Homer's Odyssey

5 • The New Kid

Anyone with even a moderate amount of right feeling knows that [you] ought to treat a suppliant as though he were [your] own brother.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

FOR AS LONG AS HOMER HAD HIS STITCHES IN AND HIS CONE ON, HE HAD to be kept separated from Scarlett and Vashti. The logistics involved in keeping them apart—while giving Homer plenty of time and space to acquaint himself with his new home; while also giving Scarlett and Vashti a fair amount of freedom and reassuring them they weren’t suddenly unloved just because there was a new kitten in the house—were even more complicated in practice than they sounded in theory. When Melissa was home, I would sometimes give Scarlett and Vashti free range while Homer stayed locked up with Melissa in her bedroom. When Homer, or Melissa, or both of them, lost patience with their confinement, I would hustle Scarlett and Vashti into my bedroom and allow Homer his run of the house. If Scarlett and Vashti were still in my bedroom come bedtime, I shepherded them back out so Homer could sleep with me.

As the days went by, I began to feel like the philandering husband in a French romantic farce, with the constant opening and closing of bedroom doors and doing everything in my power to ensure that the wife and the girlfriend never ran into each other. It got to the point where the creak of the bedroom door drew baleful looks from Scarlett and Vashti. We know, we know … other room …

The situation was far harder on Vashti, who was just over a year old, than it was on Scarlett. Vashti was an outgoing cat who loved to be around people, especially me. She had never tracked my footsteps as closely as Homer did, but before Homer’s arrival she’d always followed me from room to room and had slept every night curled around my head on the pillow. After more than a week of being separated from me so much of the time, she was becoming noticeably morose.

Scarlett had traditionally been more of a loner. At two years of age, Scarlett was the cat that people who didn’t like cats thought of—aloof, independent to a degree that bordered on anti-social, and stiff as piecrust if anybody besides me attempted to touch, pet, or otherwise approach her. Poor Scarlett suffered from a serious PR problem on this account. Even my best friend from college, Andrea, who now lived in California with two cats of her own, was apt to refer to Scarlett as “that wretched cat.”

To my own ears, I sounded like a girl with an abusive boyfriend when I defended our relationship: You don’t know what she’s really like! You don’t know how sweet she is when we’re alone together! This was true; Scarlett was capable of a great deal of affectionate cuddling and purring, as well as spirited games of chase-the-paper-ball or hide-and-seek, when she and I were one-on-one. And it’s also true that Scarlett had grown to enjoy playing with Vashti—on a selective basis, and at moments of her own choosing. For the most part, though, she was content to be left to her own devices. Constantly being locked up when Homer was around didn’t sadden her so much as it offended her sense of personal dignity. As if I wanted to mingle with the riffraff out there.

The hardest part of all this enforced separation was that I’d been forced to confine Homer to my bathroom when I left for work in the morning, concerned that unmonitored time alone with the other two cats would imperil his stitches. When I put him in there he would howl—not the loud, complaining meow of a cat who’s being confined against his will, but the gut-wrenching, awful screams of an animal experiencing stark terror. Brave though he was, the one thing that terrified Homer nearly beyond endurance was being alone. This made sense, actually, because even though Homer technically didn’t know he was blind, instinct told him his greatest vulnerability was that something, or someone, could sneak up on him unawares. That same instinct undoubtedly knew it would be far more difficult to sneak up on a kitten surrounded by people or other cats than on one kitten by himself. Alone, therefore, was an unnatural state of affairs from Homer’s perspective. Even making a nest for him out of some of my old clothes, so he would have something that smelled like me, and placing a small radio in the bathroom tuned to NPR—of all the “constant human voice” stations, this one struck me as the most soothing—didn’t ease his anxiety.

