Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen Read online

  Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen

  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.

  10440 N. Central Expressway, Suite 800

  Dallas, TX 75231

  www.benbellabooks.com

  Send feedback to [email protected]

  e-ISBN: 978-1-946885-88-3

  Distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand www.tworiversdistribution.com

  I Choo-Choo-Choose You!

  Even as I sit to type these words, I hear it. It’s the sound that’s come to define my waking hours and haunt my dreams, the first thing I hear when my eyes open in the morning and the last thing I hear at night before I fall asleep. Whether I’m writing, cooking, reading a book, cleaning the bathroom sink, talking with my husband, blow-drying my hair, or lying in bed, it’s always with me, like the beating of my own heart.

  Rattle. Rattle. THUMP.

  Rattlerattlerattlerattlerattle.

  It’s the sound of a tiny, felt-covered plastic mouse—adorned at its tail with rainbow-colored feathers and filled with something or other that produces a rattling noise—being picked up and shaken vigorously by a cat, then dropped at increasingly closer intervals to my desk chair before being picked up and shaken again. Sure enough, when I swivel in my chair to look behind me, Clayton sits on his haunches about a foot away, his black fur groomed to a high gloss in the sunlight that streams through the window next to us. His golden eyes are impossibly round and hopeful as he stares at me without blinking.

  “MEEEEEEE!” Clayton’s meow has no “ow” at the end, so he lives perpetually in the insistent first person. His voice is comically high-pitched and squeaky for such a stocky cat, and under different circumstances I’d probably laugh as he repeats “MEEEEEEE!” picking up and rattling the toy mouse once more for good measure. Its tail feathers curl to form a jaunty rainbow moustache beneath his little black nose.

  But it’s already later than I had intended to begin my writing for the day, the precious morning hours of peak mental clarity slipping into the creative doldrums of early afternoon. My arm is sore from having spent the better part of two hours hurling that plastic mouse: pitching it down the stairs as I yawned my way out of bed, throwing it from the bathroom to the living room as I brushed my teeth, tossing it from one end of the kitchen to the other as I poured myself some orange juice, and spiking it from my office nook in the back of our little house all the way to the bay window at its front—then throwing the mouse again and again each time Clayton retrieved it.

  Enough is enough.

  “Clayton, I’m working,” I tell him, in a voice that’s meant to be stern but comes out sounding like a plea. “How can I afford to keep buying you toys if you won’t let me work?”

  Human logic so rarely prevails with actual humans that I shouldn’t be surprised when it fails to move my cat. Still, for the first time all morning, he sounds uncertain. “Meeeeeee?” He lets the mouse drop from his mouth and noses it a few inches closer to me, reaching out to paw at my leg with gentle persistence. “Meeeeeee?”

  His dip in confidence helps me find my own. “No,” I say firmly. “Playtime is over. I have to work now.” I make a show of turning away from Clayton and toward the computer keyboard, randomly hitting the keys to type nothing in particular as I watch him from the corner of my eye, trying to gauge if, indeed, he’s ready to let me move on with my day.

  Perhaps my exaggerated determination has done the trick. More likely, however, is that the effort required to propel a three-legged cat up and down the stairs of a three-story house for two hours has finally sapped even Clayton of his energy.

  Whatever the cause, I exhale a small sigh of relief as Clayton uses his powerful upper body to haul himself up to the windowsill next to my desk, stretching out his forelegs with the toy mouse balanced carefully between his front paws.

  “Good boy.” I reach over to scritch him affectionately behind the ears, and he responds with a sleepy, subdued, “meeeeeee.” His yellow eyes are still fixed on mine, but the lids droop as he nods off into the first of today’s catnaps.

  I turn back to my computer screen and start typing again—actual words, this time—while birds chirp outside the window and, from his perch beside me, Clayton begins to snore lightly. Serenity reigns in my sunlit writing nook. Finally, the game of fetch is over.

