Nor was feeding them as easy as one might have supposed, since each of them, once they were no longer actually starving, developed a strong preference for one brand or kind of food only—though, like all cats, they were fickle, and often changed their mind on the subject just after you’d bought a dozen cans of what they’d liked before.
One of the odd things about cats—and another of the ways in which they strongly resemble human beings—is that cats will eat anything they can find or kill to support life when they’re on their own in the wild, from frogs and snakes to small birds and rodents, only to become finicky gourmets the moment they’re indoors and being fed two squares a day from the A&P. It’s as if they went from a state of starvation to being a fussy client in a restaurant or a hotel overnight. You might suppose that they would feel grateful for what they were offered, like the children in the parish poorhouse in Oliver Twist, but that is to underrate a cat’s power of recovery, as well as its strong individuality. Yes, when they’re still starving (and eager to please) you can put any old kind of food in a dish and leave it on the porch and they’ll wolf it down, including leftovers, but the moment they’re inside the house, they will turn their nose up at what they don’t like, and walk away from their plate rather than touch it.
Go figure! Why does a cat which has been perfectly content to eat, say, Fancy Feast Flaked Trout for weeks—won’t touch anything else, in fact—suddenly decide it won’t touch flaked trout, or even look at it? The fickle appetite of cats has made the manufacturers of cat food rich, and doubtless always will. As every cat owner knows, saying, “Oh, he’ll eat it when he gets good and hungry,” is a delusion. Once a cat turns its nose up at something, that’s it. It can (and will) sit there until hell freezes over, or until you give in (which is likely to come sooner, given a cat’s ability to provoke guilty feelings in its owners).
Of course none of our cats is exactly starving, even at mealtimes, since we have three bowls of dried cat food in the house, always kept filled, just so the cats never go short of a between-meals snack. It goes without saying that each of the dried foods that goes into the mixture is especially chosen because it’s good for cleaning their teeth, or rich in vitamins and minerals, or specially formulated for aging cats, or for preventing problems of the urinary tract, though the cats don’t know this, since they can’t read the labels on the bags. Some of the fussier ones go to the trouble of picking the kind they like out with a paw, and flicking the rest onto the floor, but even if they don’t stop for a mouthful, the fact that there is food available at all times seems to have a relaxing effect on them, though it doesn’t prevent them from screaming like banshees when it’s time for their dinner.
Jake, it has to be said, was neither a fussy nor a discriminating eater. He ate slowly—perhaps as a result of tooth problems—seriously and solidly, whatever was presented to him, bringing to the act of cleaning off his plate the solemnity of a prayer meeting. Some cats are easily distracted when they’re eating; not Jake—when it was time to eat, he ate. After eating, he liked a healthy nap, for better digestion. Unsurprisingly, he grew huge. His tail seemed small for such a large body, and he walked with the kind of slow, dignified grace that certain fat men used to cultivate, in the days when no guilt or shame attached to being fat. He bore, in fact, a certain resemblance to Orson Welles in his later years, even to the expression, which was mildly suspicious, and slightly devilish.
Though Jake was “terminal,” dying was not on his agenda, so it came as a surprise when he began to fail. Various treatments were tried, but the effects never lasted long, and in the end it seemed cruel to subject him to visits to the vet and injections for no real purpose. Not that Jake wasn’t stoic, in his own way. One evening, he had turned up at the back door with blood dripping out of his mouth, a sad sight, and had to be rushed to the twenty-four-hour-a-day animal emergency clinic, wrapped in a towel, silently drooling blood. It turned out that he had broken a tooth somehow, but he faced dental surgery with a good deal more calm than his owners, and afterward seemed none the worse for wear, though the emergency vet expressed amazement that he had been eating roast beef! Some cats hate a visit to the vet, and fight back tooth and nail, but Jake wasn’t one of them. He tended, on the contrary, to go limp, like a protestor in the hands of the police; on the other hand, he clearly didn’t like the experience, and doubtless would have liked it less had he known how hopeless his case was.
