Menagerie

by Bradford Morrow

  That’s how I wrote about my divorce in one of my books, making it sound like Dorian was a colorful minor character in the story of Chuck and me: I was married to a schoolteacher from a small town in Wisconsin and we didn’t have any children but we had a Siamese cat who terrorized everyone who stepped foot in our house; the cat became a mascot, a symbol of the choices my husband and I made to be different from the people around us; when even this childless marriage began to seem oppressive, I decided to live alone.

  The truth is more like this: Between the ages of twenty-two and forty, I lived with a Siamese cat who loved me and hated everyone else; for thirteen years in the middle of his reign, I was married and the cat came to tolerate my husband, enough to sit on his lap if I wasn’t home or sleep on his chest till I too retired for the night, at which time the cat walked across the bed, crawled under the covers into my arms, and put his head on my pillow; in the last two years of the cat’s life, we were alone together—as we had been at the beginning—and he and I were at our happiest. The cat in this revised story is no mascot. He is both the symbol and the partner of my solitude. What he gave me was fortified solitude, not a distraction from it.

  When Dorian finally died, I cried so much for weeks that the man I was dating then—who was hoping that I might move in with him and his three well-mannered felines once I didn’t have to worry about Dorian—said, “Maybe you should get another cat, a cat of your own.” We were crossing the street in front of my favorite restaurant in town, where he was taking me out to eat. I had stopped in the middle of the road to remark, “If a big truck came and hit me now, it would be no loss.” There was no vehicle in sight. What I’d said was utterly ludicrous and a total insult to my date. No matter how many cats I had in the future, I would never again be with Dorian. All the same, I couldn’t go on the way I had been.

  “If I get my own cat,” I said, “I’m never going to move in with you. I probably won’t even stay at your house overnight because I’ll be busy trying to bond with the kitten.”

  “That’s OK,” he said. “I just want you to be happy.”

  He was letting me go. By the time we got across the street and entered the restaurant, my move to Boston two years later was a foregone conclusion. Dorian had guarded my solitude until a successor could be found. The second half of my life would be a cat relay, with me as a baton passed from paw to paw. I would learn in time that if I had two cats, I would never again have to be catless.

  The Joint Reign of Miles and Jackson began with twice-a-week baths and daily pills because the bald spot that Jackson, the Burmese, had on his head turned out to be ringworm, a highly contagious fungal infection. Jackson came to me in January of 2011, at twelve weeks old. Miles, six months old by then, had been with me since July. The veterinarian said I could keep the cats separated for sixteen weeks—the length of a semester—or treat them both. Even if there had been space in my apartment to quarantine Jackson, I wouldn’t have. The cats were getting along well. Separating them for so long would have ruined their relationship.

  I had been brushing Miles’s teeth every night since he was eight weeks old, so opening his mouth and cramming a pill into his throat was only a minor adjustment. Like Ernest—whom he resembles, though, in addition to his blue-gray “points,” Miles was developing shadowy ripples of lynx-point stripes on his cream-colored coat—Miles ran if he sensed that the toothpaste and the pill were in the offing but relaxed as soon as I caught him. Jackson, glossy brown like a little prince dressed in a mink coat, had been raised in a house piled with old photographs, magazines, fabric scraps, and unopened boxes of cat-food samples—I suspected his breeder, a retired middle-school teacher, was a hoarder though, thankfully, not of animals—nursing from whichever mother cat happened to be nearby. He was the mellowest, most confident cat I’d ever met. Whenever he wanted attention, he clawed his way up my legs onto my lap and demanded to be petted. The pill regimen didn’t faze him a bit.

