“Stop standing in doorways,” I hissed. “You’re making her more nervous.”
“I’m just standing!” Liam whisper-yelled back.
“Don’t talk! She doesn’t like it when she hears you!”
It had been three days since we were able to enter our bedroom without Adelaide flying, arms and legs spiraling with claws out like rotary saws, straight for our jugulars. The shiniest trail of foam from her growling mouth told you which furniture underbelly was her new lair. About once a month, something would happen that scared her (a poster falling, plastic bag opening, someone sneezing the wrong way) and Adelaide would unzip her flesh suit to reveal the demon within and just be evil for a few days until she decided she was over it. We were mostly okay with tiptoeing around her, for the time being.
My family already had a horrible track record with pets. We had plenty of fish that survived an average of six days and my brother kept lizards that he periodically dissected. Once, the tumor in my mom’s head rendered her critical thinking skills a little dull for a weekend and she let us get three hamsters: Hammy, Nibbles, and Frankie.
Horrific hamster stories are a dime a dozen but I’ll tell mine anyways: they quadrupled in size and grew violently gluttonous. Hammy sought freedom and managed to yeet herself out of her cage and off our entry room buffet table. We found her a few days later in the pantry, a couple inches wider than we remembered, suffocated in a jar of Ovaltine. Frankie developed a penchant for self-cannibalism and didn’t last long after we noticed she was armless. Nibbles, true to her name, didn’t limit herself to flesh and corn syrup like her sisters, may they rest in peace. She tried a bite of EVERYTHING: hay, the old sock Dave gave her as a house, a rock Harry found outside, Dana’s finger, you name it. Eventually, her appetite caught up with her when she started to make major headway eating her cage and went off to the giant hamster wheel in the sky.
We continued with rodents for a while: guinea pigs that inflated until they looked like shihtzus, mice the size of small cats. Before we had a chance to ask if maybe we were the problem, Dana tried to renew the cycle with another hamster that chewed its way through its box on the ride home from Petco, never to be seen again. Less worried about the ever increasing hamster death footprint belonging to our family than being able to return Mom’s lease, Dad banned us from pets for the near future. But I always wanted a dog.
Dogs were at the top of my Christmas list for as long as I could remember. One year, to add insult to injury, my parents got me a dog encyclopedia thinking it would satiate me but it only made my desire more specific. Now I didn’t just want any dog, I wanted a Bernese Mountain Dog who I would name Jay and love forever. Every Lent I’d pray the Divine Mercy novena leading up to Good Friday asking only for my dad to come home from work with Jay. It caused a major crisis of faith every Easter. While all my siblings hunted for eggs, I sat in the corner doing intricate Catholic calculations to figure out what could’ve gone wrong.
A big portion of why I wanted a dog was the same reason I wished I had a dead grandmother—I just longed to fit in. It was such a thing: The Family Dog, The Dead Nana. I wanted the lumpy elderly dog that I’d need to take a week off of school to mourn. I wanted to be able to say “yeah I can’t hang out until I walk the dog,” or “sorry, I have my grandma’s funeral.” Everyone I knew would hang their heads thinking of how special and sad I must be, and my whole sitcom-worthy family. Send us flowers for Gigi maybe and bring dog biscuits when they came over because Jay was just that lovable.
My mom always made the standard Mom argument—she has enough to clean up already, she just knows she’d be the only one who fed him, she doesn’t believe in veterinarians, she had a dream that a dog would eat Harry and she always thought he’d be the first of us to die, etc etc. She kept repeating the story of the cocker spaniel they had for about five minutes before Dana was born because it bit one of her friends’ kids so she opened the front door and just waited for it to leave. She did not want a dog and if we brought one home, she’d do the same thing.
When I went away for college, I left a hole so big in my dad’s heart that he could only fill it with a demanding pitbull named Castiel. I felt betrayed. My mom felt called to family annihilation. But every time she opened the door to let Cass run away, he’d be back 45 minutes later, smelling a little like Burger King or with some ice cream on his nose. Eventually, his determination won her over and my parents turned into personal chefs for this big fat dog. Omelette in the morning, rotisserie chicken for lunch, a tasteful supper of broccoli and pizza. He was 95 pounds when he died.
I took care of Cass on school breaks and that weird summer of 2020 before I moved to Connecticut and was dog-less again. I once got dangerously close to adopting a senior pitbull named Jazzy with one leg and three ears when I was lonely and unemployed. Then the shelter called Liam as a reference and he told them I yank tails and eat roadkill, because he (rightfully, I guess) thought it was a bad idea. He kept saying, if anything, I could get a cat.
