“What about that huge ‘decorative bowl’ you made us buy for the middle of the kitchen table?” Laurence suggested. “It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there until we push it out of the way at dinnertime.”
“No way!” I protested. “That’s Clayton’s favorite place to sleep when he’s in the kitchen.”
“He only ever comes down to the kitchen when we’re not eating so he can bother Fanny,” Laurence pointed out.
“Exactly,” I replied. “And when he can’t get to her, because she’s on top of the cabinet in her frying pan, he goes to sleep in his bowl, and everybody’s happy. I thought you thought it was so adorable of him,” I added wistfully. “You always call him the ‘bowl boy.’”
Moving through the house with an eye toward ridding ourselves of the unnecessary, it was astonishing to realize how many things had long since ceased to be of any practical value except insofar as the cats got some enjoyment out of them. For example, the gel pads I’d bought to support my wrists while I was typing, when I’d felt the earliest twinges of incipient carpal-tunnel syndrome (an occupational hazard for writers). Clayton, who likes to sleep next to me on my desk while I work, had immediately claimed them for his own, clawing at them until the gel oozed out to form sticky patches. This had rendered them unfit for my own use, obviously, but—once the sticky patches had attracted enough of Clayton’s shed fur to make them more fuzzy than gummy—they made for ideal catnap pillows. I didn’t really want to take those away from him, did I?
Then there was the recumbent exercise bike I’d installed in a corner of our bedroom, intending to ride it during the breaks I managed to snatch for reading a book while on writing deadlines. I’d ended up discovering, however, that I much preferred a couple of hours of dedicated gym time to twenty-minute increments here and there over the course of the day. Still, I’d been loath to try to resell it, because it was Clayton’s favorite bedroom perch once we’d all turned in for the night. In any event, he’d “marked” the bike’s faux-leather seat with his claws until it was so torn up that we probably couldn’t have resold it even if we’d wanted to. There was plenty of room for it in the bedroom, so it was hard to see what harm we were doing by just letting it stay there.
We had empty shelves mounted on walls throughout the house, having planned once upon a time to display our knickknacks on them. But Fanny, with her love of high places, was apt to sleep on those shelves, and Clayton—when it came to the shelves he could actually climb up to—had a habit of pushing any knickknacks he encountered onto the floor. So the shelves remained empty, devoid of any justifiable use to our home’s human inhabitants and making it look as if we were in a perpetual state of either moving in or moving out. Fanny was happy, though, which was the thing that really mattered.
There were two plush blankets that Laurence’s sister had given us as holiday gifts last year—intending, I think, for Laurence and me to snuggle beneath them together while watching movies from the couch. But the cats adored all soft things, and the second we’d placed the blankets on the couch, Clayton and Fanny had sprawled out on them, rolling around ecstatically on their backs as they luxuriated in the plush texture. Now the blankets were thoroughly be-furred and wadded up on the ground, one in our third-floor bedroom and one in the book room on our middle floor.
“If anything’s going to attract moths, those blankets will,” Laurence said.
“Moths don’t eat polyester,” I replied.
Like all cats, Fanny and Clayton loved cardboard boxes more than just about anything. Accordingly, a few old shoeboxes had taken up a permanent residence on our living-room floor. “We can finally get rid of those—can’t we?” Laurence suggested, pointing to two boxes that the cats happened to be sleeping in at that exact moment. As if they understood what we were saying, Clayton and Fanny looked up at us, anxious pleas for clemency written in four identical golden eyes. You’re not going to take away our shoeboxes that we love soooooo much . . . are you?
“You’re a monster,” I told Laurence.
Similar stays of execution were also granted to a few stray plastic bottle caps (“Fanny loves ‘hunting’ them, and she never gets to hunt anything real,” I implored); a nest of ink-less pens that Clayton, unbeknownst to us, had been hoarding beneath the couch (I tried to get rid of them, really I did—but Clayton had hippity-hopped after me, as I clutched his treasure trove of useless pens, with such a persistent and plaintive chorus of Meeeeeeeee! that I’d been forced to relent); some old rolls of wrapping paper that didn’t have enough paper left on them to wrap another gift, but that nonetheless delighted the cats with the crinkling sound they made when they were knocked onto their sides and batted across a tile floor; and a couple of ancient bed pillows that were well past any ability to provide comfort to human heads, but that the cats thought were absolutely purr-fect spots for a long siesta, once Laurence and I were up and out of bed for the day.
In the end, we got rid of two huge trash bags’ worth of moth-chewed clothing and a far more modestly sized bag of broken hangers, old papers, and the like, culled from our cleaning efforts throughout the rest of the house. “It’s not as much as I thought it would be,” I admitted to Laurence, who sighed and agreed, “Yeah . . . it never is.”
Our first battle against the moths was over. The war, however, had only begun.
2. Fanny Frenzy
It’s hard to imagine two creatures whose lives more closely resemble an airtight cocoon of security and love than my cats. They came to us as a “bonded pair” of littermates and best friends, and—except for the two weeks Clayton spent recovering from the surgery to remove his bad half-leg—the two of them have never been separated since the day they were born. They live with a pair of humans who dote on them to a fairly ludicrous degree and who work from home, ensuring that Clayton and Fanny have a near-constant stream of attention and affection pretty much on tap. Our leafy street in Jersey City is generally quiet and serene, and the rhythms of Clayton’s and Fanny’s days—varied mostly by whether and how many squirrels and birds perch on our windowsills to tempt our little would-be predators—have the sort of comforting and predictable sameness that would be the envy of most other cats. And life, for the most part, has always been good to Clayton and Fanny. Unlike so many rescue cats, they never spent a single day of their existence confined to a cage in a shelter. They were found at two weeks of age in the backyard of a kindly cat rescuer who turned them over immediately to a foster network he volunteered with, called Furrever Friends, which placed the two kittens in the home of an experienced kitten foster mom. From what I could tell in our conversations prior to my adopting them, she lavished on Clayton and Fanny (then named Peeta and Katniss—possibly the only genuine hardship they’ve ever had to endure) nearly as much slavish adoration as Laurence and I do now.
It’s true that I can’t account for anything that may have happened to them during the first two weeks of their lives. But, then, I doubt that Clayton and Fanny would have much information to offer about those two weeks, either.
So it irks me, probably more than it should, when the two of them get more skittish than a given situation seems to call for. I expect—and accept—a certain amount of hissing from Clayton when I run the vacuum cleaner. But I’ll admit that I get a wee bit impatient when I hear that same wild flurry of hissing upon snapping open a plastic garbage bag (“When,” I’ll ask Clayton, “have I ever allowed a single bad thing to happen in this house?”). Or when Fanny, the quintessential “daddy’s girl,” bolts in terror at the sound of Laurence’s footsteps—his tread undeniably heavier than my own—coming up the stairs. Usually, once she’s gotten a few feet away, she’ll boomerang back around to greet Laurence properly, as if having realized mid-flight, Oh, wait—that’s not the Apocalypse. It’s just Laurence walking upstairs! But after six years of hearing that exact same footfall, you’d think she’d have learned to recognize it instantly by now.