Vashti loved him, too. But after one too many visits to Jorge’s house, when I’d ended up leaving without her, something must have clicked in Vashti’s mind. She must have thought she’d been taken back to Jorge’s and left there forever, that I was never going to live with her again.
My guess was that Vashti was sending a message. And the message was: I’m not living anywhere without Mommy.
My suspicions were confirmed the next day when Jorge called to tell me he’d caught Vashti in the act of peeing on his stove. Since she had failed to communicate her point the first few times—as evidenced by the fact that she was still with Jorge and not with me—she’d obviously decided to escalate matters. I marveled at the idea of Vashti jumping all the way up to the counter-top stove—Vashti who, to my knowledge, had never once jumped half that height in her entire life.
“I’m sorry,” Jorge told me, “but she has to go.”
“I’ll come get them tonight,” I replied.
Loading the cats into their carriers was never an easy task, but for once Vashti climbed in as eagerly as if she were crawling into my lap. I put Homer in last; since he couldn’t see the carriers, he didn’t run and hide the second they were brought out. He spent his last few minutes in Jorge’s house playing with Jorge’s friends, charter members of the El Mocho fan club, who’d come to see him off. They held small bits of the tuna Jorge hadn’t been able to resist buying high in the air, encouraging Homer to leap straight up and grab the tuna from their fingers. “¡Salta, Mochito!” (Salta being Spanish for jump). As I deposited Homer into his carrier, Jorge’s friends cried, “No, no! The other two, they can go, but El Mocho can stay!”
“You know, he is welcome to stay if that would make things easier for you,” Jorge said.
For a kitten nobody had wanted, the offers to take Homer off my hands certainly seemed to be piling up.
“Sorry, guys,” I said. “They’re a package deal.”
“There really is something special about that cat,” Jorge observed fondly, giving Homer one last rub behind the ears before I zipped the carrier closed around him.
I smiled. “Let’s hope my parents feel the same way.”
The one profitable outcome of this episode in Homer’s life (I use the word profitable loosely, because I practically bankrupted myself repaying Jorge for the damage Vashti caused) was that I was decidedly less anxious about Homer’s ability to adjust to life in my parents’ house. With all the concerns I had for Homer over the years, I never again worried about his ability to adapt to new spaces and new people. Even my parents’ dogs no longer felt like the impassable barrier to Homer’s happiness I had been agonizing over.
For he was El Mocho, The Cat Without Fear.
¡Viva El Mocho!
9 • “Dogs and Cats, Living Together …”
There is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his own parents, and however splendid a home he may have elsewhere, if it be far from his father or mother, he does not care about it.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
PERHAPS SAYING EARLIER THAT MY PARENTS DIDN’T LIKE CATS WAS AN unfair characterization. It would be more accurate to say that my father, who owned his own medical auditing business, wasn’t so much anti-cat as he was staunchly pro-dog. But he was also more sensitive when it came to animals generally than just about anybody else I knew. He was one of those people with an ability to understand and respond to an animal’s emotional state that went beyond simple compassion and seemed almost to be direct communion. Of all the stray, abused, and abandoned dogs that had come through our home over the years, there had never been one—no matter how traumatized or skittish—who had failed to melt into warm affection in my father’s presence, even if that warmth was reserved for my father alone. It was my father I’d always thought of when I’d volunteered at animal shelters, hoping to capture at least some of whatever mysterious ability he had.
My mother, on the other hand, when she was a small child had seen a cat kill a bird. She, too, was capable of deep compassion where just about any animal was concerned, but the trauma of this single act of feline ornicide had left her, as she put it, incapable of emotionally investing in cats the way she could in dogs.
“Cats aren’t loving and loyal the way dogs are,” she’d say. Upon hearing my own cats indirectly maligned in this fashion, I was tempted to ask her what exactly, in her zero years of cat companionship, qualified her to make such an assessment.
Remembering the fruitless dinner-table political arguments of my adolescence, however, I forbore. I considered this forbearance a mark of the maturity I’d attained since I’d last lived with my parents.
That my parents were willing to take the four of us in, despite their antipathy toward cats, was a testament to how much they were willing to do for me—even though we weren’t as close at that time as, perhaps, we could have been. It wasn’t so much that there was any overt hostility between my parents and me; but, where some of my friends had drifted with seeming effortlessness into adult relationships with their parents, my own parents and I were still figuring it out. I often thought I heard a distinct grown-up-talking-to-a-child tone when they spoke to me—and, as it was uncomfortably close to some of my own darker insecurities about myself, I resented it accordingly.
More than anything else, I wanted to make them proud of me. But it didn’t seem as if I’d done much in my post-college life thus far to inspire pride, unless you counted one major failed relationship and being broke enough to require my moving back in with them.
But my parents were willing to take the four of us in, and they were even willing to divide their house into “cat zones” and “dog zones.” Casey, a yellow Lab mix, and Brandi, a miniature cocker spaniel, had been with my family since I was a teenager. They were always giddily thrilled whenever I turned up at my parents’ for a visit, following me closely and looking doleful if I so much as walked past the front door, anticipating the moment when I would leave and not return for days or weeks. If I spent the night, the two of them would pile into bed with me, as they’d done when I was still in high school.
Once I’d been living in my parents’ house again for a week and change, the novelty of having me around wore off a bit and they weren’t so apt to follow me everywhere. This was something I’d counted on; conflicting demands on my time and attention from the dog and cat camps wouldn’t engender the kind of mutual goodwill I was hoping for.
But I realized there was only so far diplomacy would go. Cat/dog animosity was at least as old as history itself, and neither my cats nor my parents’ dogs had ever been called upon to share quarters with members of the opposing faction. Remembering the dictum that “good fences make good neighbors,” my parents and I retrieved the folding wooden childproof gates from the storage spot they’d occupied since my younger sister and I were toddlers. “I knew we’d end up using them again,” my mother said, although not without tossing me a glance that added, Of course, I thought we’d be using them for our grand-children.
The gates attached to the walls with suction cups and reached about waist-high on the average adult. We put them up where a hallway split off to my bedroom and another bedroom, connected by an adjoining bathroom—effectively creating a three-room apartment that the dogs would be unable to access. I conducted a rigorous cleaning—trying to eliminate as much anxiety-inducing dog smell as I could—then installed cat beds, scratching posts, litter box, and food and water bowls. The cats’ new home was complete.