Anjoli Roy
On Love and Cats, a Tale in Parts
In the 2000 romantic comedy Meet the Parents, protagonist Greg (played by Ben Stiller) is caught in an uncomfortable conversation with his partner’s father, Jack (played by Robert De Niro). Jack has just found out that Greg doesn’t like cats. Jack, who might be looking for any reason to challenge him, asks Greg why. Greg insists that he just likes dogs more because of how, when you come home, they wag their tails and are happy to see you.
“You need that assurance?” responds Jack. “You prefer an emotionally shallow animal?”
Greg tries to interject.
“You see, Greg, when you yell at a dog, his tail will go between his legs and cover his genitals. His ears will go down. A dog is very easy to break, but cats make you work for their affection. They don’t sell out the way dogs do.”
While I, as a seventeen-year-old watching this film for the first time, wasn’t expecting much more than a laugh from a Stiller-De Niro film, I remember feeling vindicated during this scene. See? I thought to myself. Cats are emotionally complex, respectable animals. In the endless debates about which are better, cats or dogs, cats clearly won.
I’ve loved cats all my life. I have been known to pull over and ditch my car for a chance to visit with a cat-friend in my neighborhood who I haven’t seen in a while. I will cross the street to greet ones I’ve never met but who pause to see what I’m clicking my tongue about.
I am always excited to see them, and any shred of affection in return feels like being chosen.
And, yet, today, at 41 years old, I wonder, what are we taught about love based on the animals we grow up with and how they express their affection?
Maybe the fictitious character of Greg only grew up with dogs.
Cats were the only pets I grew up with. They are woven into my origin story. When I think of my childhood, I can’t separate them from my concepts of home, from my domestic sphere.
*
Cats are the only animals in the world to have domesticated themselves.
“Here I am,” the first may have said, licking a paw after sauntering into a human’s sleeping quarters. “What’s there to eat?”
Or maybe the first said, “It’s warm in here. You may now pet me.”
Or maybe the first just entered, lay down, and yawned.
What’s it like not to need a human?
*
Sometime during graduate school, I started asking my parents more about their divorce. I looked closely at my parents’ wedding invitation. It’s framed in my mom’s spare bedroom, the one where I sleep when I come home to Pasadena from Honolulu. I peered at their young faces in the wedding photo just below it. My dad’s brown face looks mischievous and pleased with himself as he stands together with our white mom, his bride with her hair in a serious updo, their hands in self-conscious namaskar in front of a crowd of indistinguishable white guests.
Dad said he should’ve known their relationship wasn’t going to work out when Mom started adopting cats.
“She did it on purpose,” he said.
Dad is terribly allergic.
My sisters and I laughed when he told us this because it’s funny, thinking about passive-aggressive cat dander. Fur revenge.
“The first cat, Alice, loved me so much, she peed on my pillow,” Dad said. “And despite that, your mother got more cats.”
As the youngest of the three kids in our family, I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have cats wandering in and out of our house.
Cats aren’t the only ways my mom seems to have expressed her desire to exit their relationship. She drank when she was pregnant with me: another sign of marital discord.
*
Cats are pretty much everywhere. They are throughout the islands and continents of this globe with the sole exception of Antarctica. Cats have appeared because, as rodents spread, humans have transported the ever-hunting felines who sought to terminate them. There are approximately 500 million cats in the world today.
In 1963, cats were even found in space. Or, rather, a cat was sent there.
She was a black-and-white tuxedo picked up from the streets of Paris. Her name was Félicette, a French name that means happy or lucky. Chosen from a group of other potential astronautic cats for her calm disposition (and, purportedly, because she did not amass the same weight her rivals did during their training), Félicette was transported more than 1,700 miles south to France’s first space launch and ballistic missile testing facility, in Hamaguir, Algeria, a former French colony that had won its independence just the year prior.
Félicette journeyed without a human chaperone nearly 100 miles above the earth and six times faster than the speed of sound. She stayed there for approximately 15 minutes, briefly experiencing weightlessness, a sensation that the launching scientists were pleased to find did not negatively impact her mammalian body.
She returned to earth via parachute in her own tiny cat capsule.
She survived the journey.
Two months later, French scientists removed the electrodes they’d implanted in her brain for her space trip. This was how she died.
