by Gwen Cooper
We didn’t have any big plans for that evening, having set aside the whole night to help our new kitten acclimate. Scarlett reappeared from the bedroom a few minutes later, and I watched as she ran around for a while, keeping an eagle-eyed lookout for any signs of distress or potential hazards that might have gone overlooked when I’d kitten-proofed the apartment. But Scarlett seemed fine in her new home—more than fine. She skittered around for a while, chasing shadows across the floor and invisible bugs up the walls, pausing every so often to impatiently knock one of the cat toys I’d bought out of her way. I crouched down a few more times—trying to get her attention by tapping my fingernails on the tiled floor or tossing a tiny toy ball in her direction—but Scarlett seemed to find my presence as extraneous as she found the toys themselves. Finally, right in the middle of hopping repeatedly into and then out of the shopping bag the toys had come in (thus fulfilling Jorge’s prediction), she fell into a deep sleep while still sitting up.
I was pretty tired myself, not having slept much the two nights before. Whenever my family had brought a new puppy into our home, it was always an unspoken rule that the puppy would spend her first night in bed with one of us—born out of a feeling that nobody should spend her first night in a strange place all alone.
And so, as Jorge and I headed into the bedroom, I knelt and gently lifted the sleeping kitten in one hand, marveling at how easily she fit into my palm. It was the first time I’d touched Scarlett. My heart dissolved again at feeling her soft fluff, at seeing up close the little whiskers that swayed gently with her breath, the rise and fall of her tiny, perfect chest.
I carried her into the bedroom and deposited her gently on the bed, lying down next to her once Jorge and I had changed into our pajamas and turned out the lights. I’d thought her likely to sleep all the way through the night, so exhausted did she seem. But, at feeling us settle down next to her, Scarlett awakened, stood up, and bent into a deep, languorous stretch. Then, without so much as a backward glance, she clambered down from the bed and toddled back into the living room. When I checked a few minutes later, I found her asleep in a ball on the couch, her tail wrapped snugly around her nose and forehead.
I couldn’t help feeling that the two of us hadn’t exactly gotten off to a roaring start. Still, we were in the early stages of our relationship. It had been unrealistic to expect everything to happen all at once. There would be plenty of time for Scarlett and me to bond, I assured myself, and for that bond to blossom into everything I’d imagined it could be.
After all, tomorrow was another day.
* * *
One of the great charms of living with a dog is that a dog has a way of making you feel as if—unbeknownst to anyone else—you might actually be the greatest person in the world. And not just the greatest, but also the most fascinating. A dog might not understand anything you say beyond her name—from a dog’s perspective, your monologues may sound like nothing more than, Blah blah blah blah, Casey, blah blah blah—but she’ll still hang enraptured on your every word like ancient scholars trying to unravel the mysteries of the gods. Even Pandy the cat, in singling me out so decisively, had made me feel as if I just might be special and interesting in ways that I, myself, had never suspected.
Scarlett, however, had none of that particular brand of charm. Scarlett’s great power was her ability to make me feel as I might actually be the least interesting person that the entirety of human civilization had ever produced.
I would never have said that Scarlett was charmless. She was a kitten—she was charming by definition. Everything she did, every gesture she made, every time she chased some microscopic ball of fluff, or raised one miniature paw to her face in a grooming ritual (she was immaculately clean, my Scarlett was), or rubbed a fuzzy cheek against a table leg or door frame to mark it with her scent, I was charmed. I was enthralled. Seeing her play and gambol about was an endless source of fascination.
I may have been fascinated by all things Scarlett, but Scarlett couldn’t have been less fascinated by me. Watching her scamper around—as happy and healthy as any kitten, despite the ordeal of her earliest life—I wanted nothing more than to cuddle and play with her, to entertain her and find new ways of increasing her joy.
But if I walked into a room, Scarlett would either walk out of it or continue whatever she’d been doing with barely a glance in my direction. If she was asleep on the bed at night when I got into it, she’d wake up just long enough to hop down and head off to sleep on the living room couch. Or, if she was asleep on the couch and I sat down next to her—even if I sat all the way at the other end, as far from her as possible so as to avoid disturbing her catnap—she’d promptly decamp for the bedroom and snooze in there.
