A Girlish Girl Goes On

The night of the first new episode of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter after the death of John Ritter, a cold, wind-driven rain came down on Chicago, swaying trees and rattling windows all over the metro area. I'd worn a leather jacket to work that day, so when I got home the upper half of my body was tidy and dry, but from the waist down I was soaked. I squished when I walked. I wasn't a happy camper.

When I came in the back door, I put my foot out, as I usually do, to keep Ms. Christopher from dashing out. She still tries, after all these years, even though the one time she succeeded she spent a day outside and was eternally grateful to be found, brought in, cleaned up and fed.

But this night, she didn't come to the door. And with all that had happened--with her sister Lottie having died just weeks before--I immediately thought the worst.

I needn't have. Neither of the Girlish Girls ever liked storms, and even though this night's event lacked sufficient sound and fury, it was still enough to make Christopher hide under the couch beside the phone--the same couch Lottie liked to hide under those last few weeks she was ill. I pulled back the denim-colored cover to find Christopher there, blinking at the beam coming from the forest-green Maglite, letting out a "meep" and pretty much looking like she wanted to be left alone. I gave her a stroke or two on her forehead and went back to the kitchen to make dinner.

After a while, when the storm had passed and I'd had my good cry, Christopher came out from under the couch, pushing her head and front legs from under the cover first, then pulling the rest of her body through. She stopped in the kitchen first, no doubt to grab a bite to eat from the can of Friskies Senior Ocean Whitefish I'd put down earlier, and to make a stop at the litter pan. Then, she returned to the living room--and jumped up into my lap.

Ms. Christopher had never been a lap cat, really. She liked attention as much as any housecat does, but preferred to get it in the form of pats on the head while standing atop the radiator cover in the kitchen or reclining in the cradle of the Kitty Kondo. She rarely jumped up and demanded attention. Lottie was the sociable one--the one who butted you with her enormous head and jumped up on the couch (with amazing ease, given her size). She wanted to be a lap cat, but was far too large to properly fit on a lap--even one as wide as mine has become in recent times--so she'd either drape her front half over my lap or, more likely, curl up next to me and continue butting, purring hard enough to shake my glasses off.

After Lottie was put to sleep, I cried for days. Talking about her for more than a few seconds would start the waterworks right up again. (And it still happens: at lunch today, I was in a used bookstore, looking through the Children's section, when I ran across a copy of James Herriot's The Christmas Day Kitten--which, aside from being a very sweet book with lovely art, features a scene in which the kitten's mother dies. Yup. Lost my shit right in the basement of After-Words.) I was sad, angry, guilty...you name it, I felt it. What I found after a brief search on the Web, though, was that what I was feeling wasn't unusual at all. In fact, it was expected.

What's more, I learned that other pets in a household where one has died grieve as well. Not in the same way as people do, true. Cats don't get death. They just know that their companion--or, in this case, littermate--isn't there anymore. And, in many instances, the surviving pets take on personality traits of their deceased partners in crime.

So it is with Ms. Christopher.

She butts me with her head when she wants attention. She clambers up into my lap--which, being somewhat smaller (if noticeably fluffier) than her sister, she actually fits in--and often continues up onto my chest, kneading my much-too-substantial gut with her talons and yanking up threads from my sweater. She's become much more personable. I even have witnesses. At this year's HMB, she approached everyone in the room for a petting session. In past years, she'd peek out at the gathering of strangers in the living room and maybe--maybe--come out and cry piteously, but she wouldn't work the room the way Lottie did. This year? She was belle of the ball, even though she damn near lost it when Sailor J tried to pick her up and cuddle her--Christopher wasn't quite ready to be held by a total stranger. Not yet. Maybe next year.

Christopher has also taken up other habits of her sister's--like licking plastic bags to get attention (even in the middle of the night, when I'd much rather sleep in a tightly curled ball than play with jingly catnip toys), sharpening her claws on the Kitty Kondo (Christopher used to prefer the couches or the corners of rooms, especially when she was pissed at me) and sitting in the desk chair (which has been in the living room since HMB) and watching me watch TV. When I work at the iMac, she either sits at my feet or stretches out on the futon behind me. Either way, she meows and wants to be petted.

She still does many of the same things she always did--tucking herself into my right armpit at bedtime, reaching up to lightly pat my nose and lips with her paw as I try to fall asleep, complaining loudly about the lack of fresh food about an hour before the Bettie Page Bondage alarm is supposed to go off--but she's become more outgoing, more talkative, more visible in the past few weeks.

I'm sure part of the change is the lack of competition for affection, food, space to recline and just be pretty, etc. Christopher has me all to herself--when I'm in La Casa del Terror, that is. The rest of the time, she's on her own. Cats are solitary creatures by nature, but she was used to having Lottie around--to play with, to fight with, to snuggle on the futon with. Now she's alone for long stretches of the day. For the first time since she came out of the womb. And it's freaking her out a bit. Me, too.

(I'll get another cat at some point. Not as a replacement for Lottie--no cat, no matter how sweet or smart, will replace my Girlish Girl--but because I don't think Christopher should have to spend her days in solitude. The extra company would do her--and me--good.)

But I think that, more than anything, Christopher has started to do what Lottie did so well: pick up on what I'm feeling and try to comfort me. She knows I'm sad and wants me to feel better. And she wants assurance herself, wants to know that I'm not going to leave and never come back. So she sits in my lap, on my chest, kneading away and ruining my best sweaters, rubbing her head on my chin and purring contentedly. And for those few minutes, I do feel better. Neither of us is alone. Nor need we be.

We've got each other. And, for now, that's enough.