Fifty-six years after Félicette’s space trip, a bronze memorial was unveiled at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, after a Kickstarter campaign successfully raised $57,000 to fund the project. The statue depicts a life-size cat, presumably after Félicette’s likeness, perched atop an earth two-thirds her in size.
She sits on the North Pole, her hind quarters spilling over onto Canada, her paws stamped across Europe. Her tail descends into Northern Africa, draped perhaps purposefully alongside her launching site in Algeria.
The bronze cat peers up at the stars.
*
A half-century after Félicette’s space journey, another high-profile cat entered global memory. In May 2014, a female tabby named Tara saved her human, Jeremy, a four-year-old boy on a push-bike, from a dog attack in Bakersfield, California. Security footage from Jeremy’s home shows the neighbor’s dog prowling around a white SUV and then sneaking up on and biting the leg of the unsuspecting child. Even before Jeremy’s mother, Tara the Hero Cat appears as a gray flash hurtling from off screen and chases the dog away, looks back to make sure Jeremy is alright, and then resumes chasing the dog. Jeremy’s calf needed ten stitches. This footage received more than 16.8 million views in the first two days after it was posted to YouTube.
Tara the Hero Cat was recognized by many for her bravery, including one such honor to throw, assisted by her human family, the first pitch at a local minor league baseball game.
In news interviews, Jeremy and Tara were featured loving up on each other, clear in their mutual affection.
*
In 1980s Pasadena, California, the first of our cats that I remember knowing and loving was named Chunk after the character in the adventure-comedy film Goonies, which features a bunch of kids trying to save their homes from being destroyed and turned into a country club and who happen upon the bootie of a seventeenth-century pirate. The lovable klutz of this crew is named Chunk.
We adopted Chunk from the Humane Society. He was a long-haired orange tabby, part Maine Coon. Separated from his momma too young, he didn’t know how to clean himself. He had extra toes and these huge paws and was so skinny when we first got him that we named him Little Bit because he fit in the palm of your hand, but he never responded to that name. As he filled out, and after the blockbuster release, the name Chunk caught on and stuck.
Chunk was so sweet and trusting, he’d hug you if you held him upright like a human, his little feline jaw resting in the crook of your neck, his soft forward paws warming your shoulders. Once, when Chunk choked on a chicken bone when Grandma and Grandpa were visiting us from their home in Escondido, Grandpa snatched up Chunk by the back of the neck like a momma cat and dug the bone out of his throat. My sisters and I were so grateful.
In our house on top of a hill between a Liquid Amber tree, Birds of Paradise flowers with their beaky noses, and a small hedge of lemon trees, unseen currents of wind moved like independent bodies. In summertime, without the help of AC, we’d leave the doors open, for coming-and-going cats or for a breeze.
When I was four or five, a garden snake got in the house. I cried and cried for Chunk behind the swinging kitchen door as my middle sister, Maya, and I tried to call him away. Chunk seemed to be completely unafraid of the snake. He even batted at it. Mom, who was an ER nurse, ever the hero in moments of crisis and her daughter’s panic, eventually came in, grabbed the snake by the tail, and threw it outside, teasing baby Maya and me for being afraid. Didn’t we know garden snakes weren’t dangerous?
That might have been when I started worrying about what would come into and go out of our unlocked house.
A few years later, Mom moved out and took the cats with her.
*
In ancient Egypt, the exporting of cats was forbidden. An entire branch of ancient Egypt’s government was dedicated to preventing this. It is said that families mourning the loss of a cat would shave their eyebrows to mark their grief (the time it took for them to regrow would determine the length of their grieving period). It is also said that cat veneration is what ultimately led to the downfall of the Egyptian Empire: in the Battle of Pelusium, Persian soldiers fought with cats painted on their shields and with live cats in their arms. It is said that the bewildered Egyptian army fell for fear of hurting those cats.
I have read that the cat goddess Shashthi was as revered in India as Bastet was in Egypt. In a moment of research made feverish by the overlapping of two of my interests—cats and the region of the world my dad and his ancestors came from—I learned that India is where the original story of Puss in Boots came long before the well-known French version that’s bandied about today.
The prophet Muhammed is said to have loved cats so much that, rather than disturb his favorite, who once fell asleep on his arm, he cut off his sleeve and slipped away carefully so as to preserve the cat’s rest.
