Skeeter: A Cat Tale Read online

  He became unusually playful, too, leaping from one toy to another as if he hoped to extract the meaning of this new phenomenon from one of them. He also hid and pounced on my feet. I started the morning barefoot as usual, but soon donned slippers for my own protection.

  It’s funny, though, how some primitive sense tells you when you’re about to be pounced on. I think I first noticed this one evening when I was about sixteen.

  There was only one phone in my parents’ New Orleans house—in their bedroom. When I started dating, I found this a problem. I told myself it was because my tête-à-têtes with my boyfriend were private, and they were. But my need to protect my privacy wasn’t based on steaming passion, as I told myself. I suspected my parents would find my talk both poignant and hilarious—I didn’t want my first efforts at lovers’ conversation to be laughed at.

  Instead, I used the phone in my father’s garage woodshop for my nightly telephone trysts. I would talk by the hour if nobody stopped me. During one of these conversations, I intuited there was something behind me, about to pounce. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  I turned around to find I was being stalked by a crawfish. It looked about the size of a lobster. Its claws were extended and snapping, fast closing in on my ankles.

  I shrieked and chased the critter away with a broom. Then I went back to the phone and explained, but this wasn’t easy. My boyfriend had been badly scared when I screamed. Now he was relieved, annoyed, and incredulous. Attacked by a crawfish? Did it have a gun?

  Even that wasn’t enough to make me use the house phone when I talked to my boyfriend, though I kept an eye out for marauding wildlife from then on. Being stalked is much less upsetting than being laughed at, when you’re sixteen and in the throes of first love.

  I’ve never heard of any other case of a crawfish attacking a human—till now I haven’t been able to imagine what was on that one’s mind. I’m starting to have a glimmering, though—the crawfish must have been the Skeeter of the arthropod world, set off by something beyond anyone’s understanding. Rain, maybe.

  Love,

  Lynne

  January 22, 2000

  Dear Angie,

  Winter is not past, of course, even in Southern California, but “the rain is over and gone”—for now. For all the fretting, we got less than half an inch. The news media today are through with yesterday’s fender benders and are back to talking about La Niña. I don’t know why they can’t use the frank, old-fashioned word “drought.” It’s always sufficed before.

  Skeeter’s reaction to water falling out of the sky was a sharp increase in energy. I wish it affected me that way. He played furiously with his toys and even snitched one of mine, a hand carved wooden doll about six inches tall. When I came home from work, I found it on the floor where he’d been fooling with it. I played with dolls when I was little, but I’ve never heard of a cat doing it.

  As kids, my sister, Melissa, and I were doll-crazy. Our mother wouldn’t let us have Barbies and glamour queens of that ilk. Instead we had Raggedy Anns, Toni dolls, stuffed animals, and a crowd of dollhouse inhabitants. Our Toni dolls had long lost their wigs by the time of my earliest memories. This, in our world, meant they were men. Having become enraptured with the King Arthur stories, we appointed the Toni dolls as Lancelot and Galahad. My sister’s plush dog did duty as a horse, as did an English Tigger of mine. The Toni dolls engaged in jousts on these unlikely mounts. I don’t remember what they used as weapons.

  The Raggedy Anns were Elaine and Guinevere. Since we were more interested in sword fighting than in either glamour or romance, my memories of the womenfolk are hazy.

  Our grandmother had given us baby dolls, but these did not fit well into the Arthurian legend. The difficulty wasn’t their appearance. A child who can pretend Raggedy Ann is Queen Guinevere would easily accept Betsy Wetsy as the Green Knight. The baby dolls had two insurmountable problems. The first was that we spoke lines for the characters. But just as we were about to intone something like, “Ye be of great chivalry and right hardy, why come ye not to cast me out of peril of death?”—the Green Knight would break in with Ma-ma and spoil the effect.

  The other drawback was their trademarked attraction, namely their incontinence. We found their tendency to wet their tinfoil armor to be inauthentic and banished them to the toy box.