Jake’s end was eventually the result of a kind of coup. He had never really fought for the position of Top Cat, it was more his sheer size and Margaret’s affection for him that kept him at the top of the pyramid. The ladies were not a threat to him, though he took good care not to provoke them, and Mr. McT, while he suffered from a certain jealousy, and glared at Jake from time to time through narrowed, yellow eyes, did not actually challenge the only other male in the house. But as Jake’s strength ebbed, and he grew thinner and more listless, Mr. McT became bolder, and more eager to take his place. Mr. McT began to jostle and push Jake, until finally, he managed to attack the big gray cat and mutilate one of his paws. Dripping blood, Jake had to be taken back to the vet, but the defeat and the injury at the hands of Mr. McT seemed to strip Jake of his will to live, and, in the end, as his immune system collapsed, he simply gave up.
Margaret adds: “Cat bites and scratches can be serious for people too. I remember early one morning when I was having my breakfast, Queenie jumped up on the table and when I picked her up to put her down, she bit my finger. I didn’t pay too much attention to it apart from washing it clean and putting on a Band-Aid, but by late afternoon, it was throbbing and very swollen, so I drove myself into Poughkeepsie to Vassar Brothers Hospital, where of course I waited for ages in the ER, a reason one is often making for not going when one should. Eventually the necessary forms were filled out and I found myself in one of those little curtained cubicles. A very young intern came in with my form in his hand and said that he had noticed that I was allergic to penicillin. ‘How allergic?’ he asked. ‘Try death,’ I said. He sighed, ‘What a pity, it would have been the best treatment.’”
Mr. McT slipped effortlessly into Jake’s place—no doubt where he had always wanted to be—put on weight, bulking himself up almost to poor old Jake’s size, and replaced Jake on Margaret’s side of the bed.
“The king is dead. Long live the king!” With cats, as with human society, the business of life and succession go on in an orderly way. Whether cats feel grief or not is hard, of course, to say. Certainly they miss a friend when he or she is gone, though by human standards they recover swiftly from grief, but then again Jake’s friendship had been reserved for Margaret, rather than his fellow cats.
In any case, it was Mr. McT’s moment, and he made the most of it.
7. Mr. McT in Love
Mr. McT had a streak of the bully in him, and although both the “ladies” of the house were more than capable of looking after themselves in a scrap, neither one of them thought herself a match for Mr. McT, and being cats, it never occurred to them to team up against him—teamwork just isn’t a big cat concept. Hooligan wasn’t afraid of him, or any other cat—she just stood her ground, howled, and puffed herself up into a huge spiky, inky bundle of fur with which it seemed prudent not to tangle—but Mumsie was, and made the mistake of showing it.
Not that Mr. McT was looking for trouble—he simply wanted to have his own way, without any interference—best place on the bed (nearest Margaret), first plate of food at dinnertime, a place on Margaret’s lap and scraps off her plate at lunchtime, that sort of thing. Nothing about Hooligan or Mumsie suggested that they saw themselves as Mr. McT’s harem, even had he been in a position to need a harem, and on the whole they did their best to steer clear of him, Mumsie particularly.
From Mr. McT’s point of view, it was a good life, but for cats, as for people, things change. There was about to be a whole new set of arrivals, all females, beginning with a singularly self-possessed stray who was not perhaps as stray
as she first seemed.
As Margaret recalls, unlike that of most strays, who hang about trying to make up their mind about whether to approach closer or not, her arrival was not quite as accidental as it looked. “Kit Kat I know was planted on us by my two barn workers, who lived next door. She had most likely made a nuisance of herself at their house, and they quickly figured out that I would be a soft touch as usual. So surprise, surprise, when I came out to the barn one morning and Leroy said, ‘Look, a new kitty, she certainly came to the right place. What do you think Michael will say?’ I said, ‘You know perfectly well what Michael will say, and isn’t that the cat Juan said had come down his chimney last week, and that you said had been hanging around your garden?’
