“Girl With a Cat,” oil on canvas, by Ivan Kramskoy, 1882.
“Writing is also my cat. Writing lets me face it.”
—Charles Bukowski, On Cats
I.
My mother chases my female, Ernie, out of the kitchen so her two females, Iggy and Ginger, can eat their breakfasts in peace. I’ve had Ernie since she was a kitten and never denied or rationed her food, yet she’s grown into a borderline psychotic adult when mealtime comes. Meanwhile, Nicolas, my male, patrols the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms, howling about God knows what. Perhaps the horror of being trapped in a house bristling with estrogen. These are cats of the developed world. Their litterboxes are freshened daily, which is the human luxury equivalent of taking a warm bath every day; their food and water dishes are never empty; their communal Amazon best-seller cactus-shaped scratching post is replaced as needed; and since I moved in with my mother not long ago, the tabbies have two laps to choose from for their midday naps.
Since my childhood, my mother has had the same breakfast every morning: Two Shredded Wheat Original biscuits, a chopped banana and handful of strawberries, 2% milk. I wish I could cut loose like that, just plunk some strawberries and pour some milk into my bowl of cereal. But right now, measuring everything with my mom’s vintage yellow Tupperware cups is the only life choice I can trust myself to make without inviting bad consequences. Something I can safely follow through with. Last night, on a whim, I joined Noom. I’d like to lose the weight I’ve gained this past year, and Noom keeps popping up in my Facebook newsfeed, promising I can do it. I just have to believe. It’s Day 1 of my free three-month trial and I’m unable to complete the short task list the program has set before me. I’m too distracted by my anxiety about being distracted by a new app on my iPhone. I guess I don’t believe. I’m 45 and living with my 75-year-old mother, who’s in the early middle stage of Parkinson’s Disease.
My cats love to be groomed. They purr and weave around my legs whenever I put on the glove with the rubber nubs. If I start with Nicolas, Ernie sits and stares rather creepily at me; if I start with Ernie, Nicolas lies on the floor and washes his face, squinting up a storm. Both are confident they will get their turn. They are cats of the developed world. My mother wishes I would brush them more often so she wouldn’t have to vacuum so often. Four tabbies generate a lot of fugitive fur, a lot of expelled hairballs to step in on your way to the bathroom at three a.m. But by the time I get around to it, usually my mom has beat me to it. She’s always reminding me to do all kinds of things around the house, and she’s always beating me to it. This arrangement seems to suit us. My mother has accepted that I’m depressed, even if she doesn’t understand why or why I can’t move past it; I’ve accepted that one way she copes with the tremors in her right hand and arm, the right side of her face, is by criticizing me but then picking up my slack without complaint. It validates her to have someone to look after, and I need looking after.
I didn’t realize X was grooming me. I just knew nobody had ever demonstrated such enthusiasm for me, and I was willing to overlook our vast age difference and other red flags for a shot at love. We had everything in common. I believed everything he said: You are beautiful, talented, our meeting was preordained. He had just retired from a long and successful career as a journalist and wanted to write a novel. He said he needed prompting, I said that’s my specialty, he said, “You’re hired!” Four months later, while we sat at the back of a restaurant one evening, I was drunk and crying to a friend on the phone about how I couldn’t understand why I kept getting yelled at. X snatched the phone from me and demanded, “Who is this?” The next morning he threatened to surrender my cats to a local shelter simply because I went for breakfast without him. I needed to leave but I had lost myself and my sense of purpose.
But I loved my cats and now we are six, two humans and four tabbies, and hopefully someday not too far off, I’ll feel safe enough again to freely pour milk into my morning bowl of cereal.
II.
It is only Day 2 and I’m hooked. Coasting on the adrenaline from completing yesterday’s task list, which included skipping the morning weigh-in (apparently it’s normal to avoid this in the beginning, and who am I to contest the wisdom of Noom psychologists?), logging my food and beverage intake (I was at a caloric deficit, although my waistline would disagree), and setting my fitness goal for today (in a nutshell: wake up). Now it is today. I have achieved my goal of waking up and am listening to a mini-lesson on Noom’s food color system while I prepare my stovetop espresso. Ernie is staring at me from across the kitchen. It’s five a.m. and I haven’t fed her yet, and the simple fact is that she must be fed before I may prepare my espresso. With last night’s “fall back” time change, I could be accused of animal neglect.
Noom’s color system—30% green good-for-you foods, 45% yellow good-for-you-in-moderation foods, 25% orange consume-with-caution foods—is superior to the traditional food pyramid thrust upon us early in life. Every parent has or will eventually affix the pyramid infographic to their fridge. And every child has or will eventually weigh the future consequences of refusing their dinner veggies against the immediate consequences of holding their noses and swallowing an overcooked carrot-cauliflower-broccoli medley that “smells like butt!” Noom doesn’t mind if you skip the medley. A plate 30% filled with strawberries or shrimp is just as healthful. Binge away.