Listening to his cries from the bathroom, it took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to let him out. My first impulse was to open the door, fly into the room, scoop him up into my arms, and assure him that nothing bad would ever, ever happen to him as long as I was there. Thinking about what might have gone into producing his terror, what he’d been through blind and defenseless on the streets before he’d been found and handed over to my vet, was the kind of thing that kept me awake many a night as I pressed him closer to my chest and buried my face in the warmth of his fur.

At last, after a week in his new home, the great day arrived when Homer’s stitches came out. This meant that his cone, too, was a thing of the past. He would be able to start grooming himself, and I would no longer have to wipe his bottom for him after he used the litter box. And he would never have to be alone again.

“Although you might wish you were,” I told him as we drove to the vet’s office, imagining Scarlett’s probable reception of him.

Eeeeuu! Homer replied from the confines of his carrier in the backseat of my car.

LIBERATION FROM THAT plastic cone was a pure draught of sweet ecstasy. Upon being released from his carrier after arriving home from Patty’s office, Homer went straight for the living room rug, where he lay on his back and flipped from side to side, rapturous that he could now do so without any limitation on his range of motion.

Scarlett and Vashti entered the room cautiously—half expecting to be locked up again, or simply suspicious of the newcomer. Homer was still rolling around on his back on the living room rug, but he jumped up immediately and sat at attention as Scarlett and Vashti approached him.

I’d always known he was tiny—he was still under six weeks old, after all—but he looked positively dwarfish as Vashti and Scarlett circled him. I held my breath as they took turns sniffing him inquisitively, flinching backward with slitted eyelids when Homer responded in kind. When Homer reached up an impish paw toward them, they recoiled. Scarlett’s own paw came up in immediate response, batting at Homer’s head in a manner that clearly indicated he was to sit still until they’d finished inspecting him. Homer lowered his paw and hunkered down his neck a bit, huddling himself up as tightly as he could while still sitting upright.

Vashti sniffed around his ears a few more times, then began to gently lick the top of his head. I was encouraged by this, and so, apparently, was Homer. He lifted his head once more to sniff around Vashti’s nose and whiskers, and his paw rose again as he attempted to touch her face and fur. Startled at his touch, Vashti bolted a few feet away, continuing to regard Homer from this safer distance.

Scarlett, meantime, had had enough and walked slowly away in Vashti’s direction. After a moment’s hesitation, Homer toddled after them. When Scarlett saw this she picked up her pace and made for the bedroom door, having no intention of allowing Homer to catch up to her.

“Don’t worry, you guys will get used to each other,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

Doubtful, the look on Scarlett’s face indicated, and her walk quickened into a run.

PEOPLE ASK ME all the time if Scarlett and Vashti know that Homer is blind. I think blindness is too abstract a concept for a cat to grasp, so what I usually say is that Scarlett and Vashti realized Homer was different at first—klutzy, as far as they were concerned, and somewhat rude, and not terribly good at being a cat—but that, by now, they’ve come to accept him as he is. I know it confused them when, for example, this bumbling little kitten would leap enthusiastically onto the couch and unwittingly land atop one of their sleeping heads, backing up hastily upon realizing the spot was occupied. Couldn’t he see somebody was already sleeping there? When awakened in this fashion, Vashti and Scarlett would grimace in annoyance and cast a look at me that said, What’s with the new guy?

Homer was also apt to play much rougher than Scarlett or Vashti was accustomed to. The two of them had a favorite game, one that was mostly of Scarlett’s devising with Vashti happy to follow her lead. The game went like this: At some point when Vashti’s back was turned or she was otherwise distracted, Scarlett would leap upon her and whap her in the face a few times with her front paw. Scarlett’s claws were always retracted (retracted claws were an essential part of this game). Vashti would respond in kind, and the two of them would engage in a fullblown slap fight, whapping at each other’s faces and paws, until Vashti landed what was—in Scarlett’s opinion—one blow too many. Whereupon Scarlett would flatten her ears and arch her back slightly, a signal to Vashti that it was time for her to knock it off. Once Scarlett had decreed Game Over, the two of them would go off, unruffled, in their separate directions.