“Seriously—what the hell?” I said to Jorge one day, as we watched Scarlett unceremoniously exit a room we’d just entered and I fought the sudden impulse to sniff under my arms for offensive body odor.
Her kitten fluff, which refused to lie flat no matter how strenuously she tried to lick it into place, was a sore temptation for my fingers. How I longed to feel the warmth and softness of her fuzzy little body! Scarlett didn’t shrink from my touch, exactly, when I tried to pet her, nor did she violently lash out. Rather, she took no visible notice of my caresses one way or the other. She’d just kind of slide out from under my hand, like someone absentmindedly brushing lint from their shoulder, and trot off to do something else.
That she took no interest in the treasure trove of toys I’d bought her probably goes without saying. I’d dangle a little felt mouse enticingly by its tail over her head, and she wouldn’t even muster a half-hearted swipe at it. I’d bend the vertical spring attached to the sisal-rope base until its feathered-and-belled crest touched the floor, then let it spring back to make the feathers flutter and the bell tinkle merrily. “Look, Scarlett!” I’d say in my best talking-to-a-kitten voice. (It was very similar to my sing-songy talking-to-a-dog voice.) Widening my eyes to feign great astonishment, I’d say, “What’s this, Scarlett? What’s this?”
That voice had never failed to rouse even the sleepiest dog to near frenzies of tail-wagging, hand-licking, and playful crouching. Even Pandy always responded to it with louder purrs and spirited Siamese mews of acknowledgment.
Scarlett, however, would merely level a bored gaze in my direction. It’s a bunch of feathers, stupid. And that was all the response I’d get.
“At least somebody’s playing with them,” Jorge observed, coming home one day to find me flat on my belly in front of Scarlett, a cat toy in each hand, absorbed in yet another fruitless attempt to engage her attentions.
“Don’t you dare say I told you so,” I warned him.
Naturally Scarlett liked to play—she was a kitten, after all. When she wasn’t sleeping or eating, playing was all she did. She chased her tiny tail in dizzying circles until she appeared little more than a gray-and-white blur. She would frequently do that sideways flip and crab-walk that I’d come to call “Ninja kitty.” She found bits of dust or tufts of her own shed fur and chased them furiously from one end of the apartment to the other, or sat up on her hind legs like a prairie dog and tried to catch the dust motes that appeared like flecks of gold in the sunbeams that fell through the windows.
Scarlett’s favorite game of all was to chase a crumpled-up ball of paper around the room, batting it furiously between her front paws and then knocking it just far enough out of reach that she’d have to run after it. It was her favorite game, that is, if she happened to find the wadded paper ball on her own. If, however, I obligingly crumpled up a new piece and tossed it over to her, she’d watch the paper ball as it rolled to a stop at her feet and then stare at me, as if wondering why an apparently sane person would throw garbage around her own home.
Scarlett had, at a minimum, caught on to the fact that it was I, and not Jorge, who was her primary caregiver. As the weeks passed and her kittenish cheeps matured into more adult-sounding tones, she developed what Jorge and I called “Scarlett�
�s mother-in-law voice,” a harsh, guttural, and distinctly unloving meow that sounded like MRAAAAAAA and was deployed only when Scarlett felt she had something to complain about. And I was the only one she ever complained to.
When her food bowl was empty, for example, or her litter box was dirty—even as a kitten, Scarlett had exacting standards when it came to litter box maintenance—I was the one who heard about it. “MRAAAAAAA,” Scarlett would say, sitting on her haunches on the floor directly in front of me if I was on the couch watching TV. If I didn’t jump up immediately to attend to her, she’d advance to the coffee table, making sure to position herself directly between me and my view of the TV screen. “MRAAAAAAA,” she’d repeat. “MRAAAAAAA!” If I was reading a book with my legs stretched out, she’d sit on my knees until the pressure of her weight made the joints ache and demand, “MRAAAAAAA.” And if I didn’t look up from my book quickly enough, she would put one paw directly onto the page I was reading, insisting at the top of her voice, “MRAAAAAAA!!!”
