“I am not a cat lady,” my mother declares, a bag of Whiskas under her arm and a Maine Coon at her feet. She marches through the laundry room to answer the lament of a portly calico who is kept locked in the pantry. “No, you stay out here, Don Diego,” she cautions the Maine Coon. “Mrs. Gummidge has yet to reconcile herself to other cats. Thus she remains in self-imposed exile here in the pantry.” My mother manages to slip into Gummidge’s chamber without Don Diego. “Well, Gummidge. You didn’t finish your white albacore. Why didn’t Gummidge finish her white albacore, pray tell?” She directs the question to the calico, while referring to her in the third person—the way, in Batman, that Alfred speaks to Bruce Wayne. Master Wayne wishes not to entertain any guests this evening? “Gummidge desires that I take this tiresome tuna away, and present her, in its stead, with some fresh Whiskas—or perhaps some Science Diet? Yes, Gummidge need a new snack.” She moves from butler talk to baby talk. “Gummidge finished with dat tunie. She done.”
My mother emerges from the pantry, the china plate of abandoned albacore in one hand, the now slightly lighter package of Whiskas in the other. She is wearing a calf-length pink cotton skirt and a discarded t-shirt of my brother’s that bears, down the front, the word “paranoia” six times. Her hair hangs down to the middle of her back. Though it is gradually becoming more and more white, for years it was a deep copper, with just two silver streaks that framed her face. The streaks had been a lineament of her icon in my childhood; several of my classmates had believed her to be a witch, citing the strange strands of silver, symbols of age that stood in contrast to her still-youthful face. My mother has some wrinkles now, but her lips remain overly full, defiantly young. Only months ago, a Walmart one-hour-photo clerk mistook her for my wife. She is an age chameleon.
“Sit down, Carol,” she says to my aunt, the sister of my father, who waits for her in the kitchen. “I’m just going to run upstairs and quickly change.”
“Take your time,” Carol calls.
My mother is usually an obsessive hostess, assaulting guests with hot chocolate and pillows, items of sustenance and comfort. But Carol comes over almost every day now. She is slender, with recently bleached blonde hair, and red lipstick. She had once embarked on a Broadway career, but aborted it, opting to marry and raise a family. Still, she is revered by community theatergoers throughout the greater Kalamazoo area. Her husband, Terry, recently had an affair with a local country western singer named Debbie. He is now divorcing Carol. She has taken to self-medication, sometimes preparing cocktails of vodka and various anti-anxiety pills.
My mother returns in a purple skirt with intricate black designs, a luminous gold short-sleeved shirt, and alligator boots. “Want to visit Gummidge?” she asks.
“Oh, not right now, Kit,” Carol replies. “In a bit, though. I’ll see plenty of her.”
Carol has agreed to help my mother take Mrs. Gummidge to the vet’s this afternoon.
“She’s awfully forlorn, you know,” my mother says.
A one-time filmmaker, poet, mixed-media artist, and high school English teacher, my mother has not created work since our house burned down in the eighties, destroying her reels, assemblages, and manuscripts. Since that time, she has, however, devoted herself to the 24-hour-a-day interactive performance/installation of caring for, dominating, and dramatizing the lives of cats. While critics, historians, neighbors, and the mailman all classify this piece as quintessential Theater of the Cat Lady, my mother often entitles it I Am Not a Cat Lady. This could be understood as a surrealist strategy, akin to that which Magritte employed in his painting of a pipe with a caption that reads, “This is not a pipe.” My mother, the Cat Lady Who Is Not, wishes to keep her relationship to the cats unexplained.
My mother summons the void in her baby talk to cats. A militant grammarian, she is prone to suddenly deny her understanding of subject/object and past/present, affect a speech impediment, and recite Elmer Fuddian incantations. For example, I remember once doing my middle school algebra assignment at the kitchen table, in the company of my mother and our cat, Cubby, a former stray with one ear who bore a remarkable resemblance to a baby bear and taught himself to sit up and beg and wave for treats, play fetch, and other circus bear tricks. As Cubby blankly watched my pencil in the erratic movement of equation solving, my mother announced, in baby talk, “Cubs don’t do ‘rithmatic! No. Him don’t do no ’rithmatic.”
“Don Diego is named after Zorro’s alter ego, a dandyish fellow that nobody ever suspects of being Zorro,” my mother begins to explain to Carol, apropos of nothing in particular. “Why, no one would imagine, while watching our Don Diego in the pantry, daintily nibbling on his Fancy Feast, that when he ventures into the yard, he becomes a virile and mysterious hero. Mrs. Gummidge is named after the widow in David Copperfield. Our Gummidge also weeps, perpetually, in her own plaintive mew.”
The Dr. Moreau of interior decorating, my mother sits among strange mixtures of animal prints, in her dark laboratory of excess. Zebra print pillows populate the sofa, a deep-orange leopard rug spreads across the living room floor, and peacock feathers peak out from the ceramic Chinese umbrella holder. The alligator boots my mother has put on her feet are the variable in today’s experiment in hybridity. She strokes Cleopatra, the chubby Siamese who sits next to her, on one of the five luxurious cat beds in the living room.
My mother continues to psychoanalyze the cats as Carol nods quietly and smiles her actress’s smile, the corners of her mouth rising high up on her face, only to turn slightly downward at the last moment—like a firework streaking up to the sky and failing to explode.
Carol is afflicted with Sjögren’s syndrome, a rare condition that makes one unable to produce tears. When she cries, she must squeeze drops of saline solution into her eyes. In life and on the stage, Carol is an actress incapable of summoning tears. She often arrives on the porch, Visine in hand, coming to present my mother with a new plot to sabotage Terry—or win him back. “Kit, I’ve got it. We can plant a camera in his apartment, and catch him, in the act … Or maybe I should just write him a long letter, tell him that I love him. What do you think?”
Carol brings plans to my mother like densely tangled knots. My mother carefully unties each one. While my mother frequently talks Carol out of her outrageous plans, she sometimes trumps Carol with machinations of her own. Several weeks ago, enacting a plan of my mother’s, the two broke into Terry’s office in the middle of the night to steal financial documents.
On Carol’s more manic days, she greets my mother on a sustained pitch, at the top of her rich coloratura soprano, and the two women exchange operatic dialogue for a few moments, before Carol goes careening into an aria about the tawdriness of Terry’s mistress. “That Debbie is a sluuuuuut!” she shrieks.
Carol talks about the divorce obsessively. She puts on an exaggerated Southern accent, referring to the upcoming hearing as my trial. “Aw, Kit, you gotta come tuh mah trah-uhl, and testifah! You can say: Wha ye-es, Ah saw them two—togethah!”
Today, though, Carol is subdued—not despondent and not at peace, just still. Well acquainted with the cast of cats, she does not mind listening to my mother’s stream of anecdotes.
“I don’t know what to do with Gummidge,” my mother sighs, rising from the sofa.