In Japan, Beckoning Cat figurines are everywhere. These porcelain cats honor a single famous live one who is said to have saved an emperor from a lightning strike. The cat called the emperor inside a temple just before the place he had been sitting was struck. The porcelain figures of this cat, who became known as Maneki-neko, are considered to act as talismans and charms that bring good luck to their owners.
While Greeks struggled with their association of cats with death and witches, the legend of cats protecting baby Jesus from vermin and snakes secured cats’ position in the home, another example of how cats gained their high standing because of their proximity to or recognition as the divine.
*
Thinking about all this, it’s hard to imagine why anyone might dislike cats.
Maligning cats has cost some human communities dearly. The bubonic plague may have succeeded at killing between a third and half of the people in Europe in the 14th century because of a misplaced hatred of cats. Seen as animals of the devil, cats were slaughtered just as the notorious disease carried by the animal cats were most successful at killing flourished. Rats went unchecked. Scores of humans perished. Cats bore the blame.
In ancient Egypt, it was common to sacrifice and mummify kittens to Bastet, the goddess of protection, pleasure, and the bringer of good health who had the body of a woman and the head of a cat. The key to this killing seems to be the ceremony of the act. The mummified kittens were offerings. Killing a cat for no good reason was punishable by death.
I wonder if the ancient Egyptians knew they should care for cats because of how they destroyed vermin and therefore kept disease at bay.
*
As much as I love cats, I do wonder about cat’s placement in today’s domestic society. The first domesticated cat on Turtle Island arrived via colonizing ships in the 1600s. They were not unlike their human counterparts, who burst ashore and worked murderously to erase and replace.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has listed cats as one of the most harmful invasive species in the world. Because of their unchecked killer instincts, cats slaughter upward of 2.4 billion birds every year. The Wildlife Society and the American Bird Conservancy state that even when domesticated, outdoor cats still kill two animals per week. They are also infectious creatures known to carry parasites, including Toxoplasma gondii, whose organisms, according to the Mayo Clinic, complete their sexual reproduction only within the bodies of cats, making cats both feral and domestic the parasite’s ultimate host.
Rats that have been infected by Toxoplasma gondii seem to lose their fear of cats, approaching their natural predator with curiosity and a strange attraction to cat urine, a side effect of the parasite that serves its chosen host.
More than 40 million people in the US may be infected with this parasite because of contact with litter boxes, contaminated water, and undercooked meat. What does this parasite do to us?
Scientists today believe that it may shift dopamine levels to the extent that it can change people’s personalities. For those who are genetically susceptible, coming into contact with the parasite may trigger schizophrenia. Two researchers from the University of Chicago’s department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience have been studying the possible link between the parasite and aggression disorders in humans, including what has been called Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
I wonder if the sexist gibe of the “cat lady”—which suggests that a person has a lot of cats because they are depressed or anxious because of a presumed failure in close romantic relationships—persists because of the link between cats and Toxoplasma gondii.
While healthy people usually do not need treatment to combat toxoplasmosis, pregnant people and those with weakened immune systems are vulnerable to infection by this parasite that can trigger headache, confusion, poor coordination, seizures, lung problems that look like tuberculosis, blurred vision, and, in its most dire of forms, blindness, swelling of the brain, stillbirth, and miscarriage. This is why OBGYNs test prospective mothers for the parasite.
When I shared this information with Maya, she said she hadn’t been tested when she was pregnant.
“But,” she continued, “I wasn’t supposed to touch the kitty litter or any cat poop.” That, she laughed perhaps a little darkly, was her husband’s job.
*
In Hawaiʻi, cats were previously unknown until European contact. Today, cats have wreaked havoc likely due to a combination of factors, including stopover culture and military occupation, where people adopt kittens and then, when shipping off or relocating, abandon them, oftentimes without having spayed or neutered them, in already-thriving cat colonies. On the island of Oʻahu alone, feral cats number between 50,000 to 300,000.
In turn, toxoplasmosis has resulted in shrinking native populations of birds, like the Nēnē and the ʻalalā (now considered extinct in the wild), and the Hawaiian monk seal, which is on the critically endangered list with only approximately 1,400 left in the ocean.