“Leroy started to back away from me, taking his cap off and putting it back on again, and staring into the middle distance, a sure sign that something was not on the up and up. Juan appeared, saying. ‘She the kitty who come down chimney, she run around all over the house, we like, but she no stay.’
“Leroy gave him a look and walked away. ‘Goddamnit, Leroy,’ I said, ‘we don’t need another cat, you know that.’ He kept walking. Kit Kat and I looked at each other. She was very pretty, very feminine, no doubt about that. Orange, tabby, and white. I walked back to the house, and she followed. She came straight inside.
“For a cat, she had a hard time judging distances, and was always taking off from one spot but never making a secure landing where I imagine she had planned to. China, books, photos, precious small objets d’art all hurtled through the air, and flowers flew out of their vases and lay in pools of water on the floors. ‘She needs some sort of tranquilizer,’ Michael said, as she continued on her path, stacks of videos tumbling from shelves, pots and jars and bottles on bathroom shelves crashing to the ground. He liked her despite all that, and even overlooked the fact that one day we discovered that she had neatly bitten around the bottom edges of every lampshade in the house. ‘Those were very expensive, and we brought them back from Santa Fe,’ I said.
“‘She didn’t mean any harm, she’s the pretty one,’ he answered, and started carrying her around, and letting her sit on his lap. But she was tough, and swatted at him all the time, often scratching him, and he began to appear with iodine swabbed over his fingers and up and down his arms. She never purred, wore an irritable expression, fought all newcomers, and the vets were always pleased to see her leave their examination rooms. Over time she has slowed down, and we have less damage indoors, but I am always pleased to see her waiting to be let out in the morning—it gives us and the other cats a break.”
Kit Kat was certainly pretty, and full of strange and endearing habits—she disdained water bowls, and preferred to drink from a faucet, for example. She tended to lurk on the kitchen countertop next to the cold-water faucet, and would tap your hand when she wanted the water turned on for her. Unfortunately, she did most of her tapping with her claws out, so if you weren’t fast enough to suit her, it was back upstairs for the iodine bottle and a Band-Aid. Eventually, it proved necessary to keep another bottle of iodine and a big box of Band-Aids in the kitchen cupboard. Once, she managed to take off Michael’s glasses with a single swipe of her paw, sending them flying across the kitchen, but mostly she satisfied herself by leaving a series of crisscross cuts on your wrist that bled for hours and made you look like a failed suicide attempt. She also had a habit of hiding in out-of-the-way nooks and crannies to give you a quick scratch as you walked by. She had enough charm to make these seem liked lovable habits, except at the actual moment when she had her claws in your skin.
Mr. McT gave her a reasonably wide berth—it did not escape his attention that Kit Kat was not a cat to be tangled with. Her expression, even in repose, was menacing. Not surprisingly, she quickly took on the telltale look of “a Korda cat,” which is to say a big body and a little head. One of the objects of her persecution was Tizz Whizz, a stray who, after much drama and enticement, spread over a long period of time, had finally taken up residence in the tack room.
Margaret has been grooming Tizz Whizz (literally) for greater things, and calls her “a success story, over almost a two-year period.”
“She appeared to be living belowground in the driveway culvert, and continued to live there for some time, causing us a lot of anxiety when after one heavy snowstorm her exit hole was piled high with plowed and frozen snow, and we could hear her cries from deep below. She is probably Kit Kat’s mother or sister, as they are almost identical. I ran out through the first winter and left food by the opening. Then she started appearing in the barn. You could not get near her, and she hissed and spat at all of us. But we put a nice box in the hay stall, with a bowl of dry food and water and that was okay until the spring got warmer. She grew thinner. One evening I was sitting out on the mounting block and she joined me, rubbing against my back. I put my hand out to stroke her, and off she flew. So I got a small hairbrush and held it out to her. A long time passed and then she started rubbing her face against it. The brush was the turning point. Gradually, she let me touch her, and even pick her up, but to this day nobody else can touch her. After nineteen months she decided to come into the heated tack room through the cat door we installed for her. She now lives there most of the time, sitting in the sun-filled window, not bothered by the comings and goings of all of us. One day, while we were having our Dunkin Donut break in the tack room, Michael said, ‘She looks as if she’s ready to come into the house, but then one will have to come out and live in the barn—McTavish gets my vote.’”