Homer was a boy, and he didn’t have much use for these kinds of subtle girly games. Homer wanted great life-and-death battles, the fierce drama of perseverance and triumph in the face of crushing odds. Homer’s idea of the perfect game had nothing to do with slap-and-retreat. His favorite game was to leap onto Scarlett’s and Vashti’s backs and pin them down while they struggled furiously, sinking teeth and claws into whatever he could reach.

He didn’t intend to hurt them by doing this, and would always back up in confused alarm if either of them squealed in pain or anger. But as far as Homer knew, anything that escaped his grasp could disappear into the black void of gone forever. Homer could never assume that any plaything—whether a squeaktoy or the body of another cat—would be findable again once he was no longer touching it. If I dangled a string in front of him for him to try to catch, a game that Scarlett and Vashti both loved, he could sense the string but always went for my hand instead, digging his claws into my skin to keep both string and hand from disappearing. It was this same tendency that made him grabby when it came to sharing toys with the other cats. If Scarlett and Vashti were batting around a ball of paper between them, Homer would bound over and clasp the ball of paper tightly in his claws to keep it from spinning off into infinity. This inevitably led Scarlett and Vashti to walk away—clearly, Homer was hogging all the action—while Homer was left to bounce the ball of paper around in his tight claw with a perplexed expression at finding himself so suddenly alone. Don’t you guys want to play with this anymore?

So he tended to dig his claws into things, like the other cats’ flesh, without meaning to do them any harm. I spent long hours training Homer to retract his claws when playing—mainly by encouraging him to play with me, then issuing a harsh “No!” and abruptly ending the game when his claws came out—but in the meantime, he wasn’t winning Vashti and Scarlett over.

I think what most surprised Scarlett and Vashti, who weighed eleven and nine pounds, respectively, was that Homer never got tired of stalking, or at least attempting to stalk, the two of them. Surely, had he been able to see how very much bigger they were than he was, he would never have contemplated it.

But Homer couldn’t see how much bigger they were. What’s more, it’s entirely possible that he had no understanding of the concept of relative size. He might have been a six-week-old kitten who still had a distinct waddle to his walk, but in his mind’s eye he was one of the Big Cats—a panther, maybe, or a mountain lion.

His efforts at playing the mighty hunter hardly ever produced satisfactory results. He was able to leap upon Vashti whenever he wanted, but only because Vashti—conditioned by a lifetime of bending to Scarlett’s will—adopted a philosophy of passive nonresistance. Homer would jump onto her back, a minuscule black mound on top of a much larger white one, nipping at Vashti’s neck in a vain effort to get her to fight back or do something, for crying out loud.

But Vashti would just lie there patiently while Homer thrashed around, turning resigned eyes upon me that seemed to cry, Oh, the humanity!

Scarlett, by contrast, was nobody’s patsy and always put up a fight. She was Homer’s White Whale, his mortal nemesis. The unequivocal sacking of Scarlett was the pot of gold that lay at the end of all Homer’s rainbows, and I think it was the dream of his life to finally—indisputably—best her.

The will was certainly there, but his tactics were woefully inadequate. Homer had all of a cat’s normal instincts to creep noiselessly and crouch down before springing. Unfortunately, he never understood that, since he wasn’t crouching down behind anything, he wasn’t any less conspicuous to his intended victim than he would have been if he were preceded by a marching band.

It was as good as a play, watching the drama unfold when Homer would take it into his head to attempt yet another assault on Scarlett. You could tell the exact moment when, with a tilt of his head, he caught the faint sounds of her stirring across the room. He would hunker down into his stalking posture, taking a few breathlessly slow, silent steps in her direction. Then he would stop. Still crouched low, he would run for four or five more steps. Then he would stop again. He repeated this process—slow, then fast … slow, then fast—”sneaking” up on Scarlett directly from the front.