It is perhaps no surprise that in Mary Kawena Pukui’s book ʻŌlelo Noʻeau: Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings, none of the three sayings about cats is positive. The one that jumps out at me is “pōpoki hūnā kūkae,” which Pukui translates to mean “excreta-hiding cat” and annotates as “usually said in anger of one who won’t reveal his own or other people’s wrongdoings.” In this instance, cat poop is synonymous with wrongdoing. This is a perspective that the Hawai‘i Invasive Species Council might agree with: they estimate that “A single cat may excrete hundreds of millions of infectious eggs—called oocysts—into the environment through its feces.” Each oocyst can live up to 18 months in damp soil. A single female cat can birth more than 100 kittens in a lifetime. I don’t know how to calculate oocyst-to-kitten math, but that is a lot of wrongdoing, especially since it only takes one oocyst to infect someone.
Experts say that gardens and sandboxes are rife with Toxoplasma gondii, since cats prefer loose soil for areas to relieve themselves. Gardeners are said to have as many as 100 oocysts in the persistent dirt lurking deep beneath their fingernails.
Toxoplasma gondii is not limited to land. With rising ocean temperatures, the parasite has been found in beluga whales in the Arctic. Researchers don’t know how this acquisition has taken place but posit that local Canadians might be taking up with more cats, whose feces might be washing into the ocean from what has been called the powdery Arctic soil.
The negative environmental impact of outdoor cats has been so great that researchers like Pete Marra, an ornithologist and coauthor of Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, has called for the targeted killing of felines. Cat’s rampant slaughter of birds have drastically reduced their numbers, resulting in more unchecked insect populations and environments robbed of some of their most important pollinators and seed distributors, making those of us who have a home on this planet all the more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which seems a strong reason for the elimination of cats, or at least the keeping of cats indoors.
Marra says we humans need to rein in our “misplaced compassion” for cats.
But, Marra also insists that he doesn’t hate cats. Instead, he says, bring those cats indoors and keep them there.
For the cats who can’t find indoor homes, trapping and neutering is not enough, says Marra. He insists on euthanasia.
It’s hard to argue against this logic, but I feel the little kid in me lurching to guard all the cats I can from this culling.
Strangely, thoughts of my mom surface here too.
Is it humane to demand any being stay with you?
*
I don’t know if it was the fear of toxoplasmosis that explains why he did this, but our maternal grandpa drowned feral kittens during the Great Depression on Long Island, New York, where he grew up. I was horrified when I heard this story as a kid, especially because I struggled to imagine our sweet, loving grandpa doing something so vicious. Sure, we would fish together. Sure, he would club what we hauled into his skiff. But he wouldn’t drown cute, mewling, soft-bellied kittens, would he? He saved Chunk, after all.
As I thought more about this, trying to reconcile who our loving grandfather was, I found myself negotiating with the story. If he did actually do this terrible thing, maybe he was being kind? During the Depression, there wasn’t much to eat. Maybe he didn’t want those feral cats to suffer?
“He didn’t just do it then,” Maya told me. “He did it when we were kids too.”
He put them in pillowcases and drowned them in buckets.
Maya, who has always been the kindest and gentlest of our family toward animals, remembers.
Sweet Maya. Maya was the kind of kid who, for Easter, would put on one of the pristine white dresses our mom had sewed for us and keep it clean all day. No one can find this picture today, but with the sharpened clarity of a younger sister who studied her, I remember when Maya pressed an orange beneath her chin as us three girls stood beneath Grandma and Grandpa’s citrus trees, dressed in our Easter white. She and our beautiful older sister Joya were perfect, while I, the colicky baby with chronic ear infections who went on to become a feral kid, was scuffed and dirty within minutes. My lace socks puddled around my ankles. My grin closed my eyes and showed all of my teeth.
I picture little Maya at our grandparents’ dining room table, her brown legs dangling above the brown linoleum floor she was too short to reach. I imagine her perfect, pouting mouth and big eyes pleading, her gentle chin just starting to tremble.
“Grandpa, please stop doing that,” she must have said.
And, he did.
I still don’t know for sure what got him started on his cat killing. We never asked him, and he died years ago.
Mom doesn’t remember Grandpa doing this at all.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Mom said. “We always had cats as kids. They didn’t suddenly disappear.”
I wonder if, somehow, Maya and I made this story up. But why would we do that?