  Well, maybe not over. But at least my demanding feline overlord seems willing to allow me a small window of time in which to get some actual work done.

  For now. Until the next round of fetch begins.

  * * *

  Cat lovers are fond of referring to themselves as their cats’ “slaves” or “adoring servants.” Dogs have owners, cats have staff, the saying goes. I’ve repeated it myself often enough for humorous effect, but privately I never used to think of myself as being the servant of any dog or cat I’ve lived with. I’ve always indulged them, of course. I legitimately don’t know what the point of adopting an animal—especially a rescue animal—even is if not, at least in part, to allow yourself the fun of spoiling them silly.

  I’ll freely admit, however, that nowadays I’m wholeheartedly and downright euphorically enslaved to my three-legged cat, Clayton, in a way I’ve never been with any other cat before—not even my blind cat, Homer, who burrowed so deeply into my heart that I felt as if he were literally my flesh and blood. Clayton hates to be alone, and if he awakens from a nap to find himself in an empty room, he’ll let out an anguished howl—and I always come running, no matter where I am or what I’m in the middle of doing. He pushes me like a slave driver, nipping at my ankles with his teeth when it’s his feeding time and I’m not walking to the kitchen quickly enough, or at my calves if I’m standing and talking to my husband, Laurence, or doing anything that doesn’t involve paying attention to Clayton. He has a habit, when I’m sitting at my desk and working on the computer, of hopping in semi-circles behind the desk chair, rising up on his one hind leg, every other hop, to nip at whatever parts of me he can reach through the chair’s lower back—usually my hips and rear end.

  “Silly boy!” I’ll say with a smile, as I reach down to rub beneath Clayton’s chin and Laurence looks on in amazement at my cheerful benevolence.

  If I’m reading a book, a throw pillow in my lap to prop it up on, Clayton will often pull himself up onto the couch and unceremoniously head-butt the book out of his way, installing himself in its place. Not only don’t I get angry at this, I don’t even get irritated. “Who da fuzzy wizzle man?” I’ll croon, my book forgotten. As I scratch Clayton’s back, he lifts his head at a regal angle and sprawls out to his full length atop the cushion on my lap. “Who got da mushy wizzle belly? Who such a good boy? Gooooooood boy . . .”

  “It’s unbelievable how much better the cat’s treated than I am,” Laurence likes to grumble. He’s not wrong. There’s nothing more irksome to a bookworm like me than being pulled abruptly out of an engrossing read. If Laurence were to slap a book out of my hands and shout, “Pay attention to me right NOW!” he’d be treated to an earful of obscenities rather than a back scratch. I can state with near certainty that no affectionate rubs of his “fuzzy wizzle belly” would be in the offing.

  Clayton, without question, fares much better.

  Eventually, Clayton will flip onto his back and nestle in the crook of my arm, his nose wedged into my armpit (Clayton being something of an arm
pit fetishist) and his chin resting on my breast, which he kneads ecstatically with his front paws. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching My Cat From Hell, it’s that cats emphatically do not like being cradled on their backs like babies. But Clayton is the exception to this rule. Not only does he like it, he insists on it. At least once a day, while I’m working at the computer, he’ll crawl into my lap, flop onto his back, and snuggle himself in the bend of my elbow. I’ve learned to type with one hand so that the other is free to balance Clayton’s supine body against my chest—as if my arm were a baby sling—as he drifts into sleep.

  “You did this to him,” Laurence says whenever he comes upon us in this Madonna-and-child pose. (Laurence likes to think that he’s much more measured and “reasonable” in his affections for the cats than I am, but when he thinks he’s out of earshot upstairs, I hear him with them. How’s my little man? he’ll say. Or, You’re a sweet kitty . . . yes, you are! Yes, you are!) “You made him this way.”

  “Untrue!” I reply. “Clayton’s just naturally a very attention-seeking cat, and I’m just naturally the kind of person who pays attention to attention-seeking cats.”

