i cleaned the cat
/With twenty relatives coming for the Thanksgiving holiday, the house seemed all wrong, especially the faux maple leaves bought to decorate the table so it would scream FESTIVE!
My confidence wavering, I decided to put the blame on the first victim I found: the cat.
If only his tongue and fur, like the guests coming to dinner, would connect. If only he would wash himself, the rest of the holiday would take care of itself.
The stuffing would be moist, the cauliflower would get eaten, and Ray’s family and mine would avoid testy topics: Politics, global warming, health care, UFOs, big business, genetically modified food, and the appropriateness of eating Chinese eggrolls and Japanese sushi for American appetizers. Did the Pilgrims eat that?
But the seventeen-year-old feline Yoda, both oily as salmon and wrinkly as his namesake, the wizened Jedi from “Star Wars,” washed no more.
The Jedi might advise: Clean not cat. Roast not turkey. Reinvent Mayflower no. Too much work Thanksgiving is.
Where’s a Jedi master when you need him?
After cleaning the cabinets, the refrigerator, the couches, the rugs, the floors, the wine glasses, and my mother’s old silver, I bought a new coffeepot, casserole dishes, tablecloth, ice bucket, sofa pillows, and sheets and blankets for the guests who would stay the weekend. I found new family photos to put in old frames, rearranged the plants, artwork, and candles. Unfortunately, without the benefit of Jedi wisdom, I then turned my attention to the cat.
Panicked after the dishwasher broke, I fixed my steely eyes on Yoda.
Was it true he’d never had a bath? He was old, his back legs barely worked, his fur flaked off if you blew on him, and he stumbled around between sleeping twenty-three hours a day and drinking a vat of water for his aging kidneys.
“If the cat lives through Thanksgiving,” I pronounced, “the cat will be clean.”
As with any hostage, this fated feline knew his days were numbered. When Ray and I began whispering in the kitchen, he lasered a cold, green stare, bared his still sharp teeth, ejected his still sharp claws, then turned on his sagging gray tabby legs and careened across the tile floor in search of cover.
Cat leave. Basement you run. Bad time coming it is. Hide you must.
The plan went this way: we would lure him to the upstairs bathroom with a handful of his beloved Quaker Rice Puffs, slowly caress him, lovingly drip soap on his fragile body, then aggressively pour buckets of water on the drowned rat until he completely flipped out.
We dressed in riot gear, thinking of the Pilgrims with barely a body part showing, and Jedi foe Darth Vader, with no face showing at all. We put on ski pants, rain jackets, face masks, gloves, bubble wrap. I took out the hydrogen peroxide, antibiotic ointment, Band-Aids, Valium, defibrillator, and Hoover Wet Dry Vac. The last time we washed a cat, long before Yoda, it was a fight that ended with both of us pressed against the walls, both of us equally soaked, both of us with hair standing on end, droplets of blood everywhere.
This holiday tale ended better. I learned cleaning an old cat is like a big family dinner. At first, there’s a lot of nervousness, but eventually everyone calms down and accepts who they can’t sit next to, what favorite foods are missing, and who they wish they could punch. Yoda accepted his fate for a good five minutes and when we freed him from the porcelain tub, he made a swift retreat to his special corner, rolled up in a ball, and tried to recover from his Thanksgiving ordeal. He even, shockingly, licked his imagined wounds.
Come to think of it, that’s what a lot of people do when the long holiday weekend is over.