*
Toxoplasma gondii can persist for long stretches of time in human and animal bodies, potentially for a lifetime.
I worry about the idea that cats can change human brain chemistry.
We didn’t have kitty litter to deal with when I was growing up since the cats went outside to relieve themselves, but I always had dirt under my fingernails as a kid.
When our next-door neighbors sold their house and the new owners leveled the place, I snuck onto the construction site to scramble up and slide down huge mounds of wonderfully loose soil, an area the neighborhood cats might have loved as much as I did.
Who knows what oocysts I may have encountered? I’ve been diagnosed with two inflammatory disorders in my adulthood. I’ve had my own quiet bouts of rage. I have wondered about the lasting impact of alcohol on fetus me, but I wonder too if I could be carrying long-seeded parasites within me even as I type this.
Joya told me once that, around the time that I was sneaking onto the construction site next door to play in the sand piles, so was Mom, and she was not alone. This was before the divorce.
Joya was a teenager. She wrote Mom a letter, shaking.
“I know what you’re doing when you go over there. I know who you’re doing it with. You’re hurting me,” she wrote, big tears streaking the ink of her page. When Mom came home and read the letter, she did not apologize.
“I’m doing what I need to take care of myself,” Mom said.
This, wound and wounding, refusing to heal.
*
When Mom moved out, her first post-divorce boyfriend, Roger, dropped off to her house in the nearby town of Sierra Madre an orange cat named Pumpkin.
I wasn’t thrilled about having Roger in our lives. He was Joya’s best friend’s dad, and young-me knew him as a moody vegetarian prone to yelling fits. In those time, long before the stint when I ate vegetarian myself, I quietly saved my quarters so I could walk into town to buy a burger that I’d stuff into my face at home in front of him.
“Make sure you clean up all your dead animal,” Roger would fume.
Pumpkin wasn’t all that great either. We waited too long to neuter him, and he grew muscled and aggressive. He started spraying the furniture, and we couldn’t stop him. It drove Mom wild. Mom eventually dropped Pumpkin off several miles away in another neighborhood, and he found his way back to our house a few days later. My sisters and I sang, “the cat came back the very next day . . . ” and laughed and laughed.
Pumpkin is the only cat we ever gave back to the Humane Society. I can’t remember if that happened before or after Mom and Roger broke up.
*
Maya earned the nickname “Mouser” when we were little because one day, when we were playing at the wild bottom of the hill where our house was located, she came across a mouse that she coaxed onto her shoulder.
“Look, Mom,” she said calmly when she got back up to the house. She walked carefully, like she had a stack of eleven dishes balanced precariously on her head.
“Don’t. Move,” our mom had said slowly, her mind likely jumping to thoughts of rabies or haunta or any of the other highly communicable rodent-transmitted diseases. Mom, the keeper of wild animals and odd children, managed to get the mouse off Maya’s shoulder.
Maya never repeated this stunt, though the nickname Mouser persisted.
A “mouser” is an animal that kills mice.
I’ve searched my memory, but I can’t find an instance of our lives together that would corroborate Maya, the longest-standing animal-lover and vegetarian in our family, earning the true definition of this name.
It might be worth noting that latent toxoplasmosis is characterized clinically by the progressive impairment of memory.
*
At our dad’s house in Pasadena, from the eucalyptus tree on the east end of the backyard, an owl perpetually hoots. Who? The sound is as everyday as the metal chimes gonging in the wind or the creaking of our persistently unsettled house during still nights.
Once, Chunk went missing. We didn’t see him for days and then we found these huge horrible tufts of orange fur in the yard under the oak trees. We thought he was gone for good and grieved him with belly-deep little-kid crying, but he showed up a few days later, looking worse for the wear but very much alive.
Years later, when I was in middle school, Chunk was nowhere to be found at Mom’s house. I called and called for him, sure we’d lost him again, until I finally went up to the converted attic, which was my room, and found him asleep on the roof, panting on the skylight. His fur was soaked. He was weak and couldn’t move. I couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten there, but I gathered him in my arms and brought him inside and dripped water into his mouth until he livened up again.
