Helen The Cat

Helen the Cat - One Month

Helen is not my cat. 

I provide for her care and entertainment the best I can, but I don’t own her.  I own a book and I can open it flat on the table and it will stay open.  It will have done as I commanded, wanted and needed.  Helen is not like that.

For bits of lunchmeat turkey, Helen will “come” and “sit,” the latter only after a moment of grave indecision.  The books said to teach her to come in case she slips out of the house.  Done.  The books said to teach her tricks for mental stimulation and bonding.  Ha!  She runs crazily away from me, up the stairs, and around and around the upper floor after the administration of turkey. 

What?  Does she feel guilty because she didn't hunt and kill it herself?  Is it a hunt victory dance?  What?  What?  She's not much into explaining. 

I am losing my taste for turkey lunchmeat. 

Helen the Cat - Be with Yourself

"Be with yourself" is advice I have been given by wise people in my life.  This is so difficult for me.  Being with me is being with unspeakable loneliness.  When my husband or my boyfriend or my cat focus anywhere other than me, or if I let go of, or give up on, focusing on them, I am left with me.

I was in a roomful of people once who were taking turns to speak.  When my turn came, I spoke.  When my turn ended, I realized that if all these people stayed with me twenty-four hours a day and cared for me and let me speak the entire time so that I had a forever turn, it still wouldn't be enough.  Even if they encircled me and sat me in the middle so I was their complete center of attention, I would look over their shoulders to see who else might come.  No man or woman could ever provide solace for the vastness of that unending yearning.  And certainly not a small black cat, however golden her eyes.

Helen's window vigilance has worn her out.  She sleeps now.  I'm tired, too.  Will Helen ever find peace with not having what seems to be right there, so tantalizingly close? 

Will I?

Helen the Cat - Three Weeks and Four Days

Helen, my newly adopted cat, doesn't sleep on me anymore. 

She doesn't sit on my notepad when I'm trying to write.  She quits playing after twenty-eight seconds instead of fifty-four; her toys are in the same place in the morning.  When I bend down to stroke her, she dips her head and lowers her back to escape my hand.  She still sleeps on my bed, arriving at about the same time, sometimes with a yowl, sometimes not, but with no physical contact. 

I know Helen is just a cat.  I know human beings tend to personify pets and to project the potential for the fulfillment of their unmet needs onto their pets.  I know that it's dangerous to read too much into a pet's behavior or to take it personally. 

And yet. 

I find myself deeply pained by what I perceive as her choice to exclude me.

I think I can explain part of her behavior.  She's seen the neighborhood cats out the window.  She saw the white cat first.  She put her forepaws on the windowsill and moaned with such longing that the sound seemed torn from her throat.  The white cat is a misery of clotted fur and dribbling feces, a ghost moving through the gardenias and ferns, disappearing instantaneously when spooked by a door opening, a heel on the sidewalk, a dog barking.

The other cat is black, with white mittens and green eyes, friendly to humans, but it cuffs the white cat.  The mittened one is definitely this neighborhood's alpha cat. 

I saw her approach my window yesterday morning and watched Helen dart to the window, bobbing her head anxiously, looking for a crack or opening to reach the cat.  The cat hissed, then attacked, throwing itself against the windowpane.  Helen responded instantly, but soundlessly, the two cats head-to-head, paws-to-paws as if in a mirror, separated by the glass.

I ached for Helen.  When I was deciding on a cat while visiting the Humane Society, I noticed that when the handler replaced Helen in her lower cage, Helen reached to touch noses with the cat in the upper level.

So Helen's focus is now outside.  She stays near the windows, hoping for a glimpse of the ghost cat, even the mittened one.  She, like many humans, seems to have decided that abusive contact is better than none at all.

I miss Helen.  When I was upstairs, she was upstairs.  When I was downstairs, she was downstairs.  Now she stays where she last slept—near a window.