  We built medieval towns in the backyard, using discarded cartons for castles and manors. Our pride and joy was a tall cylindrical container that had once held laundry detergent. This was the tower. In my subsequent architectural history studies, I was never to see photographs of chateaus without checking their pinnacles for the brand name all.

  Sometimes we played Mad Hatter tea party with these same dolls, magically transformed into Lewis Carroll characters. Melissa once persuaded me to take a bite out of one of the china doll dishes in imitation of the story. Explaining that one to Mom was fun.

  I took the doll away from Skeeter, but if he’s following in my footsteps, he may soon chew the dishes. Next time it rains, I could find some tiny, tooth marked shards lying around. I’ll be sure to wear shoes, just in case.

  Love,

  Lynne

  January 20, 2000

  Dear Angie,

  I visited the town of El Segundo today. I lived there when I first moved to southern California, but I hadn’t been back for years.

  The place has changed, of course. It’s getting built up now, and most of the old houses have been replaced by what people here call “McMansions.” When I lived there, I had a tiny house, no more than five or six hundred square feet. There were dozens of those cottages in El Segundo then. They had big yards—mine stretched along half the block, behind the shallower lots on the cross street. At the back of my yard was a hedge, and this hedge had a gap, if you looked carefully.

  Through the gap was Mrs. Fairchild’s yard. Her house was another of the small ones, actually a converted garage, and she lived alone in it. I’m not sure if I ever knew her first name. I wouldn’t have used it if I had. I called her Mrs. Fairchild, as I knew she preferred.

  She had a married son, who visited her often and did as much for her as she’d allow. But she wanted to be independent. And she was.

  I didn’t feel responsible for her. But I thought a little neighborliness would be welcome. So I’d make my way through the hedge, sometimes with cookies, sometimes without. She probably baked better cookies than I did, but she accepted mine politely and chatted with me for a while. Mostly she talked about the town and about the past.

  She had lived in the neighborhood for many years, not originally in the garage house but in another of the modest ones. I liked to listen to her memories. “Back in the twenties, we thought we’d soon be parking our own airplane in the driveway. Instead we got the Depression. We were so disappointed.

  “My husband left when my son was a baby. Walked away one morning and never came back. I kept us going by cleaning houses, cleaned all the houses around here.” She peered through her window. “The ones that used to be around here.”

  With her son grown and gone, most days she just talked to Buddy, her cat. He was a tabby tom, friendly enough if you scratched his favorite spots and knew better than to touch his tail. I never knew why he was sensitive about the tail. If it was touched, he performed a Jekyll-and-Hyde whirl from tabby to tiger and sank his teeth in the offending hand. He didn’t do it to me, though. Mrs. Fairchild warned me in time.

  She told me he’d first come up the drive, squalling and skinny, as a stray kitten. This was not easy to imagine. Buddy must have weighed twenty pounds when I met him. He’d gotten lost once when he was small, and she’d thought he was gone for good. But he came back and stayed. He and Mrs. Fairchild had stayed, and our two cottages had stayed, but now the town was changing around us. Changing fast.

  I finally had to move away from El Segundo. My house was being torn down, as so many were, to make way for a much finer structure. I couldn’t find anything else in town that I c
ould afford. Today I tried to remember whether I said goodbye to Mrs. Fairchild before I left. I think so. I hope I did.

  Her house is gone too now. I suppose she’s gone as well. It would be tempting to think the neighborliness disappeared when the trophy houses were built. Tempting and a little cheap. The hedge is still there, and maybe the gap is too. You never could see it from the street.

  Love,

  Lynne

  January 29, 2000

  Dear Angie,

  Skeeter is not entirely happy about the way we live. For example, he doesn’t like my going to work. With more justification, he disapproves of some of my attitudes. Most of my experience with animals is with dogs. In a relationship with a pet, I elect myself pack leader. Cats are not pack animals. Skeeter, a democrat, considers us equals and resents my bumptious ways.

