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

by Bob Tarte

  I set off a small explosion of activity when I looked for her next to the pump house. A downy woodpecker had been chipping away at a brand new block of suet while a squirrel hung upside down pilfering sunflower seed. They left both feeders swinging when they bolted, taking a pair of mourning doves with them that shot off with clattering wings. Our pet geese trumpeted their dislike of my skulking behavior as I circled the spirea bush in search of the fugitive. Deep in the woods a pewee sang its last song of the day. I thought about following the song to the river, but I didn’t suppose that Frannie had wandered that far. A crow agreed with me.

  As I shouted from the porch I wondered if our neighbor a quarter of a mile down the street was puzzling over what a “Frannie-sweetie” might be. A tomato red SUV pulled up to our mailbox, executed a U-turn, and left behind a fog of dust as a farewell present. Caught in the cloud, I thought about how the yard would look a few months from now buried in snow. Into such a weird world our Alfalfa gal had appeared a few days after Linda spotted her racing through the woods. Her fragile appearance had surprised me. Since she was eking out a living in the dead of winter, I had expected a fearsome bruiser instead of a wisp of smoke. I remembered that spark of connection when our eyes first met through the bathroom window blinds and I felt protective of her all over again.

  I decided what I would do when she came up to the front door again. I’d scoop her up and haul her into the house like a sack of mackerel.

  “DID YOU THINK I was calling you?” I asked Moobie.

  I was surprised to find a bright-eyed white cat perched on the back of the couch facing the door with the resoluteness of a Foo dog. She spent most of her time sleeping in the closet and rising with the sunset to haunt the bathroom sink, her dish, or a patch of rug in front of the squatty cabinet. She wasn’t just winding down in life, she barely had a spring left at all, and I worried about her. As she followed the spine of the couch, her steps were slow and carefully placed. She needed to concentrate to keep her balance. Raising her head to meet my hand, she switched on the purring machine. After I petted her awhile, she plopped down to the floor and slid between Maynard and Tina, who barely noticed the gaunt figure. She trailed me into the bedroom and after one false start managed to hop up onto the mattress. She continued to purr as she arched her back in pleasure.

  “You’re certainly lovey-dovey today,” I told her while she licked my hand. Then I remembered that moments ago I had crushed catnip between my fingers. “Is this what you want?” I floated a leaf down to the bedspread. Torn between eating the nepetalactone delivery device or rolling on it, she did each in turn. When no trace of the leaf remained, she jumped down to the floor, tipped over Linda’s wicker wastebasket, and triumphantly flourished a discarded strip of packing tape that I had torn off a parcel of vitamins. Chewing on tape, envelopes, or anything with adhesive had been a quirky pleasure of a younger Moobie, and it buoyed me to watch her transform the tape into a giant Chiclet.

  I fished Tina’s “squiddy” toy out of Linda’s dresser drawer. Closing the bedroom door so that Tina wouldn’t horn in on the action, I coaxed Moobie into rolling over on her back and taking kittenesque swipes at the dangling tentacles. As I played with her I realized that the there was a reason that catnip didn’t work on people. The herb hadn’t caused her joy. It had merely boosted the innate sense of wonder and delight that was central to the nature of every cat. Even sourpuss Lucy was merrily in love with herself and never surrendered a moment of her day to worry. I guessed that if I somehow managed to attain a similar state of continuous contentment, then catnip would pitch me over the railing into a sea of sheer bliss, too.

  I thought back to the days after Moobie’s surgery when she had been forced to wear the Elizabethan collar. Although the collar had bothered her at first, she ended up transforming it to her advantage. Because I had felt so sorry for her, I treated her to extra helpings of coddling and called the cone her funnel of happiness. But in that sense the collar was redundant. In sickness and in health, and in youth as well as old age, she already wore the funnel of happiness that she had been born with, and she never once took it off.

  I figured that I had a funnel of happiness, too. But the problem was that I usually wore it upside down, and the joy of life kept spilling out.

