THEM!
THEM!
A Story in Five Parts
Gwen Cooper
BenBella Books, Inc.
Dallas, TX
Copyright © 2018 by Gwen Cooper
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
BenBella Books, Inc.
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e-ISBN: 9781948836036
Distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand www.tworiversdistribution.com
THEM!
A Story in Five Parts
1. The Bowl Boy
Laurence and I uncovered an infestation of moths in our closets and drawers a few weeks ago. It was the kind of thing I thought only happened to people in sitcoms and movies—having never personally known anyone with a moth-ridden house in real life. Turns out, it does happen in real life. When I first started finding holes in the cashmere sweaters I was prepping for summer storage, I blamed the cats—Fanny, in particular, who dearly loves sleeping on articles of my clothing, especially when that clothing is made of cashmere or angora (Fanny having very posh tastes). I’ve occasionally observed her remorselessly “making biscuits” on said clothing—her claws at full extension—preparatory to lying down. It seemed like a plausible theory.
But when I then found identical holes in T-shirts, sweatshirts, silk blouses, pajamas, socks, workout togs, and all manner of other clothing that neither Fanny nor Clayton had access to, I began to doubt the cats’ guilt. And when I finally noticed two teeny-tiny moths, perched upside down on the bedroom ceiling above my head, I knew I’d found my culprits.
Tearfully, I consigned a large pile of expensive cashmere sweaters—accumulated over some fifteen years—to the trash, the holes in them so numerous that no amount of clever crocheting could have salvaged them. I walked from the bedroom closet to Laurence’s home office, right next door to our bedroom, cradling in my arms the moth-eaten corpse of a much-beloved cranberry cowl-neck as tenderly as if it were the bullet-riddled body of a comrade fallen in battle. Throwing it across the desk where Laurence was working, I informed him of the moth-y new development in our lives. “We must kill them,” I announced. My voice quavered with the intensity of my desire for vengeance, and I struck my fist on Laurence’s desk for dramatic emphasis. “We must kill them with fire!”
The only ones who seemed pleased at this turn of events were the cats. My manic tear through our closets and drawers, after I’d discovered the first moth holes, had sent airborne perhaps another half-dozen moths who’d been disturbed from the cool, dark comfort of their hiding places. Small as they were, their frantic, looping cartwheels in the air around us made the catching of them a delightfully tantalizing prospect for Fanny and Clayton.
Poor, stocky Clayton, who has only one hind leg, is a mediocre jumper at best, and most of the moths evaded him easily enough. But his littermate, Fanny—slender and leanly muscled—is our resident jock. Able to leap from a starting point on the ground to the height of my hairline, with as much dazzling speed as if she were a black-furred bolt of lightning, Fanny was in her element as she made short work of one moth after another.
It’s possible that Fanny is the actual sweetest cat in the world—a devoted lover who coos and cuddles and looks at me with her whole heart in her round, golden eyes—but she is, conversely, also the most murderous cat I’ve ever lived with. If Fanny has a bucket list, that list consists of only one item: to kill something worth killing before she shuffles off this mortal coil. Every spring, when the sparrows who nest in the eaves of our Jersey City brownstone push their fledglings down into the little patch of grass in front of our bay window, I have to lock Fanny in the upstairs bedroom for a couple of days, legitimately afraid that she might crack her skull from striking it repeatedly against the bay window’s panes, so desperate is she to dispatch those temptingly plump and flightless baby birds as they hop around helplessly on the other side of the glass.
As a strictly indoor cat, Fanny never gets a chance at the birds or squirrels who seem to take a certain delight in taunting her from safe perches just outside our windows. And since I’ve never seen a rat or a mouse in any home I’ve shared with my cats—not even when we lived in Manhattan, dubbed “Worst Rat City in the World” in 2014 by Animal Planet (presumably the rodents catch our home’s cat smell and clear a wide berth)—Fanny is forced to expend her bloodlust on toy mice and whatever live insects manage to make their way indoors. The moths, therefore, were a bonanza for her.
