When I'm not dreaming of tornadoes, I dream of kittens

I used to have this red t-shirt I loved to wear around, when I was maybe six. On the t-shirt, in black cursive, it said Little Lady, with one big loopy “L” making the first letter for both words. Around the words, in the same loopy black hand, were a hat, a hand holding a purse, and two little high heel shoes. Like I said, it was my favorite.



I mention this because when I was six, just like when I was five and four and seven, what I wanted more than anything in the world was a cat. My cousin M., six years older than I, had a cat named Honeydew we brought to our house for a couple of days, and after that I was mad for M. and also for cats. I was mad for the word honeydew, though the melon, not so much.

My parents tried. My mother drove me to the depressingly white and tiny pound to pick a cat for my very own. Am I imagining that the pound, not only was it next to the municipal dump, but also it had barred windows? There were no kittens at the pound, but there were a few cats. At this stage I was very guided by my mother, and anyway none of the these cats were my hoped-for kitten, and so I let mom steer me toward a cat she liked because it was “docile.” This was her word, “docile.”

There was no waiting period or calling-the-landlord nonsense at this pound, so after my mother gave them the ten bucks, the cat was ours. We loaded it into the cardboard box we’d brought, set the box at my feet, and headed home.

Within a couple of minutes, it became clear that what my mom had taken for an admirable calmness of personality was, in fact, the serenity of a beast about to meet its maker. Halfway down the hill, the cat had tucked its head against its tail and died right there at my feet, nested on one of our orange bath towels I’d added to the box to welcome my new pet into our household. My mom screeched the car around and headed back up the hill. Back at the pound, the attendant apologized profusely and returned our ten dollars.

On the way home for the second time, mom stopped at the dump and pitched the bath towel.

Some time later, my mom got a phone number for someone who had free kittens. There was a grey one, the woman told us, and three black ones. She would meet us in the parking lot of her church. She would bring all the kittens in a box so I could see them. Yes, if my heart was set on the grey one she would hold it for me, but she’d go ahead and bring them all.

The woman was a little late meeting us in the parking lot. When she pulled out the box, there was no grey kitten. The grey kitten, she apologized, made a suicide leap out the window somewhere around the Kroger.

That’s how I ended up with Ebony, the sweet black cat who was my very own. My mom named her.

Ebony and I and my Little Lady t-shirt (and, eventually, the Cabbage Patch Kid I finally wheedled from my parents) had many fun adventures, mostly me wandering around someplace imagining I was an orphan. Once I locked Ebony in the linen closet, where she liked to lay on the towels, and forgot about her. That night, I was convinced she’d run away, and I was a very sad girl until two days later when I finally needed a fresh towel. There was my cat. On the towels. Where I’d locked her.

Eventually, we moved to the country, where my mom decreed that now all pets were outside pets. In retrospect, I’m appalled, but at the time, what could I do? My inside-outside cat was now exclusively outside. On the upside, our place attracted a lot of strays, and I was allowed to keep them. The first one was a grey cat I named Tinkerbelle, and I was pleased to have my sweet black cat AND the grey cat I’d always wanted.

But life is not only addition. It is division, irrational numbers, foiling and subtraction. One evening my mom and I went for a walk and Tinkerbelle trotted behind. A car came zooming down our road at high speed and, as many cars would do in the years that followed, hit my cat. After the car zoomed by, my mom and I looked at each other.

“I was so scared that car was going to hit your cat!” my mom said.

“Me too!” I said. But Tinkerbelle was just rolling around on the ground like cats do, arching her back and paddling her paws in the air. On my mom and I walked.

We kept looking back, and the cat kept paddling her paws in the air, only now it seemed like she’d been doing it a really long time.

“Did that car hit your cat?” my mom asked.

I ran back, and sure enough, the paddling was getting robotic, staticky. And that’s the second time a cat died at my feet.

The next stray that showed up was Kichebo, a tiny feral calico who kept the place supplied with kittens, and the kittens of kittens, for the next several years. I was always allowed to keep two or three cats, but no more, so with each new litter that appeared, I’d decide: do I want one of these? And if so, which older cat do I give away to make room? In this way, I thought a lot about friendship.

But in some ways this was probably a good system, since cats continued to disappear and die. Ebony never adjusted to outside life and all the other cats, and presently she ran away. One kitten had a hole in its neck from a fatal worm and had to be shot by my dad in the woods with a borrowed bb gun. Another time my two favorite half-growns, the Tuesday cat and the Wednesday cat (they were from a litter of seven, obviously), were frisking about the ditch near the road when a motorcycle slammed through. Its front wheel caught the Wednesday can and tossed her through about five cartwheels before she slapped to the pavement, soft and dead.

The motorcycle stopped, came back. The young man driver shook and shook his head. “Was that your cat? I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” he said to me. I was still standing there in the front yard, where I’d been, only now I was clutching the Tuesday cat and not letting him down.

“It’s okay,” I said to him. “It happens all the time.” Then I went upstairs to my room and cried a little.

But you should not be distracted by all the death in this story. Death happens. It’s no reason not to love something, just because it might die cartwheeling. Instead, you should focus on the promise of kittens. Kittens! When the cat has them, will you be able to find them? Will they be beautiful and original, like no kittens ever before? Kittens. They’re so sweet and incipient, and like pork chops I haven’t had one in years.

I anticipated graduate school gleefully, not only because it meant I would shortly be a famous writer, but because it meant once again I could have a proper cat, the kind that lives inside with you and is fixed and has regular vet checkups and a collar with tinkley charms. Talking to the teachers at the prospective graduate schools, this is what I told them: I’m going to live alone and I’m going to have a cat.

But because I didn’t know yet how to say no, I lived instead with two people: a man allergic to women and a woman allergic to cats. My plan was derailed, my clear and simple plan to go to graduate school, to live with my cat and become a writer. We were weather moving through America, my roommates and I from a vast generation in which it seemed all men were named Matt. We were like a giant cold front, edges visible because of all those Jennifers and Matts. “Matt called for you.” “Which Matt?” Matt was also our roommate, the gay man with three biological brothers and forty-three fraternity brothers, who never had lived with women before, save good old mom. Our other roommate was a tiny storm.

My life, part II, was occasioned by my fat orange cat. When I adopted him, I got kicked out of the apartment by that year's crop of roommates. Then commenced the living alone with my cat. Some writing happened, but it was slow. I was trying to wake myself from a dream of my life cartwheeled into the ditch.



I abruptly decided Wednesday that it is time for me again to succumb to a kitten, with all the sweetness and incipience that implies. And now, I am driving my husband mad.

“We haven’t adopted any pets together; both our pets we got separately!” I explain. Sometimes I say, “See how nice I am when I am happy? Think how nice I’ll be when I get a kitten!” Sometimes I say, “I think the dog wants a kitten.” Sometimes I just whisper “Kitten!”

“Stop talking about kittens!” he says each time. “No! No kittens!”

I explain further that this isn’t nagging, what I’m doing. This is called taking steps to meet your goals. This is called persistence, and it’s the kind of thing that will help me to get ahead in life.