Homer's Odyssey

9 • “Dogs and Cats, Living Together …”

There is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his own parents, and however splendid a home he may have elsewhere, if it be far from his father or mother, he does not care about it.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

PERHAPS SAYING EARLIER THAT MY PARENTS DIDN’T LIKE CATS WAS AN unfair characterization. It would be more accurate to say that my father, who owned his own medical auditing business, wasn’t so much anti-cat as he was staunchly pro-dog. But he was also more sensitive when it came to animals generally than just about anybody else I knew. He was one of those people with an ability to understand and respond to an animal’s emotional state that went beyond simple compassion and seemed almost to be direct communion. Of all the stray, abused, and abandoned dogs that had come through our home over the years, there had never been one—no matter how traumatized or skittish—who had failed to melt into warm affection in my father’s presence, even if that warmth was reserved for my father alone. It was my father I’d always thought of when I’d volunteered at animal shelters, hoping to capture at least some of whatever mysterious ability he had.

My mother, on the other hand, when she was a small child had seen a cat kill a bird. She, too, was capable of deep compassion where just about any animal was concerned, but the trauma of this single act of feline ornicide had left her, as she put it, incapable of emotionally investing in cats the way she could in dogs.

“Cats aren’t loving and loyal the way dogs are,” she’d say. Upon hearing my own cats indirectly maligned in this fashion, I was tempted to ask her what exactly, in her zero years of cat companionship, qualified her to make such an assessment.

Remembering the fruitless dinner-table political arguments of my adolescence, however, I forbore. I considered this forbearance a mark of the maturity I’d attained since I’d last lived with my parents.

That my parents were willing to take the four of us in, despite their antipathy toward cats, was a testament to how much they were willing to do for me—even though we weren’t as close at that time as, perhaps, we could have been. It wasn’t so much that there was any overt hostility between my parents and me; but, where some of my friends had drifted with seeming effortlessness into adult relationships with their parents, my own parents and I were still figuring it out. I often thought I heard a distinct grown-up-talking-to-a-child tone when they spoke to me—and, as it was uncomfortably close to some of my own darker insecurities about myself, I resented it accordingly.

More than anything else, I wanted to make them proud of me. But it didn’t seem as if I’d done much in my post-college life thus far to inspire pride, unless you counted one major failed relationship and being broke enough to require my moving back in with them.

But my parents were willing to take the four of us in, and they were even willing to divide their house into “cat zones” and “dog zones.” Casey, a yellow Lab mix, and Brandi, a miniature cocker spaniel, had been with my family since I was a teenager. They were always giddily thrilled whenever I turned up at my parents’ for a visit, following me closely and looking doleful if I so much as walked past the front door, anticipating the moment when I would leave and not return for days or weeks. If I spent the night, the two of them would pile into bed with me, as they’d done when I was still in high school.

Once I’d been living in my parents’ house again for a week and change, the novelty of having me around wore off a bit and they weren’t so apt to follow me everywhere. This was something I’d counted on; conflicting demands on my time and attention from the dog and cat camps wouldn’t engender the kind of mutual goodwill I was hoping for.

But I realized there was only so far diplomacy would go. Cat/dog animosity was at least as old as history itself, and neither my cats nor my parents’ dogs had ever been called upon to share quarters with members of the opposing faction. Remembering the dictum that “good fences make good neighbors,” my parents and I retrieved the folding wooden childproof gates from the storage spot they’d occupied since my younger sister and I were toddlers. “I knew we’d end up using them again,” my mother said, although not without tossing me a glance that added, Of course, I thought we’d be using them for our grand-children.

The gates attached to the walls with suction cups and reached about waist-high on the average adult. We put them up where a hallway split off to my bedroom and another bedroom, connected by an adjoining bathroom—effectively creating a three-room apartment that the dogs would be unable to access. I conducted a rigorous cleaning—trying to eliminate as much anxiety-inducing dog smell as I could—then installed cat beds, scratching posts, litter box, and food and water bowls. The cats’ new home was complete.

“What do you guys think?” I asked the cats when I brought them in for the first time.

Scarlett and Vashti crept forward cautiously from the safety of their carriers, noses to the ground and ears at full attention. Casey barked in the other room, and they immediately scrambled under the bed. It was two hours before I could get them to do more than peek their whiskers out through the bed’s eyeleted dust ruffle, a relic of my preteen years.