They were, however, anything but a bonanza for me. I hadn’t been kidding when I’d proclaimed, “We must kill them with fire!” A cursory check of Google revealed stories of people who’d been fighting moth infestations for years. I quickly outlined for Laurence what seemed to me an entirely rational plan of attack, involving roughly a metric ton of kerosene and a single lit match.
Cooler heads eventually prevailed, however. We ultimately embarked on a far more sensible course of action, purchasing dozens of boxes of mothballs, plastic zip-up storage bags, cedar hangers, two cans of repellant cedar spray, and another two cans of a pet-safe insecticide. We backed these up by emptying every single item out of every single closet and drawer and either putting them through three entire laundry cycles or, in the case of delicate fabrics, sending them out to the dry cleaner. Once everything had been cleaned, I then completed a thorough visual exam, sitting beneath a strong lamp with a magnifying glass in my hand as I pored over sweaters and wool dresses like a Talmudic scholar, searching for any telltale signs of moth larvae.
Having undertaken such an early and unexpectedly aggressive round of spring cleaning, Laurence and I decided we might as well give the entire house a thorough scrubbing from top to bottom and, in the process, dispose of all the superfluous stuff we’d accumulated over the years. Since we were, thanks to the lepidopteran pestilence visited upon us, getting rid of so many things we actually cared about, what was the point in hanging onto things we were indifferent to?
And here’s where an old and familiar series of arguments began: Is it technically fair to call something “unused” if we never use it ourselves, but the cats use it all the time in some way other than its original intended purpose?
“You made me go out and buy that special cast-iron frying pan so you could make us omelets,” I said to Laurence, “and we’ve still never had a single omelet in this house. The pan’s been gathering dust on top of the kitchen cabinet for three years now.”
“You really think we should get rid of it?” Laurence gestured across the room to indicate Fanny who, as if on cue, made a nimble leap from kitchen counter to cabinet top, then stepped neatly into the middle of the frying pan in question. “Someone might object.”
It’s true. Fanny has a fondness for high places—probably because the higher up she is, the less likely that Clayton will be able to pester her—and that frying pan had become her favorite kitchen napping spot. And I’ll confess that, once I noticed how much she loved curling up there, I’d lined the pan with an old T-shirt, hating the thought of Fanny trying to make herself comfortable in a “bed” of cold, hard metal.
“What about that huge ‘decorative bowl’ you made us buy for the middle of the kitchen table?” Laurence suggested. “It doesn’t do anything. It just sits there until we push it out of the way at dinnertime.”
“No way!” I protested. “That’s Clayton’s favorite place to sleep when he’s in the kitchen.”
“He only ever comes down to the kitchen when we’re not eating so he can bother Fanny,” Laurence point
ed out.
“Exactly,” I replied. “And when he can’t get to her, because she’s on top of the cabinet in her frying pan, he goes to sleep in his bowl, and everybody’s happy. I thought you thought it was so adorable of him,” I added wistfully. “You always call him the ‘bowl boy.’”
Moving through the house with an eye toward ridding ourselves of the unnecessary, it was astonishing to realize how many things had long since ceased to be of any practical value except insofar as the cats got some enjoyment out of them. For example, the gel pads I’d bought to support my wrists while I was typing, when I’d felt the earliest twinges of incipient carpal-tunnel syndrome (an occupational hazard for writers). Clayton, who likes to sleep next to me on my desk while I work, had immediately claimed them for his own, clawing at them until the gel oozed out to form sticky patches. This had rendered them unfit for my own use, obviously, but—once the sticky patches had attracted enough of Clayton’s shed fur to make them more fuzzy than gummy—they made for ideal catnap pillows. I didn’t really want to take those away from him, did I?