Crazy as it sounds, this "relationship" with Helen reminds me of so many others in my life, particularly with my former husband and then with the man I dated after my divorce.  Both of those relationships started with closeness, intimacy, sharing, both personal and physical.  Slowly, slowly, however, the man began to move away from me, distancing himself.  I felt like a starving child, hands to the windows, looking in on Dickensian feast.  Why was I outside and not in?  What had I done?  What could I do?  I could have uttered Helen's bereaved cry.

I spent years with one man, then another, trying to love, shame, persuade, seduce, and control, anything to "make" them come back to me after they “left.”  But they wouldn't.

So I am free of men who both love me and stay-and-leave at the same time.  But here sits Helen on the ottoman, three feet from me, in classic cat form, forepaws and back feet under her, tail curled close to her body, a nice little "cat package," the picture of domesticity.  She stares intently, relentlessly out the window.

With sadness and humility, I must admit that I have tried all the methods I used on men on Helen.  About twenty toys are strewn about my small living room, some handmade using my best creativity and innovation.  I've played, I've not played, I've stroked, I've not stroked, I've invited, I've left her alone.  As is usual in my relationships, I've tried really, really hard.  And gotten the exact same results.
I e-mailed some of my concerns to my mediation teacher, who has two cats.  Her reply:  "Try less."

Yes, but with what do I replace trying?

Helen the Cat - Two Weeks and Two Days

I took my newly adopted cat Helen to the vet to have her toenails clipped, to learn how to do it myself, and to make sure I wasn't killing her slowly and unintentionally with my ignorance of cats. 

Two weeks prior, I took her to the same vet straight from adopting her from the Humane Society.  Then, I stood by while the vet and her technician examined and stroked Helen, gave her treats, and oohed and aahed over her calm heartbeat.  I felt anxious, left out and inadequate. 

This time, when the clipping was done, two women, the technician and I, stood watching Helen hovering in the center of the stainless steel examining table.  Helen could choose.  She walked towards me and pressed herself against my chest.  I held her to me.

When Helen leaped onto the bed last night to begin our emerging good-night ritual, she expected to claw her way up the side of my elevated 1902 Sears bed via the sheets and my grandmother's afghan.  She clambered, slipped and thumped on the floor in a baffled, bruised heap. She no longer had her climbing tools.  She hadn't remembered that to save my skin, my furniture, and her own domesticated life, I had had her changed.

I jumped out of bed, apologizing, trying to stroke her.  She accepted a moment or two of my remorseful pats, then moved away and sat on a pillow (that used to be in a chair but is now trippingly in the middle of the hall for her convenience as a secondary bed), looking dazed. 

I moved her multi-leveled scratching post and a folding chair to the end of my bed to make steps, then coaxed her with star-shaped dry cat food to climb each level so she could still get in my bed, clawless.  She accepted her "training" and treats, then jumped off the bed and went downstairs.

I felt so sad.  Although I have had sleeping problems for several years, and sleep little when Helen is there, I have come to love having her in bed with me.  I lie down around nine or ten; around one in the morning, she wakes me with a yowl, leaps onto the bed, and walks straight onto my chest.  In the dark, she moves from one paw to the other, her face near mine.  One time she brushed her tiny wet nose and furred cheeks and tickly whiskers oh so delicately against my face with such gentle softness that I'm not sure it happened.  I felt my heart rise and my face lift not to miss even a moment of such tentative intimacy.

Then she turns and her tail pummels my face as her feet continue to lift up and down on what I would consider inhospitably bony ribs and small breasts.  Once more around and she falls onto my chest, taking her time to lower her head for sleep. 

Each time I fill my lungs, I lift nine and a half pounds of sleeping cat.  I wear a Helen blanket.

She leaves eventually for the center of the bed and I sleep deeply until I roll over onto my stomach.  Then Helen walks onto my back, does her four-paw dance, and settles herself.  I can imagine a side view of us, a woman face to the mat like a wrestler, pinned by a sprawled cat.  I awaken again to turn slowly.  Helen rides from the small of my back to my ribs, to my belly, as if she were in a log-rolling contest, until I'm flat on my back.  I am again under a Helen blanket.