I never ever liked cats. I found them untrustworthy and generally frightening. The first sleepover I ever went to, I woke up to my friend’s cat sleeping on my chest and catapulted her (the cat) across the room, before rolling my sleeping bag up to use as a weapon against her (the friend).
But Hildy is more than a cat. She’s my little sweet thing. PAWS Animal Shelter found her being advertised on Facebook Marketplace for free, can you believe it? Hildegard Beluga Duncan Keith, Hildy B, Keeper of South Norwalk, being given away for free!! What LUNATIC gives away a cat on Facebook, let alone one as priceless as Hildy Bildy Bildy Bee.
PAWS took her in, fixed her up, and we happened to come in and adopt her just a couple days later. She had a little shaved belly when we brought her home and loved a cute little purple mouse that we called “Purple Mouse.” She followed me around everywhere and even figured out how to open the bathroom door to meow at my feet. The cutest sweetest little “hello” meow! I love her. She has perfect little brown and gray spots because she’s not just any kind of calico, she’s a dilute calico. And she’s not just a dilute calico, she’s also polydactyl and has thumbs. Freaking thumbs! She uses those thumbs to pick out her own toys from her basket and throw them across the room. She’s a genius. She’s Hildy. My Hildy girl! Hildy Bildy!
Which is why the application for a nearly identical looking kitten being fostered in NYC wasn’t filled out by me, it was filled out by the ghouls in the deepest bowels of my brain, knowing my exact weaknesses, plotting my downfall.
As a 2 week old kitten, Adelaide was rescued from an abandoned van in Alabama that was full of 13 other cats and an opossum. The rescuers then drove her to NYC to be fostered and I’m sure she fucking bothered the shit out of the driver the entire time.
Her antics were scary but livable before and during my pregnancy. If Liam breathed funny in his sleep and she camped out, mooing and slashing, in the top drawer of my dresser, I just wore the same clothes for a few days and dealt with it. Once, a book fell while we were at work so Adelaide chose the bathroom tub to go hulk mode. Without realizing, I came home and started the shower. Liam found me, unresponsive, strangled in the plastic liner. But I lived! Adelaide was even so kind to eliminate the need for matching tattoos by giving us four pronged claw scars that start on my ankle and finish on his. What beautiful marks of true love and shared bad decision making! Thanks, Adelaide!
When we found out I was pregnant and it seemed like it was gonna stick, her recurring attempts on our lives weren’t as cute. I figured Adelaide’s days were numbered. I could already see her, violently hissing, using the crib as her personal dungeon to keep my baby captive.
The day we brought Ignatius home, Adelaide figured out how to jump into his crib. This is it, I thought. She’s gonna kill my baby. Steal his breath. Wear his clothes. Make us cart her around in the stroller. Put her in preemie diapers. Get her baptized. (Maybe we should’ve…).
But instead, she meowed. She meowed and freaking meowed. She wouldn’t shut the fuck up. In the crib. Howling, almost. She’d stand on her hind legs like a skin walker and meow meow meow. She had never been this talkative.
It makes me want to drop kick her into oblivion. I see red. I look at her and her bright orange and black spots and I think bad things.
During the day, she’s quiet as a mouse. Sleeps under the bed, mostly. You wouldn’t even know she exists. Iggy cries, no reaction. He screams like he’s dying, she might glance up, then go back to sleep. I once accidentally dropped two glass containers in the sink which immediately shattered, coating our entire kitchen and freshly cooked dinner in a thin layer of broken glass. Iggy sure fucking heard it, but Adelaide didn’t flinch.
But at night, as soon as I’m done rocking and shushing and nursing and rocking and nursing and shushing Ignatius and he’s finally asleep, she suddenly materializes in his crib. Meowing.
She doesn’t want anything you might think she wants. We give her treats, toys, the laser pointer, we even do things to intentionally scare her: squeezing plastic water bottles and rattling the drying rack. I’ve locked Hildy in the bathroom and opened all the windows in the house, placed neon signage on the frames pointing to the roof, blinking “Churu Here!” She does not give a shit. All she wants is to disturb the baby and interrupt our designated 20 minutes of adult time watching one of the bajillion Apple TV shows about a freshly wife-less guy before bed.
Meows and meows and meows.
This is all to say: Regular Ass Calico Cat For Sale (not dilute, no thumbs).
Price: Free
Local pickup only. You will have to forcibly remove her from my home while we vacate the premises.
Best of luck.
If I can find a church that does cat baptisms, I’ll take her
Those poor hamsters haha