  For the baths, I carried both cats into the bathroom and shut the door. It seemed prudent to start with Miles, the older and more cautious. “Wet the fur thoroughly,” the directions on the medicated shampoo bottle said. “Apply and lather, being careful to avoid the eyes and the mouth. Leave on for ten minutes and rinse.” I dunked Miles in a dishpan full of warm water, doused him with the shampoo I’d shaken to a full “lather” inside a plastic bottle made for squirting barbecue sauce on spare ribs or chicken wings, then wrapped him in a towel and held him on my lap for ten minutes. He only started squirming and meowing about eight minutes in. By the time he was being dunked again for the rinse, he was yowling, but he never bit or scratched me. I towel-dried him, put him on the bath mat, and repeated the process with Jackson, who was so small that he resembled a hamster when wet. I’d have to be an idiot, I thought, not to be able to handle him. The cats scampered out as soon as I opened the door but within ten minutes, they came up to me, purring. I petted their still-damp fur and told them that the whole ordeal was a team-building exercise. Unlike the pills, which had to be given for sixteen weeks (“A semester of pills,” I said), the baths could stop after six weeks, when Jackson had had three consecutive “negative” readings on his skin test. Miles and I never developed ringworm. After caring for Ernest and Algernon, who had gotten sicker as time went on, it was a relief, even a pleasure, to bathe and pill these young cats at the beginning of our time together.

  On the wall opposite the door in my foyer is the black-and-white photograph that Chuck took of Dorian in 1986. Dorian is sitting on the bed, mouth open to expose his pointed teeth like a vampire’s. He was actually yawning but he could easily have been roaring. The quilt billowing around him has patterns of lion heads.

  “That’s my first cat, Dorian,” I tell my guests. “He’s my household god.”

  Dorian is my One God of Solitude, though his successors too have fortified the happiness I discovered in living without a human partner. My favorite day is one on which I don’t go anywhere except to run in the morning: I can spend hours afterward reading with the cats on my lap, writing with them by my side, or puttering around the apartment with one of them on my shoulder. Like Chuck, or the man I was dating when Dorian died, my current boyfriend understands that I am more like the archetypical cat than my cats actually are: finicky and independent, needing to be left alone until I decide it’s time for company. The cats like him enough but they keep him at an ideal distance, three and a half hours by Amtrak: He has to come to us since pets aren’t allowed on the train.

  The difference from the Reign of Dorian is that Miles and Jackson—as did Ernest and Algernon—enjoy occasional entertaining. Because Dorian hissed, growled, and lunged at everyone from the meter reader to my in-laws, Chuck and I seldom had any guests. We believed that only boring people got all dressed up to make small talk around a dinner table, so we didn’t care. With Chuck and later without, I went to the movies, concerts, restaurants, and parties with a group of friends I’d known for years, some of whom liked to organize outings and get-togethers so the rest of us didn’t have to. Although, or perhaps because, I didn’t intend to move through life partnered, I valued having a close-knit group of friends.

  When I moved east for a new teaching job, I suddenly had no one to call me every week with plans for movies and dinners. My new colleagues and neighbors were always saying how busy they were. In the brief conversations we had by the mailboxes or in the laundry room, they expressed strong, even heated, opinions about what they liked or—more often—what they couldn’t stand. Inviting these people to dinner in my apartment seemed less daunting than asking them to a cultural event or an eating establishment. Many seemed to soften, or at least be amused, when I said, “I live with two amazing cats. I’d love for you to meet them. We’ll make you dinner.” I started announcing that the cats and I liked making rhubarb pies (a Wisconsin specialty), that they’d mastered a repertoire of vegetarian recipes, and took turns baking to keep our sourdough starter going.

  Food preparatio
n has turned out to be another exception, besides caring for animals, to my general ineptitude. Last August, I spent the whole morning failing to learn the computer program the colleague who’d volunteered to teach me had assumed I would master in ten minutes and was relieved to stay in my kitchen all afternoon assembling a trifle, for which the cats and I first prepared an angel food cake, lemon custard, raspberry jam, and whipped cream. We’d volunteered for the dessert portion of our co-op’s backyard cookout. Instead of carrying the heavy glass dish down to the yard, I invited my neighbors to my apartment so the cats could host the finale. About twenty people sat in our living room eating the trifle and drinking sherry.

