But she adjusted. The morning after we got there, she’d already peed on the welcome mat by the door, eaten 90 percent of the other cat’s food, and was basking in the sunroom, chattering angrily at the birds who dared graze at the feeder hung outside the window. I sat on the couch, watching her perched on the chair she had sneezed on to mark as her own.
I was thinking that Mavis and I could maybe pioneer a new type of marriage situation, one that some relationship expert would eventually dissect in The New Yorker. Mavis could continue to hang laundry on a line and churn her own butter in rural Michigan, and I would spend the days counting down to my early death in my dark, refrigerated Chicago apartment, scowling out my peephole at neighbors who made too much noise getting their groceries off the elevator. Mavis could keep picking her own blueberries to make jam under the blazing sun and knitting socks to sell at the Christmas bazaar in the church basement, while I could bankrupt myself ordering $17 cocktails at rooftop bars and waiting four hours for a brunch table downtown. We’d meet up occasionally to talk about married stuff (uh, property taxes? which big-box retailer has the best deal on economy-size containers of soup?!) and pretend we were still interested in having sex. Sounds like a dream, right? But oh no, fam—apparently marriage involves a little thing called compromise, a concept of which I’d been previously unaware. For Mavis, this means having to wake up to a framed photo of Ice Cube on her bedroom wall, but for me, it apparently means GIVING UP EVERYTHING I EVER LOVED.
Everything here is dangerous and/or irritating: mosquitos the size of a fist bite through my winter-weight hoodie (I will never change) and leave itchy, egg-size welts in their wake; loud-ass frogs in our backyard pond croak all goddamned night; bats flap their leathery wings hysterically while trapped in the woodstove; squirrels in the branches over the deck hurl walnuts at our heads maniacally as we grill farm-stand corn for lunch. Sick raccoons fall out of trees, fat groundhogs chew through the fence to snack on the okra and tomatoes I refuse to help harvest, and young cats disembowel field mice and leave them in the middle of the dining room at dawn. Gas is thirty-seven cents a gallon. You can buy shoes at the grocery store. The farmers’ market is full of actual farmers instead of bearded hipsters in distressed flannel pontificating about peak asparagus season. This week on Americana Horror Story.
But the Serpent of Old was learning to love her new life, or at least pretend to love it just to spite me whenever Mavis hovered nearby to get a picture of her to post on Instagram. By the time I packed my good cassoulet pan and a bag of assorted sensible cotton briefs and joined them in the Wolverine State, it seemed that Helen had adjusted quite nicely, mastering the art of intimidating the other cats with a punishing look and learning to use stairs for the first time in eight years relatively quickly. After a couple of weeks of giving me the cold shoulder, she busted open the door to my bedroom and sat at my feet demanding to be picked up and placed on my pillow. “Are you happy that I’m here?” I asked tentatively after she placed her moist butthole right on the spot where my eye had recently been.
“LOL NO.”
“Of course you’re not.” I shoved her off the bed and started counting the twenty-nine assorted vitamins and medicines I have to take every morning. “Why did you even bother coming in here?”
“I enjoy watching you suffer. Hey, did you know that these people eat three different vegetables with every meal? Also they don’t consider milkshakes a food group. You could learn a lot by following their example.” And she sashayed out of the room with her tail swishing lazily behind her and an unidentified human finger between her teeth.
I have followed their example, okay? Under Helen’s mockingly watchful eye, I started doing healthy things like “eating roasted cauliflower” and “deciding to read a book even though there is a television in the room.” Which brings us back to my newest adversary: days with a limit on screen time. Helen doesn’t care. I mean, she’s a goddamn cat, so why should it matter if I’m two weeks behind on Queen Sugar? I’ve learned that every child in the neighborhood can feel a television’s electromagnetic waves from three blocks away and will wander into the room on some “Hey, whatcha watching?” shit just as it reaches a crucial point in the episode.
But then she bit a kid. I didn’t even see it coming until it was too late. One minute we were settled on the pointless couch in the room with no TV, watching as tan legs in postage-stamp-size shorts whizzed past us to grab precut vegetables and other snacks at the bottom of the food pyramid from the kitchen, and the next, Helen was pressed into the couch’s corner with her ears flattened against her head. I tossed the book I was pretending was an episode of Survivor on the floor, hooked my hands under two scentless armpits, and lifted Addison? Madison? out of harm’s way, only to be caught off guard when Helen latched on to my arm instead. After I wrestled my arm away, we sat looking at each other for a second, her eyes angry and mine surprised, my blood smeared across the tiny patch of white on her chin. “What has gotten into you?” I asked as what sounded like an entire third grade trampled up the stairs to get away from her. Helen responded by bear-hugging the smooth, slender ankle of a mom who’d just arrived to collect her Caitlin and plunging her teeth into the softest part.
—
Later that night, at midnight, Helen and I were sitting alone in an exam room at the emergency vet. The harsh yellow lights overhead made the cat hair stand out in sharp relief against my faded black hoodie and pajama pants. Helen, in her carrier on the table across from me, was seething. It had taken snow boots, two pairs of fireplace gloves, three old towels, and a folding chair to trap her in the hard plastic case. The doctor entered shaking an X-ray, disconcertingly cheerful considering the time of night and the severity of my situation. Maybe he was nervous. He told me that Helen’s chest cavity was small (I know) and her lungs were constricted (mm-hmm) and her heart was abnormally small (FOR SURE), and while none of that explained why she’d lost her shit, fainted, then rose up to launch herself in my general direction again, it definitely was the reason for her labored breathing and a possible cause of her “emotional breakdown.” Helen snorted at that.
The doctor droned on about her poor quality of life, how she had suffered from a URI and a compromised immune system since she was born, how I might have to chase her down and put her in a headlock every day to force Prozac into her, how he couldn’t guarantee that her behavior would ever go back to normal. I started adding up all my credit card balances in my head, trying to calculate how much I was willing to pay for this cat. “Well, why don’t we start with—?”
“I’m ready to die,” Helen interrupted, tapping the bars of the cage. “Get the paperwork ready, I want the shot.” The doctor excused himself and left us alone.