You could almost hear Scarlett heave a sigh and see her roll her eyes heavenward. Again? The look on her face was invariably one of bemused contempt, as if she were observing some new species of idiot. She’d wait for him to get close enough to spring, wriggling his backside in joyful preparation for what would assuredly be his moment of victory, and then—with a casual disdain that verged on boredom—Scarlett would swat him a few times on the head with her front paw, making it painfully obvious that she’d known exactly where he was the whole time. Homer would sit there flummoxed (Why didn’t it work this time?), and Scarlett would turn and stride with cold dignity into the other room, swishing her tail as if to say, That’s quite enough of that.

Perhaps realizing the futility of trying to take an unsuspecting Scarlett from a sitting position, Homer would sometimes attempt to catch her in midflight. One afternoon, I saw a gray blur whiz past me at breakneck speed, followed by Homer—racing as fast as his little legs would carry him—in mad pursuit. I laughed long and loud at the visual of this half-pound kitten chasing an eleven-pound, full-grown cat. Scarlett leapt to the safety of a kitchen countertop, glaring down at Homer who was making his best, if unsuccessful, efforts to scale the side of the counter to reach her.

Homer never caught her, but he did frequently come close. I would often come upon a disgruntled Scarlett, angrily settling herself onto a sofa arm or the top of a coffee table, and a few feet away would be Homer, sitting on his haunches, a tuft of gray fur in his mouth.

“Homer, were you just chasing Scarlett?” I would ask in a severe tone.

Homer would turn toward me with an innocently blank expression, unaware that I could see the incriminating clump of gray fur still clinging to his snout. Who, Scarlett? I don’t think she’s been here recently …

Poor Homer had no truly bad intentions; he didn’t want to hurt anybody. He was a kitten and he wanted to play. He was blind and he wanted to be sure that whoever he was playing with didn’t run away from him. Why didn’t Scarlett and Vashti understand that? Many was the time when I found Homer, having been recently abandoned by the two of them, turning his head and ears from side to side as he tried desperately to track down the slightest sound that would indicate where they were. He would utter a sad little mew? as if he were playing a game of Marco Polo all by himself, waiting for a response that never came. Hey, guys? Where’d you go?

“You know, they’d probably play with you more if you weren’t so rough with them,” I would tell Homer. The pity in my voice always brought him over for a round of cuddling and head rubbing. Why don’t they like me, Mommy? But the advice—alas!—was never heeded.

In true big-sister fashion, however, it was Scarlett who ended up being Homer’s most instructive influence, who encouraged Homer to develop his abilities to climb and leap as he did everything in his power to keep up with her. If Scarlett could climb a six-foot cat tower to get away from Homer, then why couldn’t Homer climb it, too? If Scarlett could leap to the top of a desk or dresser, then there was no reason why Homer couldn’t climb up the side of it, even if he wasn’t able to leap directly up the way Scarlett did.

Homer was a typical little brother in many ways, always wanting to play with the big kids, who were far more interested in playing with each other and who regarded him, at best, as a mildly annoying “baby.” But like all younger siblings, he learned by imitation—trying things he might never have otherwise tried and learning more quickly than he would have on his own.

And it was usually in Scarlett’s presence that Homer could be found whenever I wasn’t there. When curling up for a nap with me wasn’t an option, Homer always felt safest sleeping somewhere near Scarlett. I think, in his mind, Scarlett was the strongest one in the house next to me, despite the fact that she was also the “meanest”—or maybe because of it. When Homer wasn’t in one of his hyperactive, jump-on-Scarlett-at-all-costs moods, it was surprising how respectful he was of her.

Safety in numbers, right? you could almost hear Homer thinking as he curled up (always curled up, because Homer never—ever—slept sprawled out on his side or back) wherever Scarlett was dozing, close enough for protection but with enough distance left to indicate courtesy.

Scarlett would open one eye and regard him indulgently for a moment before settling back into her nap. Don’t push your luck, kid.