No Room For The Queen(s)

I realize I have too much furniture, too many books, far too much dishware and more clothes than any three normal people need so it’s no surprise that I also have too many animals. I understand I could get by with a few less chairs, one less couch, and who knows how many less end tables. I could also lose the entire midsection of three of my closets and go six months without noticing which suits were missing. I comprehend that if I were to minimize in this regard, life would probably be less complicated and therefore that’s what I should do. The problem is, I’m not apt to actually do it. Not now and not at any time in the foreseeable future. No more than I would be apt to give up either of my cats or consider living for one minute in a house not largely dominated by Basil and her stuffed animals. If I know anything about myself it’s this: Once anything – animal, vegetable, mineral, or end table – earns a place in my heart, I’m hanging onto it. If this occasionally poses a difficulty, I simply work around it.

The working around it is the easy part, most of the time. About the third time I bang my leg into an end table, I just move it to a different location. I’m constantly finding new places to store books, and you’d be amazed just how many clothes you can fit into a closet if you hang everything correctly. I’ve managed to convince myself I need antique Kayson china service for ten in addition to the service for fifteen I have in Fiestaware and the regular every day plates from Macy’s. I’ve learned to step over the inevitable cat in the hallway when I exit the bathroom in the semi-dark of morning, and double check to insure that’s a pillow not a dog on the couch before I flop down on it. Most of the time, life flows pretty smoothly.

Once in a while, though, we hit a snag and last night was no exception. About ten-forty-five I started shutting down lights in the living room and called Basil in to bed. Creature of habit that she is, she trotted down the hall and I heard her leap up onto the ottoman beside the bed so she could make the leap up onto the mattress (Girlfriend’s getting a little too chubby to make the leap without it, so mental note to lay off the Milkbones for a bit). A night like any other, I thought, and then saw that both cats had already settled onto the bed, something they generally won’t do until after Basil and I are both asleep. I’m not sure why this is, but have decided it’s an innate part of a cat’s nature to have the last word in everything, including the final prowl around the house before the day is officially over. The fact that they’d retired to bed earlier than usual wasn’t a huge problem for me. I just slid in a little closer to the wall and over to one side to give them both space.

The problem was Basil. Rather than jumping onto the bed she continued to sit on the ottoman, staring blankly at me, pausing only momentarily to dart her eyes over to each cat in turn before returning her gaze to mine. I patted the bed. “Come on, Bas,” I said, “night night.” Well, the ears came up but that was it. She simply continued to stare and that’s when I realized that given the positions of both cats, there wasn’t a whole lot of bed left for her. There was a small space near the wall but nowhere near the foot of the bed where she’d long ago staked out her own ‘spot’.

I thought about shifting the cats around and probably would have but something stopped me. Maybe it was a rare moment of insight when I realized surely I had better things to do with my time than use it to rearrange cats at nearly eleven p.m. Maybe it was just the fact that it was nearly eleven and I had to get up early. I’m not sure which, but I do know I patted Basil’s head, pulled the comforter around me, and fell asleep, confident they’d somehow work it out amongst themselves. Never mind I felt terrible at the blank stare Basil continued to send my way, a blank stare that said as plainly as I’m sure she would have if she could talk: “Are you kidding me? What’s up with this?”

I woke up shortly before five, due in part to the alarm clock’s beeping and the fact that I had two ice cold kitty paws wedged just above my right ear. Both cats idly raised their heads at me, then lowered them back to the bed, stretched, and resumed sleeping. Basil was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t on the bed, she wasn’t on the couch, she wasn’t on the back of her favorite chair. I found her in the den, on the twin bed, curled at the foot of it, still giving me the eye. “Look,” she seemed to be saying, “I had to sleep here all by myself last night and I’m not happy about it.”

I empathized with her sentiments, but only partially. Only partially because given the kink in my neck at the time (induced by having to semi-constantly shift the position of my head on the pillows to avoid the pre-dawn placement of ice cold kitty feet on my ears) the idea of sleeping alone seemed like the only intelligent one. It might be time, I thought then, stepping into a hot shower, to revert to Plan B.

Plan B was instituted last week, and had a very short run. It started out as a brilliant idea on my part, or so I thought. When it came time to go to sleep at night, I’d simply close the bedroom door. Basil and I would have the entire bed to ourselves, and I wouldn’t have ice cold paws applied to various parts of my head and shoulders when I was trying to sleep. Plan B was promptly enacted and lasted exactly two nights. On the first night, I fell asleep to plaintive meowing coming through the door, followed by the swooshing sounds of random kitty paws swatting under the door. The second night foiled the plan altogether. That’s the night Gus, the boldest of the cats, made a game of lunging at the door, making a nice resounding thud that sounded for all the world like a burglar trying to break in, shortly before 2 a.m. After that night, the bedroom door had remained open and the queen sized bed was available to all of us. Which had worked out, but not for very long.

“Oh, yeah,” Casey said this morning, when I told her about how Basil had been booted from her own territory and forced to sleep alone, while I myself had been reduced to sleeping in far less space than I wanted. “You give them an inch, they take over.”

I digested that, because it was true. They had taken over the bed. They’d also, come to think of it, taken over most of the furniture in the house and they certainly had me hopping to their command. I might be in full management mode in the workplace, but within two minutes of coming in the door at night and being assaulted by both of them meowing for dinner, I drop everything – no matter what it is – to crack open that can of food and get it served. The label may say “Classic Dinner Pate, Beef and Chicken” but I call it simply, “The Silencer”.

“So what do I do?” I asked, and Casey just gave me a look and shrugged, a look and a shrug that told me what I do is nothing because there’s nothing I can do. A look that told me, as she has many times before, that she lost her own bed years ago to her two cats, and not even her husband has been able to get them under control. Sometimes, she said, he’ll even get up and sleep in the guest room just to get away from them.

Which is sad, in a way, if you think about it, but maybe not so much on second glance. That is a pretty comfortable twin bed in the den. If Berk promises not to take up too much of the room on her side of it tonight, I should sleep pretty well.