Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (21 page)

This is A Tale of Two Kitties.

Mimi is an adorable black-and-white kitten who looks like Figaro from Disney’s
Pinocchio,
with white paws like cartoon gloves and a matching stripe down the center of her face. She has golden eyes set close together, and her nose is jet black. She loves to be petted, eats whatever is put in front of her, and wakes me up by dancing on my face.

She also has a repertoire of great noises, including a gratifying purr and a questioning chirp that sounds like, Mrrrp? And when she chirps, she curls her black tail into a question mark. Genius.

If Mimi catches a mouse, she brings it to me alive, so that I can scoop the poor thing into a tumbler and set it free. Obviously, she doesn’t have the heart to kill anything.

In fact, Mimi is so affectionate that the other day, my daughter came hurrying into the kitchen to say that she had been petting the kitten, who had actually drooled with happiness. I didn’t believe it, so Francesca returned Mimi to her lap and
scratched the kitten’s head. In a few minutes, Mimi drifted into a feline fugue state and started dripping.

It was cuter than it sounds.

Our other kitten, Vivi, is also adorable. She looks remarkably like Mimi, but is gray where Mimi is black. An upside-down V on Vivi’s forehead reminds me of a demented Harry Potter, and her eyes are the green of martini olives. She has a perfect slate nose and delicate ears.

But beauty is only fur deep.

If Mimi is Gallant, Vivi is Ted Bundy.

Last week, Vivi killed three mice, two moles, and a large dove. She also killed three more snakes in addition to the one she exterminated when she was only two months old. And yesterday she came home with fresh blood on her fur.

I think she buried the body.

Unlike sunny Mimi, Vivi has a dark side. It’s like a Patty Duke episode, but one of the Patty Dukes is homicidal.

They say that serial killers start with killing animals. So what do animal serial killers start with? It’s a good question.

Vivi knows the answer.

When she’s not killing things, Vivi spends her day ignoring me. Whenever I try to pet her, she runs away. She hates to be picked up. She never purrs. Not only doesn’t she love me, she doesn’t like me. In fact, she doesn’t even recognize me. Every time I come home, she cocks her head as if to say, Have we met?

But that’s not my point.

My point is, why did one kitten turn out so good, and the other not-so-good? I am the mother of an only child, so I have no experience with raising two of anything. I treated the kittens exactly the same, yet they turned out completely different.

Where did I go wrong?

I can’t figure it out. I love both kittens equally. I haven’t shown any favoritism. Yet Mimi adores me, and Vivi wishes me dead.

And you, too.

Bribes don’t work. I offer them Flaked Chicken & Tuna Feast, plus all manner of fish-shaped oily treats, to the same result. Mimi gobbles them up, but Vivi turns away. I even bought them both the same toy bird on a string, which Mimi happily batted, cute as an illustration in a children’s book. But Vivi only watched from the sidelines. If the bird was dead, the fun was over.

I even got them catnip, which Mimi rolled around in, purring. Vivi merely left the room. She has outgrown gateway drugs. As we speak, she’s probably out dealing.

Things got worse when Vivi came home with a cut on her ear, from a brawl outside with God-knows-what. A hawk, or maybe a dragon. So I took her to the vet, and he told me I had to give her an antibiotic with a medicine dropper.

Are you kidding, doc?

Vivi won’t let me hold her, much less stick something in her mouth. So I put on a down coat and leather gloves to dose her, and still she raged like Charlize Theron in
Monster.

One way or the other, the fact that Vivi turned out so bad will get blamed on me. People always blame the mother, and it’s not fair. Look at Mrs. Spears, Britney’s mother. Sure, she raised Britney, but her other daughter turned out . . . oh, wait. Okay, never mind. Maybe Mrs. Spears gave them too much wet food?

Nevertheless, I have to admit that I still love Vivi. I keep hoping I can turn her around. Gain her trust. Win her love. Maybe I’ve been too much of a friend, and not enough of a parent.

