Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [78]
The checkbook is safely home on the bureau.
The judge gives the feather test; only this judge uses an orange ball on a bouncy wire, and one cat cringes and hisses at it. My cat reaches out for it with both arms to the shoulder through the bars. A happy cat. I try to look her up in the catalog, but I can’t find my way through the pages.
The judge passes out ribbons, but I don’t know what they mean. Cat shows are not a spectator sport. Any fool at a horse show can see Number 27 refuse the In-and-Out, or hear the bonk when a hock clips the top bar, but in this place you have to belong to know what’s going on. Or, I suppose, to care.
I pick my way back through the card tables, down the row of Rexes. The black-and-pink has been taken from its cage by its owner, a motherly-looking woman in a low-cut blouse seated on a folding chair. I smile nervously down at it. I’m told they feel warm to the touch, like puppies, because of the short fur. I try not to notice its whiskers.
As I pass, it worms its way up the woman’s front and buries its face in her neck, nuzzling and licking, and begins to purr. I stop to listen; yes, it’s purring. Purring? That? I’m as shaken as if a frog had said “meow.” Distorted, monstrous, warped by human meddling till God Himself wouldn’t know it as a cat, it thrusts its head against its human’s neck and purrs as if it had a right to purr. It’s a cat. I suppose it must eat its dinner and wash its paws, sprawl on the rug in the sunshine, all those things, as if it didn’t know or humbly accepted what we’ve done to it. All our long, expensive efforts to turn cat into not-cat have been in vain; strong as wire, catness still runs humming through the generations of increasingly uncatlike cats, and just like Kallibunker’s mother on her Cornish farm, this thing can purr. Leave it alone for a few generations and it would cure its own monstrosity, flesh out, grow fur, have real ears and whiskers. Persians that snuffle like bulldogs would grow their noses back; Siamese that look like strings would broaden, and catch mice.
The cat triumphant. Cats 10; people 0.
Satisfied, I get my coat and leave.
10
Medical Matters
Cats feel pretty good most of the time. They rarely indulge in the ailments so popular on television: the common cold, flu, headaches, insomnia, sinus pain, indigestion, lower back pain, hangovers, coffee nerves, sore throats, and sunburn. On any given day they probably feel better than we do. They live the way we should, and while they may eat an occasional button or length of thread, they never go out and buy junk food full of salt, fats, and sugar, and they don’t need exercise clubs to keep the muscles taut; an occasional dash up the curtains and a little stretching does it.
Their talent for sleeping anywhere and any time is enviable. Their capacity for contentment keeps the heart and nerves and gastric juices in the pink. If they’ve eaten unwisely, and even sometimes when they haven’t, they vomit swiftly and easily. They do not stress their systems with office politics, nuclear war, the stock market, or whether their children are using drugs, but live contained in the savored moment, an example to us all. And the lucky cats of responsible people have the advantage of dizzying recent progress in feline veterinary medicine.
It’s as well they don’t get sick often, because a sick cat is a discouraging creature to nurse. We go to the grocery store and buy a lamb chop, get down the heating pad and the cashmere shawl, sit beside it, and speak gently; it turns its head aside.