In time we learned to forestall her mischief, hiding small appliances, camouflaging large ones with rugs or blankets, and devising catproof expedients with wire or duct tape. Howard had not touched his stereo for weeks!
“Let’s get a cat of our own when Sin-Sin goes home,” he said, after she had untied his shoelaces for the fortieth time.
As her visit drew to a close, we congratulated ourselves. We had kept her from meeting other cats or committing suicide or burning down the house.
Sin-Sin had one more surprise in store for us, however. Two days before my sister was due to return from Europe, Sin-Sin came of age. She announced the delicate situation at the top of her voice. Her wailing and howling verged on hysteria and continued nonstop for hours. Even though we kept the windows closed, her vocal exercises penetrated the walls, and the reaction around the neighborhood ranged from simple fury to threats of lawsuits.
In desperation we telephoned a veterinarian at his home in the late evening. He said:“That is characteristic of Siamese queens. You’d better mate her or she’ll drive you crazy.”
“I can’t,” I explained. “My sister in St. Louis has plans for breeding her.”
“Then put cotton in your ears, and bring the cat to the clinic in the morning. I’ll give her a tranquilizer.”
Howard and I took a couple of pills ourselves. Then we locked Sin-Sin in the utility room, after wiring the laundry faucets and disconnecting the washer and dryer.
The utility room was farthest from the bedroom, but it was not far enough, and the pill was not effective enough to counteract the bedlam that waked me a few hours after midnight. It was worse than Sin-Sin’s howling. It was a cacophony of screaming, growling, snarling—like the sound effects from a horror film. I half fell out of bed and groped my way to the utility room, at the same time shouting to wake Howard. As I opened the door, showers of sparks swirled around me. Red sparks and white sparks were shooting about in the dark like fireworks, amid a bedlam of crashing and clattering. While I stood there in dumb panic, the sparks stopped churning and hovered in space. And then I realized that the little red lights and the little white lights were arranged in pairs, like eyes.
Howard stumbled sleepily into the room and found the light switch. The sparks disappeared, and the room was full of cats—cats on the washer, cats on the dryer, cats in the laundry tubs, and one hanging from the circuit breaker box. They were inside, underneath, and on top of the wall cabinets. Gray cats, black cats, orange cats, striped cats, spotted cats glared at us in indignation.
In the middle of the assemblage was Sin-Sin, looking bewildered but proud. By opening the milk chute she had admitted the entire tomcat population of the neighborhood.
We shipped Sin-Sin back to St. Louis with an explanation that was not well received by Geraldine, and eventually my ungrateful sister shipped us all four of Sin-Sin’s mismatched offspring.
All four kittens were remarkably adept at operating mechanical devices—not as advanced as their mother, but far superior to the barn cats and lap cats of an earlier era. Furthermore, each succeeding generation has exhibited increased capabilities. Can this technological sophistication be attributed to watching television instead of mouseholes? Or is it the result of nutritional improvements in catfood? It is a trend worth watching, and we are in a position to monitor it closely.
Howard and I now operate a halfway house for wayward or unwanted cats, as well as a boarding school for the truly gifted and a placement bureau for upwardly mobile felines (Fluppies).
The Fluppie Phenomenon should not be taken lightly. The time may come when all household appliances, particularly computers, are required to be catproof. Today’s catly mischief could be tomorrow’s CATastrophe.
THE HERO OF DRUMMOND STREET
After the unpleasant accident on the Jamisons’ front lawn, the cat retired to the shade of a juniper to ponder the situation, and little Vernon Jamison ran indoors and cried for hours. In time his weeping became dry and unconvincing, but still he raised his voice in a penetrating six-year-old’s wail. Meanwhile, the neighborhood children stood in front of the house and chattered and shrieked and ogled the spot on the lawn—now covered with a bushel basket—where the accident had occurred.
Mrs. Jamison finally telephoned her husband at the advertising agency where he worked.“Vernon has been crying all afternoon and won’t stop,” she told him. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What started it?”
“He pulled the tail off the Drooler.”
“He pulled thewhat off thewhat?”
“The tail! Off the Drooler!” said Mrs. Jamison, raising her voice. “It’s that gray-and-white cat that hangs around the neighborhood. All the kids tease the poor thing, and Vernon was pulling his tail this afternoon. A piece of the tail came off in his hand, and he’s been crying ever since. Now he’s running a temperature.”
There was a pause on the line.“Hmmm,” said her husband. “How’s the cat’s temperature?”
“Oh, the Drooler seems to be okay. He’s just sitting under the junipers with three-quarters of a tail, but all the kids on the block are trampling on your lawn.”
“My lawn!” Mr. Jamison shouted into the phone. “I’ll be right there!”
Drummond Street, where the Jamisons lived, was lined with split-level houses, all of them identical except for the quality of their lawns. Some looked like cow pasture, some like country club fairways. Only Mr. Jamison’s grass resembled green velvet.
Each family owned two cars, three bicycles, a tricycle, a baby stroller, a power mower, and an electric lawn edger, but no one claimed to own the Drooler. He was a large gray-and-white cat with an unattractive habit of driveling. Festoons of saliva continually draped his whiskers and chin, glistened on his breast, and collected in puddles on every doorstep where he elected to doze in the sun. If any resident of Drummond Street sat down in a patio chair and quickly stood up again, it meant that the Drooler had been there, napping and salivating copiously. He played no favorites but gave every household, one after the other, his damp blessing.
The Drooler had another defect that impaired his prestige. Two years before, a TV repairman had backed his truck over the Drooler’s tail, which afterward drooped forlornly and was apparently insensible to pain. The children rode their trikes over the tip of his tail to prove that it was totally numb, and because of his unappetizing appearance they jeered at him and made faces intended to scare him to death.
None of this ill-treatment bothered the Drooler, who continued to loiter wherever the youngsters gathered, waiting hopefully for their insults and purring at their abuse.
“Get outa here, Drooler,” they would yell. “You’re a sloppy old cat,” and the Drooler would rub against their ankles and gaze at them with devotion.
When the Drooler lost the tip of his tail, he took it calmly, but Vernon—who was left holding the grisly souvenir—gave vent to mixed horror and guilt with a marathon of weeping. Only the reassurance that his father was coming home from the office succeeded in quieting him.
When Mr. Jamison arrived, he chased the wide-eyed, thumb-sucking spectators from his prize lawn, then called to his wife:“What’s this bushel basket doing on my grass?”
“That’s covering the Drooler’s tail,” she said. “I didn’t want to touch it. Vernon is in his bedroom, drinking cocoa.”
At the sight of his father, Vernon opened his mouth in a piercing wail and clung to his parent with renewed anguish.
“Now that’s enough, young man!” said Mr. Jamison, removing Vernon’s sticky hands from the sleeve of his seersucker coat. “Crying won’t fix the cat’s tail. It was an accident, and there’s nothing you can do about it—except to apologize and promise to be nice to the poor fellow in the future. He’s one of God’s creatures, and we must treat him with respect.”