The Mighty Queens of Freeville

by Amy Dickinson

  “I think he’s going to be sort of bigish when he’s filled out,” the clerk said. I looked into the cat’s calm and un-blinking orange eye. I thought of something my mother used to say to my sisters and me when our childhood squabbles threatened to get out of hand: “Mark my words. This will end in tears.”

  He was delivered to our apartment in a super-size pet carrier—the kind most often used for Labrador retrievers. When the door to the carrier was opened, the cat sauntered out, looked around, and draped himself on the floor, as if he owned the place, which, of course, he would—in good time.

  I’ve always preferred granting human names to animals, so I was partial to calling our new cat Calvin Derrick, after one of my favorite ancestors. (I only knew Calvin Derrick through old-timey photographs, in which he was often surrounded by laughing women wearing stiff collars and straw hats.) Emily decided to name him Skunky, but thankfully the name didn’t stick. Animals have a way of inhabiting or wiggling out of their given names. I’ve known a Skunky or two, and this cat was no Skunky.

  It was October. Our cat was fat and orange, so Emily started calling him Pumpkin. He tried his name on for size and it fit.

  Cats have a reputation for not being as interesting as dogs, but Pumpkin seemed to embody favored qualities of both species. He ran to the apartment door and greeted us with doglike enthusiasm when we came home, but he was lumpy and compliant enough to let Emily dress him in doll clothes—something few dogs with any self-esteem would tolerate. Pumpkin spent much of the first several months of his time with us dressed like “Felicity,” a colonial-times doll that Emily owned. He wore a cape and bonnet willingly, though he didn’t take to the lace-up boots. He participated in tea parties and safaris and treasure hunts. Sometimes we tied Emily’s old baby blanket around his middle like a skirt, just because we could. He had a high tolerance for humiliation and a fondness for headgear, which is something of a prerequisite for being a member of our family.

  At night, the cat split his time between our two rooms, curling up with each of us in turn, placing his massive head on the pillow like a person.

  As Pumpkin grew ever larger, topping out at twenty-two pounds, it became clear that his size would be one of his defining characteristics. When he was seated, his belly bulged over his haunches; from the back he had the silhouette of a snowman. Standing on his hind legs, which he could do surprisingly well, he was as tall as a kindergartner. Eating, eating, eating, and food were his main preoccupations, though he also loved to watch television and track the pigeons that would come to light on our windowsill.

  One time my mother and I were talking on the phone about our cats—one of our favorite topics. We liked to trade anecdotes about them and then decide which movie stars would be best suited to playing them in a movie. One of Mom’s cats, Blackie, a neurotic black and white foundling with tuxedo markings, was going through an anxiety-fueled upholstery-shredding phase. “He always looks like he’s headed out to a sophisticated black-tie party with his tuxedo on,” she said. “He’s handsome, all right, like William Powell, but unfortunately he acts like Don Knotts.” We decided that we would cast John Goodman to play Pumpkin in a movie, but only because Jackie Gleason was dead.

  Every now and then I would catch a glimpse of Pumpkin’s massive hindquarters and tail as he sauntered around the corner into the kitchen toward his bowl, and it would hit me: I am sharing my home with another species. I inhabit the same space as a four-legged thing covered in fur. I have livestock in my kitchen.

  I didn’t set out to complete our family by adding a pet to it—but that is what happened. This animal took the third chair, completing our family trio and bridging the gap of our loss. Emily and I projected onto him all of the qualities we most valued, and he went along with it. When we needed a playmate, we would drive him crazy by making him chase a feather or the light from our flashlight. When we needed a hug, we would hold him on his back and rub his belly like a dog, and he would fall asleep with his paws splayed in the air—paralyzed. When Emily had kids over to play, they would take the cat into her room and spend hours following him, talking to him, and trying to carry him around. We decided that he was hilarious. When we had been out and he was alerted to our return by the sound of the key in the door, we could hear his heavy footfall as he bounded across the apartment toward the door, as if to say, “Where were you? I’ve been worried sick!”

