by Lissa Warren
My father didn’t have a lot of rules—just a general set of expectations. Be kind until someone takes advantage. Surround yourself with people who default to happy. Work harder than anyone and everyone else. Know how to take a joke but, even more important, know how to tell one. And, for goodness sake, use your head. He didn’t care about curfews or allowances or bedtimes, or any of that traditional parenting stuff. He cared about being nice and not being stupid. And he cared about Mom and me.
What few rules Dad did have did not extend to Ting. His patience with her was endless, so he was mostly just amused when, over the course of her first week with us, she proved herself adept at several other forms of redecoration—including the living room sofa which, according to Ting, needed a slightly distressed look, like a pair of jeans from the juniors’ department. Little cat, 1; scratching post Dad bought for her, 0. Or the coffee table whose corners, she thought, would look much better rounded—a task she accomplished with a surprisingly minimal amount of surprisingly soundless gnawing. Or the bath mats, which she apparently felt should be changed more often—and which were changed frequently from then on, because she threw up on them at fairly regular intervals after gobbling her food. Or the potted plants, which clearly had entirely too much dirt in them.
In addition to forays in interior design, it turned out Ting was also part tailor. Her specialty: sweaters. Her subspecialty: the destruction thereof. She developed a habit of hurling herself (all five pounds, four ounces of her) at Dad every time he walked in the room, like a little cat grenade—aiming for his chest and occasionally making it. Of course, when she didn’t, she was left literally hanging by a thread. He didn’t care about the sweaters; he just loved the attention. But Mom soon tired of the mending, and trotted off to Marshalls to buy Dad a polar fleece hoodie—which Ting immediately claimed as a blanket.
We soon learned that Ting was also part rooster, meowing her fool head off at sunrise every morning while perched on the back of the couch—the bedroom couch. She didn’t get the memo that the Warrens like to sleep late. Nor did she get the memo that ankles are not snacks. Mom’s bare legs were simply too much for Ting to resist, especially when said legs were shuffling to the bathroom at, say, five or six in the morning. Mom soon traded in her nightgowns for pajamas. Dad excused Ting’s behavior by saying she was acting as his bodyguard. Mom assured Dad that if Ting kept it up and he kept laughing at her while Ting chased her around the bedroom, he’d need one.
My parents had been married for about thirty years by then. They met when they were working at Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn, in the flagship location on Fulton Street. Dad was the buyer for infant furniture. Mom was the buyer for intimate apparel, aka lingerie. They shared a stockroom, and figured that because they could manage this without killing each other, they may as well share a life. It wasn’t quite as easy as that, of course. It never is. At some point Dad got cold feet and, after much discussion, they broke up.
Then, a couple of years later, Mom came home from church one Sunday to find a note from her roommate saying that some nice guy had called for her, but hadn’t left his name. A few hours passed, and he called again; this time, Mom was there to answer. It was my father. They met for dinner that night at Café 72 on East 72nd Street and decided to get back together—this time for good.
In 1968 they were married by a judge in Manhattan, because the Catholic Church couldn’t wrap its head around a Catholic woman marrying a Jewish divorcé. A year and a day later, after petitioning the Catholic Church for an exception, they were married in a rectory by a Catholic priest.
When I was growing up, my mother and father were so united that I was in college before it dawned on me that they were actually two separate people. They were in lockstep regarding how to raise me, in complete agreement that I didn’t have to “make all gone” at dinner, but did have to take a daily multivitamin; that I should take Spanish in middle school, not French, given the increasing Latino population in the United States; that I was welcome to swear at home, but not at them, and never in public; that I should take theater and dance classes instead of playing sports; that I could stay up as late as I wanted, so long as I was reading. And, of course, that I should be raised with pets.
