01:
In the past couple of months, Wendy has peed on two of my handbags. The first was a navy blue canvas bag, and the second was a giant brown leathery-type purse. Luckily, neither of them had important papers inside, and my cell phone, too, was blessedly spared. One had my laptop case in it, but no laptop, and the smell has faded over the past few weeks. I had to throw out a change purse, a pack of gum, and some index cards with Things to Do lists on them, but the damage has been minimal overall.
I’m more considered with the motivation behind these furtive acts. Wendy the cat has a generally mild attitude, which is what allows us to get along so well; she only yells at me once in a while when her food gets low, or when she sees me opening a can whose contents aren’t for her (such as cans of tomato sauce or chicken broth or pineapple), so I don’t understand – is she harboring secret resentments? Does she hate me, in her own quiet way?
Or is it instead a comfort issue? Perhaps she has gotten tired of the crumbly, biodegradable, wood-chippy product spread into that scratched up, plastic, ammonia-smelling tray, tucked behind a pink curtain of privacy I’ve hung for her to do her business behind; perhaps she has made the decision that once in a while, she’d much rather squat her soft cat haunches on to a nice, squashy handbag. As someone who always splurges for the multi-ply, I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same in her situation.
18:
Wendy doesn’t know that we are moving to Halifax, Nova Scotia in three weeks. I am hesitant to tell her because she doesn’t always deal well with change. When I first moved her from the Baltimore SPCA to my Baltimore apartment, she ran and hid under the bed. And one time I switched the position of my bed and sofa and she stood on the arm of the sofa and howled. “What have you done?” I imagine she might have been saying. “Why have you switched everything around on me?” So I moved them back. I took a few weekend trips last year and she peed in my suitcase twice, having caught on that the luggage was somehow related to my absence.
But, as cats go, Wendy is more adaptable than most. When her litter changed from clay to sawdust (lighter, cheaper, smells nicer), she did not once pee on any of the furniture. And I’ve changed her food a couple of times (better ingredient list, availability in Canada), and she ate it without complaint (though has expressed a preference for canned).When we moved from Baltimore to Toronto, she was quite content in the car. I let her out of her carrier for a while and she sat on my lap and turned her head at every highway sign we passed. It took her months to get used to the house, which is approximately eighteen times bigger than anywhere she’d ever lived. But she adjusted. She claimed every armchair for her own, and all the rugs, too. I moved one of the armchairs from the living room to the family room yesterday (better back support), and she glared at me initially, but today I found her rolling around in it, daring me to chastise her.
04:
Last week, Wendy did something she has never done before: she caught a mouse. She’s caught flies before – very deftly, I might add, like President Obama. She trapped each fly in the palm of her paw, and then chewed on ‘em. How did she know they weren’t poison? Back to the mouse, I didn’t see it happen, but my mother found Wendy sitting in the front foyer, playing with the poor little guy. His body was still warm, and my mother thought the mouse was still alive and she tossed it out in the yard, expecting it to run away, but it didn’t. She collected it and disposed of it properly.
Most of the time, Wendy lies on the most expensive armchair, belly up, waiting for somebody to feed her. For this reason, It is easy to forget that she is a ferocious creature, full of instincts and violent impulses and anticivilization emotions. I share my living space with a beast. One time she ate a potato chip, and another time a crumble of feta cheese, but in general, all she eats is meat, and she eats it indiscriminately. Recently I read about people who have giant pet snakes and let them sleep in their beds, thinking the snakes are their best buddies, when in reality the snakes are just sizing them up, to see if they will fit in their stomachs. Is this what Wendy is doing with me?
26:
Wendy is fat. I can’t sugarcoat it. I read once that the way to tell if your cat is overweight is to see if you can feel her ribs when you pet her stomach. When I pet Wendy’s stomach, she goes, “mraaoow!” indignantly and bats me with her paws, and there are no ribs to be found. She’s not obese, and she seems comfortable with herself, and she has a really pretty face, but, you know, if she were a human going on a trip to the beach, she would probably not be baring her midriff.
The thing is, if you think about this in human terms, there are plenty of people who have the same problem; if you petted many of our stomachs, you wouldn’t feel our ribs either, but most people have the tact not to say anything about it, especially if our health is not being endangered. Why don’t people have this same tact when dealing with cats?
Every time we host a guest (usually the kind who does not have pets of their own), the guest will remark, “That cat is really big!” “Has she always been that big?” “What does she eat?” “Is she pregnant?” No, she is not pregnant. Wendy is very chaste; in fact, she abhors other cats. And while Wendy is generally very stoical, I wonder if her feelings don’t get a little hurt once in a while.