  I had been “clicker-training” Miles and Jackson. Cats respond more to hand gestures than to voice commands; there are dog tricks you can never teach a cat, such as “Wait” (look longingly at the offered treat but refrain from eating it till the trainer says, “OK”). Still, it had taken Miles and Jackson only a few minutes to understand the basic concept: A “click” from the clicker I wore around my neck meant they would get a treat; to cause me to “click” and toss them a treat (dehydrated shrimp, recommended by our vet), they had to do something. They learned to come, sit, stay, stand up like a bear, shake hands, high-five, and even jump over a pole.

  Jackson was eager to show off in front of the guests in our living room. By far, the pole jumping earned the loudest applause, but people were amazed just to see him jump up on a chair on command, sit, and raise his left paw (my fault: I got confused which hand was which when I was teaching him and, rather than retrain him, decided that feline handshakes should be the reversal of the human version). Miles waited until only a handful of our close friends from the building were left, but he did his routine too. He’s shy with strangers and clings to me. He can jump straight from the floor to perch on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, Athena emerging from Zeus’s forehead, or, for that matter, my conjoined twin (“My True Siamese,” I call him: “Two heads are better than one.”). My friend Pamela Petro, who stayed with us to give a reading at my school last fall, took a photograph of Miles on my shoulder and me slicing apples at the kitchen counter and e-mailed it to me under the title “Sous-chef.” I’m pretty sure she meant that Miles was my helper, but since I was doing the prep work and he was watching, the title should, more logically, refer to me.

  At the peak of their migration in early October, five hundred chimney swifts circle our building every evening at dusk. Over the loud chattering, clicking calls they make, you can hear their wings slapping together as several birds hover above the chimney’s opening, maneuvering around one another as they wait their turn. They dive in one at a time while hundreds swirl above like smoke blowing into the chimney instead of out. I don’t know how far down the chimney shaft the birds go to roost. The chimney rises above the building’s roof and there is a crawl space between the roof and my ceiling. If the swifts filled up all that space, then some would have to cling to the bricks next to my bed.

  In their sleep, I’ve read, swifts continue to chatter. Some nights, I stand on my bed and put my ear to the wall. So far, I haven’t heard anything. I’ve held my cats—Ernest, Algernon, Miles, then Jackson—aloft in my arms and pressed their ears to the wall, hoping their keener sense of hearing might detect a faint bird chatter. Each cat has looked down at me in total incomprehension.

  Chimney swifts were once called “North American swifts.” They roosted in tree hollows across the eastern United States until the European settlers cleared acres of forests to build houses—at which point the birds started using the bricks inside their chimneys. It’s a story of adaptation, of wildlife managing to live at close quarters with humans, but only a few ornithologists with special mirrors and cameras have been able to observe their nesting and roosting habits inside chimneys. Although the swifts’ general migration pattern is known, how far south they travel in the winter is up for debate. Swifts eat flying insects in the air, so—unlike birds that can be fed on seeds, grains, or mealworms from a dish—they cannot be kept in captivity to be studied. They nest and sleep practically inside our houses and yet they remain mysterious and elusive.

  That’s the traditional view of cats too: aloof, independent, mysterious. Recently, when some indoor-outdoor cats were outfitted with cameras around their necks to assess their environmental impact, many owners were surprised by the distance their pets traveled daily, the frequency of the skirmishes they got into with other cats or predators, and the number of birds, rodents, insects, and lizards they hunted. Some people also discovered that their cats had another family who fed them, let them sleep in the bed, and considered them their own. Apparently, a cat can have two of his proverbial nine lives simultaneously.

  The owners in the study let their cats out believing it’s cruel to keep these natural predators from following their instinct. Most were not convinced, even afterward, that their pets should remain indoors. It must be that the appeal of an indoor-outdoor cat is precisely its freedom: The cat goes to places we cannot follow, does something wild and dangerous, and still comes back to us—like a kite that soars above the trees and power lines and returns in one piece.