It has always been about cats for me. Cats and books, books and cats. In my mind the two are inextricably linked, and in college I set about immersing myself in any and all cat-related literature. To this day, I still read and reread poems in which cats play a role. There are the old ones—William Wordsworth’s “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves,” with “the kitten on the wall, sporting with the leaves that fall”; William Butler Yeats’s “The Cat and the Moon,” with the cat whose eyes change “from round to crescent, from crescent to round”; and John Keats’s “To Mrs. Reynolds’s Cat,” where he describes its “velvet ears.”
But I gravitate toward more contemporary poems about cats—Gerald Stern’s “Another Insane Devotion,” in which he gives a stray half of his ham sandwich in a gesture of solidarity; William Carlos Williams’s one about the cat who steps with such a sense of purpose into an empty flowerpot; Margaret Atwood’s “February,” with the cat “purring like a washboard”; Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” with its “silent haunches” and “little cat feet”; Marge Piercy’s “The Cat’s Song,” in which the cat says, “I will teach you to be still as an egg”; Wislawa Szymborska’s “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” which will break your heart with its hopeless hope; and Cesare Pavese’s “The Cats Will Know,” with its “sad smile you smile by yourself.” Except, of course, she’s not by herself—her cats are all around her.
Short stories, too, have provided opportunities to combine my two loves. My favorite, hands down, is Ernest Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” which was supposedly inspired by his first wife, Hadley—his “Paris wife.” I became so taken with the story that, the summer after I graduated from college, I took a trip to Key West to visit Hemingway’s house—the one with the gardenias and the bright yellow shutters that he lived in with his second wife, Pauline, during the 1930s. Descendants of his cat, Snowball, still roamed the place, and several of them were polydactyl. This made sense given Hemingway’s love of sailing. Polydactyl cats had long been thought to bring good luck at sea and, indeed, it was a ship’s captain who had given the six-toed white one to Hemingway.
I spent an entire morning with Papa’s polydactyl cats beside his saltwater pool, then toured his house where, atop a cabinet in his bedroom, I saw the brightly colored, flat-faced ceramic cat Pablo Picasso had given him. The two of them had become friends in Paris in the 1920s, and Picasso had gifted the statue to Hemingway because he knew how much the author liked cats.
Bibliophile. Ailurophile. I like books and cats. Lovers of the written word do seem naturally drawn to cats. Perhaps it’s because reading is a solitary activity but feels less so when a cat’s beside you. Not even my favorite books could hold my attention like Ting, though, with her delicate purr and appreciative licks—and propensity for trouble. I don’t know what it is about cats that makes people like them better when they’re naughty. But they are, most certainly, the biker boyfriend of the animal world: You know you should stay away, but you can’t.
Despite all her jobs around the house, Ting did manage to find some leisure time. For example, she learned to use the dresser to get up on the open bedroom door, the kitchen counter to gain access to the top of the refrigerator, and the shelves to reach the pole that ran along the length of my parents’ closet. She did not, however, learn how to get down from said locations, but she did learn that if she meowed pitifully and ceaselessly, one of us would come find her, turn away from her, hunch over, and let her jump right down. We lost serious back skin to this cat.
Ting also learned to fetch, although she refused to retrieve anything except pipe cleaners coiled like a pig’s tail (green ones were a favorite; red, not so much). Her game of choice, however, was pouncing on a piece of butcher’s twine as we dragged it across the bed. The ga
me always began with one of us asking her, “Do you want to plaaaaay?”
In her spare time, Ting had taken up studying a foreign language—by which I mean English. In addition to play, she knew words like birdie (which always made her snap her head toward the window) and hot stuff (which sent her running for the bed, certain that towels or clothing fresh from the dryer would soon be piled on top of her which, of course, they always were—even if it meant we had to throw back in some items that had been washed and dried a week ago).
It was truly an impressive vocabulary. We were not as adept at speaking “cat,” but we did start to learn which sounds meant what. Luckily, most of them were some form of “Pick me up,” “Pet me,” or “Feed me,” including the unmistakable “Feed me now.” Ting drank from the same water glasses we used and ate off the same set of plates—usually not at the same time we were eating, although one of us (Dad) liked to bend that rule.
