“Can I get a cat?” my sixteen-year-old son Luke asked last Christmas, for what seemed like the hundredth time. By then, I didn’t even have to answer, not with words anyway. I gave him a withering look and sighed.
“But you won’t have to do anything,” Luke implored, using the age-old accountability line. I’d said those exact words myself back in the 1960s, except I was a decade younger than my son is and asking my mother for a dog, just like so many other kids in our Bronx neighborhood. “I’ll get up early before school to walk it. And I can come home at lunch and then after dinner…” was my argument.
“No,” my mother said, in a way that always let me know the discussion was over. Instead, my mother got me a goldfish for 15 cents at the one-time empire of inexpensiveness, Woolworth’s. Soon enough, I overfed it, and it died. I can only imagine how the poor dog I desired would have fared under my less than responsible care.
That ended my stint as a pet owner until I was in college, when a stray gray cat we later named Smokey made her way into my uncle’s car. He and my aunt already had a Siamese and weren’t looking to add a playmate to the mix. And so my mother said we could keep her, figuring by this time I was ready for a domestic animal to call my own.
I never really got the chance. Smokey had no interest in me, deciding to bond with my mother instead. Though I got none of the therapeutic joys of pet companionship, I got to be Smokey’s handmaiden. “Open the food and put more water in the dish,” my mother would command me. “Clean out the cat box.”
Oh, that box. No matter where we put it, we always ended up with tiny pieces of litter underfoot, and no matter what the kitty litter people promised when it came to odor camouflage, the smell permeated the house.
Although I’ll give the industry the benefit of the doubt that it has improved its products since 1977, vivid remembrances of cleaning up after “my sister the cat” made it easy to say “no” to Luke’s persistent requests for one. I suggested that if he really wanted a pet, he should choose one that could be caged and sequestered in his own corner of our world.
The next thing I knew, FedEx was delivering a Rainbow Boa. Because Luke was going to be in school when the box of boa was delivered, he handed me some instructions on how I was to open the cardboard flaps, lift out the bag with the reptile inside, drop it in the tank, cover it securely, and let the snake emerge on its own.
I honored his request by telling my husband that he had to go into work late so he could handle the box-to-tank transfer. I also made it clear that, aside from the initial curious peek, I would not be looking at, holding, or associating in any way with my home’s new resident, who my son inexplicably named Jones.
It was only a couple of weeks later that I was informed that Jones was shedding.
“What does that mean?”
It meant he was growing and would do so until he reached seven feet. I also found out he could live up to 20 years in captivity. Oh, goodie.
I’ve started reminding Luke that not long ago he was smitten with kittens, pointing to their cuteness when they appeared on television or when he spotted one in a magazine. I suddenly find myself in my supermarket’s pet care aisle comparing the prices of Friskies and Fancy Feast as well as examining the odor trapping capabilities of Tidy Cat versus Fresh Step. The idea of a litter box, even in the middle of the living room, suddenly doesn’t seem all that bad.
Lorraine Duffy Merkl is a freelance writer in NYC and author of the novel FAT CHICK.