It might take a new bribe. I haven’t tried the Gourmet Gold Filet Mignon Flavor with Real Seafood & Shrimp. That’s even better than the food at my last wedding.

No matter, I’ll never give up on Vivi.

Even a bad girl needs love.

There’s a lot of talk lately about the big mysteries of life. By that phrase, people seem to mean how the Earth began or other questions that only public television can answer.

Honestly, I’m more interested in the small mysteries of life. The mysteries that stump us day-to-day. The mysteries we need to figure out to make our lives better.

Like magazine renewals.

I’m a big fan of magazines. Actually I’m a big fan of reading anything, including cereal boxes, which is why I knew the word “riboflavin” at an early age. But when I grew up, I loved magazines like
Seventeen.
The day they publish a magazine called
Fifty-Two,
I’m in.

I subscribe to a bunch of magazines;
People, Us Weekly, Time, The New Yorker, House & Garden, Vogue
,
Publishers Weekly
, and
Cosmopolitan
.
Cosmo
is for my daughter. I’m no longer qualified to teach her about sex, since I forget.

To stay on point, I love all these magazines, and because I love them so much, I try to avoid the dreaded Interruption in Service. In my broke days, I had one of those with the electric company, and it was no fun at all. I prefer to keep my magazines up and running, with their current flowing smoothly.

But the mystery is that I can never figure out when to renew, mainly because the magazines send me so many renewal forms, almost as soon as my subscription has begun.
Time
magazine sends renewal forms even before you get your first issue of
Time,
or maybe whenever you use the word
time,
or even if you wonder what time it is. You read their magazine, but they read your mind.

There’s simply no other explanation for their speed. If I ever have a heart attack, give my nitro to
Time
magazine.

And the subscription rates are a mystery, too. All the forms offer special rates. Some have a special rate if you subscribe for two or more years, others if you want to buy a gift subscription, and still others if you like the color blue. I get the distinct impression that special rates aren’t all that special in magazineland.

As Gilbert & Sullivan say, If everybody’s somebody, then nobody’s anybody.

And then there are the offers for a professional rate, which I’m offered all the time. The magazines seem to think that I’m a professional, and as flattered as I am, I have to wonder. How do they know what I do and whether I’m professional at it? Plus, what type of professional do you have to be to get a professional rate for
Cosmo
?

Don’t answer.

For a while, I thought I was onto their game, and so I ignored the snowglobe of renewal offers. I figured I would renew when I sensed my subscription was about to expire. Wait them out. Play renewal chicken.

But I lost.

I got so used to ignoring renewal forms, I must’ve ignored the wrong 300 of them, because now I have an Interruption in Service in both
People
and
Time
magazines. I don’t know about
you, but I need People magazine. I pounce on it the moment it comes in and gobble it right up. I also need Time magazine, so I can put it on my coffee table and impress people.

Ironically,
People
doesn’t impress people.

So I renewed
People
and
Time,
and determined not to ignore any more renewal forms. I figured they must know better than I do when my subscription expires. So I responded to the various offers for special professionals like me, but I still messed up. Now I get two copies of
Us Weekly
every week, which is four times as much Lindsay Lohan as I can take. (Although I do love
Us Weekly
’s feature, They’re Just Like Us, which shows celebrities on their continuous vacations, proving conclusively that They’re Not Like Us At All.)

On top of my double dose of
Us Weekly,
somehow I started getting
Rolling Stone,
to which I never subscribed. I have no idea how this happened. I like
Rolling Stone,
though I have no business getting it. I stopped rolling a long time ago. Nowadays, I’m happy just to sit and stay. I’m more a rock than a stone, these days.

But it’s a mystery why
Rolling Stone
started coming to me. I’m guessing that my magazines know a renewal rookie when they see one and they passed the word.

It’s a mystery of life, to me. I’m a mystery writer, and even I’m stumped.

Maybe I need to be a mystery of life writer.