31:
Sometimes, when you have a cat like Wendy, whose personality is affectionate yet aloof, you have to learn to manipulate her. For example, every time I see Wendy, I want to hug her, but if I hugged her every time I wanted to, she would hate me and hide in the corner and never speak to me, as she did with that one small child who came to visit and harassed her until she retreated under the bed. If I dole out my affection sparingly, however, Wendy craves it. It’s like The Rules for cats.
When I go away on vacation, I usually call a cat sitter to check in on Wendy and feed her and socialize with her and play Scrabble with her, but still, Wendy gets lonely, and when I return, she trails me around and won’t leave my side for days. “Mew,” she says. “Why did you leave me? Are you going to leave again?” It’s terribly sad, but it works. It is very similar to my long distance relationship – we like each other better because we never see each other. Today I was out of the house for many hours, and so when I got home, Wendy came right up to me and rubbed her face on my face, like she was my exfoliant. She would never do this on a day when I was home all day. Instead she would snooze in the sunlit patch on her favorite chair, or glower at me while scratching up the carpet.
The best, though, is in the mornings, when I have generally left her alone for a solid eight hours. She sleeps at the bottom corner of my bed, sometimes in an sleep-alert leonine pose, sometimes sprawled tummy-up, eyes glazed, but then as soon as I wake up, she wakes up, and then I say, “Wendy!” and she comes running to sit near my head, even if she seems still half-asleep. She waits for her instructions like a robot maid. I think it is a sign of loyalty that she does not descend to the kitchen for breakfast before I do, but I also think it’s a sign that my strategies are working.
18:
This morning in the newspaper, there was an article about some particularly brave dogs and cats receiving awards of valor and being inducted into an Animal Hall of Fame. One dog kept a young autistic boy company while he died in a snowstorm, one cat meowed into her owner’s ear while she slept, to alert her that the house was filling with carbon monoxide. The article said that at the ceremony, “both men and women wept copiously, listening to their touching stories.” The main photo had a dog smiling open-mouthed, wearing a gold medal.
Wendy saw me reading this newspaper article, and I believe she was a little jealous, or no, not jealous, but perhaps wishing that she had an opportunity to demonstrate her bravery. I wouldn’t call Wendy fearless, but she is certainly loyal, and I believe that if called upon, she could do some life-saving on her own. Imagine, for example, in a variation on the carbon monoxide story, that the house were on fire. Wendy might let me bury my face in her fur to keep out the smoke, and she would guide us to safety with her excellent sensory abilities. She might lead me to an open window, as she is always, after all, in search of open windows, and if it were a second floor window, we would leap out together into the waiting firemen’s trampoline. Or imagine there were a burglar in the house, burgling all our possessions: jewelry and televisions and precious heirlooms. Wendy might run under his feet, tripping him and delaying him long enough for the police to arrive. The burglar would grab at her, but she would be too quick and squirmy; she might even bite him, though she has never bitten anybody before. There are many hypothetical scenarios – involving villains and dramatic household accidents – in which Wendy could rise to her potential. But I think there’s also something to be said for her simple daily devotion, how she waits, trustingly, to be fed, how she sleeps, in an unselfconscious stretch, at the foot of the bed, or how she can sense her owner’s occasional sadness and comes nearby to be petted.
04:
I wouldn’t call Wendy the most active cat in the world (she is more of a napper), but once in a while she can have quite an adventure. The other day, we were in my bedroom – I, hard at work on my computer, and Wendy lounging as usual on the bed – when a gaggle of birds, or a flock of birds, whichever, landed loudly on my roof and on the surrounding trees. One particularly fat one landed right near my window, black feathers falling everywhere. I think it was a starling, judging by its unique coloring and gregarious personality. Wikipedia tells me starlings are “gregarious.” Never has Wendy reacted in quite this way to a bird: she got down on her haunches and trilled at it – trilled! – and I could see that she wanted very badly to pretend as though she herself were a bird, one of its fat bird friends. What a clever ruse, a cat masquerading as a bird, to capture it, of course, and chew on it a little, ruffle it up a bit. I, always looking for an opportunity to witness animal behavior up close, opened the window (there is a screen). The window is maybe three feet higher than the bed, but Wendy leapt – she leapt! – from the bed and up on the windowsill, squashing herself against the screen. All the birds flew away, and I had to help Wendy down from the window, as she didn’t have much standing room. She was a little angry, I think, and spent the rest of the day alternately napping and glowering.