It wasn’t until years after that, when I was in high school, that Chunk left us for good. Maya and I had been staying at Dad’s house more, where it was easier to throw parties since Dad was always traveling and where I had more distance from Mom, who in my adolescence I had decided I was angry at. Chunk came home to Mom’s house less and less and then hardly at all, and finally on one of his last times visiting us, he showed up with a collar presumably from new owners as if to say he was officially breaking up with us. From the metal tag dangling around his neck was what we found to be a laughable new name: Ferguson.
“You can’t blame him,” Mom said. “You kids hardly came over anymore.”
When she was a junior in college in Georgia, Maya had a dream about Chunk.
“He was there in human form. He was a big white-ish guy with orange hair, and I saw him and started weeping and said I was so sorry we basically abandoned him when we were teenagers and he gave me the biggest, warmest hug and said it was okay. He’d found a nice family to live with then. I told him we loved him so much and he said he loved us too. And I woke up sobbing and just knew Chunk had died. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that dream.”
In the grown-up house she shares with her husband and cats, Maya painted a hallway orange in Chunk’s honor.
*
I haven’t had my own cat in my adult life, unless you count the feral kitten I took in for a short time when I lived in uptown New York when I was twenty-two. She did figure eights around my roommate Michelle’s ankles when she was walking home one day in our neighborhood, Inwood, just as tiny mice started overtaking the building where we lived.
The kitten was a little maniacal and liked to shred things. Perhaps she had an impulse for creative destruction. I named her Kali for the Hindu goddess and I kept her inside and called my mom for tips, and fell properly in love.
Kali would wait for my jangling keys and then race toward the front door when I came home each day, and I would squat down and she would use her razor-sharp claws to climb up my jeans and shirt to perch on my shoulder and purr and nudge my head and purr and it was just the best.
It wasn’t until I took her to the ASPCA to get neutered that I learned she was male. I decided to keep the name as a symbol of my fraught relationship to Indian culture as a half-Bengali, half-white person. Also, I told myself, because gender is a construct. The mice were gone, and all was going well until I found Kali was getting heavier. Wasn’t I feeding her a normal amount? I was only giving her half a scoop of dry food in the morning and the same at night. Maybe she had some kind of bug that was plumping her up?
Finally, one day I woke up a bit earlier than usual and heard my other roommate Nadia getting ready for work. She sounded like she was being terrorized by something since I could hear her running up and down the hall and slamming doors behind her. I opened my door to find Nadia dashing into the kitchen.
Behind her was Kali—who was reared up on her hind legs, stabilized probably by the low center of gravity from her hanging belly. She was chasing after Nadia and swiping viciously at her ankles.
I smacked my hands together and Nadia and Kali froze in place like two caught kids.
Nadia apologized. “I usually fill her bowl and she’ll leave me alone,” Nadia pleaded.
Each morning, by the time I would get up, Kali’s bowl would be conspicuously empty, so I would fill it, not knowing Kali had already been fed. She’d been gaming us.
I didn’t have Kali for much longer. Michelle’s allergies flared so badly she had to use her inhaler every time she came home, and one of my friends who lived in Brooklyn wanted a cat. So, I gave up Kali with a sigh.
When I checked in months later to see how things were going, my friend said Kali was still breaking everything but that it was okay. She’d started making mosaics with the ceramics Kali wrecked. It occurred to me that Kali was living up to her namesake, who Shiva had to come down to stop, at one point, from destroying the earth.
Kali was born outside, and probably was separated too young from her mom like Chunk. I wonder still whether it was the right idea to bring and keep her indoors.
Kali was never really ours to begin with.
Maybe no cat—or even any being—ever is.
*
Our dad took it as a personal affront that Maya adopted a litter of brothers before her human babies came, but he eventually got over it.
“He came over and greeted each one of the cats on their own!” Maya exclaimed one day after Dad’s long freeze. “He held their faces and called them his fur grandkids.”
In the house our mom lives in today, where there has been on average at least one cat at any given time, Dad still finds ways to go to his ex’s for visits. He stays as long as he can fend off his sneezing spells, which might be exactly how long Mom likes.
Maybe this is a kind of healing.
*
I respect that cats have their own lives. Inside-outside ones come and go as they please. They aren’t trapped. They choose to be with you.