  This is particularly true when it comes to food. I buy various kinds of food for Skeeter so he won’t become too set on one type or flavor. I had a friend in high school whose cat, Sparkles, would eat nothing but Kitty Queen Tuna. No other brand would do, even people tuna. Kitty Queen Salmon would not do, either. My friend’s family had Kitty Queen Tuna crises, when none could be found. “Did you try the all-night drugstore?” “We went there last time, remember? They don’t have it.” The cat probably would have starved before it ate anything else.

  My friend’s mother had a strange relationship with the cat. She believed Sparkles to be the reincarnation of her own mother, long deceased. So the cat ruled the household. I am not going down that road with Skeeter.

  A gauntlet has been thrown, though, regarding turkey. Till last week, he ate it with obvious enjoyment. The two cans I’ve given him this week have gone untouched. Someone said it might be spoiled, that I should smell it. A longtime vegetarian, I think meat always smells spoiled, but I gave it a whiff. Disgusting, but not rancid. I won’t buy it again, though, if he feels that way.

  This morning he got beef, which he accepted. In fact, he made a pig of himself. After breakfast he returned to the bedroom, belching alarmingly.

  “Would Monsieur like a potato with the steak next time?” I asked. “Perhaps a small glass of red wine?” Monsieur looked interested. “A salad?” No sale.

  I think I’ll continue being pack leader. Like all despots, I perpetuate Skeeter’s servitude by monopolizing the means to freedom: the checkbook, the car keys, the can opener.

  It’s unfair that I should be the leader just because I’m bigger and smarter and have opposable thumbs. But it’s going to stay that way as long as I can manage it. If Skeeter is the reincarnation of my mother, she can learn to eat what she’s given.

  Love,

  Lynne

  February 5, 2000

  Dear Angie,

  Thanks for calling this morning. It was great to talk to you. Sorry about the ruckus in the background. It was Skeeter, of course. He resents it when I talk on the phone.

  For a few minutes he waits, shifting from foot to foot like a kid. He has four feet to alternate among, though, so his performance is more interesting than any human’s could possibly be. Eventually, he starts to chew the handset cord or, if I’m on the cordless, my arm. If that doesn’t work, he runs around and caterwauls.

  Sometimes he even puts his foot on the button and hangs the phone up. It looks deliberate to me. He may want me to get off the phone and pay attention to him, but it’s also possible he wants to make a call.

  I’ve had some experience with people wanting to use my phone, and I know how demanding they can be. When I was married, my husband, Allen, and I lived in a two-flat building in Baton Rouge. At least, it was supposed to be a two-flat. It had a third, bootleg unit tacked onto the back—probably a former service porch. Now it was a tiny bachelor apartment.

  The girls in the bootleg apartment lived a bohemian life. They didn’t bother me much, except having no telephone of their own, they often asked to borrow ours. This irritated me, not only because of the intrusion, but also because Allen all too obviously encouraged it—these girls were cute.

  But even Allen was irritated one cold midnight when a knocking at the door roused us. He answered it and was confronted by an enraged older man.

  “Where’s my daughter?” the guy yelled.

  Allen stared at him blankly. “Who?”

  “Cynthia, my daughter! Where is she?” His voice boomed in the stillness of the sleeping neighborhood. He crowded the doorway, seemingly about to push his way in.

  Allen was bewildered. Cynthia? Oh, one of the girls in the bachelor apartment. He sent the man back there, locked the door, and returned to bed. We laughed with relief and went back to sleep.

  About an hour later, an even more insistent knocking woke us again. Allen went to the door. It wasn’t the father this time—it was a shivering young man wearing nothing but a pair of cutoff jeans. He asked to come in and use the phone.

  “What’s going on?” said Allen. Since he wasn’t talking to a cute girl, Allen had some inkling he was being imposed on.

  “Cynthia’s father came and beat on the door,” said the boy. “I was there, so I pulled on my cutoffs and hid in the closet behind some clothes.”