It should be said that Dad also liked to bend certain rules that applied to him. These included eating leftover Halloween candy in the garage when Mom wasn’t looking (he’d have pulled it off if it weren’t for one stray “fun-size” Mounds wrapper); nibbling Oreos over the kitchen sink while standing in his boxers in the middle of the night (until his heart problem presented itself, Mom used to sneak up right behind him and yell “Jerry!”); weeding without using gloves (the poison ivy gave him away); failing to rinse before recycling (you know you’re doing something wrong when the garbagemen reject your trash); and betting the college basketball brackets each March, using not just his name, but mine, Mom’s, and even Ting’s so that he could enter multiple times. (I bet the guy running the pool at the corner Superette wondered who Ting-Pei Warren was.)
In mere weeks, Ting had adjusted to life with us, and we had adjusted our lives around Ting. We learned which toenails she’d allow us to clip and which ones were off limits, which parts she liked for us to scratch (neck, underarms, and base of the tail) and which were completely unacceptable (belly!). We learned that there’s no guilt like the guilt caused by forgetting to take off the house alarm before opening the door to the deck, causing a blaring siren that sent her scurrying under the bed, where she’d remain for hours until we finally managed to coax her out. We learned which hour the shades must be raised for maximum sunbathing time and that the rocker had to be rotated accordingly, that she’d rather be under the covers than on them, and that we were done playing fetch with her when and if she said we were done playing fetch with her. We learned that she would “go nappies” about one out of every ten times we asked her to, but that, if left to her own devices, she’d nap a good portion of the day. We learned she’d bite but never break the skin, and that her tongue made an excellent loofah (although moderation was required for the face).
In short, we learned we loved her.
Though we were crazy about her little personality—her spunk, and her smarts—we were, admittedly, also swayed by her beauty. To say she was gray accomplishes nothing. On rainy days she looked cool to the touch, like the shale along Lake Erie, or an old pewter mug. But most of the time she looked more like a shark—solid and saltwater slick. Then the sun would come out, and she’d turn to amethyst in my lap.
Her fur was soft and dense like a chinchilla’s, and then there were her eyes. Bright blue at the time of her birth and for several weeks after (we had seen pictures), they had turned to amber during her kittenhood, and we’d been told by the breeder that they would change to a luminous green between the ages of two and four.
Like all cats, Ting was unaware of her beauty, and yet she enjoyed playing beauty parlor—particularly with Mom, who quickly realized that Ting, independent little creature that she was, preferred brushing herself to being brushed. So, after posing the question “Do you want to get bruuuushed,” Mom would just sit there holding the brush—a small white one with plastic bristles that Mom had gotten for free with a Clinique makeup purchase—while Ting repeatedly rubbed the sides of her face against it. If Ting didn’t like the angle at which Mom was holding the brush, she’d adjust it by grabbing the brush with her front paws and pulling it closer. To indicate she was done, she’d start gnawing on the brush or thumping it with her back paws. Average session: twenty minutes. I never saw Mom try to end it early.
The Korat is known as “the cat with five hearts.” The first is obvious when you look at the cat straight on: It has a heart-shaped face. The second heart is visible when you look down at the top of its head. The third is the heart-shaped nose. The fourth heart is the muscular area of the cat’s chest, where the fur comes together in a widow’s peak. And of course the fifth is its beating heart.
That heart got a heck of a workout every time Ting had a “nutty.” Every week or two, for no reason that we were able to discern, she would take it upon herself to race from room to room, conquering some imaginary obstacle course that involved jumping on the backs of couches, the seats of chairs, the tops of televisions, and basically any other stationary object, including us if we happened to be in her way and standing still. She’d be wide-eyed and puffy-tailed the entire time, the fur on her back bristling, and wouldn’t calm down until she had completely worn herself out, which sometimes took several minutes. Even then, her tail would switch back and forth as the adrenaline left her body. Her nutties were disruptive, unsettling, and odd, but we—Dad, especially—couldn’t help but appreciate her athleticism.
