Re: Only Three Days Left....
My Thanksgiving started last week.
Interesting you should ask about the cat. I need to give you a little background before we get to my mother’s house.
There was this cat. I found it when I was a senior in high school. It was sitting on the driveway in the pouring rain, collar but no tags, no claws, all white and all wet. I brought it into the house and gave it a can of BumbleBee Salmon, which had apparently been intended for dinner, which meant my father would have to go out in the rain to pick up hot dogs from Fluky’s.
So my father hated the cat from the get-go, a) because he hated all cats, and b) because he had just read that hot dogs can give you cancer, despite my mother’s insistence that this did not apply to Kosher hot dogs, only the kind made with hair and rat droppings.
But my mother loved this cat. Named it Kitzie. My sister called it Klitzie.
Kitzie ended up staying a dozen years. Hours before my dad died, in intensive care unable to speak because of the breathing tube, he wrote notes to everyone. On mine, he wrote, ‘Your ****ing cat gave me cancer.’
The cat died two days later.
Which brings us to the smell.
Like everyone else in the house, the cat was afraid of the basement, which was unfortunate since that’s where the litterbox was. Maybe she was afraid of the electric organ that played ‘Little Brown Jug’ whenever the power went out and came back on, maybe she was afraid of Beatrice the One Eyed China Doll, who knows. She would not go down there.
So she found this corner in the living room, behind the big record player where my mother kept her Broadway albums. And this is where the cat peed. Horribly, consistently, reliably. No one ever went in there anyway, on account of all the all the furniture being covered in three inches of plastic slipcovers, but still, the smell was so overpowering people would walk around with turtlenecks—in the summer—pulled up over their noses. My sister would test out new boyfriends by having sex with them next to the Klitzie Corner. If they pretended not to notice, they were history.
And while everyone else tried politely—and later not-so-politely—to point out the horrific smell, my mother completely denied it. There was no smell. (‘Sweetheart, I just don’t know what you mean, perhaps your sweater needs dry cleaning, my goodness, they certainly do feed you college girls well, don’t they!’).
The smell lasted ten years longer than the cat, when my mother finally decided to rip out the orange carpet and put in wood floors. When the carpet was removed, it revealed the cat pee had permeated four inches of concrete. ‘It must have been from the previous owners,’ said my mother.
I apologize for the length. but needed to tell you this before we get there. Also, there's grass growing on the garage floor.