Tarte - Kitty cornered : how Frannie and five other incorrigible cats seized control of our house and made it their home

For more stories about Bobs cats, please read Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather.

Kitty Cornered

How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home

BOB TARTE

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2012

To my sister Joan, who is generous enough to have taken in twelve cats, and to my sister Bett, who is sensible enough not to have any.

Contents

Cats of Characters

Agnes: our original cat who wonders where all of the others came from ( aka Aggly-wa g )

Frannie: nervous white-and-black stray who insists on being petted while she eats ( aka Alfalfa Girl, Ferret Face, Francine, The Little Kitty, Miss Pinkie-Winkie Nose, Sunday School Girl, Feline Trotsk y )

Lucy: snapping crocodile disguised as a diluted tabby with a disdain for litter box geometry ( aka Fatsy Pats, Lucy Caboosey)

Maynard: portly tabby on a nonstop wailing expedition (came to us as Mabel; aka Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle, Rand McNally, Harold the Barrel, Fac e )

Moobie: aging snow-white cat who sleeps more than Snow White (came to us as Moonbeam; aka I Want, Conehea d )

Tina: thorn in Frannies side with a periscope tail ( aka Teena-Weena, Periscope Girl, Tina Louise, Sis, Lump-a-Bump, Puppet Mout h )

Introduction

I had my first encounter with a cat when I was two-and-a-half years old. It didnt turn out well. My mom had carried me next door so that she could get a closer look at our neighbors climbing roses and still keep an eye on me. While she talked to Mrs. Farran, I busied myself by poking an anthill with a twig. Then I noticed the Farrans black cat, Fluffy, rolling in the sun on the porch. Before anyone could stop me I lurched over and rubbed Fluffys stomach. I enjoyed her promised fluffiness for a fraction of a second before a set of claws raked my arm. My howling ended the visit.

The incident didnt sour me on cats. It only made me wary of Fluffy. I was too young to develop prejudices yet, but that wasnt true of my parents, who held an unexplained grudge against cats. They had no problem with dogsespecially our family beagle, Muffin, who seldom stirred except to bury her head in her bowl. Cats, in contrast, were devious creatures, according to my mother. You cant trust a cat, she said.

She repeated this for years. My dad backed her up. Finally, I asked him what was so bad about cats, and he told me, They can jump on you and scratch you while youre sleeping. This was as close to spouting superstition as my commonsense father ever came, but I believed him at the time. I was in second grade by then and should have known better. But none of my friends had catsor if they did, the cats were smart enough to keep out of sight when I showed up. So when Id see a cat skittering across the street, I never thought of it as someones companion. I thought of it as a wild creature like a squirrel or pigeon. A nuisance animal, in fact.

This all changed when I was in high school and my older sister Joan brought home a gray mass of matter fur from her riding lesson. I named her Rigel, and Ill keep her in my room, she told my parents.

Absolutely not, my mom said. Youre not keeping a cat in this house.

What your mother says goes, said my dad.

Joan bought Rigel a litter box and set it up in a corner near her closet. She wasnt particularly rebellious, but her will to rescue a needy barn cat was stronger than my mothers will to keep out the cat. I sided with them against her, as I usually liked to do, but this time I really believed that she was wrong. Taking in Rigel was a betrayal of a family policyespecially from aging beagle Muffins point of view. We were in for a surprise, however. Rigel turned out to be a shy and gentle soul who had zero disruptive impact on our lives. About the only time I knew that she was there was when I slipped into Joans room to visit her.

Rigel was so sweet and undemanding that I ended up exchanging one false notion about cats for another. Instead of sharing my parents belief that cats were trouble, I decided that they were hardly anything at all, just purring plush toys that wanted to be petted. Even Muffin seemed more intriguing. It never occurred to me that only a person who was duller than a sleeping dog would make such a mistake about a cat. I simply hadnt spent enough time around cats yet to absorb some of their smarts, or to know that each cat was different, and that some were considerably wilder and more unpredictable than others.

When Joan married Jack a few years later, Rigel joined Evenstar and Romulus in a three-cat household. When they took in a fourth cat named Tigger, I grew deeply concerned that Joan was suffering the dreadful fate of turning into a cat lady. She and Jack had two dogs, too. But while owning a couple of dogs seemed normal to me, four cats struck me as borderline crazy. I figured that you might as well just move out into a hollow log as live in a house where there were twice as many cats as people. What was the point of four walls and a roof when nature had already taken over?

A decade and some years later, my thinking began to change after I married animal lover Linda. Under my nose at first and then with my approval, our house filled with all manner of birds. For our first Christmas, she surprised me (to put it mildly) with a gray kitten that we named Penny. Before we knew it, stray cat Agnes needed a home. Moobie came next, and her arrival sent me to the store up the street for another litter box. When I complained about my fate to the cashier, she said, Three of them. You must be a cat person.

Not me! I told her, as if she had accused me of running a meth lab.

By then I had long since recovered from my early misconceptions that cats were either devious creatures or as mellow as stuffed toys. There were both, and much more. In fact, they were as complicated as any person that Id ever met and more intelligent than most people, too. But I refused to think of myself as a cat person. That was going a step too far.

I readily called myself a bird person, because the term was so amorphous that it didnt pigeonhole me. A bird person could be anyone from an egg-headed aviculturist who specialized in rare parrots to a redneck with a backyard chicken flock. But the term cat person was pretty specific, suggesting a tame middle-aged eccentric who substituted interaction with pets for a healthy social relationship with other people. I resented that whole notion, because it described me perfectly.