  There’s some truth to the idea that Clayton is far more people-oriented than even the friendliest feline. It’s one thing for a cat to leap immediately into the lap of every visiting guest, without so much as first giving a preliminary sniff or receiving a cursory pat on the head. But how many cats fling themselves—purring and rapturous—into the arms of a veterinarian who’s just given them a shot? You stuck a needle in me! I imagine Clayton saying. That means you’re paying attention to me! You’re my new favorite human!!!

  Whatever natural, attention-seeking inclinations Clayton might have started out with have certainly been amplified by the sheer volume of time my cats and I now spend together. I adopted my first generation of cats—Scarlett, Vashti, and Homer—twenty years ago. Back then I was young and single, working long hours in an office all day and going out with friends or on dates at night.

  But I adopted Clayton and his littermate, Fanny, in 2012. By then, I was already a full-time writer working from home, as was (and is) my husband. I used to be out of the house ten to fifteen hours on a typical weekday. Nowadays, Laurence and I will make a point of going somewhere, even if only out to lunch or to run errands, at least once every day. Some days we play hooky in Manhattan, taking in a movie or going to a museum for the bulk of the afternoon. We’ll go out a couple of nights a week to the theater, or to meet friends for dinner. Still, it’s not at all unusual for us to be home and with our cats for a good twenty-two hours in any given day. When I meet people at functions and they ask me what I do, I’m as apt to quip, I’m a stay-at-home cat mom as I am to go with the more serious-sounding I’m a writer. Both feel like equally accurate descriptions of my life.

  Clayton and Fanny, in other words, are used to having near-constant access to their humans—and to human attention. Clayton spends his entire day in close proximity to me. If I go upstairs to talk to Laurence in his office—even if Clayton is in a deep slumber, and I’m only up there for a couple of minutes—Clayton will follow, eyes half-closed and dazed with sleep. If I head to the bedroom for a brief afternoon siesta, Fanny inevitably crawls out to join me from whatever hiding/sleeping spot she’s designated for the day—and a room that contains both Fanny and me is a room that Clayton absolutely must be in. Any foray into our first-floor kitchen—even a quick one to get a glass of water—automatically becomes a group excursion.

  If I run out to the corner bodega, a mere half-block away, to get a can of soda, Clayton and Fanny race to greet me at the door upon my return as if I were coming home from the wars after a years-long absence. I can’t even describe how overwrought they are when Laurence and I get back from an overnight vacation, or a trip to do a book reading at an out-of-state animal shelter. Clayton and Fanny cling to us like two little black burrs—refusing even to let us go to the bathroom or take a shower unattended—and it takes days for things to return to normal. We thought you’d be gone forever! they seem to be saying. We thought you might never come home!

  So we’ve become quite the codependent little foursome, Fanny, Clayton, my husband, and I. I often think that if cats could talk to each other, and if Clayton were to hear tales from other cats about humans who leave their homes for work every single day, and stay away for up to ten hours at a time, he would react with the same mingling of pity and horror I used to feel as a small child in Miami when my grandmother would tell stories about Life In The Olden Days—before there was air conditioning, television, or Cheez Doodles. “But what did you do?” I’d demand, fighting back tears at the thought of my beloved grandmother enduring such hardships. “How did you live?”

  This is all by way of saying that when Clayton first taught himself to play fetch, and then decided that he really liked playing fetch—and then further decided that he wanted me to play fetch with him all the time—the stage had already been set for casual interest to develop into full-blown obsession.

  * * *

  Like so many great innovations, Clayton’s initial discovery of fetch was a happy accident. He’d always been fond of throwing games, particularly when they involved the crinkle balls and miniature plastic springs that were, not so very long ago, his favorite toys. I’d find one lying about, toss it a few feet away, and Clayton would run after it, batting it around for a while before finally losing interest and looking for something else to do.

