Moody Elyse - Girls and Their Cats

For the loves of my life:

Chris, Liza, and Tuck

Copyright 2019 by BRIANNE WILLS .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-8141-7 (epub, mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-7679-6 (hardcover)

Design by LIZZIE VAUGHAN .
Typesetting by JARED GENTZ .
Typeset in FreightBig, Grenale, Kabarett, Mission Script, Noe, Proxima Nova, Radiant and Recoleta.

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by Molly Young

Im standing in the kitchen, watching my cat prowl the floor for dinner crumbs. Its early autumn in Brooklyn, too late for ice cream and too early for hot chocolate.

Maybe Ill dress up as a cat lady for Halloween, I am saying to my husband.

So, he replies. No costume?

Cue laugh track. But also, hes not wrong. Dressing up as a cat lady for Halloween would mean putting on my regularly scheduled clothing and going about my regularly scheduled day. No alterations in presentation or temperament required. After all, the modern cat lady has evolved.

In decades past, cat ladies were a minor but pungent pop culture archetype. There were Little Edie and Big Edie of Grey Gardens fame, who had between twelve and three hundred cats at their East Hampton manse (the exact number is unclear). There was Patricia Highsmith, the famously prickly novelist who prepared gourmet meals for her Siamese cats and spoke to them in a made-up language. There was the actress Vivien Leigh, who collected cats, cat books, and portraits of herself with various cats. There was Eleanor Abernathy from The Simpsons, a disheveled hoarder in purple cardigans, screaming gibberish at Lisa Simpson.

There was once a pervasive sense that a (run-of-the-mill, nonfamous) cat lady was someone who likely smelled of mothballs and old soup. Perhaps she was a fan of Barbara Pym novels. Perhaps acquaintances would describe her with the old-fashioned epithet spinster. There was something unwholesome about her attachment to felines, possibly a suggestion that her communion with cats resulted from a distaste of fellow humans, or an inability to interact with them.

But as our access to a dizzying universe of people and lives has increasedthanks, Internet!a new landscape of cat ownership has emerged. (A phrase, by the way, that feels totally wrong. You can never really own a cat. All cat people know this.) The new vision includes cat companions of every age, hue, and fancy, with corresponding cats of every shape, size, nomenclature, and personality, from meltingly mild to diabolically sneaky.

BriAnnes portraits are sparkling visions in this cosmos, with their depictions of women at work and at play in cat-dappled habitats. The women come from different backgrounds and work in different fields, but they all have one thing in common: a healthy obsession with felines. Which brings us to the question: What is it about cats that tickles a certain kind of imagination? Of all the furry quadrupeds that roam the earth, why is this the animal that Egyptians deified and Chinese calligraphers immortalized and Balthus painted and T. S. Eliot wrote poems about?

Something about cats inspires worship, and I have hypotheses. Lets start with the physical similarities to their wild kin. Domestic dogs no longer closely resemble members of the larger Canidae familyyoud never mistake a yellow Lab for a jackal or a standard poodle for a maned wolf. Cats are another story. With domestic cats, the distinctions are of scale rather than kind: A black cat looks just like a tiny panther; a spotted one like a miniature cheetah. Domestic cats hunt, prowl, and leap just like their wild brethren. A dog may blend seamlessly into the household, but when youre contending with a cat, its impossible to forget the uncanny strangeness of housing a foreign animal under your roof.

Theres also a cats temperament. No two are alike, but all are profoundly unpredictable. The cat is a creature of quixotic preference and habits. Do you ever truly know what your cat is thinking? Do you know why she supervises you in the bathroom or sleeps on your head? No, you dont. None of us do. Just when we think we have a handle on our little darling, she stops eating her favorite food and starts sleeping exclusively in the dish rack. There is a logic at work, but its not for humans to transcribe. Having a cat in the house relegates you to the role of a permanently surprised audience member.

And that, in a sentence, is the gift of this book. Girls and Their Cats is a window into the intricacies of these wondrous creatures and the women who love them. The sweet truth of cat ownership is that we treasure our animals not despite their peculiarities but because of themand that, perhaps, is as good a rubric for loving as any on earth.

by BriAnne Wills

September 3, 2013: my birthday. My husband, Chris, and I are living in Kiev, Ukraine. We had friends over for a party, but now, at almost three in the morning, everyone is gone. Chris is asleep, passed out. Im fully awake, thanks to all the sugar in the drinks we had. Thats when I hear it: tiny kitten cries.

No going to sleep for me. Ive got some experience helping animals out of sticky situations in our adopted city, which happens to be full of cats. Theyre mostly well cared for, fed by babushkas, but this one is clearly in trouble. I go to investigate. In Kiev, the city blocks are long, lined by tall trees with white-painted trunks and something that would soon be a problemno low limbs.

In one of those tall, bare trees, I see two glowing eyes. I hear two meeps. There she is, way above the first branch, itself at least seven feet high. I leave and come back with half-asleep Chris, who tries to shimmy up the trunk. We try hoisting each other. No luck. Then, lo and behold, comes a very tall man, walking his dog. He hoists Chris up into the branches. Chris climbs. The kitten climbs. He climbs, and she climbs, onto the tiniest limb, and then she falls. I scoop her up and put her in my jacket, and we take her to the emergency vet. Shes okay, just filthy, with ear mites, tapeworms, fleas, ringwormevery ailment a month-old kitten could possibly have. But shes ours. Mine. She immediately bonds to me.

A few months later, when Liza is clean and healthy and weve almost gotten rid of the fleas in our place, Im walking home from my job and see a black ball on the ground. Its screaming in the most pitiful way. Everyone is passing it by. Its impossible to believe its a kitten. His whiskers are all crooked and he looks like a goner, but I think I can at least make him comfortable. So I put him in my sweatshirt and take him home. Food and water turn him into a totally different creature. Eventually he lets me bathe him, and we take him to the vet, and we de-everything him, and finally Tucker (aka Tuck) looks like a regular kitten. By now, its December, and the revolution is starting. I go home to Oregon, without Chris and Liza and Tuck. Six months later, I move to Brooklyn. Chris gets the cats their shots and their kitty passports (yep, they issue those), and he flies with them for twelve hours to meet me.