  To make our frequent trips to Freeville, we would shove Pumpkin into his carrier for the seven-hour-long drive. He grew so used to the routine that eventually we could leave the carrier’s door open and know that he would essentially just hang out. In Freeville, Pumpkin led the life of a country cat; we let him go outdoors, and he would stalk the backyard, occasionally catching a rodent by accident and then acting horrified by what he had done. He staked out a spot on the bank of Fall Creek, and I could look out of the kitchen window and see the outline of his massive silhouette as he sat and tried to watch the water while swallows from my neighbor’s barn dive-bombed him in an unrelenting course of harassment.

  At night, when the village was silent, Pumpkin would travel across Main Street to visit with the neighborhood cats. Our neighbors directly across the street, the Joneses, had a series of muscular bruisers over the years that were all named Indiana. (Unlike our family, the Joneses liked to stick with one cat name, regardless of the cat, though all of the many “Indiana Joneses” I have known over the years do seem to share a certain swashbuckling quality.) Though Emily and I imagined that Pumpkin was happily playing poker and smoking cigars with Indiana Jones and his crew of local feline hoodlums in a cat version of Guys and Dolls, we heard nighttime howling and knew that he was getting into scrapes. Like us, Pumpkin was a part-time resident, and certain lifestyle adjustments needed to be made. “You can’t just show up from the big city and expect everyone to accept you right away,” we’d tell him as we dressed his bloody ear. “Back off a little. Be a listener. Don’t go on too much about how great you have it in the city. These cats catch their own food and have never met a sardine straight from the can.”

  Unfortunately, like our long-ago Holsteins, Pumpkin was a slow learner—or a masochist. I heard from neighbors that he would roam their backyards at night, yowling under the occasional window, looking for trouble but evidently too slow to outrun it when it happened. I used to marvel that this cat, accustomed to nine hundred square feet of apartment living, could come to the country, ramble so far away at night, and then still find his way home. Some nights I would lie awake worrying about him, imagining him getting hurt or lost. I couldn’t figure out how he would know where we lived and wondered if maybe he’d find a better deal elsewhere and just not bother coming back to us. Our neighbor Penny had five handsome cats, some of them hungry refugees originally from the Section 8 housing one block away on Railroad Street. When Penny took in a cat, he or she got a literary name plucked from George Eliot or Dickens, a leather collar, two square meals a day, free and excellent health care, and the freedom to lounge on her Stickley furniture and watch movies. Penny’s house must have seemed like Club Med to these Section 8 kitties. What cat wouldn’t want that? I’d move in with her if she’d take me.

  Rachel’s new husband, my brother-in-law Tim helped me to understand an animal’s instinct and desire to come home. Tim is a bird expert who works at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology and is a well-known falconer who flies birds all over the world. Tim raises birds of prey as well as a flock of homing pigeons at his house down the street from ours in Freeville. One evening I was standing in back of Rachel and Tim’s house, watching the sky as it turned from dusk to dark. Suddenly, his flock of birds came wheeling across the sky—thirty birds flying in concert. They made a grand loop over the playground at the elementary school and then dropped their speed and altitude and, one by one, flew into the large coop that Tim keeps in the backyard. These birds leave in the morning, cover a huge territory each day, and return at dusk to a coop behind a house on Main Street. I couldn’t
get over it. “How do they know where to go and why do they always come back?” I asked Tim. “Well, they come back here because this is where they live. This is their home,” he told me. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I do that too, come to think of it.”

  And so our cat always came back too, because his home was with us.

  I should have expected that Pumpkin’s prodigious appetite would get him into a serious jam one day, but unfortunately I didn’t quite see the role I played in his lifestyle choices. I was like the bewildered mother who goes on Dr. Phil wondering why her 850-pound bed-bound son is so fat. Our cat had no “off switch” on his appetite, and I never denied him anything. Though I always considered myself a responsible parent to Emily, unfortunately I didn’t apply the same standards to my stewardship of our most vulnerable, obese, and charming family member. Belying the ste reo-type of the cat as a finicky, careful eater, ours was a Hoover in a cat suit with no culinary standards.

