The moment I met Marmalade she nearly took my eye out. I had just started dating a very nice gal, Valerie, and the first time I spent the night at her place, she acquainted me with her two cats. She had one who was as sweet as sweet could be, and the other one was Marmalade. Marmalade was a blood-thirsty, wild beast that Valerie kept in her home for some inexplicable reason.
“Hello little kitty! Oh you are so cute,” I gushed when introduced.
“Hiss!” Marmalade retorted, cutting a crimson slash across my nose for emphasis.
Valerie had found Marmalade a year or so earlier, a starving fuzzy little urchin begging for fortune cookie crumbs in Chinatown. She passed her once on the way to a restaurant, was wracked with guilt and sympathy all through the meal, and, finding the scrawny waif still whining pathetically when she passed the same spot on the way home, promptly adopted her.
Her new companion was so emaciated that the veterinarian wouldn’t even administer vaccinations, because she was too weak to tolerate it. Valerie nursed her back to health, though. She is a caring healer and Marmalade is a spunky, tenacious little bugger. She fought her way from the brink of starvation. And as soon as she recovered her strength she immediately set about terrorizing the other cat.
This was Hockney, a big lovable lug wearing a permanent tuxedo. Like an adorable miniature maître d’. Marmalade just attacked the poor guy for absolutely no reason, all the time. I think she considered him a threat to her food supply, for, having endured life on the mean streets, never knowing where her next meal was coming from, she had vowed never to be hungry again. Never. And if at all possible, she would be fat. With God as her witness, she would be fat.
She saw him eating cat food, which happens to be the same stuff she eats, and must have figured that every morsel he consumed was one she’d be missing out on. It didn’t occur to her that if he weren’t around, less food would appear in those bowls on the ground, and that eliminating him would avail her naught. There’s no arguing with kitty logic though, and Hockney paid the price for Marmalade’s flawed analysis.
Many were the times that I’d be over there, everything serene and tranquil, when Marmalade decided on some crazed feline whim to just throw down. Calm placidity gave way to horrific screeches, and fur, quite literally, flying. Hockney’s very existence offended her, and she decided it was her duty to make that existence miserable. Valerie became a case study in cognitive dissonance, her kind and compassionate nature in conflict with itself, in some sort of cruelly ironic ethical paradox: her attempt to help one cat had resulted directly in the suffering of another one. Something had to be done. One of them had to go.
I woke up at my place one day and found Marmalade there. I suspect I may have been drugged, because I don’t know why I would ever have agreed to this arrangement. It’s all very hazy in my recollection. Sex or mice may have been involved. But there Marmalade was, a guest in my house, while Valerie posted ads on Craigslist looking for a permanent home for the little orange monster.
Marm was not thus designated in the postings. No, they were a paragon of false advertisement, promising a gentle, loving companion to any caring individual foolish enough to take the vicious beast off my hands. But “little orange monster” is what I started calling her around this time. Nobody responded to the openly deceitful ads, so Marmalade decided the time was ripe to really make things interesting. This is when she initiated her policy of constantly pissing on all my stuff.
Have you ever tried to get the smell of cat urine out of anything? You have? How long did you try before you gave up? It doesn’t come out. It’s the most persistent stench in the known universe, an olfactory juggernaut, unstoppable, undefeatable. My place reeked of it. As winter approached, she pissed all over my heavy coat. I had another one, a backup coat, thinner, torn, less stylish, but it did slightly decrease my chances of freezing to death, until, of course, Marmalade peed on that.
On one frigid day, I reached for my coat to go face the chill, only to be bowled over by the pungent reek of urine. Somewhere, a camel’s back broke with an ominous snap. I had had enough of the little orange monster and I grabbed her and screamed at her and threw her out my front door. She cried and whined, all pressed up against my door, a carefully calculated sympathy play, and people started knocking until I let her back in while they scowled hatefully at me.
I called Valerie and told her she had to come get this vile hell beast because it was making my life miserable. Val and I had broken up months ago, but we remained friends and I still had the cat, “temporarily.” She had not yet found a permanent home for her. I did not give a rat’s ass.
“I don’t have anywhere to bring her,” she pleaded.
“Take her to the pound,” I suggested. “Take her out in a field somewhere and ditch her. Throw her in the Schuylkill in a sack. I don’t care. She’s not my responsibility. She can’t stay here anymore. I want this pissing, hissing little fiend out of my life.”
