I Am Cat Lady

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Abyssinians are to tabbies as caviar is to salmon roe: the expensive version. I was determined to find an Abyssinian as I walked the floor of The Cotillion Ballroom in Wichita, Kansas, on what was also Super Bowl Sunday. I wanted to get lost in row after row of cats and their adoring humans, their custom wire brushes and sequined carriers. The “Fancy” in “Cat Fancy” was subjective; admission cost $5 at the door, $3 for kids six to twelve. The glitter was BeDazzled, not Swarovski. But it was a beautiful shine nonetheless.

Before Salamander, there was Whisky. We kept the names of both our rescue cats, though we shortened Salamander to “Sal,” and I had a hard time learning to spell “Whisky” without adding an e before the y. The foster couple had changed her name from “Whizzer,” which had all the wrong connotations. Whisky seemed so much larger than in the Craigslist snapshot, Muppet-esque. She leaned into my inquiring gaze—first of many headbutts—and jumped down, to roam the back aisles of the warehouse where she was being fostered.

“Cat Lady” can be a pejorative, as an archetype of spinsterhood. My marriage makes me ineligible for true “Cat Lady” status. But I like to remind my husband that he is a decade older and, given prevailing statistics around average American lifespan, I’ll probably end up his widow. He should get a life insurance policy, I tell him. He does not appreciate this nudge.

Doris Lessing kept multiple cats in and around her London addresses. They roamed, subject to street fights and eye infections and traffic accidents. Some got nothing more than signifiers such as “gray cat” and “black cat,” while others merited names such as Butchkin and El Magnifico. When Whisky was dying, an indeterminate but aggressive wasting away, I sat on the floor beside her and read Lessing’s On Cats. I was comforted by the way her tone alternated between brusque practicality and tenderness.

Even given kibble, pâté, scritches, catnip mouse, dancing laser, and endless bowls of fresh water, a cat sulks when their favorite is missing. During my month in Kansas, left behind in our DC apartment, Whisky stared dolefully at my husband and curled up on my pillow to sleep. Now, our cat Sal settles himself resolutely to wait for his favorite’s arrival home. The moment my husband steps from the elevator into the hallway, Sal begins to circle and paw at the door.

For a long time I didn’t know how to explain my lack of interest in having children. Was this a self-preservation instinct, given an already fickle immune system and the known phenomenon of pregnancy making a system go haywire? Was it so I could focus on writing instead? So I could favor drinking and travel and sleeping in? Was I reacting to my mother’s frustrations with parenting? Was it weird that, the first time I heard my husband refer warily to a “fully articulated child”—a baby old enough to be somewhat engaging, but never so intriguing as for him to want one of his own—I was profoundly relieved at his disinterest?

Grief is a shell game. The first time I tried to write about not having children, someone put forward the specter of the unbearable grief I would experience if I did not. They had told me I might change my mind. Of course, I’ll feel grief, I wrote. Howling grief. Who doesn’t howl over their lives unlived? I can’t be glad I’ve stayed in DC without grieving the woman who would have moved to small-town Mississippi. I can’t be grateful for Sal without knowing that, if Whisky had recovered, someone else would have gotten a rescue cat named Salamander.

Helicopter Kitty Studios was where Lloyd Wayne Jenkins recorded and mixed Cat Songs, which the cover tells us contains “57 Minutes of silly to serious feline-related songs, including one instrumental.” My 1991 cassette is in mint condition. I hesitate to risk popping it into the perils of my husband’s old tape deck, where the tape might tangle and tear, and try instead to fetch tunes from memory. The track titled “907 Whitehead Street” marks the address for Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida, famously populated by polydactyl cats. “I Talk To My Kitty” stirs faint recall of a syncopated, thirty-year-old melody. Drums? Zither? There’s a guest vocal for “Oh, No!” credited to Linda Marie Jenkins, Lloyd’s sister, and a guest vocal for “Without a Kitty-Beast” credited to Laura Jenkins, their mother, who lived next door on Tenth Road. Saida “Laura” Rice Jenkins is my original Cat Lady.

