Zoe is my mother's cat. For awhile, Zoe was my mother's substitute for a man. She arrived at my mother's house because one morning my mother woke up and decided she needed something besides empty in her apartment. So we drove to the SPCA. My mother said, "No kittens. I want a grown cat. No one ever wants the grown cats."
But when we went into the cat room, there they were: a cage full of squirming kittens. We bent close to the cage. We cooed. We wiggled our fingers at their pink noses, at their unsteady paws. That's when Zoe trotted to the front of the cage. She looked at us. We looked at her. That's when she decided to go to the bathroom. Right there. Right there as we watched. And she covered her business when she was done.
"Well," I said, "that's something, huh? She's considerate."
"No kittens," my mother said. Still, she didn't move from the front of the cage. She smiled and smiled and smiled. The SPCA lady told her she could take one of the kittens out and play with it in the playroom for a bit, to see if it was a good fit.
Still, my mother made a big show of looking at all the other cats. "This one is pretty," she said of an older tabby. "And look at this one's face--so much personality!"
But she wasn't fooling anyone. After she made her rounds, she had the SPCA lady bring Zoe out of her cage. The three of us sat in the playroom for five minutes. My mother and I watched as Zoe climbed unsteadily on the scaffolding of a scratching post. We watched as she fell. We watched as she hid.
"She's pretty cute," I said.
Ten minutes later, Zoe was wearing a pink collar and being transported from the SPCA to my mother's apartment in a cardboard carrying case.
Zoe is a good cat. She has a cranky meow and a fascination with anything minty (toothpaste, Chapstick, or Altoids). Her ears are too big for her body. Her tail and paws are, too. She likes to sleep on my brother's bed, but only when he's not home. She likes boxes and wet towels. She likes to knock over water glasses just to watch them fall. She fetches (rubberbands or napkins) just like a dog. She likes to crawl inside backpacks, briefcases, and totes. She doesn't like ham or pork. She doesn't like my mother's boyfriend's possibly gay black belt son.
Zoe understands me perfectly. Or at least she did this week. She was with me all Friday as I sat in the silence of my mother's house and graded the seventy-five research papers I need to have done by Tuesday. She climbed up on my lap and put her face in my face and looked at me with her big green eyes. She purred. She smelled the uncapped red pen that was clenched in my hand. She huffed out her displeasure. The pen did not smell good. And when I set it down so I could take a break from writing comments about proper MLA citation and vague pronouns, when I took a break so I could put my forehead on her warm forehead, that's when Zoe reached her big Bobcat paw up to the red pen, hooked it under the pads of her feet, and dragged it off the table. The red pen clattered to the floor and made a surprising amount of noise in the silent kitchen. Zoe looked pretty happy with that result. She tipped her head up at me. She twitched her whiskers.
"Yes, good girl," I said, and I petted her. "Good, good, smart girl."
I have four more papers to go.
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