Honey and Her Humans

The dog days of summer clung to the East Coast like a vinyl raincoat. In Connecticut, the humans who could drive off to air-conditioned offices did so. They left pets in the heat, their only consolation a few apologetic words. More aid would have been irresponsible: dialing the temperature down during the hottest hours of the day threatened brownouts. Fish and turtles didn’t care. The warmer the air and water, the higher they got. But warmbloods, dogs and cats, had to find ways to retreat with grace.

One August morning, a female Maine coon cat named Honey perched on the family bed and took her master’s parting regrets without demur. A modicum of sorrow was acceptable in a human: at least he wasn’t brooding lately. The cat, an interweave of tans with black accents, stretched languidly. She knew she had to take imprisonment in her barren condominium philosophically. After all, contentment required surrendering to the inevitable rhythms of day and place. And everycat knew about air conditioning problems.

She made good use of the tempo of her life, starting with the wakeup routine. She’d pretend that she was still sleeping when the master jiggled her at the foot of the bed as he fought off his covers. He would lurch to the bathroom and, with luck, still be sitting there when she’d greet him with a friendly meow and hop onto his lap.

While he dressed, she would vault onto the windowsill to watch the rising sun and the sparrows. It was the only time of the day they swooped in and out of the eaves, chattering to taunt her. The birdbrains—as if they could bother a cat. 

Master would march off to the other bedroom—the “home office,” he called it pretentiously—watch a humming white screen, and make black symbols appear on it by striking a plate of pushbuttons. It was a struggle to get on his lap then, but she’d manage when he didn’t fidget or shoo her away. After an hour of such dithering, he’d do something even more ridiculous—don a blazer (a stupid name if ever she’d heard one for a garment to wear in the summer) and head out into the hot sun.

Play could await the evening hours. Sleeping was a full-time occupation for Honey, so it could be timed to anesthetize her against the high temperatures from late morning to evening, when no master was about.

When he’d reappear and walk about the condo with mail and then human food, she could attack. She silently dashed from behind to shadowbox his ankles, barely touching them as he walked from room to room. It felt a bit sissy, but it brought back pleasant memories of hunts for mice in the tall weeds around the house where she had grown up. The temptation to extend her talons made shadowboxing not only a Zen exercise in martial arts but also a Sufi dance with restraint.

The master also provided unwitting bedtime amusement. She gave him a big head start up the stairs and still beat him handily to his bedroom. There he snapped on the air conditioner and began another ritual. She hid her amusement as he struggled with rags once more, changing outlandishly colored cuts of cloth to fit his ridiculously furless body, as humans did incessantly. Then came the opportunity to jump onto the vanity as he groomed himself and watch the hissing waterfall he’d create in the sink by turning silvery knobs.

Finally, the room cooling for the night, he turned off the lights, and she leapt onto their bed, snuggled with hum, even got her neck scratched awhile when she rubbed up against him. She had to avoid stepping on that annoyingly tender spot he had in the very place that was most snuggle-worthy.

This closed the circle in Honey’s daily life. The master soon dozed off, his busy activities arrested for a few hours. She did not drag herself into ill humor about how overactive people kept themselves. Such pandering to the baser emotions of humans was beneath her.

Honey yawned and stretched.

Condo life was a come-down in comparison with the previous years of her life in the real house with the big, wooded yard—but at least the bickering was over. Miz Master had gone away after repeatedly planting her mouth on Honey’s head while making sucking sounds. To Honey it had seemed alarmingly close to getting eaten alive.

This would have been traumatic enough, but it followed the woman’s impudent snatching of Honey from the floor and jerking her into midair, and it led to actual squeezing of her torso! Unbelievable, downright dangerous indignities. And woe betide Honey if she cried out or struggled to free herself. She knew from previous encounters that the Miz would then start making wailing noises and dripping saltwater onto Honey’s coat.

Humans were often unfathomable, though pitiable.

Scratching behind her right ear, Honey admitted to herself that even the mouthings were preferable to the moping and bickering. During Miz Master’s long vacations from home over the prior year—to something she called “the school” though lord knows school only takes a few hours a day—Master had sat around the house silently. Hardly ever had he done any of his enjoyable chattering. Seldom had he twittered into the lumpy black stick that spoke back in tinny garbles. Certainly, he hadn’t chatted with any visitors, and hardly ever even with her when he returned from his day outings, the ones for which he would tie a striped noose around his neck.

She had missed the way he used to get music in his voice when he spoke to Miz Master in their earlier years. Gone were those lilts. So were their birdcall trills, the ones they called “laughing.”