I would not exist without Laura, who introduced my mother—who worked as her assistant, teaching art at Chesterbrook Elementary School—to my father, divorced son of her friend Peggy. By the time I was born, my parents were living in Peggy’s old house, which made us next-door neighbors. You cannot ask for a better neighbor than a woman who possesses construction blocks, a trampoline, an oversized xylophone with rubber mallets, and a cat.

Jeans and cowboy boots. Embroidered jackets and statement jewelry. Jewel-toned sweatshirt with faux-cross-stitch design, white peter-pan collar. The dress code for the 2018 Wichita Cat Fancy Cat Show was whatever-makes-you-feel-good. One man wore his cinnamon-and-white Sphynx draped across the back of his broad shoulders. His back pocket offered a fireworks display of play-rods, dangling with feathers and faux fur and ribbons. The cats wore their coats with aplomb: Selkirk Rexes in curls, Persians disappearing within their carefully groomed mop-tops.

Kitsch is associated with the garish and sentimental, and I’m picky when it comes to cat kitsch. Felix-the-Cat clock? Yes. Lucky waving cat by register of a Chinese restaurant? Maybe. Blofeld’s cat? No. Meme of a cat’s face poking through a piece of bread? Probably. On my fifth Sal phone-photo of the day, I text my husband a caption, “bucket of fluff.” Also acceptable: “kitteh,” “kits,” or “buddy-boy.” I draw the line at using a cat’s picture in my social-media profiles, or the rhetoric of “fur-
babies.” When friends began having kids, I felt as though their children became proxy identities. Photos of babies literally replaced their Facebook faces.

Laura was the only woman I saw, as a child, whose life seemed curiously and wonderfully dissociated from children. She had retired from her teaching job at the elementary school. I vaguely understood that she had kids, but they were no longer children. They were grown-ups who did amazing things such as recording albums full of cat songs.

My mother, when I asked her if she had thoughts on whether I should have children, said, “Well. There’s a lot of different ways to be happy.”

New Orleans was where Laura lived later in life, except for the months when Hurricane Katrina had displaced her. Every Christmas, she’d send goofy, inexpensive gifts. Whatever we sent in return—tea towels, magnets, sweatshirts—had a cat on it. Although my sister and I were ten years apart, it could often be hard to tell which one of us was the intended recipient of a gift from Laura, except for the year of a velvet bag with a gaudy, faux-diamond ring. The “engagement” bauble was for me, but why? She’d sent me a “she’s taken” ring for wearing to the bar, imagining nights when the only company that I wanted was a martini and my book.

Over time, every partnership I chose dug the road deeper away from motherhood. The high-school love who didn’t want children. The college love who didn’t want children. The Mississippi love who’d had a child, long ago, and didn’t want another one. The Mississippi fling who swore he wasn’t fit to be a father (then had two kids with the next woman he dated). When I met the man who would become my husband, what worried me most was the pair of cats he’d had earlier in life, and his memory that they’d scratched his vinyl records. Kids? Eh. But having cats was nonnegotiable.

“Prince” was what I wanted to name the kitten that my grandparents brought me from West Virginia when I was a child. They’d plucked a tabby from my cousins’ farm without asking my parents’ permission beforehand. But my mother vetoed “Prince,” and I never came up with another option. “Kitty” stuck. There’s a yawning gap, generational, between those who think of pets as family and those who think of household pets as animals you treat humanely (but for whom you don’t go overboard). My mother is of the latter generation. She scooped the litter box and sluiced clean the sludgy hermit crab cages. But when a mass guppy extinction event happened right before a birthday party, she’d hit her limit. She threw a sheet over the whole ten-gallon tank where it stayed, a rotting graveyard of fish, for weeks untouched.

Quest of a child obsessed with the book Stone Fox: I was determined to be Little Willy, John Reynolds Gardiner’s protagonist, and win the sled-dog race. I did not have a sled dog. I decided to teach Kitty basic Iditarod commands. I ran circles made around our basement, leash in hand, all the while shouting “Mush!” at a confused cat.

Regret of a child obsessed with the soap opera All My Children: I laid out Pounce treats, dangled the pole-ribbon, then stepped out to reenter as my Evil Twin. I expected Kitty to discern between us twins, and react accordingly, until I dropped my anger and collapsed into smothering coos and pets. I was always relieved to become the Good Twin again.