  MY PATIENCE HAD bubbled over into frustration. The last patches of sunlight were flickering in the treetops. In another twenty minutes or so the few birds that still lingered in the sky would punch out for the day and the bats would start their shifts. Frannie had strategically positioned herself on a square of sidewalk close enough to the house to indicate her interest in coming inside but far enough away to prove that she hadn’t yet reached a decision on the matter. I sat down on the outside steps and stared at the divided cap of black fur on top of her white head that reminded me of Our Gang star Alfalfa’s slicked-down hairdo. How could I allow a cat with such a silly face to get the best of me? “If you don’t come inside, I’m going to have to pick you up,” I warned. She gave me an extended blink of satisfaction. Obviously, she didn’t take my threat seriously.

  The relaxed arc of her body on the cement was a far cry from the pulsing dynamo of nervous energy that had crouched beneath our bird feeder a few years earlier. Her back had twitched and flinched as she prepared to rocket away at the first shadow of movement from the people whose help she sought. Now when I took two paces in her direction, she yawned, rose to her feet, and in slow motion glided out of reach into the thick of Linda’s flower bed. As soon as I returned to my spectator’s seat on the porch, she ambled back to her spot on the sidewalk and showed her respect for my authority by turning her back and licking her tail. In a last-ditch attempt at doing things the easy way, I sprang to the top step, opened the door, and reasoned with her. “Come on Frannie. It’s getting dark. Let’s go.”

  Completely ignored, I slumped back down the steps. Although she was driving me crazy at the moment, I knew that I didn’t have a whole lot to complain about. Yes, Frannie could be difficult to live with. Inside the house she required megadoses of reassurance. Outside the house she required a wheelbarrow load of being left alone. She bore no resemblance whatsoever to the snuggly-wuggly kind of kitty that I used to think I loved the best. In fact, she insisted on having more empty space around her than any cat I had ever known. But on those rare occasions when she waltzed up to me wanting to be petted, I felt like I had been given a gift.

  Back in the latter half of the Pleistocene Epoch when we only had a single solitary cat, adding a second not unexpectedly doubled the burden. Taking on a third cat, though, only increased the labor and shed tears by 33 percent. Moving from three cats to four, five, and six should have involved incremental changes so that we would hardly even notice the additional aggravation. These weren’t theoretical cats, however. These were Frannie, Maynard, and Tina. On a good day, Linda might complain, “You can’t go anywhere in this house without stepping on a cat.” On a bad day I could only console myself by contemplating my sister’s lot in life. “At least we don’t have twelve like Joan and Jack,” I would say.

  Faults aside—litter box mishaps, scuffles, dining room incursions, disturbed sleep, vet bills, food bills, damaged property, and our battered psyches—our cats were a companionable crew. Not a single day passed in which they failed to make us laugh. Even if a Buster Keaton video would have had the same effect, hugging a DVD fell a wee bit short of cuddling Moobie or Maynard.

  RETREATING INTO THE house, I killed fifteen minutes leafing through the latest copy of the New Yorker and taking a shower. I scrubbed my hands at the sink to wash off any last residual traces of catnip and then I put on clean, catnip scent–free clothes. The kitty drug occasionally accentuated the uncooperative side of Frannie’s mercurial personality, and I didn’t want to take any chances.

  I couldn’t find her when I sat back down on the steps, but she emerged from beneath the hosta leaves to rub against my leg. Leaning backward on the step, I popped open the door behind me and held it
open awhile.

  “Let’s go, sweetie,” I told her.

  Even on her most stubborn days, this nonchalant method of creating a point of entry usually coaxed her inside, but today she adamantly refused to abandon the amusement park of my shins. She didn’t even scoot off when I lowered my hand to pet her. She buried her face in my fingers. Then she gave my leg the old-fashioned full-body-massage treatment by pressing against me as she sidled back and forth. I held off picking her up, hoping that she would finally hop up the steps on her own and ease onto the porch, but cooperation didn’t appear to be on the evening’s agenda. I hated to break her trust with a fast grab—so I decided upon a slow grab instead.

  I warned her of what was to come by petting her with both hands, one on each side, and then I slowly increased the pressure. “Sorry,” I told her as I tightened my grip and lifted her off her feet. To my astonishment, she didn’t struggle when I held her to my chest. She leaned against me, laying her head on my shoulder and staying completely still as I stroked her neck. I expected her to freeze into stony panic as soon as I stood up, but I was able to hold her with one arm as I opened the door. She didn’t bolt when I set her down on the porch floor or act aggrieved. She trotted over to her dish as if we hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary and glanced up at me with a summons to pet her while she ate.