“All right!” I’d finally say, getting up and scurrying off to attend to whatever it was that was bothering her. “You know,” I suggested once, looking back at her over my shoulder, “it wouldn’t kill you to say something nice every once in a while.”
To Jorge, Scarlett paid literally no attention at all—and he, after a few attempts at petting her or tossing her paper balls, was content to let her go her own way without any further interference. “Some cats just don’t like people,” he said.
He was right, of course. There were cats who flat-out didn’t like humans. Nevertheless, it struck me as a premature judgment in Scarlett’s case. She was still so little! She’d been only four weeks old when we’d gotten her—and she was barely twelve weeks old now. Surely, a kitten rescued at such a young age, and adopted immediately into a loving home, should be capable of forming an emotional bond with someone.
I felt vindicated a few days later when, sitting on the couch, I felt a tickling at the back of my head. Twisting my neck just a fraction so I could see her from the corner of my eye, I observed Scarlett sitting behind me on the futon’s arm, her face buried deep in my hair as she nuzzled gently and insistently. I remembered my mother telling stories like this about Tippi, a little beagle/terrier mix she and my father had adopted before I was born. Tippi had been so attached to my mother as a puppy that she’d insisted on sleeping each night on my mother’s pillow, nestled in her hair.
Awwww, I thought, and my heart began to puddle—what could this new behavior of Scarlett’s be if not, at long last, an affectionate gesture? I knew I was right! I thought, and decided not to say anything to Jorge—not right away, at least. I’d let him discover the two of us like this on his own one day. I tried reaching my hand slowly back and around to stroke Scarlett’s fur as she pressed her nose and whiskers all the way into my scalp. But she wriggled out impatiently from under my touch, and—not wanting to push her too far, too quickly—I left her to it, murmuring, Good Scarlett . . . sweet kitty . . .
This went on for some days, and I began to cast a complacent eye over Scarlett as she tore around the apartment, absorbed in her play. I still longed to rub beneath her little white chin and hear her purr of contentment, to watch her stir and sigh as she fell asleep in my lap or curled up next to my leg. She wasn’t yet what anyone might call demonstrative, aside from those moments she spent buried in my hair. But a good time was coming—I could feel it. We were finally starting to bond, my kitten and I, and the rest would happen in its own time.
All that newfound complacency was shattered a couple of weeks later, however, when I happened to catch a glimpse of Scarlett in my peripheral vision, sitting behind me with a thick lock of my hair—which she’d gnawed off my head—hanging from her jaws.
“What the—” I sat bolt upright, the book in my hands tumbling to the floor. “Is that what you’ve been doing this whole time?!”
I’d been blessed (or cursed, depending on Miami’s up-and-down humidity) with an extraordinarily full head of hair—enough that I hadn’t noticed from one day to the next as bits of it had begun to disappear. But now, disbelieving at first, I reached around and felt what I realized was a decidedly thinning patch on the back of my head.
I told myself to stay calm. After all, was it even possible for one smallish kitten to chew a bald spot right into a person’s scalp?
With mounting horror—as I clutched at a limp clump of wispy strands that had, only recently, been a thick tangle of curls—I decided that, yes . . . yes, it was.
“Oye!” I cried. “No se hace!” (Jorge and his family disciplined their own cats in Spanish, and I’d fallen into the habit myself.) “Malo gato!” I shouted. “MALO GATO!”
Startled, Scarlett leapt from the couch and I chased her, trying to wrest the lock of my hair from her mouth. Obviously I didn’t think I could stick it back on, but at least I could stop her from swallowing it, if that was indeed her plan. After about three minutes of pursuit—she nimbly evading my grasp, I feeling more than a little ridiculous to be lumbering so ineffectually after a kitten, for crying out loud—she darted under the bed and out of my reach.