Some psychologists might theorize that this “Twin” game, besides being a horribly reductive understanding of twins, was about exploring the way that taking care can trigger, in me, both fierce love and utter resentment. Because I never saw models for how to integrate the two, I polarized them instead.

To be honest, I’m rarely excited to be around babies. They’re fine. They are charming, smiley, smelly milk-bombs, though, and I’m allergic to milk. My superpower is bouncing a bawling baby on my knee and blithely continuing the conversation as if nothing is happening.

Union Vet was where we took Whisky when she first refused to eat. They charged us for diagnostic tests that revealed little and urged regular doses of subcutaneous fluids. When a vet used the same injection site the third week in a row, a chunk of fragile skin and cat hair came off in his hand. He tossed it in the trash, assured me it was nothing, and ushered us out. By the next morning, there was a gaping wound at the base of Whisky’s tail. I bullied the manager into giving us a refund but the damage was done. Her skin was too weak to hold stitches or glue, and it would take weeks to knit back together. I didn’t know how to fix her.

Virginia is where I grew up and where we drive an hour each way, with Sal, to the Marshall Veterinary Clinic. One of the techs is my cousin Kathy. Before we brought them Sal, they took care of Whisky, who was deemed a “sassy cat.” They took care to clip the claws on her extra toes and kept her comfortably circling the drain, while we tried every variety of food that I could have in the house, given my allergies. There’s a special hell to being told that bits of cheese will help your cat and having to say, “I can’t risk having that in the house.” I went shopping. I couldn’t buy beef, or shrimp, but I was ready to try every tuna and chicken and salmon combination. Could venison do the trick? Duck? Sure, maybe. I went shopping again. Then, and now, the Marshall Vet practice maintains a bright, chittering cage of parakeets in the waiting room.

When Whisky died, a friend said that every time he’d ever had an animal, he’d gotten “better” at having an animal. Meaning, more confident in managing their lives and deaths. I thought, that is a powerful thing. I also thought, that would not be okay to quote as one’s approach to having children.

Xylophones and trampolines: Laura had a house full of havoc-inclined objects that would never be welcome in our house next door. I remember going out to her side porch and breaking open geodes with a hammer. Did that really happen? I don’t know, but I remember the snap of goggles around my head, how they bunched up my bangs. A life without children could be a rough-hewn egg with jagged, glittery crystal insides.

You tell yourself where you’ll draw the line on the cost of an animal’s medical treatment. Then a voice on the phone tells you that unless they thread a catheter to clear the blockage, his bladder will burst. That’s how Sal went from a $100 rescue to a $3,000 cat.

Zoom, eight months into the pandemic, and the young writer on my computer screen asked: “Where is Sal? Can we see Sal?” He was curled up at my feet. The first time I got a hint that a pandemic was emerging was at Meows Corner in Sterling, Virginia. We hadn’t found Sal yet. I was asking after a tuxedo cat, Agate (who, in my head, I had already renamed “Agatha”). Where had she gone? Adopted? No, I was told, she had a mild cat-flu that was making the rounds. “At least it is not the coronavirus,” the front desk attendant joked. I smiled and nodded. What was “coronavirus”?

Zoom, eighteen months into the pandemic, and the young writer on my computer screen asked, “Where is Sal? Can we see Sal?” Sal was gnawing on a cactus.

You tell yourself where you’ll draw the line on the cost of an animal’s medical treatment. Then your doctor at Marshall Veterinary Clinic tells you that a surgery that will head off further blockages, and it is time to insist on that surgery. That’s how Sal became a $9,000 cat. I avoid telling my mother just how high the bills have gotten.

Xanthippe was Laura’s cat. I could say “first cat,” but that’s only true on the scale of my life, not Laura’s. “Best cat” might be true. Her son Lloyd’s Cat Songs is dedicated to Xanthippe, which he wrote as “Xantippi.” The name is ancient and Athenian, the name of the wife of Socrates.