  “So?” Allen still didn’t see why the boy had knocked on our door.

  “They got into a big argument. The old guy yelled: ‘We’re goin’ back to Tennessee, Cynthia!’ Then he jerked open the closet door and grabbed the clothes. There I was, hunkered on the floor.”

  “What did you say?” asked Allen.

  “What was there to say? I jumped out and ran. I guess she’s going back to Tennessee. I need to call someone to come get me.”

  We let him use the phone. As he’d put it, what was there to say?

  I have lots to say to Skeeter about his antics when I’m on the phone, but I don’t think he’s listening.

  Love,

  Lynne

  February 10, 2000

  Dear Angie,

  Not long ago, Mark said he thought my apartment looked uninhabited, more diorama than dwelling. He was referring to the combined effect of my neatness and my love of museum-quality wicker furniture. In his view, this produced an intimidating atmosphere, as if the interior decorator had only just left and might be coming back to check up.

  My response was that his place looks unlived-in too. I countered his surprise by adding that most book warehouses are unlived-in. We both got a laugh from this, and it continues to be a joke, with variants such as, “Well, you have to admit, it looks lived-in today.”

  Now that Skeeter has become, in cat terms, a teenager, a decorator would probably be disappointed in me. The wicker is too valuable to give to Skeeter. But I’m not home during the day to prevent him from scratching it to ribbons. My solution has been to cover everything with blankets until he gets firmly fixed in the habit of using his scratching posts. Mark says my place, too, looks like a warehouse—the warehouse of a storage and transfer company. He’s right, temporarily.

  This is my solution to the furniture problem, but Skeeter is not a one-problem cat. Like teenagers of any species, Skeeter is busily testing my limits. He’s obedient, for a cat—he comes when called, usually respects my “no,” and is clean in his habits. Some typical teen problems were forestalled when I got him neutered. In certain ways, though, he’s been a problem.

  Some of my possessions especially incite Skeeter to mischief. One is an Amish quilt hanging above the bed. He likes to bat at it and explore the wall behind it. Heaven knows why—there’s nothing there. Another is a phoenix kite on the wall by my desk. Its tail feathers are irresistible, also delicate. A third is a wind chime on a bracket within his reach. Skeeter plainly thinks it’s an alarm clock. He bats it to get me up.

  He does this with one eye on me—if he were human, he’d be sticking out his tongue. He knows his behavior annoys me.

  I consulted a few friends who have cats. The advice I received was confusing. It ranged from letting him do whatever he wants, to swatting him hard.

  I sifted the vari
ed opinions and developed a workable program. When Skeeter is naughty, I tap him with one finger, gently but not caressingly. If he persists, he gets a time-out in the bathroom. This has in fact happened only a few times. Skeeter hates solitary, even for twenty minutes. He has adjusted his behavior to—barely—avoid this supreme penalty.

  Of course, he tears up the bathroom while he’s in there. I’m resigned to it—at least it makes it look slightly more lived-in.

  Love,

  Lynne

  February 20, 2000

  Dear Angie,

  When I first met Mark, I thought I’d like to read one of the books he’d written. So I ordered a copy from one of the big bookstores. They were “out of stock,” as they seem to be with everything I want.

  Yesterday, I got a call from the store to tell me my book had come in. “What book?” I asked. It had been such a long time, I’d forgotten about it.

  They gave me the title and author, and then I remembered.

  Problem was, Mark gave me that book for Valentine’s Day. Signed, of course, but also inscribed, “With all my love.” Clearly, this was the copy I wanted.

  Just as clearly, telling the exact truth to the bookstore clerk would have been a mistake. She would have thought I was a real nut case.

  “It’s been so long since I ordered the book, I got a copy from another source,” I said, thinking fast.

  She apologized and got off the phone, but it left me giggling all day. I giggled as I tidied the house and even in public, doing my errands. It goes to show, you just can’t win. Now the bookstore clerk doesn’t think I’m a nut case, but a lot of other people do.