Then there was the time when Fanny got a tiny price sticker—picked up heaven knows where—stuck to one of her front paws. I found her in the hallway trying furiously, and unsuccessfully, to shake it loose. Intending only to help—and not thinking much of it—I picked her up with one hand, pulled off the sticker (it came off very easily, I should note, and didn’t take a single strand of fur with it), and placed her back on the floor. The whole thing took about two seconds. Nevertheless—I kid you not—Fanny hid under the bed or ran to hide in a closet whenever she saw me coming for the next five hours. Five hours! The same cat who spends half her day napping sweetly in my lap while I write—a cat whom I’ve never once touched with anything other than gentleness and love—was now fleeing from me in abject panic because I’d pulled a tiny sticker off her front paw. The nerve of it! The drama! “Fanny!” I pleaded, watching her scuttle out of my path, eyes wide with fear, as if I were Carrie at the prom. “What is your problem? Nothing bad has EVER happened to you!”
So I knew we were really in for it the Saturday afternoon that Fanny got her exceptionally long, snaky tail caught in one of our moth traps.
If Phase One in our war on the moths had been a general carpet-bombing of drawers and closets with moth spray, then Phase Two was all about hand-to-hand combat. Once our arsenal of mothballs and cedar hangers, and a generous application of cedar spray, had made life in closets and drawers thoroughly untenable for the invaders, they began showing themselves out in the open, in plain sight. One of them, in a frenzied flight away from a plume of cedar spray, flew right up Laurence’s nose. “I think it came out my ear!” Laurence sputtered, pressing his finger against his nose to hold one nostril closed as he exhaled furiously through the other—until, finally, he saw the welcome sight of the moth exiting (considerably worse for wear) the same way it had entered.
For a good few days, it seemed as if the air in our house was thick with minute gray wings. We went on something of a rampage, whacking them with rolled-up newspapers and T-shirts—whatever was close by, basically, that could be used to crush an errant moth against a wall or the floor without damaging either. The cats were alarmed at first by the constant hiss of spray and thwack! of newspapers that filled our home—although they, too, were eager to get in on the action. Fanny and Clayton sometimes made their kills individually and sometimes worked as a team, with Fanny leaping high to force a moth into a downward trajectory while Clayton waited on the ground beneath her to scoop up the befuddled insect in his jaws.
In addition to the mothballs and insecticides we’d already acquired, we purchased—on the advice of several online posters who’d also dealt with moths—a slew of moth traps, which were triangular cardboard tents with sticky interiors that operated on the same premise as Roach Motels: They enticed the moths inside with a moth-attracting scent (undetectable to the human nose) and then held them fast.
We placed the moth traps atop our tallest bookcases and highest shelves—higher, we thought, than even Fanny was able to go. Clearly, however, we had underestimated the zealousness of Fanny, our little huntress, in her pursuit of airborne quarry.
Laurence and I were downstairs on the living room couch watching a movie when we first realized something was wrong. Ever the film buff, Laurence had curated a collection of giant-bug movies from the ’50s for us to watch during this, our time of insect affliction. With a new appreciation, we rediscovered (or, in my case, discovered for the first time) such noteworthy entries in the subgenre as The Deadly Mantis, Earth vs. the Spider, Tarantula!, The Wasp Woman, and, of course, the classic Them!, which was about a swarm of giant, irradiated ants that sprang up in the New Mexico desert, near the nuclear test sites.
Clayton was sound asleep on my lap, so when we first heard the rapid-fire thudding of feline paws on the floor above our heads, we assumed it was, as we call it in our house, a “Fanny Frenzy”—which is when Fanny goes to town on Rosie the Rat (her favorite plaything), swatting and tossing the toy from one bedroom to the other in a burst of hyperactivity. But then we heard the clatter and thump of unknown objects flying from their perches, and the crash of a bedside lamp hitting the floor. Those noises weren’t at all typical of a Fanny Frenzy. Swiftly dislodging a thoroughly unhappy Clayton, I leapt from the couch and ran upstairs to see what was going on.
The sight that greeted me as I entered our bedroom looked like a crime scene. The pillows on the bed and the pictures on the walls were all askew. Everything that had once been on top of a piece of furniture now lay in a heap below it—books had been swept from the bookcase and were lying open and bent upside down with their pages wadded up; pens and earrings had been tossed from the top of the dresser onto the floor; the lamp, clock radio, and tissue box that customarily resided on the night table were lying at odd angles on the ground. In the midst of all this chaos, Fanny was crouched on the floor. Her pupils were so dilated with fright that her golden eyes appeared black.
Glued firmly to the end of her long, long tail was one of our tented moth traps. Unable to detach it, she’d obviously tried to outrun it instead—alas, to no avail.
“It’s okay, Fanny.” I deliberately made my voice low-pitched and calm as I walked slowly toward her, not wanting to alarm her further. “It’s okay, baby girl. Let mommy help you.”
Laurence came up the stairs behind me just in time to see Fanny turn her all-pupil eyes briefly in my direction (Don’t come any closer! I REMEMBER THE STICKER!) before darting under the bed, the triangular moth trap still stuck to her tail skipping merrily across the floor behind her. In vain, Laurence and I knelt on opposite sides of the king-size bed and then lay down on our sides, trying to get to Fanny so we could pull her out. But neither of us had arms long enough to reach the spot in the middle where she’d curled herself into the tightest ball she could manage. The only way reaching her might have been possible would have been if Laurence lifted the bed, and it seemed unwise to risk adding the complications of a back injury to the problem we already had.
So, for the moment at least, Fanny had us at a stalemate. “She’ll have to come out eventually,” I finally said with a sigh. Bending down, I picked up the lamp and clock radio and restored them to their appointed spots on the night table. “And she’ll probably be calmer when she does.”
Fanny had bolted under the bed at around one o’clock in the afternoon, and it was nearly midnight before she finally reemerged. She’d missed both her lunch and dinner—although I’d done my best to tempt her out of hiding, carrying the cans up two flights from the kitchen to the bedroom, just so I could open them next to the bed. In my experience, the sound of a can opening and the rattling of a treats bag are the two sounds likeliest to summon even the scaredy-est cat. Accordingly, I’d also gone up periodically to shake the bag of Greenies in the hallway just outside the bedroom. But Fanny had remained unmoved by either of these lures.
Some calls of nature, however, are harder to resist than others, and I think Fanny was heading for the litter box, some eleven hours later, when she finally crept down the stairs. But the sound of the moth trap dragging behind her, thumping against each step as she descended, sent her into another, quite literal, tailspin.