The Tao of Martha (12 page)

I make vet appointments for everyone, to double-check that there are no physical issues turning my beloved creatures into hellcats, and it’s confirmed that they’re just jerks. I’m still not on board with medicating them, so we try everyone on a new diet, and I invest in all kinds of pheromone dispensers—via collar, diffuser, and spray. These are supposed to make everyone calm and copacetic. My house is so rife with ectohormones that I’m surprised every cat in the neighborhood isn’t swarming us.

I invest in these plastic sheaths to put over the cats’ nails so that Gus can’t attempt to filet Eddy when I put them together. Then I buy really great toys, like the Cat Dancer, that will keep everyone occupied when I do test runs of them together in the same room. And I pick up a kilo of catnip. I work on introducing everyone through concurrent play and their version of weed. Come on! It’s a party! Everyone be cool, okay?

Nothing works.

I finally break down and put Eddy on kitty Prozac. The doctor said it will be a month before the meds fully take effect, if at all. So there’s a possibility that this warfare will go on indefinitely. Argh, seriously? Don’t I have enough to worry about right now with poor little Maisy?

I have to fix this.

I find some cat behaviorists online and am deeply dismayed to learn that the fees
begin
at $125 per e-mail consultation. I’m sorry…what? Now, I realize that the cats have cost me at least ten times that in damages, but I can’t bring myself to write that kind of check for such a first-world problem.

Kittens are free, indeed.

I also try to get Jackson Galaxy’s
My Cat from Hell
show to work with us, but Fletch refuses to help me make a video. Something about our dignity being at stake? Pfft, like that wasn’t gone
long ago
.

I have all of the above systems in place when I suddenly receive a dozen e-mails telling me to check out the link about Martha biting her cats.

Beg pardon?

As it turns out, Martha had just brought two new baby Persians into her house and lets her new cats know she’s the boss by nibbling on their little faces.

I swear I’m not making this up.

The Internet pretty much lost its collective mind with Martha jokes, but this woman did not become a billionaire mogul by doling out bad advice. If Martha does it, then this shit must work.

I immediately rush up to my office, where the cats have since been relocated, and I pick up Eddy. I gently give her a nip on her wee cheek and I wait for a sign of recognition that I’m her true leader. She gives me a look as if to say, “I’d advise you against doing it again, bitch,” so I figure the fault is mine and I didn’t nip her hard enough.

I bite harder, this time on the top of her head. She cocks her head, flattens her ears, and gives me a tiny bite back.

We’re communicating here! She gets it!

And then I give her another nip for good measure.

Eddy pulls full back from me and looks up, blinking her trusting green eyes. A true understanding passes between us.

Yes! We have liftoff! I’ve broken through to her!

Then, with the quickness of a cobra and the ferocity of a lion, she somehow unhinges her jaw and latches onto my nose like the refugees clung to the last chopper out of Saigon during Operation Frequent Wind.

But something happens as I try to shake her from my face. Other than bleeding, I mean.

My tolerance level and capacity for foolishness vanish faster than you can say “cat scratch fever.” Here I’ve been babying these little assholes for months. I’ve catered to their every whim and tried so valiantly to understand their needs that I’ve forgotten mine.

I worked hard for these rugs and these floors. I deserve to lay my head on a pillow that’s not damp with liquid displeasure, and I’m sick of all my shirts smelling like a litter box. I want to ride in the car with the windows down because I enjoy a breeze, and not just because I want the stench to dissipate.

This ends now.

I
am the alpha cat, and every feline in this house needs to recognize that fact.

With a bottle of cat pheromones in one hand and a squirt gun in the other, I open the doors to my office and watch the Thundercats come pouring in. As Chuck and Gus attempt to pounce, I douse them with a solid stream of water, which, from their reaction, you’d assume was battery acid.

Each subsequent time they attempt to mount an attack, I spray them. Eddy and Patsy aren’t immune, either. Whenever they give the boys the evil eye, they get a thorough spraying, too.

I spend the next week patrolling the house, squirting whenever needed. I keep a Rubbermaid thirty-two-ounce spray bottle looped through my yoga pants, as well as one in the kitchen, on my desk, in Fletch’s office, and in the TV room, and every time a cat growls in warning, everyone gets wet. I find myself calling, “Who’s got a hurting for a squirting? No one? That’s what I thought!”

Yes, indeed, cats, there’s a new sheriff in town.

And she’s finished with your nonsense.

I
’d like to say that all the cats are BFFs now and spend their days braiding one another’s tails. That’s not the case. You can’t have that
much animosity for that long and then all of a sudden become one another’s bosom buddy. The girls primarily hang out upstairs, while the boys prefer the first floor and basement. They don’t mix.