  That was more or less what I expected to happen one morning a few months ago when I spotted, lying next to my desk chair, one of the two little toy mice with rainbow tail feathers that I’d spontaneously bought for Clayton and Fanny the day before. When Clayton saw me lift it from the floor, his ears immediately pricked up and he sat at attention.

  “You want this?” I said. “You want this, little boy?”

  My tiny office nook sits off of our living room, and it was in that direction that I threw the mouse, watching as Clayton chased after it. When he caught up with it, he picked the mouse up in his mouth and shook it vigorously a few times, an instinctive “predator” reaction as much as a delighted response to the rattling sound the toy mouse made.

  Something about Clayton sitting there on his haunches with that little gray-and-white mouse between his teeth—its merrily colored tail feathers curving upward toward his ear, as if he were an old-timey gentleman wearing a feathered cap—struck me as particularly adorable. “What a good boy you are!” I cried. “You’re a good, good boy, Clayton!”

  My delight with him in that moment was obvious, and he responded to it by running back toward me, the mouse still clutched in his mouth only because, in his excitement to reach me, he’d forgotten it was there. There’s very little in this life that I find more endearing than Clayton’s hippity-hoppity three-legged run, his gait resembling a cross between a bunny hop and a drunken sailor trying to find his shore footing. And so, when he dropped the mouse and lifted his head toward my hand for a petting, I picked it up and threw it again.

  Clayton’s second pursuit of the mouse was, if anything, even cuter than the first one had been. He ran for a bit, then slid the last few inches in dramatic fashion on his legless rear haunch, like a baseball player stealing home.

  “Awwwwww!” I called after him. “You’re a good, good boy, Clayton!”

  By now, Clayton was as happy with me as I was with him. Once again, he galloped back with the mouse still hanging from his jaw, eager for more praise and petting. I was lavish with both.

  Technically, I was supposed to be working. I was on a deadline and had more than enough writing ahead of me to occupy the next several days, and then some. But, like most writers, a good fifty percent of my “work” time is spent procrastinating. (And at least half of the other fifty percent is spent thinking up new ways to procrastinate.) Watching my cat frolic with his toys was certainly a more appealing prospect than getting down to business. And so, once again, the little felt-covered mouse went air
borne.

  I think it was this third toss of the toy mouse that started the gears turning in Clayton’s mind. This time, he didn’t wait for me to praise him or tell him what a good boy he was before promptly running back to deposit the mouse at my feet. Instead of craning his neck to angle his head closer to the touch of my hand, he sat on his haunches and looked eagerly from my face above him to the toy on the ground, and then back again.

  “Aha! So it’s a game of fetch you want, is it?” Before I knew it, an hour of toss-retrieve-repeat had flown by—at which point, Clayton, seemingly spent, pulled himself up the side of my desk, stepped down from the top of the desk into my lap, and flipped onto his back for belly rubs and a snooze.

  Engaging as that hour of fetch was, I’d more or less forgotten about it by the time I sat down to dinner that night. Laurence had a story to tell that took precedence. A magazine-writer friend of ours, who’d been on the receiving end of months of verbal abuse from his new editor but had yet to stand up for himself, had finally brought matters to a head in the worst possible way: He’d meant to send Laurence a text complaining about his editor. Instead, he’d sent the text to the editor himself.

  “He’d just gotten out of a meeting with the guy, and it was the usual barrage of sarcasm and insults. He meant to send the text to me, but two seconds later he realizes he’s actually sent it to his editor, whose name also begins with an L. And it says—”

  “OW!” Looking down, I saw Clayton at my feet with the toy mouse on the ground between his front paws. I’d been engrossed enough in Laurence’s story not to have noticed Clayton’s soft pawing at my leg for attention—so he’d decided to step things up a notch and unsheathe his claws. “Don’t do that again,” I told him sternly, picking up the mouse and throwing it all the way across the kitchen. Clayton immediately tore after it. “Continue,” I said to Laurence.

  “So the text says, ‘I can’t believe—’”