Then there was the recumbent exercise bike I’d installed in a corner of our bedroom, intending to ride it during the breaks I managed to snatch for reading a book while on writing deadlines. I’d ended up discovering, however, that I much preferred a couple of hours of dedicated gym time to twenty-minute increments here and there over the course of the day. Still, I’d been loath to try to resell it, because it was Clayton’s favorite bedroom perch once we’d all turned in for the night. In any event, he’d “marked” the bike’s faux-leather seat with his claws until it was so torn up that we probably couldn’t have resold it even if we’d wanted to. There was plenty of room for it in the bedroom, so it was hard to see what harm we were doing by just letting it stay there.
We had empty shelves mounted on walls throughout the house, having planned once upon a time to display our knickknacks on them. But Fanny, with her love of high places, was apt to sleep on those shelves, and Clayton—when it came to the shelves he could actually climb up to—had a habit of pushing any knickknacks he encountered onto the floor. So the shelves remained empty, devoid of any justifiable use to our home’s human inhabitants and making it look as if we were in a perpetual state of either moving in or moving out. Fanny was happy, though, which was the thing that really mattered.
There were two plush blankets that Laurence’s sister had given us as holiday gifts last year—intending, I think, for Laurence and me to snuggle beneath them together while watching movies from the couch. But the cats adored all soft things, and the second we’d placed the blankets on the couch, Clayton and Fanny had sprawled out on them, rolling around ecstatically on their backs as they luxuriated in the plush texture. Now the blankets were thoroughly be-furred and wadded up on the ground, one in our third-floor bedroom and one in the book room on our middle floor.
“If anything’s going to attract moths, those blankets will,” Laurence said.
“Moths don’t eat polyester,” I replied.
Like all cats, Fanny and Clayton loved cardboard boxes more than just about anything. Accordingly, a few old shoeboxes had taken up a permanent residence on our living-room floor. “We can finally get rid of those—can’t we?” Laurence suggested, pointing to two boxes that the cats happened to be sleeping in at that exact moment. As if they understood what we were saying, Clayton and Fanny looked up at us, anxious pleas for clemency written in four identical golden eyes. You’re not going to take away our shoeboxes that we love soooooo much . . . are you?
“You’re a monster,” I told Laurence.
Similar stays of execution were also granted to a few stray plastic bottle caps (“Fanny loves ‘hunting’ them, and she never gets to hunt anything real,” I implored); a nest of ink-less pens that Clayton, unbeknownst to us, had been hoarding beneath the couch (I tried to get rid of them, really I did—but Clayton had hippity-hopped after me, as I clutched his treasure trove of useless pens, with such a persistent and plaintive chorus of Meeeeeeeee! that I’d been forced to relent); some old rolls of wrapping paper that didn’t have enough paper left on them to wrap another gift, but that nonetheless delighted the cats with the crinkling sound they made when they were knocked onto their sides and batted across a tile floor; and a couple of ancient bed pillows that were well past any ability to provide comfort to human heads, but that the cats thought were absolutely purr-fect spots for a long siesta, once Laurence and I were up and out of bed for the day.
In the end, we got rid of two huge trash bags’ worth of moth-chewed clothing and a far more modestly sized bag of broken hangers, old papers, and the like, culled from our cleaning efforts throughout the rest of the house. “It’s not as much as I thought it would be,” I admitted to Laurence, who sighed and agreed, “Yeah . . . it never is.”
Our first battle against the moths was over. The war, however, had only begun.
2. Fanny Frenzy
It’s hard to imagine two creatures whose lives more closely resemble an airtight cocoon of security and love than my cats. They came to us as a “bonded pair” of littermates and best friends, and—except for the two weeks Clayton spent recovering from the surgery to remove his bad half-leg—the two of them have never been separated since the day they were born. They live with a pair of humans who dote on them to a fairly ludicrous degree and who work from home, ensuring that Clayton and Fanny have a near-constant stream of attention and affection pretty much on tap. Our leafy street in Jersey City is generally quiet and serene, and the rhythms of Clayton’s and Fanny’s days—varied mostly by whether and how many squirrels and birds perch on our windowsills to tempt our little would-be predators—have the sort of comforting and predictable sameness that would be the envy of most other cats. And life, for the most part, has always been good to Clayton and Fanny. Unlike so many rescue cats, they never spent a single day of their existence confined to a cage in a shelter. They were found at two weeks of age in the backyard of a kindly cat rescuer who turned them over immediately to a foster network he volunteered with, called Furrever Friends, which placed the two kittens in the home of an experienced kitten foster mom. From what I could tell in our conversations prior to my adopting them, she lavished on Clayton and Fanny (then named Peeta and Katniss—possibly the only genuine hardship they’ve ever had to endure) nearly as much slavish adoration as Laurence and I do now.
