MoxVib

Do we deserve our pets? The question was on my mind as I crawled over the kitchen floor in the 5 a.m. hour, swabbing with a damp paper towel at the shards of glass left after the cat smashed a jam jar on the floor. She’d done it on purpose; I knew that as soon as the sound of shattering glass woke me in the dark. At bedtime, someone had used the jar to get a drink of water and had left it on the counter, and the cat, sensing dawn was near, or near enough, decided to see whether knocking it off the counter would get the people up and moving.

It took effort to add this cat to our family life. I grew up sharing a house with a profusion of cats and dogs — two or three of each at any given time — but my own kids, living in city apartments, reached double-digit ages without ever having a pet around. Like grilling burgers on the driveway, animal companionship was something from my childhood that didn’t translate to theirs.

At last, though, we got a slightly larger apartment, with slightly larger bathrooms. If we put a pedestal sink in one of them, there would be just enough room in the corner underneath for a cat box. I measured and confirmed it. We could have a cat.

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This was when I realized I had no idea how one went about getting a cat. Aside from my first cat, a Siamese I received as a gift when I was 7 years old, all the other cats had just sort of happened — wandering out of the woods, usually half-grown, skinny and hungry and maybe suffering from tapeworms. The dearest and best of them, a brawny gray-and-white piebald, had turned up in a litter of newborn kittens in the drainage ditch on a cold day with their eyes still closed; we nursed him and his siblings from a syringe till he was fat and round, and he grew up to trail along after me making conversational chirrups and grumbles, unaware of any difference between himself and people.

Now a cat had to be found — found and, it seemed, earned. Friends recommended an online pet-finding portal, whose listings pointed the way to an assortment of animal rescue groups, near and far. The animal rescuers had questionnaires, screening humans for suitability: Will you feed your cat canned or dry food … Is your schedule steady … How many hours a day will your cat be alone at home? One application ran to eight pages, including social media account names, employment information, prior employment information and two references.

I could understand what the questions were trying to get at, especially the gantlet of questions to root out would-be declawers: Do you currently have or have you in the past had a declawed kitten/cat? Do you plan to declaw your kitten/cat? What would you do if your kitten/cat would not stop clawing your furniture? But something, I felt, had gotten tangled up about the concept of “animal rescue.” Rescue is a strangely dual concept: a basic moral duty — to refuse to rescue someone would be a grave failure — but also an act of heroism. Everyone should take care of a needy kitten; almost no one was worthy to take care of a needy kitten. Or cat. To specifically ask for a fresh, new kitten seemed suspect, a callow rejection of all the older cats and their accumulated vulnerabilities.

We also wanted just one cat, to fill our new cat-size space. That was its own problem. One widespread rule, or shibboleth, across the listings seemed to be that you couldn’t have a kitten unless you adopted two kittens, or unless there was another cat in the house, so the new one would not get lonesome.

This seemed to me to oversimplify feline psychology: None of the cats of my childhood paid the least attention to any of the other cats, except my brother’s cat (acquired from the dumpsters behind his violin teacher’s apartment), who had an irresistible, furious urge to maul my Siamese. On the back of my left hand, perfectly centered, I still have a matched set of puncture scars where she sank her teeth once when I grabbed her in mid-attack. The cat is decades gone, and my hand is twice as wide now; no house cat could stretch its jaws to fit the bite, but I’ll carry the mark to the grave.

Every cat is its own event, and how can you really aim to script it? We’d never thought of ourselves as “rescuing” our cats. My old gray-and-white galoot, my ditch kitten, was mine because other people came by and adopted his daintier or prettier littermates. You get the cat the world gives you.

If the world can even be persuaded to give you one. This was 2½ years ago, in the thick of the pandemic shutdowns, and it was hard to even reach a person. The applications went out and no word, let alone a kitten, came back. Finally, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wrote to say it was having an adoption event right away, with an evening appointment available that same week. Picking a single kitten would be fine.

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And then we were there, in a backroom full of tidy cages, to make a decision. Very gently, with no pressure, the ASPCA people asked whether we would be willing to take a cat with a medical challenge. One had a damaged eye, which needed medicine every day and which might eventually be removed. Some had injured or missing limbs.

The whole idea of making a choice of it seemed absurd and wrong. Any cat in the room could be lovely, or possibly terrible. A white one with spots stood on his hind legs and called out, sweet and friendly, but what if he called out like that all night? Surely someone else would say yes to such a nice kitten if we didn’t. But then — the ASPCA opened a cage door on a skinny kitten, entirely black, with yellow eyes. She came out purring. In the cage above her was an almost identical black kitten, with prettier golden eyes and one missing paw. But she was sleepy, at the moment, and the kitten with four paws was purring at us.

Black cats, I’d heard, were harder to place. No one could say this kitten didn’t need us. There was no reason in the world not to take her.

So there she went. Here she is. On closer inspection, the fur between her eyes and her ears was sparse, and it never grew any thicker, so the skin shows through in strange silver-white patches. Her tail has a kink in it — possibly handed down, along with the melanin gene, from a Siamese ancestor.

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Not long after we brought her home, I lay down beside her to take a nap, and she reached out her little front paws and embraced my wrist, pulling my hand against her forehead as she snoozed. Only later would I understand this meant she was trying to bite me and was too sleepy to open her mouth.

She does dote on people, at close range, from the moment she scrambles onto my desk, kinked tail thwacking at the keyboard as I try to start the day’s work, till she jumps on the younger boy’s bed to get into the middle of story time at night. But she will stalk away if someone tries to scoot up nearer to her. My old cats, even the half-feral ones, would snuggle up at night; this one simply showed up on the middle pillow in the bed, between the sleeping adults’ heads, once she was sure they’d stopped moving.

Surely you’ve heard people explain how their cats are. This one makes high agile jumps to propel herself sideways off the walls, and also crashes headfirst into things or stumbles off the top of the piano, hitting the keys on the way down. She leaps out in ambush to biff at my ankles, paws soft, claws always gently retracted. A roach showed up once, and she confusedly helped me corner it so I could squash it; once she accidentally ate a spider while trying to figure out what it was. She gets wet and dry food, and snubs them both half the time.

Lest any of that sound sweet, there’s the breaking glass. Or the now-familiar clatter of the salt shaker hitting the floor. Or the sound of her hooking her claws into the baseboard heater cover in the middle of the night and making it go “thwack.” Maybe a second cat in the house would distract her, but I doubt it. Her sense of play — in my mother’s house, she does full circuits of the bedroom on the tops of the furniture, like a child pretending the floor is lava — flows seamlessly into her sense of malice. This is the cat we got. I can’t imagine a different one.

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