A therapist once asked me if this idea of a cat isn’t a metaphor for the kind of love I accept in my life. They asked if I’m so terrified of people leaving me that I’ve defined a safe relationship as one where the door is wide open and folks can leave whenever they want. To be honest, this is a framework that makes sense to me. There’s no divorce to muddle through. No doors to claw at. If you want to go, then go, I’ve said.
Of course, this way, I still have to deal with people leaving and not knowing if they’ll come back. But I’ve gotten to pretend that I set these terms.
I spent almost ten years nurturing a love with a person more cat than I cared to admit. He came and went as he pleased. I didn’t know when I could expect him, but I always hoped for him to be there. I felt so special when he did show up. When he was gone, I wasn’t ever sure he was going to return. I accepted this love even as it broke me. It wasn’t until, finally, when it became clear we wanted futures that we couldn’t fit each other into and we were breaking up that I realized I’d been stuck in a lesson I’d refused to learn until then.
“I just don’t want to have to start all over again,” I’d sobbed to my therapist. It had taken nearly a decade to get to the kind of closeness I’d finally achieved with this person.
My therapist, an elderly white woman who saw patients in her mood-lit Upper West Side living room, looked at me with about as much pity as a shrink is allowed to give. “When it’s right,” she said plainly, “you won’t have to work this hard.”
*
The cure to ending the disease cats carry is inside-ness. Domestication. A monotony of walls. Is this a breed of monogamy where nothing comes and nothing goes, so we remain uncontaminated and our shit, oocyst-rich or not, minds its own business?
I started writing this essay indoors amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The windows were open, but if I thought about it long enough, the screen looked a bit like a fence.
And, yet.
When my partner and I first started dating, someone I’d seen casually a full year prior showed up at my door, unannounced. I’d ended things immediately when I discovered that he’d gotten married during spring break while he’d continued to text me to set up our next date. We hadn’t promised each other monogamy, and I’d been honest with everyone I’d been seeing about that too. I’d assumed the folks I’d been seeing were being honest with their other partners too. When we were seeing each other, he would randomly show up at my house whenever he felt like it. I’d find him sleeping on the lānai outside my bedroom, or twisting the handle to my bedroom, as if I’d always be happy to see him and otherwise unoccupied. When I’d discovered he’d gotten married while still trying to date me, I’d expressed a rage to him I didn’t know I was capable of. How dare he involve me in the betrayal of his partner. How dare he make me a part of that awful story without my consent?
That year later, I felt the rage anew. The look on my face was enough to send him scuttling back to his car and out of my life.
I was more than happy to have had a locked door then, recognizing with clarity how there are far worse things than garden snakes that might otherwise try to wander back into my life.
Today, I look around at my partner’s and my life together, and I feel calm. Happy. I choose to be there, and I am grateful for what we have. Aren’t these the kinds of feelings I’ve always hoped for, in married partnership, comfortable aloneness, and otherwise?
Despite all my cat-person-ness, I realize that my partner is not at all feline. He has been a calm presence in my life from the moment our friends introduced us. Self-contained. Sure of himself. I was not sure what to make of him. I was cautious. I watched him closely for signs of untrustworthiness. I promised nothing, and he was patient, in it for the long game.
If he isn’t the cat, am I? As I think about this, light breaks across a thought so obvious and sweet it almost embarrasses me: this is the kind of love beings domesticate themselves for.
During the height of the pandemic, the world raged beyond our doors. My partner and I went for long, masked walks, and I still called out to the neighborhood cats, though if I’m being honest, the pandemic made me a bit more wary of what I touch. At home, I had no pets.
They say that petting a cat lowers your blood pressure.
After all of this cat research and conversation, with all of my fraught and longing feelings for cats, I asked my partner with not just a little bit of hopefulness if one day we’d adopt a cat or two.
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he kissed me gently the way one might when someone dear to you has talked too long on a topic and who you wish might finally drop the subject.
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Anjoli Roy was first introduced to the genre of creative nonfiction by Prof. Caroline Sinavaiana, who in turn changed the trajectory of Anjoli's writing life. Sina was a mentor and a fellow celebrant of Audre Lorde, and she welcomed many into her quiet, peaceful cottage in Mānoa with the stream that ran beside her collection of orchids that always seemed to be in bloom. Anjoli hopes Sina would have been tickled by this odd and rambling research-based creative nonfiction essay about cats and what it means to love others and ourselves too.
Photo by staff
