out of the dining room, we had to pick up the gate and move it, open the folding door, and then replace the gate behind us. Throughout the day my ears were treated to the sharp crash of the gate hitting the floor as Linda failed to balance it just so. I tried to step over the gate a few times, but after falling over it onto the dining room table, I abandoned the athletic approach.

  The bright idea finally struck me of reversing the door so that it no longer pushed open from the living room side.

  “Let’s see her learn to pull it open,” I said a little too smugly.

  Linda shook her head. “She’s smarter than you think.”

  For a couple of weeks the dining room fortress held. Then Tina discovered that by doggedly, cattedly banging the leading edge of the door with her paw, the door would pop open just to be rid of her. Even Maynard got into the act and hammered away with his oversize head. Once he had created a yawning passage, in traipsed Moobie, Lucy, Frannie, and a passing herd of elk.

  Loathe to reprise our dances with the gate, we racked our brains to devise a latch. I went online and searched out mechanisms for patio doors, trailer doors, cabinet doors, and even shed doors, but they were either too large or couldn’t be operated from both sides of the door. But our Gary dabbled in metal sculpture, glass blowing, and other artistic feats. Possessing a genius for thinking outside the box and seeing past the door frame, he made us a nifty bolt that actually slid across the middle of the door to prevent it from folding. And he capped it with a pair of ornate amber-colored glass knobs for easy operation from both sides. It worked beautifully, though he might as well have used gold nuggets in place of the glass knobs.

  After all of the needed renovations and rehangings, we now owned the most expensive two-panel louvered folding door on the planet.

  YOU MIGHT THINK that solving the door problem would have marked the end to our current streak of troubles ushered in by Tina and her dirty chin. You might also think that the Rhine River emptied into Lake Michigan.

  “Oh, no, not again,” Linda groaned. We were drinking our morning coffee as Maynard hopped up onto the bed. “Look at his chin,” she told me. I hung on to him long enough to locate the telltale red bump. “He can’t be allergic to the ‘duck food,’ ” Linda said. In addition to Tina’s duck-based formula, the pet supplies megastore carried salmon-based, chicken-based, lamb-based, and even venison-based cat kibbles, and I envisioned us trying out limitless limited-ingredient foods until we found one that agreed with all of our non-Lucy cats.

  I hauled Maynard to Dr. Post to confirm the diagnosis. Uttering a matter-of-fact “Aha,” she announced that Maynard’s problem was fleas. “If he doesn’t go outdoors, he probably caught them from another cat who does.” I thought of Frannie. “You’ll have to treat all of them to be sure.”

  But we hadn’t resolved the last of our food issues yet. After playing with the “bug light” in the living room one evening, Frannie led me out onto the porch.

  As usual, I took a pinch of the green-pea-and-duck-formula chow from the bag, asked her, “You want some of your ‘duck food,’ sweetie?” and sprinkled it on top of her green-pea-and-duck-formula chow. But she stared at me instead of eating. I added more and got the same results.

  Then it dawned on me what she wanted. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew it with absolute certainty. Trudging across the porch, I unrolled what was left of a bag that hadn’t been opened for months, dug out a small handful of food, and dropped it into her dish. “It’s your ‘duck food,’ Frannie,” I told her. Accepting my newly expanded definition of the term, she buried her face in her bowl
, crunching loudly and arching her back as I petted her.

  “Talk about coming full circle,” I told Linda when I came back into the house. “Remember when Frannie had to have ‘duck food’ sprinkled on top of her supermarket cat food? Well, now I’m sprinkling supermarket cat food on top of Frannie’s ‘duck food.’ You just can’t win with that cat.”

  Chapter 14

  Funneled Again

  I couldn’t imagine what Frannie must have been thinking. We had a contract, which I had signed and she had marked with a muddy paw. So it was all very official. She had agreed that she would stay within earshot of the house while she was outdoors, and in return I’d let her decide when she wanted to come back in. She was allowed to get distracted by a praying mantis or sudden activity at a mole’s burrow as long as she came running after I called a few times. But clause three stipulated that once she pranced up to the door as I held it open, she was supposed to go through it. She wasn’t permitted to veer off in another direction to roll upon the lawn. And when I ambled over to pet her, she was specifically prohibited from pulling her old trick of racing away to taunt me through the boughs of our spruce tree.

  Contracts written for cats clearly didn’t apply to will-o’-the-wisps, and the usual standards of pet treatment fell by the wayside, too. If Agnes, Moobie, or Lucy had refused to come inside, I would have hauled the cat into the house like a sack of mackerel. But coercing Frannie in any fashion just felt wrong. Ever since her accident, she had developed a phobia about being picked up. If I whisked her up off the ground and carried her inside, it would terrify her for a moment, and even a moment was too long. I also wanted to avoid getting my sternum punctured.

  Slogging toward the spot where she was huddling, I faked her out at the last instant by curving past her hidey-hole and putting the barn in my sights. Continuing on behind the poultry pens I followed the gravel path to our neighbor’s driveway where Linda used to leave a margarine dish of food for her when she was still a stray. Then I turned around and started searching among the overgrown masses of jewel­weed for catnip plants. I plucked five medium-size leaves that hadn’t been turned into lace by leafhoppers, crushed a leaf between my fingers, inhaled the pungent smell, cursed myself for lacking a feline brain, and slipped them all inside my shirt pocket. Getting Frannie high would be risky, since she could just as easily tag my hand with a claw as follow me back to the house. But I didn’t have to shoot an herbal arrow after all. She had abandoned the spruce, and to punish me for failing to hang around and wheedle her, she wouldn’t show a single hair of her white-and-black head when I called.