My dad was not a macho guy. He couldn’t do “man” things around the house, like hang a picture frame straight or install a shower curtain rod. He could refill windshield wiper fluid, but that was it when it came to car repairs. When he had a flat he called AAA. Though not a “handy” man, he had been athletic all his life, excelling at basketball despite his size, playing tennis and golf like a country clubber, even though he grew up in the Bronx. He loved Ting for her compact power, which I think reminded him of himself—of the way he used to be.
My father was so proud of Ting, and they were such a perfect match. They just loved spending time together. One of his favorite things to do was to take her for walks outside. To guard against ticks or germs from the wild animals that called our backyard home, he always carried her—tucked her right into his jacket or shirt with just her head showing, so that she could get her fill of sights and fresh air. She never once tried to escape—not even when they came across goslings; not even when they ran smack-dab into our neighbor, Charles, walking Zulu, his hundred-plus-pound (though thankfully mild-mannered) Akita. “Her eyes got big, but she didn’t even hiss,” said Dad of the encounter. The two of them, Dad and Ting, would walk over the little stone bridge, past the pair of Adirondack chairs by the pond, past the weeping willow where the kingfishers liked to chase each other, and then back across the creek to the house.
Inside and on her own four feet, Ting would follow Dad from room to room. I can’t recall ever seeing him climb the stairs to the bedroom without looking to see if she was behind him (which she always was), and then looking to see if Mom and I were watching her follow him. Any good thing, my dad liked to share it.
As a matter of course, we took Ting to be spayed—a completely routine procedure but traumatic for all involved. We were proud, though, to register her as Ting-Pei Warren at the vet’s front desk. She was officially part of our family now, and Mom and Dad beamed like the proud parents they were when Dr. Belden called over the other vets to see their first Korat.
So that she couldn’t chew her stitches, Dr. Belden sent her home with one of those plastic head cones that attach via a gauze collar. Ting was miserable with it on, pawing at it nonstop and furiously shaking her head back and forth in an attempt to dislodge it. We hated to see her so unhappy—and, truth be told, wondered if all of her thrashing could result in a football player–like concussion—so we untied the cone and slid it off. For the next week we took turns watching her 24/7 to make sure she didn’t gnaw at herself.
Some people would call this crazy, but the Warrens were nothing compared to the Egyp
tians. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, whenever there was a fire, Egyptian men from all over the city would gather to guard it so that cats couldn’t run into the flames. Our own devotion paled in comparison.
Herodotus also wrote about how, in Egypt, cats were honored in death just as they were in life—how, when a cat died, its family would go into mourning. They’d even shave their eyebrows as a public sign of their loss, just as they’d do when they lost a human family member.
And of course there was a time when the Egyptians actually worshipped cats—as in, built a religion around them. In the first dynasty there was the goddess Mafdet, “slayer of serpents,” who protected sacred places and homes with her woman’s body and cheetah’s head. And then there was Bast, the goddess of fertility, protector of women and children, and the first cat goddess to actually look like a domesticated cat. All house cats supposedly descended from her, which suggests that our treating them as royalty is entirely appropriate. We spoiled Ting, but at least we weren’t erecting temples in her honor.
As the youngest human in the house, I mostly got the night shift during the week that Ting was supposed to be wearing the cone. I had always thought cats were nocturnal but, as Ting aptly demonstrated, they’re actually crepuscular, which means they’re most active during twilight hours—dusk and dawn. From midnight until 5:30 a.m. or so, Ting would doze at my feet while I read book proposals or answered e-mail. But as soon as the sky started to lighten, all bets were off. She’d prowl around the house with me right behind her, then have her breakfast, then hop on the couch to groom herself—which is when I had to be hypervigilant, lest she try to clean her belly. Most mornings, I ended up sitting her on my lap and draping my arm across her stomach while she cleaned her face and head as the sun rose over the pond. Mom would come down around 6:00 to relieve me.