  Still, cats are products of ninety-five hundred years of domestication. Miles and Jackson shouldn’t have to fulfill themselves by roaming the neighborhood, any more than I have to go wilderness camping to realize my human potential. In some areas of the United States, indoor-outdoor cats pose a significant threat to ground-nesting birds whose numbers are diminishing. I wouldn’t let Miles and Jackson loose to eat even the common, abundant birds that frequent our yard, but more than that, I don’t want my cats to be birds.

  I released the birds I’d raised, knowing that most would not survive their first migration. To care too much about their individual fates would have been unnatural, even unkind; kindness to wildlife means respecting their freedom. Every summer, chimney swifts return to the chimney and hummingbirds sip sugar water from my window feeder. Cardinals and woodpeckers frequent the sunflower-seed feeder year-round, but I cannot tell if the same individuals are at my window from hour to hour or season to season. Birds are ephemeral, and our encounters with them are fleeting. That’s the essence of their beauty. The goal of conservation is to save the species, not each individual bird.

  Living with a pet, by contrast, is all about caring for a specific individual. Before the word pet became popular in the late nineteenth century, a companion animal was referred to more often as a favorite. A favorite dog or cat was an animal set apart from all others of its kind by being given a name and being invited to live in the house as a member of the family. I’m not sure when people started making a huge distinction between dogs and cats, when pet owners became polarized between dog people and cat people. We don’t have to clicker-train our cats to understand that a favorite cat and a favorite dog are more similar than different. They are two types of music, classical and jazz, say, the opera and zydeco. With each pet, we make a commitment to the individual: We love this dog and no other; this cat is mine.

  Unlike the chimney swifts beyond our bedroom wall, my cats are only as mysterious or unknowable as people are. Miles and Jackson haven’t learned to speak with words, but I grew up in Japan and spent two decades in the American Midwest. No one says what he or she means in either place; that kind of disclosure is simply not expected. Here on the East Coast, people express their opinions and feelings more readily, only to insist later that at the time of their previous comments, they hadn’t known all the relevant facts or they hadn’t been fully aware of their own motives and intentions. No matter where you live, it seems, understanding another human being requires both a leap of faith and the act of imagination. At least with my cats, I know everything about them already. In our 660-square-foot apartment, not much happens to Miles and Jackson that I don’t witness firsthand; due to the guilty choice I made to acquire them from breeders instead of from a shelter, I was able to learn where and how they were born and raised. It’s not difficult to observ
e their behavior and deduce their intentions or feelings.

  How freely we should ascribe human motives and characteristics to animals—anthropomorphizing them—is an interesting philosophical question. But in practice, we anthropomorphize other people, in a manner of speaking, every time we ask ourselves, What would we do in their place? If I said or did that, what would I really be trying to communicate? We routinely fail to understand others because they are not us, and yet we have no other tool besides observation and imagination to bridge the gap between the self and the world.

  Our sunflower-seed feeder is in the window next to my writing desk. The cats like to sit between the window and the desk, on the shelf my boyfriend—who is very handy—built for them. The feeder hangs from a flower pot a few inches outside the window, but the birds either don’t see the cats and me or else they understand something about the windowpane’s impenetrability. Though prettier birds often perch on the flower pot and the feeder, mourning doves are Jackson’s favorite. They are big and fat, move slowly and sit in one place for minutes at a time, and make a lot of noise when three or four crowd the feeder, jockeying for position. Jackson, no longer hamster sized, sits with his face pressed to the glass, his muscular body compressed like a torpedo ready to be launched. His eyes, the color of gooseberries, register the doves’ every move.

  Miles lounges next to him, with his back to the window, his blue eyes on me. Sometimes, he falls asleep while watching my fingers on the keyboard. He’s just beginning to doze off again when Jackson rears up on his hind legs and thumps the window with his front paw. The doves scatter; Miles startles awake but doesn’t look back. I don’t think I’m committing a flagrant act of anthropomorphism to say that Jackson studies the birds, ever hopeful he might catch one to eat, and Miles could care less about birds because he’d rather watch me.