Homer was unfazed, however. His ears flicked momentarily at Casey’s barking, but he was more interested in exploring what was in front of him. Homer had never encountered anything with the texture of the ’70s-style shag carpeting in my childhood bedroom. He spent a few minutes stalking carefully through the carpet strands that reached halfway to his chin—a black panther in perfect miniature prowling an electric-blue savanna. Once he realized the superior traction carpet afforded, far better than the hardwood or tile floors he was used to, Homer took off at a run, racing in blurred circles around the room and bouncing off walls and furniture like a rubber ball fired from a slingshot. Yippee! Look how fast I can go in here!

“He’s a little nut, isn’t he?” my mother, who hadn’t been able to resist a quick peek, observed.

“You have no idea,” I replied.

• • •

DESPITE SOME OF the concerns I’d had before moving in, my parents didn’t unduly interfere with my day-to-day activities. I did tend to let them know, as I was walking out the door, where I was going and approximately when I’d be back, but it was a level of basic courtesy that I would have extended to friendly roommates. The majority of my friends still lived on South Beach, and there were inevitable late nights, but my parents refrained from asking intrusive questions.

What I hadn’t counted on ahead of time was being on the receiving end of their parenting advice when it came to the cats.

“I don’t think you’re giving them fresh water often enough,” my mother announced one afternoon, a few weeks after we’d moved in. “I checked in on them while you were out, and poor Vashti was standing next to her water bowl making such sad eyes at me. I refilled it for her and the poor thing acted like she hadn’t seen clean water in days.”

I always changed the cats’ water twice daily—once in the morning and once in the evening. And “poor Vashti” was something of a con artist when it came to her water bowl. Vashti was a cat who, oddly enough, was obsessed with water. She loved to hold her paws under running faucets, immerse them up to her shoulder joint in full drinking glasses, and roll around in recently used showers while the tile was still wet. The refilling of her water bowl was one of the high points of her day; the beguiling roll of water caused by setting a full bowl on the ground mesmerized her, and she gave me no peace most mornings until I’d re-created this daily miracle for her.

I was about to explain this to my mother when a new thought occurred to me. “Wait a second—what were you doing with them in the first place?”

“Well, I wanted to say hello to Vashti,” my mother replied. She emphasized Vashti’s name in a way that meant there was a difference between cats, which she didn’t care for, and Vashti, who merited a degree of interest. “I am the one who found her when she was a kitten.”

“Yes, you did.” I smiled. “And you sent her to a good home, one where she gets all the fresh water she needs.”

A few days later, my father piped up with a suggestion of his own. “I don’t think the cats have enough toys,” he said. My father was the kind of indulgent dad who brought new toys home for the dogs every few days, to the point that my parents’ otherwise immaculate house looked like a chewtoy graveyard. “You should buy more toys for them.”

“They’re not like the dogs, Dad,” I explained. “They’re not into store-bought toys.” This was true, with the exception of that stuffed worm Homer still loved dearly. The bag that new toys came in was always an adventure—a large paper bag made an excellent cat fort. The receipt for the toys could be crumpled up into a ball that a cat could bat around and chase. The plastic wrapping around the toys was a bonanza for Scarlett, who loved nothing more than licking plastic wrap. (If a genie were to grant me the wish of the cats’ being able to talk for a single day, the first question I would ask is, What’s so great about licking plastic bags?!) But the toys themselves held little interest for my brood.

“You should really do something about Scarlett,” my mother said once. This was after she had found me reading a book with a purring Scarlett curled in my lap. She’d held out her hand and Scarlett sniffed it. Taking this as encouragement, my mother had attempted to pet Scarlett, who had hissed and recoiled from my mother’s touch so forcefully that her head nearly bruised my breastbone. “Brandi used to be afraid of new people, and look how well she does now.”

“Scarlett isn’t afraid of people, Mom,” I told her. “Scarlett doesn’t like people.”

The problem could be summed up in a nutshell: My parents were trying to dog my cats. Having never spent much time around cats, they tried to take the accumulated knowledge of more than three decades of dog ownership and apply it to these strange new creatures who now inhabited their home. To the extent that the cats’ reactions differed from a dog’s, it was most likely because I didn’t yet have enough experience being responsible for pets.