When my parents were confronted with the gift of a cat, they didn’t have the heart to tell their incredibly allergic daughter that she couldn’t have a pet. Kitty could stay. The plan was that the cat’s domain would be downstairs, where we had bad shag carpeting,

Versus

Upstairs, where leather sofas and Persian rugs needed to be kept clear of Kitty’s claws.

The problem was that when my father returned from a prolonged army deployment, in a sandy part of the world, he had stripped sinuses and a vicious sensitivity to dander. Even ten minutes in the same room as a cat set off a sneezing fit for my dad. We’d always kept the cat downstairs, but now we’d need to find a way to sequester Kitty further.

Sal is the most dedicated biscuit-maker I have ever encountered. He centers his attentions on the Snoopy blanket I bought for my husband for Valentine’s Day, a black-and-white harlequin cat kneading the face of a black-and-white cartoon dog. The first time we saw Whisky perform the gesture, my husband had to explain what it meant, as she methodically kneaded the edge of her fluffy gray bed. I’d never seen a cat make biscuits.

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Relegated to the laundry and storage room, Kitty lived in an exile that we told ourselves offered any number of wolf spiders to hunt for entertainment. We could hear him venture up in the air conditioning vents that ran along the back length of the house. We knew he was lonely by the way he’d launch at our ankles, nipping and batting, every time we stepped in with a load of laundry. When he could hear us on the downstairs couch, watching Jeopardy!, he’d jut his paw out under the doorframe and wave it back and forth to remind us he was there.

Quoting Marge Piercy, in her 1989 poem “The cat’s song”: “Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. / My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says / the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing / milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.” What Kitty did, instead, was suckle my fingers until the skin wrinkled.

Perhaps when I look back, I’ll understand my priorities in a coherent way. What I have in this moment is three professional to-do lists on the scale of the day, the month, and the year. A river runs alongside all the lists, flowing with household to-dos. Sal taps on the jewelry boxes at 3 a.m., so I move them from the bedside stand to the floor—I haven’t figured out where else to store my bracelets and earrings—and get up to pour a quarter-cup of kibble. I make the bed, clean out the coffeemaker, maybe take out recycling. I unload the dishwasher if my husband hasn’t already done it, but he usually has. I water cacti and mist succulents. I shower, sometimes. I exercise, sometimes. I teach. I email. We go a year without having sex. That is my choice fault choice. I do the grocery shopping, and my husband makes dinner. Sal sits on the kitchen table, pawing the jar of almonds in hopes of annoying us into giving him more kibble.

One embedded contradiction is that while a Cat Lady is regarded as sexless, a Pussy Cat is synonymous with hypersexual femininity. “Seems like every woman you try to save ends up dead—or deeply resentful,” Michelle Pfeiffer tells Michael Keaton in the 1992 movie Batman Returns. She is wearing a skintight suit with pointed ears as her alter ego, Catwoman. “Maybe you should retire.”

No one comes along to validate your choices. My husband sometimes exclaims, without any provocation, “I love my life!” He does this while stretching, or after a big meal, or while organizing records. Such pure, buoyant energy: He has figured out that when no one else cheers you on, you cheer yourself on. “She’s doing it,” he’ll say, when he walks into a room where I’m working, but I often don’t believe him. Maybe I chose not to have children fearing they’d hold up a mirror in which I’d only ever be “doing it” wrong.

Much of the circus-like atmosphere at the Wichita Cat Fancy Cat Show was the constant rotation of evaluations. Ribbons were granted freely by the Fanciers, whose judges pulled cat after cat from cages to multiple stages, pushing each one around to evaluate look and demeanor. One gray-striped tabby’s cage boasted “6th Best Cat in Championship” for the “All Breed” category; I assumed different colors indicated different years, since the cat was also ranked “7th Best Cat in Championship” and “10th Best Cat in Championship.” An Ocicat began its pageant journey as “3rd Best Kitten.” There was also “Shorthair Specialty,” and “Best in Color.”

Linda made sure that I would get to visit her mother, Laura, in February 2010, when I came to New Orleans. The reason was my memoir—a national allergy conference where I could obtain a press pass, and source experts in the field. But Laura’s time was winding down, and we knew it. Call Victor, I was told, and given a number for the taxi service. He’ll get you there.