A medley of differences between X and me kept me from entering into the relationship with complete abandon. Some cautious, watchful part of me knew it would not end well, and still I got hooked. Now I think I understand why: Our relationship plate was, in the beginning, 100% orange. According to X, after a decade of celibacy to heal his heart and focus on his career, he was ready to devote himself fully to love. To me. He wanted to swoop me out of my drab apartment and into a seaside cottage, be at my beck and call while I wrote my next novel. He suggested we get married so he could make me the beneficiary of his pensions. Mornings when we didn’t wake up beside each other, he texted, “X loves April more than he did yesterday, but not as much as he will love her tomorrow.”
And then the love portion abruptly dropped to 0%. I questioned X about why he wanted me to block this male friend or that on Facebook and was punished with an absence of gushing texts from him the next morning. Texts, period. Not even a reply to my late-afternoon, “Are we still on for dinner? I love you…” I was sick with anxiety when he arrived to pick me up. At the restaurant, we sat at the bar instead of a table and I drank three Old Fashions while he chatted with the barmaid for over an hour, never inviting me to join the conversation. He never once looked at me or touched me.
Several days later, on our way to Walmart, X said, “I will not be treated the way you treated me at the bar.” I asked what he meant. I hadn’t treated him any way, while I might as well have been invisible. He yelled, “I will not put up with this abuse!” He knew I don’t like to argue in cars, so his solution was to idle over the double-yellow line dividing Route 7. There were no vehicles behind us or coming toward us, but that could change any second. “Please, keep driving,” I said, straining to keep the shaking in my hands and legs out of my voice. He started scrolling through his Twitter feed. He wouldn’t do anything until I stopped talking to him that way. A car came into view behind us and I started crying. X continued scrolling through his feed, liking and retweeting, until the car honked. The rest of the way to Walmart, he rested his hand on my thigh, content. “It’s about communication, baby. We must be open with each other if this relationship’s going to work. I want it to work. Do you?”
Ernie is psychically trying to murder me with her stare. I still haven’t fed her. I’m fixated on today’s Noom task list. Nicolas comes into the kitchen and stares at me in solidarity. I decide there’s nothing the love of two cats can’t cure, and orange remains my favorite color.
III.
My mother says my tabbies are terrorists. This might be true. Hers wait primly for their morning and evening meals and never dare get caught on the living room sofas, whereas mine scream for their food and force my mom’s cats into surrendering theirs. Furthermore, once their bellies are full, my tabbies lounge brazenly on the living room sofas, grooming themselves and squinting approvingly at each other as my mother scolds them.
My mother says I drink too much of her wine, especially since I typically down a double Kraken and Coke before dinner. Much like an aspiring sly teenager (or self-satisfied, bullying cat), I’ve come to believe if I sneak a glass of cab at bedtime, while my mom is downstairs watching Survivor, she won’t notice.
But I’m not self-satisfied like my tabbies. And I am not a bully.
Last night during my habitual pre-sleep wine and phone chat with a beloved and wonderful friend, I learned about Kitty Genovese*. Her story has been in the foreground of my thoughts since. In my hyper-focused, compulsive thought process style, Kitty’s story has been all I can think about. It’s a classic tale of the bystander effect. It’s severe and horrific, and it has led me to reflect anew on how some people treated me after I lost my husband to suicide on August 9, 2020—how, in the years since, as I’ve stumbled and fallen and stumbled even more, some people have averted their eyes as others have vultured in.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting my story is severe and horrific like Kitty’s. The young woman died, for fuck’s sake, because no one called for help when she was clearly in danger. Not only did bystanders allow Kitty to lay in her pooling blood after being raped and repeatedly stabbed by her assailant, but also, they allowed the assailant to return later that night and finish her off.
After Sam killed himself, I disappeared into a world of dark liquor and Miss Vickie’s chips. Friends fell away as my grief escalated, and my tabbies asserted, in their feline language, “We’ll stand by you.” Nicolas was diligent about sustaining my capacity for love. At every opportunity, he would knead the left side of my chest, where he believed my broken heart still beat. Ernie, perhaps being female, was attuned to the disease that would eventually make itself known in my cervix. Any time I was sitting cross-legged, she would curl herself into the diamond-shaped space between my legs and rest her head against my pelvis.
I can’t stop imagining what went through Kitty’s mind as she lay bleeding to death in the community she had entrusted with her safety. Did she know people could hear her cries for help? Did she convince herself, “I’m sure they would if they could.” I told myself similar stories about people intending to do good after Sam’s suicide. I even traded a promising Montréal life for a “fresh start” in the Appalachian town where I’d fallen in love with Sam eight years earlier. As someone with a propensity for perfectionism, fresh starts have a lot of appeal. But there’s no user’s manual for how to start fresh after failing to save your most precious human from murder a priori.