I tried to weather their input with good grace, but it was hard. I was my parents’ child, reflexively defensive at any perceived parental criticism. I was also my “children’s” parent, bristling instantly at the slightest implication that I wasn’t caring for them properly, or that they were anything other than exactly what they should be.

But the one thing I could plainly see—that touched me, even though I was never very good at articulating it—was that my parents were trying. They were trying to care about the cats, to interest themselves in their happiness and well-being.

I had worried that my parents would treat me like a child. Maybe, in talking to me about being a parent, they were trying the best way they knew how to treat me like an adult.

IT WAS ONLY when it came to Homer that my parents were abashed to offer advice or constructive criticism. This was understandable. The idea of a pet who was blind—and not just blind, but eyeless—was far enough beyond their experience to feel exotic and mysterious. They often observed that, “you do seem to understand him,” and left it at that.

Homer initially inspired more pity in my parents than anything else. The most frustrating fact of life for Homer in my parents’ home was that he was confined to only a few rooms—rooms I wasn’t necessarily in when I was in the house. Homer would sit at the childproof gate and wail piteously if he heard me talking in the kitchen or down the hall.

“Poor baby,” my mother would say, real empathy in her voice. “Life must be so hard for him.”

It wasn’t life that Homer found hard to bear, of course. It was his enforced separation from me and from the other human voices he could hear but never meet. Homer didn’t understand a world in which I was present but not with him, in which there were other people who didn’t exist solely to befriend and play with him.

It wasn’t long into our stay before Homer made his first daring escape from behind the childproof gate. I customarily slid it open just far enough to allow myself entry to or exit from the cat-designated portion of the house. One day, as I was entering, Homer sort of flattened himself sideways and pressed through the mere inches of space between my leg and the wall, like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube. He didn’t get very far that time; being unfamiliar with the layout of my parents’ house, he stopped to get his bearings after only a few feet.

That was the first time.

Homer was impossible to contain after that. I tried to prevent him from squeezing past me by climbing over the gate rather than opening it, but that just gave Homer the idea of jumping over it himself. Vashti and Scarlett could have jumped over the gate all along, but the two of them didn’t especially like to jump—nor were they anxious to encounter the dogs who dwelled on the other side of that gate. Homer had no such compunctions. The only thing holding him back had been his belief that unable to see the gate’s true dimensions, it must have stretched all the way up to infinity. Once he realized its actual height was more like three feet, there was no stopping him.

My parents, as so many before them, were astounded at how quickly Homer learned his way around their home. A sharp right turn out of (or over) the gate brought him into the main hallway. An equally sharp left turn, precisely fifteen full-tilt gallops down, brought him into the living room. A couch to the left of the living room’s entry was flush against the wall and a cinch to climb. Four or five steps along the top of it and he could clamber down behind an end table—wedged in a corner between the couch and a love seat—and hunker down into a spot where it was impossible for humans to follow and catch him. Although, while I was reaching for him over and around the couch, it was easy enough to dart through the legs of the end table, up the side of the love seat, back down onto the ground behind me, and off to farther points unknown.

“That cat’s a meshugana!” my mother always said in a kind of wonder upon witnessing Homer’s feats of speed, dexterity, and chutzpah.

“It shouldn’t be this hard to catch a blind kitten,” my father, gasping slightly, insisted after a chase that had taken him all the way down the other main hall, into my parents’ bedroom, under and over their bed, and had finally culminated atop my mother’s vanity.

In this way, it became inevitable that Homer’s daring would bring him face-to-face with Casey and Brandi. Like Odysseus encountering Cyclopes and Sirens, Homer one day came upon these foreign and heretofore undreamed-of beasts for the very first time.

Casey was a fairly large and tightly muscled dog, although also extraordinarily gentle. Upon running into her (literally) for the first time, Homer didn’t hiss and flee the way Scarlett and Vashti did whenever they thought Casey had strayed too close to the gate separating them. Homer puffed himself up as far as his hair follicles would allow and crouched down defensively, his nostrils going wild as he inhaled and processed Casey’s dog smell. What the heck is this thing? His attempt to make himself appear bigger to Casey, who weighed more than eighty pounds, would have been comical if I didn’t realize how scared he must be.