Why do I allow such an invasion of my personal space, such disruption of my routine, such startling arousals from hard-won sleep?  My little sister, Margaret, and I rarely shared a bed as children, but when we were on a trip or staying with family, I would wake up with Margaret sleeping on me trustingly, profligately, her head on my far shoulder, her tiny arm heavy across my throat, one leg on mine, the other by its side as if we were one body. 

I remember lifting parts of her off of me, feeling a mix of impatience, guilt, fear and longing.  In my older sisterhood, I judged her sleep as undisciplined, yet I wanted to be able to protect her.  She seemed so vulnerable in her need to be close to someone just a little larger and only two years older than she.  I felt too small myself to defend her from whatever was lonely or fearful on her side of the bed.

A yowl and a great leap, my carefully constructed stairs ignored, and here is a small being lying on my chest as if she has every right to, as if no rules apply, as if lying on me adds something to her night that being at a distance does not.  I remember the bittersweetness of lying under a Margaret blanket.  This time, I do not move the small being away.

Helen the Cat - Holding

On my eleventh day with Helen, my five year-old, newly adopted cat, she lolled in bed with me.  Sometime in the night, I awakened with her sleeping on me and I found her still splayed heavily on my chest in the morning.  I slid her gently off and curled myself around her.  She flopped her legs over my wrists, nestled herself into the circlet of body and tumble of blankets made by my restless sleep, and closed her eyes.

When I was around six, my family moved from Idaho to Virginia, and my child-sized teddy bear, Bearbee, was left behind in a motel room.  Once he was discovered missing, I sensed my mother's distress and I, too, felt guilty and responsible for leaving him behind.  Somehow I had abandoned him and been abandoned by him.  He had probably fallen between the bed and the wall while I was sleeping.  To attempt to protect my mother from feeling guilty, I did not cry or speak.  I sat in the back seat of the red Plymouth station wagon behind my parents, beside my sister, Bearbee hundreds of miles behind us, feeling very small.

When I was about thirteen, on a shopping trip while visiting my grandparents, my mother spotted a teddy bear much like Bearbee, much too expensive, and bought it for me anyway.  I slept with that Bearbee the Second for several years, matting its fur by placing my head on its chest.

I know that, psychologically speaking, Bearbee was an attachment object, an inanimate figure to which I attributed soothing traits:  love, acceptance, compassion, empathy.  This is normal for children.  As a small girl, I loved Bearbee and was sure Bearbee loved me.

Inanimate attachment objects do not quite work for adults.  After my divorce, feeling like a bereft child, I bought a large, stuffed dog and cried into its fur.  But I no longer had the wishful, hopeful, magical thinking of a child.  I knew the dog was shaped from flat pieces of furred cloth stitched together in China.  I named him Scotty, but I knew he didn't love me.

Knees and chest around Helen that morning, not quite in the fetal position, not able to gather her delicate body to me in a child's voracious, lonely embrace, I felt some ancient stirrings of Bearbee's soothing presence.  I still didn't know Helen, or feel known by her enough for me to say I loved or felt loved by her, but she was there on the bed, not missing for decades or miles, not leaving, not biting or scratching, just there.  And her furry little feet were soft against my arm and, unlike Bearbee, she was breathing and she was warm.

While I was married, my sister, Margaret, would visit every year or so to stay with me and my husband, bringing one child, then two, then three.  On her first visit, she brought her little boy, my nephew, who was maybe three or four years old.

Margaret and I woke up first and were lying at the foot of my bed, talking.  When he awoke, the little boy, in feety pajamas, ran into the room and buried his body in his mother's.  They embraced and he pushed, closer, insistent, and she held him harder, little "Mmm, mmm" sounds in her throat.  Of all the Madonna and child images I have seen, that is the one that has stayed with me for its beauty, for its perfect, unguarded sincerity.