Kitty began making jailbreaks in the early 2000s. He’d slip past the laundry-room door and haul his arthritic bones to the forbidden upstairs, waiting outside my mother’s door as she took a bath. I was home, living with my parents for my first semester of graduate school, when he crawled into my lap looking for borrowed warmth. He died with a mustardy exhalation, in the downstairs living room, as the two of us sat on a Jennifer Furniture sectional.

John Ashbery found the single sestina insufficient for Flow Chart’s grappling with mortality. So he doubled the form. “As you pause for breath, / remember it, now that it is done, and seeds flare in the sunflower.”

I caught a ride with Victor, paying with forty dollars cash, which rolled me far beyond the French Quarter and into the suburbs to an assisted-living facility. Laura looked the same, if older—funky but practical eyeglasses, frizzy golden-brown hair. I sat on the edge of a comfy chair with my glass of water as she told one story, then another, and talked about that time she trespassed into the middle of a 1969 concert in Woodstock, New York.

How I wish that I’d had a cat, in that moment, to tell Laura about. She’d had Xanthippe and then Taj, Tui. Only the complex’s rules kept her from having another. But I was still a few years from meeting my husband, and a few more years from us finding a place that allowed cats on the lease. What did I say to her instead? I look at the timing and know I would have been in the middle of upending my love life. Maybe I gave an update on the safer subjects of my parents, my sister. Maybe I spun out a tale about the bartender at Arnaud’s French 75 Bar.

Getting ready to leave her apartment, Laura told me to pick something off her shelves to have as a keepsake. Unsure what to grab, I picked up All Color Book of Cats. One of the captions says, “Cats adore flattery and love being told they are beautiful. Most cat photographs look as if they are posed but it is in fact difficult to make a cat do something because you want it to, and poise is in its nature.” The other volumes of All Color books include “Birds,” “Seashells,” “Egyptian Mythology,” and “Henry VIII.”

For hours I was too scared to stand and release Kitty’s body from my lap, unsure where to put it down. I waited until I could hear my mother making coffee upstairs. My father dug the hole for burying, in a ground hardened by winter. When Whisky died, in the quiet of our apartment, at a time we’d scheduled, my husband took on the job of gently enfolding her body in a blanket I’d given to the task, while I walked the veterinarian back to her car in the garage.

Everyone told me that cats would be easy, as pets go. Independent, they said.

Did Whisky wait to stop eating until she met me, a safe harbor for her wasting away? The foster couple swore up and down she’d been eating normally, though she was down to her last teeth. Did Sal wait until he landed in our household to reveal the consequence of being six years un-neutered, wanky hormones and fraught plumbing to match? He’s an anxious cat. But he lets me pick him up and sling him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He loves to look out the window by my husband’s desk, down at the Southwest Duck Pond.

Cats sense grief, a friend tells me, and move toward it.

By the time Victor picked me up for the return, he was a half hour late and his van was cluttered with juice boxes and sandwich bags. To offset my palpable irritation, I asked about the mound of costuming in the far backseat. It turned out to be a Mardi Gras costume in progress. That’s when Victor admitted that he no longer worked as a driver. But I had called his cell, and I was with Laura. He hadn’t wanted to leave his favorite customer hanging.

Abyssinians are bred with Siamese, bred with American shorthairs, resulting in the elegantly spotted Ocicat. I found a Colorado breeder with a pen of them on the floor of The Cotillion Ballroom, his gate decorated with four show ribbons. In comparison, Sal’s lineage is unknown, his coat a weird mix of snow-white and striped harlequin spots, and he has the attitude of a ravenous trash panda. He is curled at our feet this New Year’s Day of 2022, at 4 a.m. We’ve fallen asleep before the ball drop, and now my husband is sad. “Do you want to blow some crackers?” I ask, fumbling my words. I grab two “Happy New Year” party favors. When I blow mine, the silver tongue extends in a billowing curl. His blow creates not only a gold tongue but a great honk. Sal is alarmed. We blow again, honk at each other, foil tongues entwining. Okay, my husband says, I feel a little hopeful. Here we are.