Cat Fancy

My family pretty much always had a pet. When I was just a kid we had a cat named Buttons, and she hung around til I was about twelve or so. Then we got a cocker spaniel named Brandi, but that didn’t work out and my folks shipped her out. We then got another cat when I was probably about sixteen. We loved this one so much that we never gave it a name. We just called it Cat. That’s a true story. Cat died the summer before last, when my Mom was in the process of moving to Richmond. My mom packed Cat on ice, put her in a cooler, and drove her down to her new place to bury her in the yard. Kind of a gruesome story. But even better, that Thanksgiving when I went to visit my mom she packed up the Thanksgiving dinner in a cooler for me to take home. A week later, after I had finished eating everything, she confessed she used the same cooler that Cat had been in. Nice.

So in a roundabout kind of way I’m a cat person. Not that I like cats, or think anyone should have cats, but I understand them and I’m familiar with them. Because I was home all the time and up at all hours of the night I developed a bit of a relationship with Cat. She was an outdoor cat, so it was my job to let her in at night and make sure she was fed. But once she came in the house she did her thing and I did mine. The arrangement worked for us. And when I moved out of my mom’s house I thought my cat days were over.

But then I started dating Baby.

Baby hearts her two cats like most people heart children. She feeds them from the table, by hand. She lets them sleep in the bed. When they throw up (daily) or inexplicably poop next to the litter box she cleans it up without getting angry. You know how an infant spits up or has an ‘accident’ and people think it’s cute? Baby does that with the cats. She’s just that devoted. I, however, am repulsed.

Here’s a good example:

On Tuesday night I picked Baby up after work and we went and got some dinner. We went back to her place and I was trying to take a nap in her bed. She was laying beside me, reading the paper. Lola, the more docile of the cats, had taken her usual position beside Baby, on the side of the bed furthest from me. The fat, mean one, Jezebel, was nowhere to be seen. Yet.

Right as I’m dozing off I hear a sound I’ve honestly never heard before. It was a kind of scraping, slurping sound. I’m half asleep, so I ignore it for a while in hopes that it will go away. But when I notice the bed is shaking ever so slightly I can’t take the annoyance anymore.

bryc3: “Baby what is that?”

Baby: “It’s just Jezebel.”

bryc3: “What is she doing?”

Baby: “Licking her butt.”

bryc3: “You can’t be serious.”

Baby: (laughing) “Yeah, she has butt problems.”

The noise was horrifying, nightmarish. Does the mental image work for you? Good. Baby was completely unmoved. Apparently this is a normal occurrence.

We’re moving in together in two months. What the hell am I gonna do? I love Baby, more than anything. She’s the best thing since ever and I’d do anything for her. But I’m simply not a cat person. And I can tell this bothers her because she watches how I interact with the cats. It hurts her feelings that I don’t feed them French fries when we’re watching TV, or let them sleep on my side of the bed. She frowns when I spend the whole night picking cat hairs off my pillow. I have tried to explain that I love her, and in turn love her cats because they mean so much to her. And she admits the cats like me, because they’re typically unfriendly but took to me the minute they met me. I’ve had other people tell us that that’s because the cats can sense I don’t like them. But that’s simply not the case. I do like them, just in my own way. I’m not affectionate (and disgusting) with my pets. I keep them at arms length. But I would never do anything to hurt them, and take care of them as if they were my children.

Yet none of it is enough for Baby. She wants me to be a cat person. Is that even possible? Can I change? Or can I find a new way to explain to her how I feel? Or perhaps I need to just put my foot down and drown them in the Potomac?