It’s true that I can’t account for anything that may have happened to them during the first two weeks of their lives. But, then, I doubt that Clayton and Fanny would have much information to offer about those two weeks, either.
So it irks me, probably more than it should, when the two of them get more skittish than a given situation seems to call for. I expect—and accept—a certain amount of hissing from Clayton when I run the vacuum cleaner. But I’ll admit that I get a wee bit impatient when I hear that same wild flurry of hissing upon snapping open a plastic garbage bag (“When,” I’ll ask Clayton, “have I ever allowed a single bad thing to happen in this house?”). Or when Fanny, the quintessential “daddy’s girl,” bolts in terror at the sound of Laurence’s footsteps—his tread undeniably heavier than my own—coming up the stairs. Usually, once she’s gotten a few feet away, she’ll boomerang back around to greet Laurence properly, as if having realized mid-flight, Oh, wait—that’s not the Apocalypse. It’s just Laurence walking upstairs! But after six years of hearing that exact same footfall, you’d think she’d have learned to recognize it instantly by now.
Then there was the time when Fanny got a tiny price sticker—picked up heaven knows where—stuck to one of her front paws. I found her in the hallway trying furiously, and unsuccessfully, to shake it loose. Intending only to help—and not thinking much of it—I picked her up with one hand, pulled off the sticker (it came off very easily, I should note, and didn’t take a single strand of fur with it), and placed her back on the floor. The whole thing took about two seconds. Nevertheless—I kid you not—Fanny hid under the bed or ran to hi
de in a closet whenever she saw me coming for the next five hours. Five hours! The same cat who spends half her day napping sweetly in my lap while I write—a cat whom I’ve never once touched with anything other than gentleness and love—was now fleeing from me in abject panic because I’d pulled a tiny sticker off her front paw. The nerve of it! The drama! “Fanny!” I pleaded, watching her scuttle out of my path, eyes wide with fear, as if I were Carrie at the prom. “What is your problem? Nothing bad has EVER happened to you!”
So I knew we were really in for it the Saturday afternoon that Fanny got her exceptionally long, snaky tail caught in one of our moth traps.
If Phase One in our war on the moths had been a general carpet-bombing of drawers and closets with moth spray, then Phase Two was all about hand-to-hand combat. Once our arsenal of mothballs and cedar hangers, and a generous application of cedar spray, had made life in closets and drawers thoroughly untenable for the invaders, they began showing themselves out in the open, in plain sight. One of them, in a frenzied flight away from a plume of cedar spray, flew right up Laurence’s nose. “I think it came out my ear!” Laurence sputtered, pressing his finger against his nose to hold one nostril closed as he exhaled furiously through the other—until, finally, he saw the welcome sight of the moth exiting (considerably worse for wear) the same way it had entered.
For a good few days, it seemed as if the air in our house was thick with minute gray wings. We went on something of a rampage, whacking them with rolled-up newspapers and T-shirts—whatever was close by, basically, that could be used to crush an errant moth against a wall or the floor without damaging either. The cats were alarmed at first by the constant hiss of spray and thwack! of newspapers that filled our home—although they, too, were eager to get in on the action. Fanny and Clayton sometimes made their kills individually and sometimes worked as a team, with Fanny leaping high to force a moth into a downward trajectory while Clayton waited on the ground beneath her to scoop up the befuddled insect in his jaws.