Poor Mr. McT! Needless to say, suggestions that he should be turned out of the house fell upon deaf ears, but he was now living with three strong females, none of whom was about to put up with any nonsense from him. He had managed to replace poor Jake, but was still obliged to walk carefully, despite his size and thuggish expression, except when looking at Margaret. His life, however, was about to change radically, in the form of an unexpected May/September romance, proving, if nothing else, that with cats as with people, nobody is immune from love.
Margaret: “Ruby 9/11 is the only cat who has come into our lives without baggage. She was found in the weeds around the pond next to our annex barn, where we store jumps, hay, and equipment, near our neighbors Bill and Lisa, who now live in the house where I found Hooligan abandoned many years ago. They called to ask if we were missing a cat, and I said no. The next morning, I rode by and Bill picked her up out of the long grass. ‘Pretty little thing, isn’t she?’ he asked. She had a pinched little face, huge ears, long, gangly legs. Mostly black, with some pale orange and white. She was so thin, so small. Very young, and I wondered if she was on her own, or if there were more. ‘If you could put a can of food and some water in the barn,’ I told Bill, ‘I’ll be back in a while.’ Later, I took up some of the necessities of life for a cat—a nice basket, with a towel inside, a food dish and a water bowl, a flea collar, a couple of cat toys, and a brush. She was gone.
“Just as well, I thought, hard to explain to Michael, even though she could have lived up here and been an annex barn cat. I was about to get back into my car, when she walked out from some weeds and started to climb up my pants leg. I picked her off, and realized I was holding on to skin and bones—she weighed nothing. I carried her into the barn and put her down. She wasn’t the width of my wrist. She climbed up my leg again, and this time she made it all the way to my neck, purring loudly. When I got home I made an appointment to take her to the vet the following day. ‘I found a kitten today,’ I told Michael at dinner. ‘She’s going to live in the annex.’ ‘Really? And for how long?’ ‘That will be her home,’ I said.
“The vet visit went well, and she did not even have fleas. That was on a Thursday afternoon. Each day we rode by, this tiny thing would be sitting in the doorway, and on Sunday morning there was a terrible storm. This isn’t going to work, I thought, so I drove up, collected her and her belongings, and brought her home. ‘Her name is Ruby 9/11,’ I said, ‘because that’s the first date I
saw her.’ ‘But we have four cats in the house already, plus two outside,’ Michael said. ‘It isn’t going to work. She’s a kitten, the other cats will kill her.’ Michael was putting iodine on his hand, after several scratches from Kit Kat.
“As it turned out, Hooligan and Mumsie were briefly curious, Kit Kat confrontational as usual, but Ruby was smart and subservient, and gave her a wide berth. McTavish, however, fell in love. How could he have been this lucky? he must have thought. They played together, they groomed each other, they ate out of the same bowl, they curled up and slept together, wrapped in each other’s front legs. It was a May/September romance all right. ‘No more cats, absolutely no more,’ Michael cried. ‘Have you seen what they’ve done to the wallpaper in the bedroom? And to the dining-room chairs? And to the green velvet armchair? And to the carpets? I mean, Thom von Buelow would have a fit if he saw this house now!’”
Ruby grew. Unlike the rest of the cats, she didn’t put on a lot of weight, perhaps because she was active as only a kitten can be, waking us up every morning with the crash of objects falling to the floor as she leaped and bounced from one piece of furniture to another, without, apparently, looking where she was going. Her specialty was the high jump, leaving a trail of wreckage in her path. She also liked to start the morning at, or slightly before, dawn, by playing with her toys, scattering them noisily across the polished pine floorboards, and hiding them in inaccessible places. Sleep was impossible once light began to come through the windows, however faintly.
Cat People Page 8
