“What do you guys think?” I asked the cats when I brought them in for the first time.
Scarlett and Vashti crept forward cautiously from the safety of their carriers, noses to the ground and ears at full attention. Casey barked in the other room, and they immediately scrambled under the bed. It was two hours before I could get them to do more than peek their whiskers out through the bed’s eyeleted dust ruffle, a relic of my preteen years.
Homer was unfazed, however. His ears flicked momentarily at Casey’s barking, but he was more interested in exploring what was in front of him. Homer had never encountered anything with the texture of the ’70s-style shag carpeting in my childhood bedroom. He spent a few minutes stalking carefully through the carpet strands that reached halfway to his chin—a black panther in perfect miniature prowling an electric-blue savanna. Once he realized the superior traction carpet afforded, far better than the hardwood or tile floors he was used to, Homer took off at a run, racing in blurred circles around the room and bouncing off walls and furniture like a rubber ball fired from a slingshot. Yippee! Look how fast I can go in here!
“He’s a little nut, isn’t he?” my mother, who hadn’t been able to resist a quick peek, observed.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
• • •
DESPITE SOME OF the concerns I’d had before moving in, my parents didn’t unduly interfere with my day-to-day activities. I did tend to let them know, as I was walking out the door, where I was going and approximately when I’d be back, but it was a level of basic courtesy that I would have extended to friendly roommates. The majority of my friends still lived on South Beach, and there were inevitable late nights, but my parents refrained from asking intrusive questions.
What I hadn’t counted on ahead of time was being on the receiving end of their parenting advice when it came to the cats.
“I don’t think you’re giving them fresh water often enough,” my mother announced one afternoon, a few weeks after we’d moved in. “I checked in on them while you were out, and poor Vashti was standing next to her water bowl making such sad eyes at me. I refilled it for her and the poor thing acted like she hadn’t seen clean water in days.”
I always changed the cats’ water twice daily—once in the morning and once in the evening. And “poor Vashti” was something of a con artist when it came to her water bowl. Vashti was a cat who, oddly enough, was obsessed with water. She loved to hold her paws under running faucets, immerse them up to her shoulder joint in full drinking glasses, and roll around in recently used showers while the tile was still wet. The refilling of her water bowl was one of the high points of her day; the beguiling roll of water caused by setting a full bowl on the ground mesmerized her, and she gave me no peace most mornings until I’d re-created this daily miracle for her.
I was about to explain this to my mother when a new thought occurred to me. “Wait a second—what were you doing with them in the first place?”
“Well, I wanted to say hello to Vashti,” my mother replied. She emphasized Vashti’s name in a way that meant there was a difference between cats, which she didn’t care for, and Vashti, who merited a degree of interest. “I am the one who found her when she was a kitten.”
“Yes, you did.” I smiled. “And you sent her to a good home, one where she gets all the fresh water she needs.”
A few days later, my father piped up with a suggestion of his own. “I don’t think the cats have enough toys,” he said. My father was the kind of indulgent dad who brought new toys home for the dogs every few days, to the point that my parents’ otherwise immaculate house looked like a chewtoy graveyard. “You should buy more toys for them.”
“They’re not like the dogs, Dad,” I explained. “They’re not into store-bought toys.” This was true, with the exception of that stuffed worm Homer still loved dearly. The bag that new toys came in was always an adventure—a large paper bag made an excellent cat fort. The receipt for the toys could be crumpled up into a ball that a cat could bat around and chase. The plastic wrapping around the toys was a bonanza for Scarlett, who loved nothing more than licking plastic wrap. (If a genie were to grant me the wish of the cats’ being able to talk for a single day, the first question I would ask is, What’s so great about licking plastic bags?!) But the toys themselves held little interest for my brood.
“You should really do something about Scarlett,” my mother said once. This was after she had found me reading a book with a purring Scarlett curled in my lap. She’d held out her hand and Scarlett sniffed it. Taking this as encouragement, my mother had attempted to pet Scarlett, who had hissed and recoiled from my mother’s touch so forcefully that her head nearly bruised my breastbone. “Brandi used to be afraid of new people, and look how well she does now.”
“Scarlett isn’t afraid of people, Mom,” I told her. “Scarlett doesn’t like people.”
The problem could be summed up in a nutshelclass="underline" My parents were trying to dog my cats. Having never spent much time around cats, they tried to take the accumulated knowledge of more than three decades of dog ownership and apply it to these strange new creatures who now inhabited their home. To the extent that the cats’ reactions differed from a dog’s, it was most likely because I didn’t yet have enough experience being responsible for pets.
I tried to weather their input with good grace, but it was hard. I was my parents’ child, reflexively defensive at any perceived parental criticism. I was also my “children’s” parent, bristling instantly at the slightest implication that I wasn’t caring for them properly, or that they were anything other than exactly what they should be.
But the one thing I could plainly see—that touched me, even though I was never very good at articulating it—was that my parents were trying. They were trying to care about the cats, to interest themselves in their happiness and well-being.
I had worried that my parents would treat me like a child. Maybe, in talking to me about being a parent, they were trying the best way they knew how to treat me like an adult.
IT WAS ONLY when it came to Homer that my parents were abashed to offer advice or constructive criticism. This was understandable. The idea of a pet who was blind—and not just blind, but eyeless—was far enough beyond their experience to feel exotic and mysterious. They often observed that, “you do seem to understand him,” and left it at that.
Homer initially inspired more pity in my parents than anything else. The most frustrating fact of life for Homer in my parents’ home was that he was confined to only a few rooms—rooms I wasn’t necessarily in when I was in the house. Homer would sit at the childproof gate and wail piteously if he heard me talking in the kitchen or down the hall.
“Poor baby,” my mother would say, real empathy in her voice. “Life must be so hard for him.”
It wasn’t life that Homer found hard to bear, of course. It was his enforced separation from me and from the other human voices he could hear but never meet. Homer didn’t understand a world in which I was present but not with him, in which there were other people who didn’t exist solely to befriend and play with him.
It wasn’t long into our stay before Homer made his first daring escape from behind the childproof gate. I customarily slid it open just far enough to allow myself entry to or exit from the cat-designated portion of the house. One day, as I was entering, Homer sort of flattened himself sideways and pressed through the mere inches of space between my leg and the wall, like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube. He didn’t get very far that time; being unfamiliar with the layout of my parents’ house, he stopped to get his bearings after only a few feet.