My cat and I are practically interchangeable
Like me, and like all other women, Dottie is driven by an insatiable, unspecific hunger. When we met, she was a plucky Arizona stray, born in a front garden and pretending to be a dog with her sister, Whisky. The day before my 21st birthday, she came home with me, and we have lived together ever since. She was scrawny, scary-skinny, until about a year after we moved to New York.
My friends and family would tell me that I was underfeeding her. Along with dry food and canned food, I would supplement her diet with tiny slices of tuna, or egg whites that I cooked in an ungreased pan and mixed into her Sheba wet food. She never fattened. Then, all at once, her thighs and belly bulked and now I can't scoop her up without grunting. Dottie is soft like a marshmallow and dense like a star.
It's easy to fall into the shorthand people use with pets, in which I am Mom and she is A Tiny Little Baby. There's a familiar, familial feeling between us, but I don't really consider myself her mother. We're especially close roommates, perhaps. Our relationship is inexact.
I don't have sisters of my own, but in some of my interactions with Dottie, I recognize a strain of violence that I've only ever seen between women I know and their female siblings. This is not to say I am abusing Dottie! I am not! But if you have watched any adaptation of Little Women, and you saw how furiously Jo reacts after Amy burns her novel manuscript, then you know what happens when Dottie tries to scale my leg like a palm tree when I am in tights, or worse, bare-legged.
Dottie and I are the same. I have a photo, taken by a friend who slept over, of Dottie and I asleep in bed next to each other. We are both on our right side, both facing the wall, parentheses not containing anything. But we aren't touching. There's no big spoon/little spoon. Sometime in the night we simply aligned and then remained.
For a long time Dottie showered with me, and when she fell out of the habit – no explanation – I was sad. She loves to be damp and will tolerate being wet. In Arizona, she would sit between the inner and outer shower curtain, perched on the edge of the tub, staring diligently at something on the wall just past my naked body. One time she threw up in the shower while I was in it, and that was gross, but very easy to clean up. A few weeks ago she refused to go into the living room. I couldn't discern why. I checked to make sure she wasn't hurt or sick. If she wanted to go from the bedroom, where I live, to the hallway, where her food is, she would need to pass through the living room, but for days she simply would not do it. Instead, she would meow in the doorway when she needed to be ferried across, and I'd do it. She got over this and never told me why.
We do talk a lot. She's very chatty, like me, and when I'm on the phone she'll try her hardest to participate in the conversation. Her head is more round in real life than it seems in a photo. While I write, she sandwiches herself between my legs, sometimes spinning onto her back and using me as a hammock. She is headstrong and affectionate and fickle, and she's idiosyncratic and neurotic and devoted. Dottie doesn't pay rent. When it's really cold, she flattens herself out and slides under the radiator. Whatever makes me me is the same stuff that makes her her.
"When people are very young they see animals as equals, even as kin," Sigrid Nunez writes in The Friend (a book about a dog). "That humans are different, unique and superior to all other species – this they have to be taught." I think she's right, though this seems a little bit binary to me. Dottie is much more like me than a lot of humans. I think she also makes me more myself. The intimacy we have is built on a frame of privacy: she has vomited on my bare feet, but she does not know anything about my fears and failures. The same cannot be said for all of my other best friends, but none of my other best friends are lucky enough to be Dottie.
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