A Tale of Two Kitties

I have two cats. I am also allergic to cats. Why would someone with cat allergies live with two cats? Get comfortable, it’s a long story.

Remember my niece ‘T’? About three years ago while she was living with a boyfriend, she would come to my house, supposedly to see her mother, but spent the entire time on the telephone. I knew something was up because she would close herself into my sister’s bedroom or the office so we could not hear her talking. This was one of the danger signals with her. She is the type you hate to be around when she is on a cell phone in public. You hear every word of her end of the conversation. She thinks she is just that important that everyone would care. So when she made phone calls privately, something was up. I insisted she tell her mother and me what was going on. After much yelling and screaming about her privacy, she admitted she was calling about a kitten. Obviously she had not told her boyfriend since the calls were being made where he could not possibly hear.

My heart sunk. She couldn’t even take care of herself, how was she going to be responsible for a kitten? I had already taken in her dog in 1994 because she would not take care of it and my sister had sold her house and didn’t have anywhere for the dog. I just knew that if she got a kitten, I would end up caring for it.

She assured us that she was just considering getting the kitten, there was nothing definite. Two days later she walked in the door with a calico kitten. The boyfriend still didn’t know about it. He was going to find out that day when he got home from work. This is the guy she had been living with for months giving her mother and me a phony name for him. She didn’t want us to know he was the same man who had blackened her eye and broke her glasses two years before. I guess he was as thrilled about the cat as I was since ‘T’ started bringing the cat to my house every day before she went to work so that the cat was not alone with the boyfriend. Then it progressed to us babysitting the cat on weekends. I wasn’t having much difficulty with the cat dander, but I did develop hives if Patches scratched me. My sister also had a mild cat allergy, so we kept the cat out of her bedroom.

When I realized that Patches was becoming a permanent fixture, I decided to get her a playmate so that I didn’t have to take Benedryl constantly. I went to the local shelter and found a tortoiseshell cat. She seemed very friendly and so Eliot became a member of the household. Within 48 hours, Eliot was in heat! I don’t know how people can stand having female cats that are not fixed. They are obnoxious when they are in the mood for love. She even offered herself to my old dog. Since I had gotten her from the shelter, her surgery was prepaid and I set it up as soon as possible.

Eliot’s surgery just reminded me of another incident involving my niece. I had trouble fixing the timing in mind, but the cat was part of it and it helped me to remember. My sister owned two timeshare weeks in Florida that usually started the Saturday after Thanksgiving. She and I would go and just relax, maybe spent a couple of days at Disney World and do some Christmas shopping. Eliot would be coming home from the vet after my sister and I had left for Florida. We entrusted ‘T’ with the care of the dog and cat while we were gone. One condition we had set up was that the boyfriend was not to set foot in our house. By then, we knew his real identity. ‘Z’ and I had a good time and as usual we were ready to go home before the full two weeks had ended. We drove straight home on Thursday instead of Saturday. When we arrived, ‘T’s car was there and mine was gone. I didn’t think too much about it since I did allow her to use my car for work sometimes. ‘Z’ and I unloaded the most important stuff and started sorting the mail. The living room television was on. That wasn’t so strange since we sometimes left Animal Planet on to entertain the dog. It was on ESPN, but I thought perhaps ‘T’ had been watching some NASCAR related show and just forgot to change channels. I tried to find the remote, but it was nowhere around. The missing remote didn’t leave my mind, but I still had the mail, some laundry and the dirty dishes ‘T’ had left in the kitchen. I was also looking for Eliot. She was still new to the household and I had left her with the vet and then wasn’t even there when she returned home, so I kept looking for her. I searched almost the entire upstairs and then started on the basement while I was working on the laundry. We even called ‘T’ on her cell phone to make sure that the cat had been in the house that morning. After 2 or 3 hours I got a little frantic. By then I was upset about the cat, pissed about the missing remote and very unhappy about the dirty dishes. I started another search upstairs (it is a ranch house with a full basement) for the cat. I had never checked the coat closet in the living room since it had been a mild winter and we hadn’t been wearing coats. When ‘T’ arrived to pick up her car, I questioned her about the cat and the remote. Finally in exasperation, I checked that closet for the cat. My heart nearly stopped when I opened the door. There stood ‘T’s boyfriend, all 6 feet 4 inches of him, with the television remote in his hand. I exploded! I should have called the police. That man had been hiding in the closet the entire time that my sister and I had been home and never made a sound. I didn’t ask him how and when he planned to leave without us knowing. I ordered him out and told him to never come back. I guess it was foolish of me not to call the police. This man had been violent with my niece and was on probation for domestic violence with his ex-wife. My niece should not have even been with him. It was a violation of her probation to associate with another person on probation. As far as her probation officer knew, she still lived with her mother and me. My dad is right; you can tell ‘T’ is lying because her lips are moving. (I did finally find the cat. She was hiding so far under my bed, that I needed a flashlight to find her. She came out after I had been home for a day.)

