On Saturday morning I was telling a friend of mine about the kitty cats on the news. “That is nothing,” my friend said. “I talked to Ruth last week.”
Ruth is probably the strangest individual I’ve ever met. She’s my friend’s friend, not mine, although I’ve done lots of drinking with her when she’s been in Oregon. Ruth is known for her hair, her makeup and her nails, all of which are truly exquisite.
Until the tale I heard about how Ruth chose to get rid of 17 feral cats, the thing that best defined the tedious, exhausting madness of her existence was her house. It’s a two-story house – I’ve seen the pictures – sort of cottage-esque, perched in front of a large, mature, very cared for yard. The only problem is that there are no stairs connecting the ground floor to the second story. Instead, there’s an opening in the ceiling. There were no stairs when Ruth bought the house a decade ago, and, as of Saturday morning, there are still no stairs. There have been ladders, and pulleys, and platforms and one thing and another. Her son, the one who is no stranger to restraining orders and other court-issued formalities, has moved in and out many times under the pretense of building a staircase. Ruth has pulled muscles and sprained one thing and another, dealing with this problem. Once she decided that to recover from one of her injuries what she needed to do was go to bed. For a year. Which meant she couldn’t work, which meant she lost her job, which caused all kinds of drama with her daughter – not that there was any shortage of it before – who took it upon herself to deliver, weekly, Ruth’s library books by the dozen and Ruth’s groceries, which wreaked havoc on Ruth’s plans to lose weight because Ruth’s daughter favors frozen pizza and boxed macaroni and cheese, and for Ruth to ask her daughter for specific items from the grocery store would have made her appear ungrateful.
The thing about Ruth, to me, is that just hearing about her is aggravating. Ruth’s quite altruistic with her troubles: she not only shares them with everyone, she inserts everyone into them, gives everyone a role to play. It’s the grown-up version of my grandmother letting me “help” put icing on the birthday cake when I was five years old, sort of. I have a tendency toward this type of behavior myself, believing that life, when lived properly, is participatory, and that’s probably why I find Ruth stories so infuriating. I see a bit of myself in Ruth’s antics, and it horrifies me.
Fortunately I don’t have cats. Nor does Ruth, because she ran an ad on the innernets and found someone to trap them in cages in the back yard and blow their little heads off with a shotgun, which, as it turns out, was not registered with the authorities because it was owned by a guy who’s “got restrictions” (whatever the hell that means), so now there’s trouble not only with the law but with the cats’ rights people as well.
Which brings me, of course, to the cats. Ruth’s son found the original kitty in a parking lot and decided to bring it – or her, as it turns out – back to the house. Ruth’s son used to be a personal trainer, but he hurt his back trying (and you know you saw this coming, just admit it) to build a staircase for his mother, so he’s had to give up that line of work. This is Ruth’s fault so, although he’s well into his forties, she let him move in with her. And then he moved out, and then back in, and so on. He’s been on painkillers, which make him groggy, so he didn’t get around to taking his new pet in for surgery. He did, however, get around to meeting a woman at a bar, where the two of them eventually almost made finals in the shuffleboard tournament. The girlfriend loves, loves, loves cats, so imagine the joyful sense of wonder they experienced, together, when the first batch was born.
Unfortunately, their joy was short lived: Not long ago Ruth’s son tried to run his girlfriend over with his car and in this case Ruth sided not with her flesh and blood but with his girlfriend. She turned her son in. He’s now in jail and Ruth has a new roommate. Since there is no way to get upstairs, Ruth’s bed is set up in the dining room, and the girlfriend sleeps on the couch in the living room. “It’s cozy,” my friend told me. And Ruth’s daughter is sending hostile e-mails every hour on the hour, in which she accuses Ruth of setting the entire thing up as revenge for the unfinished – unstarted for that matter – staircase. While I don’t doubt her ability to do so, I have no idea how Ruth would have gone about orchestrating such a chain of events, and believe it or not I did not ask after the particulars.
What I did ask was why on earth you’d run an ad to deal with the cat problem rather than calling the Humane Society. “Oh, oh,” my friend said. “Because, her son’s girlfriend really likes the cats, and Ruth was afraid that if the Humane Society showed up it would be totally obvious what was going on and that it would upset her.” Of course, I thought when I heard that, because the rest of it is so subtle.