Years later, on another weekend visit, this time without children, my sister could sense that my marriage was beginning its slow, painful ending.  Margaret and I stayed up past midnight talking, my husband went to work that morning, and she and I were sleeping late.  I heard her call me from the guest room.  I went in and she lifted the sheets for me to get in bed with her.  We hadn't been in the same bed for twenty years.  I lay down stiffly beside her and she gathered me in her arms as she had her son and I cried and cried, buried in the warmth of my little sister's body.

On the eleventh day with Helen, divorced, childless, far from home, with her tiny form cradled against my own body, was I holding her or being held?

Helen the Cat - Duct Tape

Getting a cat was gently prescribed to me by several friends and health care providers as therapeutic for anxious, lonely people.  Oh.  I was hoping that didn’t show.

Getting a cat reveals I have a soft spot.  I feel like I’ve made a public declamation of vulnerability.  Now everyone will know I’m not tough.

I clean Helen’s litter box two times per day and keep her matching bowls filled.

Before I got her, I read about ten library books from two different libraries and searched the Internet and studied cat newsletters from universities.  I interviewed co-workers, neighbors, friends and strangers at the pet stores.  I got a lot of advice.  It all boiled down to “It depends on the cat.”  Uh-oh.  No truth and light about cats.  No directions to follow, no rules to obey.  Uh-oh.

I think Helen might be a very smart, agile cat.  When I woke up Wednesday morning, the kitchen cabinet drawers were ajar and one drawer, heavily laden with silverware, was halfway open.  I pasted the doors closed with duct tape left over from hurricane season.  Short gray stripes on wood tones.  Nice. 

While I was drying my hair, I looked down and saw her reaching between my legs for the bathroom cabinet.  She batted the door open with her paw, then used her head as a wedge to keep it open.  I duct taped those doors closed, too. 

My brightly-colored overstuffed chairs look like paisley ghosts in their bed sheets, my Wedgwood vase is locked in the china cabinet, and my feet go rasp-rasp as I traipse through scattered kitty litter.  The toy with the ball inside hurt my heel when I stepped on it.

I think Helen is beautiful.  I put on stockings and my business suit and spray myself with Shalimar, then squat on the stairs to say good-bye to her when I leave for work.  I stroke her long black fur and look into her golden eyes and start to cry.

I don’t understand her.  But I want to keep her.

Helen the Cat

I was forty-five years old, had never owned or lived with a cat, but on November 2, 2004, Election Day Tuesday, I adopted a cat from the Humane Society. 

I named her Helen.  She is all black with golden eyes.  According to some kind of reading of her teeth, she was five years and one month old the day I picked her up.  She weighed nine pounds and six ounces.  The vet said she was very healthy.  I thought cats twitched their tails.  Helen flaps hers like a beaver or a platypus.  She looks intently in my eyes.

I don’t understand Helen.  I don’t know why she sleeps through the roar of the hair dryer but bolts when I change the trash bag.  I don’t know why she climbs the footstool, then the chair arm, then stares at me, then settles herself into the middle of the notepad on which I am trying to write.  I don’t know why she climbs onto my bed, lies down beside me, and seems to want to be petted.  I pet her, then she bites my hand. 

I don’t know why she eats about seven granules of cat food at a time, will play for about fifty-four seconds each with only one or two of the ten toys I carefully selected for her, then quit, or why she drinks nothing at all for hours, then goes lick-lick-lick in her water bowl (with matching stripes on her food bowl), for two to three minutes at a time. 

I don’t know why she hasn’t put her claws into any of the three scratching surfaces I bought her, except for an afghan hand-knitted by my grandmother and my thigh through my nightgown.  I don’t know why she drapes herself across my ankles while I’m reading a book in bed.  What is she doing and why?  What does she want?  Is she happy?