  I couldn’t remember the last time that she had surprised me this much. She hadn’t simply tolerated being picked up. She had enjoyed it. In fact, I suspected that the entire point of the last forty minutes had been to manipulate me into carrying her into the house for reasons known only to her deep and peculiar self. Possibly she had seen me hauling the other cats around, and though they complained about the conveyance, what had registered with Frannie was that they were getting treatment that she wasn’t. She wanted that same measure of closeness. At least she wanted to try it once. Like Moobie wearing her collar after her surgery, she had taken what at first blush looked like a restriction and transformed it into a privilege.

  SLEEPLESS IN THE middle of the night, on my way back from a glass of water I paused to pet a moonlight-framed Moobie on the head. I scratched her neck and left her purring so loudly I wondered that she didn’t wake the other cats. In bed again, as I wiggled under the sheet I heard a thump above my head. A few moments later Lucy’s raspy hiss from the front hall was answered by a low growl. Agnes must have jumped off my chair upstairs and trotted down the steps to see what I’d been up to. Straining to hear the details of their unusually hushed disagreement, I heard a distant muffled drumming as Maynard pummeled the door of Linda’s study begging to come out. Tina was almost certainly on the rug directly behind him.

  I thought of Frannie asleep on the porch, dead quiet but drowning out the sound of the other cats. I heard her dreaming that she was racing through the woods—alone in the world, but not for long. The ice crunched beneath her feet. Snow hissed in the air and flecked her fur. She ran in that unhurried but determined feline fashion with erect body, stiffly trailing tail, and legs flickering like the frames of a silent movie. The wind flattened the fur on her face. A cat on a mission, she moved to the rhythm of her breathing, ignoring the honk of a diesel horn and my rubbernecking wife’s blue car grinding to a halt on the shoulder of the road. Squirrels, crows, coyotes, ferrets, minks, lemurs, hognosed snakes, and flying fox bats dispersed as her claws tore up the ground. She scattered her past into atoms as she ran. With the strength of a thousand beating hearts she was charging toward us and toward her happiness.

  Acknowledgments and Culpability

  SPECIAL THANKS TO Moobie for sitting on my lap and providing editing advice as I wrote this book—and to Linda for doing the real work in our house while I sat at my computer with Moobie on my lap. I owe Linda yet another debt for thinking up the title Kitty Cornered while soaking in the bathtub.

  A solid gold kibble is earned by my good friend Bill Holm for managing to find his way into yet another book—thus assuring its success—by my sister Joan and her husband Jack for cat advice, and by my sister Bett for her love and support.

  Big bowls of milk go to my agent, Jeff Kleinman of Folio Literary Management, and to my editor, Kathy Pories of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, for helping me to figure out how to best tell this story.

  Most of all, I want to thank our beleaguered veterinarians for their excellent care of our critters over the years: Dick Bennett, Laura Boge, Jason Chudy, Stephanie Dorner, Edward Farnum, Bruce Langlois, Raymond Leali, Kim Mast, Lawrence Nauta, and Bobbie Zech.

  Special thanks to Wayne Schuurman at Audio Advisor, Peg and Roger Markle of Wild Life Rehab Center, Sjana Gordon of Lowell Farm and Wild Life Center, Brian J. O’Malley, Marcia Davis, Kathleen Schurman, Claire Bruno, Kelly Meister, Cayr Ariel Wulff, Mark Winter, Dave Hauger, Dennis Keller, and Phillip Hemstreet.

  Hypnotic thanks to all of my readers who love Kitty Cornered so much that you’re going to order copies of my other books right now.

  Also Available from Algonquin Books

  LINDA TARTE

  Bob Tarte wrote the Technobeat world music column for The Beat magazine for twenty years. He has also written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Miami New Times, the Whole Earth Review, and other publications. He hosts the podcast What Were You Thinking? for PetLifeRadio.com. Bob and his wife, Linda, live in Lowell, Michigan, and currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, rabbits, doves, hens, and several cats. They also raise and release orphan songbirds for the Wildlife Rehab Center Ltd. For pictures of Bob’s cats and other critters, visit BobTarte.com.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2012 by Bob Tarte. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-61620-149-4