But the end of the human music was really no surprise. It stopped along with the rest of their couple things. Eating together. Wrapping arms around each other. Conversing endlessly. Even interrupting Honey’s attention to videos to make cracks to each other that produced more birdcalls. And, most strange, the way the Miz slept snuggled up far more closely to master than any cat would find comfortable.

Then the arguments began. Shouting “You never…” Crying “I always…” Whining “You hurt my feelings…” as if the other had stuck needles into them like that merciless veterinarian at Fieldstone Plaza. As if they didn’t create their own feelings. 

Why couldn’t the good old life have continued? Oh well, it was uncat to complain or pine. What was she doing, wading into nostalgia? Learning the silly habits of humans, the entry-level form of spirit life? Mother had always told her, “Love them and watch over them despite how self-important they act. It is because they are such fools that they need a cat’s example so dreadfully.”

Oh, yes, and her other dictum: “Groom yourself every day.

Cleanliness is next to Catliness.”

Honey gave her forepaws a lick and a promise. It was too warm to be thorough.

At last, during the hot month, Master had restarted using the black stick, chittering with glee again. But he was increasingly away, too, which was more of a challenge to accept. At least when he was home now, he would stroke her shoulders and scratch her neck—sure signs that he was purring inside again, even if she couldn’t hear it. That was a relief from his distraction from her over the year of Miz Master’s absence, wasting his time on the blinking screen and the plate of pushbuttons. It was pitiable how he slaved over them, creating screenful after screenful of black characters, endlessly adjusting and redoing them as if his life depended on this silly game.

In the middle of the winter, a screenful of characters—the kind that arrived with no apparent effort—finally broke the spell. First it sent him into whoops of joy. He audaciously swung her around in his arms, then got out the black stick and shouted into it, “They bought it! Prentice-Hall bought my manuscript!” You’d have thought he was on catnip.

His moping ended, seemingly for good, that week. No more crying while he wrote in his journal each night. No more agonizing when he spoke earnestly into the stick for fifty minutes each week, hogging all the attention, talking endlessly about himself. His strains. His sorrows. Should he get a de-force (Or was it divorse? Whatever). How the de-force was going. And, at last, his hopes, his pleasures. Finally, this month, going on and on about someone he called a girlfriend. Pharella. So sweet, so beautiful, so strong, this Pharella. “Radiant,” he even called her.

Hm. Was she the woman who came to visit the other day? The gushy one? She adored the whole, sterile condo. And the master’s so-so taste in Southwestern furniture. Even those daubs of color in flat boxes on the walls, admiring his signature at the bottom. She did have a bit of spine to her, though. She objected to his music collection—"smooth jazz,” not the real thing, and told him to try Whitney Houston and Luther Van Dross. “Don’t listen to the words. Feel the music,” she said. The woman had some soul.

She turned another gush into something notable, too. She got ridiculously rapt when reading sheets of his writings—or laughed—and even cried a little at the end and set the pages down gently. Then she did the good thing—she hugged Master as Miz Master used to do.

Honey had to admit that the woman was rather sweet. Radiant? Perhaps. She must be Pharella, though, with typical thoughtlessness, Master had not introduced her.

Now for the inevitable period when they’d blend households. Honey could start getting a decent amount of lap time once more. Oh, in their foolishness, they spoke against such joining. And against some tongue-twister apparently on the same topic. Co-hamstering? No. Co-habi-dating? Something like that. Who cared? Human language was such a poor medium of communication compared to telecatting. And they couldn’t really believe the silly limits they were putting on their togetherness.

She hoped this Pharella person would make a good Miz Master. She had one interaction with Honey to her credit so far. At her visit, the woman intruded on Honey’s space to stand over her and talk to her. She lowered her arms as if she was going to start that grabbing stuff. Honey discouraged it by giving her a nip on a toe. After all, showing some cattitude was required in an initial meeting. To Honey’s dismay, Pharella neither cried out nor flinched. But neither did she smother Honey with more intrusions. Pharella merely gave her a rather mild “No” in a tone of respect and kept speaking in low tones, the kind that usually went with human kindness.

The reluctant way the Master parted with Pharella after sharing human food, with so many mouthings, told Honey all she needed to know about how Master felt about the woman. Was Pharella wrapped up in Master the same way? That could mean reliable gentleness. Maybe even life with a couple who birdcalled together instead of bickering. Who knew? It was too soon to tell. But Honey could tell deep inside that she would be able to wangle good things out of this Pharella for a long, long time.