I got off on a tangent, duh. Back to the two kitties; not long after Eliot had been fixed, Patches came into heat. ‘T’ of course had no plans about having her fixed and the cat hadn’t even had her shots yet. ‘T’ knew her mother would take care of it; her mother took care of all of her messes. I called around for the most economical spaying price and made an appointment for Patches. That taken care of, the cat became a permanent fixture after we found out that the boyfriend did not like the cat and was mean to her. Now I had a 13-year old Bichon Frise dog and two cats.

I continued to allow the false impression that Patches belonged to ‘T’. After my sister’s surgery and she became so ill, the only time we ever saw ‘T’, it was when she wanted money or a private telephone for one of her schemes. I decided that the cat was mine. I fed her, cleaned up after her and played with her. So I changed her name to Harley which is short for Harlequin (she has diamond markings on her face). ‘T’ was livid! Too bad.

In early 2005, my now daughter-in-law moved in with her dog. I had to have the Bichon put to sleep in December 2004. He was old and very ill. The cats were accustomed to having a dog around, but an old dog, not a pup. They adjusted to Jack the dog. Eliot would hide all day and come out at night when the dog was in her crate. Harley just went about her day as usual. No dog was going to make her change her habits. When my sister passed away, I started feeling the loss of my dog. I found a Lab mix at the shelter that was about the same size and age as Jack and named her Jill. Then my son got a dachshund mix, a female named Reggie (our vet thinks we have weird names for our animals!). Eliot became a little more withdrawn and Harley began playing with the dogs! Poor Eliot, she just tried to stay out of the way of the dogs, but they are natural hunters and chases would happen. I became concerned when I noticed that Eliot used her claws to fend off the dogs. She also used her claws on me a lot which meant ingesting Benedryl. Even though I don’t believe in de-clawing cats, I had the procedure done on Eliot. I was worried about injury to the dogs and I could not continue to take the antihistamine every day. I think she misses her claws. She bites more now and looks frustrated sometimes when she plays with her toys.

By the time that my son and his girlfriend married, the household had grown to 7 dogs and the two cats. Harley was still very cool about the dogs and just acted as if they weren’t there. I had shelves on the wall in my bedroom. I ended up clearing most of the bottom shelf for Eliot to use as her safe haven from the dogs. Now the cats and I have a bedroom/sitting room in the basement. The only dog that comes down here is my Yorkshire Terrier. She is smaller than Eliot, so the cat does not seem intimidated by Raina. Now the cats play together again and not just at night. Harley has adopted a small cardboard box as her own. I need to post a picture of her in that box. I guess only a cat could find it comfortable. Harley also climbs the exposed ductwork in the room where I keep my refrigerator. The first couple of times she got up there, I heard a lot of yowling from her when she could not figure out how to get down. I made the mistake twice of ‘helping’ her and got clawed for my efforts. She figured it out on her own. Eliot has become an accomplished climber of the containers. She has even managed to get on top of the wardrobe. She isn’t adventurous enough to make the jump from the wardrobe to the bed, but Harley has (and startled the crap out of me when she did it when I was in bed). I received a pair of Zebra finches for Mother’s day last year and found out they are a gift that keeps on giving. I now have 3 cages of birds which the cats love. While we were still upstairs, I had to fasten the cages down with bungee cords. Luckily we have only had one incident of a cat upsetting a cage since moving downstairs and I solved that problem with a little furniture shifting. Twice I have had birds escape and Harley has helped me capture them. I have no illusions about Harley’s intentions. If I had not been there to take the birds away from her, they would have been lunch. She is much better at catching them than I am and the birds were not injured luckily.

I enjoy having my own living area separate from my son and daughter-in-law (I just need a bathroom down here!). I did not realize how much it would enrich the lives of these two cats that I shouldn’t really have, but would miss horribly if they were gone.