The thing is, they
do
coexist. They can walk by one another without feeling compelled to attempt an assassination. Their level of tension has dropped, so everyone else feels less tense, too. I’m overjoyed every time I see opposing forces sitting on the same couch. They may be on opposite ends, but they’re there together.

Personally, I’m overjoyed to check this task off my list. And there’s peace in my kingdom now, finally, because I grasped what Martha’s known all along: Take control or be controlled. Your call.

And to think that if Fletch hadn’t burned the balsamic, I’d have missed out on one of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned thus far.

Hurrah for the ineffectual home cook!

M
UCH
A
DO
A
BOUT
D
IRT

S
ecret gardener confession: I hate soil.

Okay, that’s not quite true. I love soil that’s all rich and pH-balanced, composed of the perfect blend of peat and perlite, with built-in slow-release fertilizer, and tiny little beads that help maintain moisture balance. So, pretty much I like my soil prebagged and placed in my car by the nice kids at Pasquesi’s nursery. What’s in the actual ground is what throws me. I guess I just hate real dirt.

Container gardens have always been my preference because of the dirt situation. I buy my big, happy bags of Miracle-Gro, and when I reach into it, at no point do I encounter bands of clay or rocks or petrified doody. There are no pesky roots to hack through, and I never have to fling my trowel and run away screaming upon discovering that I’ve cut an earthworm in half in my gardening zeal.

So, even though I have a solid half acre of yard to garden, my efforts are
primarily concentrated on the little baskets hanging off my fence, as well as planters spread across the patio.

I’ve been trying to do in-ground gardening for almost a decade, with an overwhelming lack of success. One year when I lived on Altgeld Street in the city, I spent weeks planting and tending, doing an admirable job lining the small path between the fence and walkway with all sorts of flowering greenery. This undertaking was successful because I’d dumped many cubic feet of fine bagged dirt on top of the pathetic topsoil, and the tiny yard was really beginning to take shape. But then a cottonwood tree from down the block dumped almost five inches of fluffy seedpods on my fledgling garden, immediately followed by torrential rains. Then I spent the rest of the summer weeding tiny cottonwood trees out of my plot and scattering neighborhood rats with hose spray. I sort of lost my enthusiasm after that.

Or how about last year? I attempted to fill a raised stone garden bed with an artful arrangement of perennial wildflowers and prairie grasses. The thing about wildflowers and prairie grasses is
they grow wild
; they germinate so quickly and spread so widely that people are always cutting them back and trying to contain them. I figured, “How hard could a wildflower garden be?”

As always, these are famous last words.

When we moved in, it was far too late in the season to do anything with the planter bed, so I spent all winter researching what might work there. My hope was that the 2011 wildflower and grass garden would be a lovely contrast to the roses. As my friend Laurie’s husband, Mike, services my roses, the perimeter of the house always looks amazing.

I have more than fifty varieties of bushes. In the early summer, when they’re all on their second bloom cycle, the fragrance is so intense that the air
tastes
like roses.

Before I had roses, I never knew that their scents varied. I kind of figured they were all rose-scented, yet fragrances can vary from fruit
to vanilla to clover. For example, the floribunda by the back door are redolent of cinnamon and spice, while my Elle hybrid teas are more citrusy. My favorite variety is the robust red Mr. Lincoln, which embodies a real traditional damask scent. And yet some of the most breathtakingly beautiful buds in my garden don’t even have any fragrance at all. I figure this is the same reason that God gives supermodels boring personalities; you can’t be a Victoria’s Secret runway model
and
a brilliant conversationalist.

At least, that’s what I tell myself.

Anyway, roses are notoriously difficult, so much so that I almost didn’t want to buy this house. Fortunately, our Realtor is friends with Mike and Laurie. She explained how, for the price of a bouquet, Mike would continue to service our roses, thus neatly eliminating all my objections. An added bonus is that Mike’s married to Laurie and now she and I are great friends.

So, Laurie and I are at our weekly Starbucks gathering and we’re discussing my stupid, failed wildflower garden, one of the many small aggravations that was the year 2011.

“How did they not grow?” I ask. “That’s like having rabbits that won’t multiply, or groupies who won’t make out with roadies to get closer to the band. Like, does not compute.”

“Maybe it’s the soil. Did you test it?” Laurie asks.

I blink in triplicate in response.

She continues. “You may have an acidity imbalance, or if there’s too
much clay, you could have a drainage issue. Maybe you don’t have enough earthworms.”

I think back to all the worm vivisections I accidentally performed when planting last year. “No, we’re lousy with worms.”

I sip my latte and remember a conversation I had with Angie last year. She’d had similar problems with her garden, so she checked to see what Martha recommended. The advice somehow culminated in Angie killing parasites by baking cookie sheets full of dirt in the oven.

“Ever smelled an oven full of hot dirt?” Angie demanded. “No? Then be thankful. Don’t let Martha hoodwink you into cooking your topsoil. Stick to containers.”