  One Christmas season I was so broke that I decided to make—rather than buy—all of that year’s Christmas gifts. I have done this poverty-inspired “homemade Christmas” any number of times, and it has never worked out for me or for any of my recipients, as far as I can tell. I am crafty to a fault, by which I mean that anything handmade by me is usually delivered along with the phrase “I’m sorry. It’s all my fault.”

  This particular year, my friend Margaret talked me into making biscotti to give as gifts. Biscotti are Italian cookies, baked twice and at low temperature until they are hard enough to be used as a building material. Margaret thought it would be a good choice for me. Because of its natural bricklike consistency, nobody could ever wonder if the cookie was stale. Margaret shared her favorite recipe and talked me through the steps. I successfully turned out a couple of batches of almond cookies—just enough to distribute to family members who had never heard of the exotic baked good and who would most likely toss them directly onto the compost pile on Christmas night as a treat for the woodchucks.

  My gift was finished, packaged in tins I’d gotten from the Dollar Store, and sitting on the kitchen counter for a few days until the weekend, when we would drive to Freeville for the holiday.

  Pumpkin wasn’t himself. I knew this because he had stopped eating. A day or two of this wouldn’t really hurt, I figured, but then he stopped drinking. He grew even more lethargic than usual, and his orange eyes seemed to lose their shine. His bulk started to disappear at an alarming rate.

  By the time I got him to the twenty-four-hour emergency vet, it was December 23 and he was floppy and not breathing well. They x-rayed him and discovered that he had eaten an almond that had most likely fallen onto the kitchen floor during my baking binge; the nut was stuck cross-wise in his gut. Pumpkin would need surgery right away to remove it. The vet thought that if they hydrated the cat for several hours on an IV that he would probably be able to make the long drive from DC to Freeville. Emily and I picked him up at 2 A.M. and raced him to the School of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell (ten miles from our house on Main Street) in an ice storm, our lightweight Saturn sedan fishtailing on the black ice. The vet in DC called ahead, and when we arrived at around noon on Christmas Eve, white-coated interns met us in the parking lot to run him into surgery.

  I called my sister Anne from the hospital. Unlike me, Anne really does have a way with animals. She’s had a variety of adventures involving three-legged dogs, blind cats, goats, and had even toyed with raising alpacas (or was it llamas?) at one time. She is famous in our family for being able to stuff a pill down the gullet of any animal and then covering its nostrils so that it won’t spit the pill back up. Anne also seemed to absorb the most pragmatic lessons from the animals of our childhood. “If he goes into surgery, it’s going to be expensive. You need to think about whether you want to do that. If he’s suffering now and then has surgery, he might not come through it and it’s still going to cost you. You just need to think about it,” she said.

  Our childhood had taught us too much about how animals die. As our various beloved pets neared the ends of their lives—if they were lucky enough not to die unexpectedly under a car or tractor tire, freeze to death in the snow, or as happened with one cat, in the clothes drier with a load of clothes—our father was frank about what needed to be done. When I was around ten years old and our very dear twenty-three-year-old calico house cat Mickey was too sick and feeble to function, he gathered his children together and explained the options. “I could put her into the truck and take her up to the vet and have him do it,” he said. “But you know how much she hates to ride in the truck and I don’t know if it’s right for her to be so scared at the end.” We nodded our heads. Mickey would have been frantic during the ride; I couldn’t stand the thought of it. Dad said, “Or I can do it here.” We said that he could.

  My father raised animals for a living, and it went against his nature to kill things. I knew that about him. I also knew that he started each day stroking a cat curled on his lap as he drank his first cup of coffee at the kitchen table. He was a tough guy who also happened to be an unreconstructed cat man. He got his gun. We stayed inside the house, quiet, until it was done. In time, he came back into the house. I was crying; I already missed Mickey, who used to sit on my lap and drink milk out of my spoon as I ate my cereal in the morning.