Homer reached out one tiny, tentative paw to touch Casey’s nose and face. I hovered a few inches away, ready to snatch Homer up at the first sign of growls or aggression. Casey sniffed him with great interest as Homer stood stock-still, almost holding his breath. Then Casey’s enormous pink tongue, bigger than Homer’s whole head, descended onto his face. Homer’s facial muscles contracted, and I knew if he’d had eyelids they would have been screwed shut to protect sensitive areas from this sudden assault of rough wetness. Undeterred by his obvious reluctance, Casey began to lick and groom him methodically.

I don’t think Homer cared very much for being groomed by Casey, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter if he was unfortunate enough to wind up trapped beneath one of her large paws, which Casey employed to keep a squirming Homer in place while she licked him “clean” from top to bottom. If I wasn’t there to separate them, a thoroughly rumpled Homer would end up drenched in dog saliva and spend the next half hour indignantly licking himself free of its odor.

No matter how well you think you understand a pet, there’s always a level on which the workings of their mind remains a mystery. I couldn’t tell you how Casey, who was intensely loyal to our entire family, understood that Homer—a cat—was one of us. But she did. When Homer reached seven months of age and was brought to the vet to be neutered, Casey, according to my parents, sat at the front door and howled for twenty minutes after Homer was taken off in his carrier. When Homer returned, it was Casey who spent two full days guarding the gate that separated her from a groggy, stitched-up Homer. If a car outside backfired or the mailman rang the doorbell, Casey—who had never been anything but affectionate with everybody she’d ever met—raised her hackles and issued a low growl of warning. Whenever Homer turned or whimpered in his sleep during this recovery phase, Casey would yelp an alert, a signal that meant I really ought to check on him.

It took Brandi a bit longer to warm up to Homer. Brandi had a favorite habit of hiding the dog treats my parents gave her in various corners throughout the house. It was infuriating to her that Homer unfailingly sniffed out each and every one of them with the tenacity of a bloodhound. But Brandi was a playful little thing, as was Homer, and she soon discovered the joys of having a playmate who didn’t tower over her the way Casey did.

The two of them killed many an hour chasing each other throughout the house, and soon Brandi was even sharing some of her treats with Homer. Her favorite food was baby carrots, and she’d bring them to Homer by the dozen, dropping them at his feet with a wagging tail. She could never understand why Homer’s only interest in the carrots was to bat them around and chase after them. Who didn’t love eating baby carrots? When Homer would fling them down the hall with his paw, Brandi retrieved them with great patience, depositing them in front of Homer once again and even taking a small bite as if to show him what he was missing. See? They’re for eating, not playing.

Homer’s frequent escapes also brought him into closer contact with my parents. Soon enough, it wasn’t unusual for me to come home in the evening to find Homer purring on the couch next to my mother while she stroked his back and worked on a crossword puzzle or watched an old movie. “He looks so comfortable,” she would say, almost apologetically. “I didn’t want to disturb him.”

And I would catch my father awkwardly petting Homer—realizing that the way cats like to be petted is different from dogs, and doing his best to smooth Homer’s fur in an even, soothing fashion. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s such a good boy?”

Homer often brought his stuffed worm along with him when he engineered one of his breakouts, the Bonnie to his Clyde. It became a featured player in his interactions with my father. Homer would toss the stuffed worm up into the air, his head tilted at a slight angle as he listened for the bell in its tail to hit the ground and jingle its precise location. Then he’d pounce on it ferociously, turning onto his back with the worm clutched between his front paws while he kicked at it frantically with his hind legs, as if to indicate the worm was putting up a fierce struggle. Having finally “subdued” the bedraggled thing, he would carry it over to my father and drop it at his feet—sitting eagerly in a posture that suggested he was waiting for my father to throw the worm across the room so Homer could wrestle it into submission and bring it over to him once again.

“He wants to play fetch with me!” my father would say, as if this dog-like behavior was a revelatory code understood only between the two of them.

It was during one of these games of fetch, a couple of months after Homer was neutered, that my father turned to me and said, “You did a good thing, you know.” He threw the worm for Homer to catch and, as he watched Homer tear across the room, he said it again. “You did a good thing for this cat.”

My eyes, quite unexpectedly, filled with tears.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said.