10:
Wendy is angry with me today, because I cleaned her ears. Some cats aren’t so good at cleaning their own ears, so you have to do it for them. It’s a harrowing process involving Q-tips and olive oil, which I won’t get into here for fear of compromising the elegance of this blog. The difficulty arises from the fact that Wendy doesn’t know that I’m trying to help her. She doesn’t know that cleaning her ears prevents all kinds of hideous infections requiring expensive medicated drops, drops which she would detest perhaps even more than the turmoil of ear cleaning. Her poor furry body tenses up and her ears go backwards and her pupils enlarge and she tries very desperately to escape. I offer her treats and whatnot, but she is unreceptive. Then when I am finished, she doesn’t talk to me for days. I wonder what she thinks I am trying to do. Like does she think I’m cleaning her ears for my own pleasure? Probably if somebody came at me and rooted an oiled Q-tip around in my ear with an explanation in some language I didn’t understand, I would grow frightened and avoid talking to them as well.
She likes getting her nails cut, though. She sits still and holds out her paws as though I am her manicurist. Cats appreciate having short nails, I think, because then they don’t keep getting stuck on bedspreads and sofas and rugs. I push on the center of her paw and her claws extend and I trim them very neatly as she purrs. There is something very pleasing about a cat who lets you hold her hand.
23:
Last week I was at Zellers buying cat food and noticed they had a special offer of two free cans if you purchased a bag of dry food. At the checkout line, I discovered the price of the dry food was far higher than I could have imagined, but I bought it anyway because you can’t really put back an item when you have only one item, can you? Maybe a more assertive individual would have. But it was worth it, I think, to see Wendy’s reaction. Wendy doesn’t get canned food too often, because…it’s complicated. See, the soft food is good because it has fewer carbs and helps with weight control for fat indoor felines, but crunching on the hard food actual cleans their teeth and helps prevent gum disease and whatnot. You know, in India, they feed the cats rice and lentils, which is probably why the cats always look so sad there.
Copyright 2010 Nisee Made. All rights reserved.
When you open the can of food, the can opener makes a drrrrrrrrrrrr sound, which alerts Wendy to the forthcoming meal. Even if the can you are opening is not, in fact, cat food, she will come near your legs and harass you and give you beseeching looks. Often I have had to hold a can of pineapple in front of her to smell and realize that it’s not for her. But if it is her food, she will wind around your legs and purrrrrr and then she will take small bites and take a break and walk around the room and then get all excited again and purr some more and for the whole rest of the day she will purr until she is nothing more than a purring ball of sound. And, I mean, I get a lot of joy out of food, but not like Wendy does. Wendy really knows how to live, I think, how to appreciate the simple things. If you scratch her cheek, she melts into a liquid cat puddle; if you say, “Wendy!” in an excited voice, she reflects your enthusiasm with perked ears; if you introduce her to a patch of sunlight on a carpet, she will roll and roll on it for hours, with no thought of the sun ever setting.
09:
There are window installers here today (to install actual windows, not Windows software), and they are replacing all the windows on the back side of our house. As I mentioned last time, Wendy the Cat has a certain fascination with windows, curling in a kidney bean shape on their ledges, smudging her face on the glass so that it subsequently needs to be Windexed, eyeing the birds with an uncharacteristic alertness. So you’d think she’d be happy about the window installers paying a visit, but instead she has reacted only with fear. I guess she doesn’t know about their kind intentions of providing her newer, sparkling windows for her to smudge. It must be terrible to be a cat and to witness men ten times your size, wearing heavy boots and carrying heavy panes of glass, hammering and splintering the existing windows, using electric drills. She probably thinks they will stomp on her and drill her up and smash all the windows so that there are none left for her to look out from.
Copyright 2010 Nisee Made. All rights reserved.
When Window Installer #1 came to the door, she got scared of the doorbell and her ears went backwards, and then he came in and she darted to the dining room and hid on one of the dining table chairs, under the safe shadows of the tablecloth. Then she ran up the stairs and hid under my bed. Maybe I will give her a piece of gorgonzola cheese later. She was worse, though, last time, when the duct cleaners came with their giant vacuum hoses and suctioned up all the dust out of our ducts. She hid under one bed and another, as they went from room to room. She wouldn’t speak to me for hours. She thought she might be mistaken for dust, I suppose.
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