  “She was sitting in the sun. She never even felt it. I buried her over there,” he said, gesturing toward the edge of the yard. And though I know that it sounds like a cruel thing to do, I knew that he had done a very hard thing, and that it had been a kindness. I never doubted it—then or now. Anne and I shared this history, and though we didn’t bring it up, we both knew that when you love an animal, you have to love it, literally, to death.

  The vet tried to explain to me what was going on. I was told that surgery might not save our cat and that if it did he would be facing a long recovery in the hospital. I heard myself say, “Do what ever you need to do. Please do it.” I signed some papers and they took the cat away. I was prompted to stop at the cashier’s office on my way out, where I wrote a check for a $100 deposit that I didn’t have the funds to cover.

  On Christmas day, everyone in my family pretended to marvel over their biscotti and asked about the cat. They talked about him the way you discuss a missing family member at a reunion—very fondly and optimistically. “You know what I like about him? He’s a gentleman,” my mother said. I pictured Pumpkin wearing a waistcoat and monocle. Emily and I drove over to the hospital in the afternoon to check on him. Cornell’s animal hospital is very large and fancy, as befits a huge university research facility. As we waited to see the vet on call, a few other Christmas visitors came through, stomping the snow off their boots onto the waiting room floor. “I’m here to see Muffin,” “I’m visiting Peaches,” “I brought a deer in the other day and I’m just checking in to see how it’s doing?”

  Pumpkin was brought out to us on a gurney. He was heavily bandaged and on an IV. He looked up at us—the light back in his eyes—and then gave one switch of his tail, as if to say, “I’m baaaaaack.” We petted him and cooed over him and then, elated, drove home to Freeville to tell the family. We visited him twice a day during the week he was in the hospital. When he was ready to come home I couldn’t get to the hospital fast enough. Before they would bring him out to me, however, I was led, once again, to the dreaded cashier. The bill, thoughtfully itemized, was $1,500. I excused myself and called my sister again from the hallway.

  “They want $1,500! I don’t know what to do!” I whispered. I pictured myself working off the bill by giving enemas over at the large animal clinic. My sister sighed. “You have to realize something. They really don’t want to keep your cat. Their goal is to give him back to you today. So they’ll take what ever they can get from you now. Negotiate a payment plan for the rest,” she said. I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to keep our cat, but glancing out over the waiting room (one Newfoundland with a bandaged leg, three kittens, a pair of frisky terrier twins, and a snake), I
had to concede that, for these people, Pumpkin was very much beside the point.

  Our cat limped back into our lives; he had lost half of his body weight, and we babied him and fed him special prescription cat food ($58/case) until he bulked up again.

  I read a story in the paper recently that, according to archaeologists, cats domesticated themselves. Humans originally domesticated and bred dogs to do jobs and be companions. But thousands of years ago, cats started choosing to be around humans, because when people began to cultivate grain, the grain stores were host to rodents that cats fed upon. Cats were first motivated to be around humans because we were a food source for them. Staying with humans was very much their choice.

  Pumpkin took this evolutionary notion a step further. He domesticated us. He bent us to his will in his benevolent, furry way. He put a subject in our sentences. When Emily was away from home visiting her father or at camp, I would send her letters outlining the cat’s activities and grievances, his many complaints about being in my sole care, and his threats to hire a lawyer, should she not return forthwith. I would tell her on the phone that I was fine and keeping busy, but that Pumpkin was a little lonely and couldn’t wait to see her again. Indeed, when she was away, he would wander into her room, cocking his giant head, looking for her. When we took long trips, we’d occasionally bring him with us and sneak him into hotel rooms, concealed beneath a garbage bag and sweaters. He would eat his Friskies out of an ashtray in the bathroom. During breakfast at our apartment, Emily would let him sit on top of the kitchen table and drink her sweet milky leftovers, the way Mickey used to.