The move to O-Town was rough on my tabbies. A jerky six-hour U-Haul drive is more than enough to induce motion sickness in a person, so imagine how it must feel for two teeny-tiny beings whose trust and safety are entirely in your hands. The night Kitty Genovese was murdered, her life was entirely in the hands of all the bystanders who did nothing. Someone else will call for help, they reasoned. Who could let such a thing happen? they cried after Kitty’s assailant returned to kill her. When I returned to O-Town, I was crying for help myself, but I didn’t see it. I blundered often and often publicly during my year there, and the rawer I became, the easier I was to target or spurn. Circumstances beyond my control kept the insatiable rumor mill spinning, and few people came to my defense. Until, one night, I tried to join Sam.
That’s the thing about bullying: It’s not always overt, in-your-face cruelty and humiliation.
Bystanders play a role, too.
This is why my mother scolds my tabbies for eating her tabbies’ food.
My mother is not a bystander.
IV.
One of my friends has a knack for titles. During our ongoing conversation about the last several years of my life, their senseless cruelty, he will sometimes deploy a turn of phrase that compels me to write. “There’s a poem/essay/short story/novel in there!” I’ll sometimes shout. And sometimes some writing follows. It’s how this work started, although I initially saw it as a book of standalone short-form essays. The passage before my attempt here at a conclusion was previously titled, “A Cry for Help in the Middle of the Night Never Comes at a Convenient Time.” I thought my friend’s turn-of-phrase-cum-title was an incisive commentary on Kitty Genovese’s death, and a fair description of how I’ve often felt over the last several years.
Then one morning as I exercise-biked my way through a hangover while listening to the Spotify playlist “O-Town,” which I’ve since deleted because the pain linked to each song is too fresh, I reached the conclusion I’ve been reaching since my novel Carousel debuted in May 2020: I am not a writer. Any work I’ve sold, awards I’ve received, all fortuitous at best and now I must return to the life path I was travelling prior to a 20-year literary detour. This conclusion brings me at once relief—I’ll never again have to feel guilty about all the time I don’t spend writing—and disquiet—I’m giving up too easily. The bullies, who aren’t my readers yet proclaim that I can’t write, who hate the fact that I can write and I do, and they cannot or they can but do not: They win if I retire my pen. So for now writing is my Bukowski cat, so I can face the bullies.
We’re four days into the New Year. Twenty twenty-three rolled in like a lion and out like a trailer full of slaughtered lambs. My mother’s tremors have worsened, and though it appears to have happened overnight I know it hasn’t. Life has been bounding forward as I’ve been stalling, looking over my shoulder. I’m upset with myself about this, but instead of losing more time on wish-I-hads, I’m spending more time with my mother. She lets me help her now. In August, if I offered help when I saw her struggling to open a jar of pickles or load the printer with paper, she would either wave me away or submit with visible frustration. She wasn’t ready to renounce her ability to manage the details that define her. Yesterday, she asked if I would go to Costco with her for cat litter. She even allowed me to steer the massive, unwieldy shopping cart through the madness of post-holiday shopping, where people were rushing to replenish their kitchens and bathrooms with the staples they’d lost sight of in the blizzard of holiday cheer.
We nearly lost Ginger, my mother’s orange tabby, on New Year’s Day. She discovered a spool of sewing thread while my mother and I were out, so no one was home to intervene when the thread anchored on the jagged groves of her tongue and snaked toward her intestines as she panicked and swallowed in attempt to eliminate the foreign object. The night before Ginger’s surgery, my mother and I sat with her in anxious silence and smoothed her dorsal fur, which had become dull and coarse from dehydration. The other tabbies, Iggy, Ernie, and Nicolas, formed a cavalcade around her, circling protectively and touching their noses to hers, and then looking at my mother and me as if to ask, “What will happen to us when she’s gone?” We are a pack.
On Day 3, much to the automated disappointment of my Noom support team, I deleted the app from my phone. Like the epiphany born from the awkward morning-after parting of a one-night stand, I realized what Noom was for me: A smart alternative to self-harm, yet still harmful. My ongoing attempt at denying my truth, all because a few assholes claim it’s false. Largely, I have allowed my heart and sometimes my gut to guide me through life, and largely life has rewarded me for my trust in the inherent benevolence of the universe. Now is a time when trust (faith, if you will) is critical. We are six, my mother, the tabbies, and me, and as Ginger reminded us on the first day of this New Year, even though we have only now, we have one another and that is tremendous. We are a pack.
April Ford finds purpose and pleasure in helping underrepresented groups explore their passions and aptitudes for writing. Her books include Carousel: A Novel (Inanna Publications), winner of the 2020 International Book Awards for LGBTQ Fiction; The Poor Children: Stories, winner of the 2013 Santa Fe Writer’s Project Program for Fiction; and Death Is a Side-Effect: Poems (Frog Hollow Press, 2019). Her next book, People Are Metaphors and Goodbyes: Poems, is forthcoming Fall 2024 with Cactus Press Poetry. www.aprilfordauthor.com
