This Month's Story

(Originally published in 2004)

It seems that, instead of our having one, we have two identical black cats. One black tom lives outside our house, one inside. To put a nice face on it, it’s very confusing. The confusion comes with the fact that the Holly that lives outside the house comes when he is called. The Holly that lives inside the house, doesn’t.

In that simple difference there exists a world of aggravation.

When I am outside and I want Holly all I have to do yell his name two or three times and wait. Sometimes, the waiting may stretch out to a minute or two. But that’s not because he’s not coming, he’s coming, he just may have been a good ways away. And he is hustling. More than once, after I’ve made my call, I’ve caught a glimpse of him coming from way up the street, dashing home.

Of course, this is Holly we are talking about. So, when he gets to the porch, his pace abruptly changes. It becomes the amble of a stroller, a cat who just happens to be passing by. He will saunter up to me and sort of gaze around, with a ‘no big thing, I’m here’ pose.

But the fact is that he is here and he did come when he was called.

The Holly that lives in the house is another cat entirely. I have called him by name loudly without realizing he was sleeping in a chair ten feet away. Then upon my seeing him, calling again in a loud voice - mind you, I’m looking directly at him when I do this. Nothing happens. Not a hair moves. Not a tail twitch. Nothing.

But there are times when he is inside that I very much want him to answer. Let me show you what I mean.

“Have you put the cat out?”

This is Stella asking. The question is almost rhetorical. We are about to leave to go to Biloxi and expect to be gone for most of the day. Jennie can be trusted in the house for that length of time, but Holly … Once, when we came back from an extended day trip, we found clear signs that we had left an irate cat in the house: the loaf of bread on the kitchen counter was slashed and bits of it thrown on both the kitchen and dining room floor. The papers in my office trash basket were soiled as well as the clean clothes that Stella had left in the dryer.

If we had been in the house during that same period, none of these things would have happened. In fact we might well not have seen Holly at all during the period. But our daring to leave him alone with just Jennie for company for over six hours and the devil will pay.

So when we leave to go somewhere we call for the Holly that lives on the outside. If he doesn’t come, we start looking for the Holly that lives on the inside. This Holly has made a game out of finding places to hide. Places where he can’t be found. Puny places such as under the bed are kitten stuff and he hasn’t tried these in years.

Once, Holly found the perfect hiding place. It was the rear recess of a long, low table standing beside the window in the family room. It was perfect and we almost gave up finding him, when we saw him by chance leaving it to get something to eat.

We solved that problem by putting a small mirror strategically tilted on the windowsill. That stumped Holly for awhile until one day I caught him looking at me looking at him in the mirror. He has not been back there since (although we have left the mirror there as a deterrent to his returning).

Another place was the high cornices over the bedroom windows. These have a low recess behind the wide façade, which makes up their fronts. Holly isn’t too secretive about these two places. He knows that for us to get him down is a project and he loves to sit in the well of one of the cornices and greet us as we enter the bedroom in our search for him. It is weird to come into the room and see a black cat watching you from that height. Holly doesn’t use these places as much now that he has put on a few pounds. Getting up there is evidently a bit of work.

If we are not looking for him, he is normally encamped in some out of the way chair or cusped beside the fireplace. You can usually find him without too much effort. The point is that he will not come when you call him and you have to go looking for him in these odd places.

What is maddening is that he may well not be in the house at all. You may search and search and find nothing and then see ‘the Holly that lives outside’ walk by a window or come to the door asking,

“Did we call?”