I was pretty upset. That is an outrageous understatement. I was psychotic. It only got worse when I saw her playing with a stuffed toy in the corner, looking thoroughly adorable. I started crying and called Valerie back.
“Don’t come get her,” I said. “I can’t send her to the pound.”
“Ok.”
“And you know what,” I added, “you can forget about trying to find a home for her. I’m just going to keep her. She’s my cat now.”
And then I picked up the little orange monster and I said “Ok Marm, listen up. This is how it’s going to work. You have to stop peeing on everything, ok, sweetie? And you can’t scratch me and hiss at me. You’re my cat now. You’re my cat and I’m your person and this is our home. This is my home and now it’s your home too. You aren’t going anywhere else. You aren’t going out in the cold and you aren’t going to another house. This is it. This is your home where you will always have warmth and food, and love, ok?”
And she never peed on anything ever again.
(Actually, she did, once more, but it makes for an anticlimactic story, so I’m taking some literary license. But after that: never again, I swear.)
Marmalade and I transformed one another. She became so so sweet and loving and affectionate, and I was astounded to realize that this potential had been there all along. I reacted to Marmalade with anger and resentment, and I just got it back with compound interest. In fact, I think she invested it in very lucrative mutual funds. All I had to do was to throw out some love and compassion and empathy, and I’d get that back too.
And I did. Out the wazoo, in spades, and back out the yin-yang. The transformation was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in my life. She knew she was accepted, knew that I loved her and was going to take care of her, and that made all the difference in the world. Marmalade went from the bane of my existence to the brightest ray of sunshine in the dreary overcast Tuesday afternoon that was my life.
Over the next several months, Marmalade and I became closer and closer. She rubbed up against me and purred. And talked. She’s quite a talker, but offers nothing so pedestrian as “meow.” No, she has this priceless, petulant chirp that is the cutest thing ever. “Squeak!” she would say and I would pick her up and squeeze and she would squeak again until I put her down, but then she would rub up against me and start the cycle anew. Sometimes I would find myself playing with her in utter contentment and I would reflect in absolute amazement and shame that I almost got rid of her, this beautiful little creature who had changed my life for the better in so many ways.
“It’s just you and me, Marm,” I would say to her on lonely Friday nights. “It’s just you and me.”
“Squeak!” she would agree, and rub her head up against me lovingly. “Squeak!”
And it’s true. It’s just me and Marm. There’s nobody else who loves me more than anyone else in the world. But Marmalade does and I love her right back.
A couple of months ago, Valerie was cat-sitting Marmalade while I was away on vacation and noticed a lump on her right rear leg. This was very worrisome, so we took her to the vet, who told us that it was just a cyst of some kind and nothing to worry about. We both breathed heavy sighs of relief. A month or so later I noticed that it had gotten significantly bigger, so I brought her in to have it removed.
I was expecting a routine call from the vet. “Marmalade is recovering from the surgery. Everything went fine. We removed the cyst. You can come pick her up this afternoon.” Something like that. Instead they told me that it was a massive, aggressive tumor.
This cycle of bad news/good news/bad news repeated, and I would get some hopeful prognosis, followed by some new test results that were not at all encouraging, a nauseating emotional roller coaster ride. Yesterday she saw the oncologist at Penn, who confirmed what I had by this point come to realize was the unavoidable truth: Marmalade isn’t going to be around much longer.
In the last two weeks I have shed more tears over this kitty cat than I ever have for all but a tiny handful of people in the world. But she is still alive and kicking and she still makes me smile. She misses me when I’m not there and is happy to see me when I come home. She seems to know when I’m down, and comes over to cheer me up with her patented head-butts of love. She is the only being on the face of this Earth who makes me feel needed and special, as if there is some purpose for my being here at all. She’s my best friend.
I don’t know how much longer I will be blessed with this little orange miracle. Maybe a few months, maybe a year or more if I am very lucky. Luckier, I should say, because I am an extremely lucky man to have ever had such an extraordinary experience with such a sublimely beautiful creature.
Marmalade made me appreciate the other beings in my life, human and non-human alike. Sooner or later, all of them, and me, and you, are going to fade into dust and memories. She made me realize that rage was eating me up from the inside and shortening my life. Marmalade taught me a lot and made me a better person. She’s a very wise kitty.
She’s sitting next to me on the couch right now, purring away like a little love engine. When I scratch her ears she looks up and smiles at me in pure bliss, and we have a moment. I’m going to make that moment last forever.