She emerged a little while later but ignored me for the rest of the day, not even bothering with the litany of complaints she usually took up around twenty minutes before her dinnertime. The small pot of cat grass I bought the next day—as a more suitable source of fiber, as well as a gesture of reconciliation (like an erring husband coming home with flowers, I thought wryly)—remained untouched.
* * *
Strict honesty compels me to say that there actually was one game Scarlett enjoyed playing with me—although describing it that way requires loose definitions of the words game, play, and with. The “game,” such as it was, consisted of Scarlett hiding behind a table leg, or underneath the couch or bed, and leaping out at me as I walked past. She’d hurl herself at my ankles, latching on with her teeth and front claws while her back claws kicked at me furiously, “bunny feet” style, until she drew blood, or I tripped and fell, or both.
I wore heels to work every day. I didn’t have the greatest balance in them, and I was always terrified when Scarlett jumped at me that a pointy heel might inadvertently puncture her head or vulnerable belly. In the process of trying to quickly shuffle my feet away from Scarlett and remain upright at the same time, it wasn’t at all unusual for me to end up tumbling to the ground, falling heavily against whatever piece of furniture Scarlett had just jumped out at me from. I bruised rather easily, and my arms, shoulders, and chest were soon spotted with incriminating black-and-blue marks.
It couldn’t really be said that Scarlett played this game of hers “with” me, because if I made any attempt to touch or even look at her, the game was immediately over, and off she’d run. And even describing it as “play” seems inapt, because Scarlett’s surprise attacks didn’t feel playful so much as . . . mean-spirited. How else could I describe it? Whenever I hit the tiled floor of our apartment with a loud “Oof!” I always sensed that Scarlett was enjoying a silent kitten laugh at my expense. It’s funny when humans fall down!
Still, I was pathetically pleased at receiving even this much attention from my otherwise aloof feline. Like her complaining, this was something else Scarlett did only with me—never with Jorge. Maybe it was true, I reflected (trying not to notice how desperately I was grasping at straws), that you only hurt the ones you love.
Things came to a head one day at work. The school-based community service program I ran was considered a crime prevention initiative, and our administrative space—located in a small office park in southwest Miami—had been donated by the Miami police department. Our next-door neighbor was the bomb squad, and I spent many a happy work break in our shared parking lot, watching as the puppies who were being trained to sniff out explosives bonded with their handlers.
On this particular day, I’d taken off my blazer in the heat of a broiling afternoon, and the sleeveless silk top I wore underneath left my battered arms bared
. I didn’t really think about it until one of the bomb-squad officers I was friendly with—a six-foot-two wall of muscle named Eddie del Toro—followed me through reception and into my private office as I returned from lunch, closing the door behind him. Startled at this unprecedented behavior, I turned to face him with a question mark clearly written in my raised eyebrows. Eddie took one of my hands gently in his own, looked earnestly into my eyes, and said in a soft, reassuring voice:
“Just tell me his name and where I can find him.”
This has gone far enough, I told myself a few minutes later, as I stalked out to my car to retrieve my discarded blazer. Naturally I’d understood the conclusions Eddie had reached upon seeing my bruises—and why his first thought had been abusive boyfriend and not evil kitten. I’d explained to him about Scarlett, but I’d still had to show off the corroborating itty-bitty claw marks on my ankles, and then exaggeratedly mime tripping over a small cat a few times, before I’d finally been able to send Officer Eddie—laughing and shaking his head—back over to the bomb squad.
Things were getting ridiculous. I didn’t intend to start going around in turtlenecks and wigs to cover up bruises and bald patches inflicted upon me by a kitten, as if I were the hapless heroine in a Lifetime movie. Something about an abusive, emotionally unavailable cat and the woman who couldn’t help loving her anyway. Seduced by a Feline, I thought. A Kitten to Die For: The Scarlett Cooper Story.
I headed to Barnes & Noble after work that evening and bought an advice book about kittens. Once I was home, I turned immediately to the chapter on how to deal with early signs of aggression. The book advised that, should your kitten show a tendency to attack you in overly aggressive play, you should say No! in a firm voice, and then provide the kitten with an appropriate toy as a substitute for your own flesh.
