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| The Muse that Mewed By Wendy Wasserstein I don't come from a long line of pet lovers. One of my earliest memories is of my mother, Lola, releasing our pet parakeet into a hurricane. She never explained how th ebird flew out of her cage into the storm, but all we children knew it was involuntary. And then there was the time I came home from elementary school to find our newly acquired cocker spaniel on the roof. My mother promised me that the dog climbed up there for the view, but I certainly had never seen Lassie on the roof. The police arrived and the dog survived and subsequently moved to live with relatives in the suburbs. The last straw was my father driving a cat from our house in Brooklyn over the bridge into Manhattan and dropping her off somewhere near Wall Street, apparently hoping that a generous stockbroker would take her in or perhaps she would become a cub of the Dreyfus lion. Personally, I thought my entire family should have been brought in for questioning by the animal rights board. Ten years ago, I advised a single friend of mine who was thinking about getting a dog that we had to try people first and then move on to animals. Within six months I had a cat, Ginger, and he a dog, Phyllis. Ginger the cat had at least one life before she met me. I found her as an adult at the ASPCA and have no idea where she lived before. Ginger and I did not have love at first sight. In fact, it was my friend Andre who first spotted her. Actually, it was Andre who dragged me to the ASPCA to begin with. He was a cat lover, the owner of a late, great Pussers, a gray aristocrat with elegant lines, and he convinced me to drop my fears of becoming L.S.W.W.C. - Lonely Single Woman With Cats - and replace them with the joy of having a warm, intelligent feline by the fire. Ginger was never a calendar cat. We chose her because she was an orange calico, and if I was to have a cat, I didn't want a czarina like Pussers but rather a fuzzy orange creamsicle. My veterinarian, Dr. Ann Lucas, says Ginger was between 3 and 4 years old when we first met her and always had an older cat's teeth and personality. That was fine -- frankly, I didn't want a Puffy jumping around the house with a ball of yarn. I had read once in an Anne Beattie interview about her cats sitting on the windowsill as the light flooded in on a bright winter day as the delicate and talented writer sat down to work. I wanted old Ginger with her dark sad eyes seated beside me like a sheepdog as the evening light faded on my day's literary travels. You can't always get what you want. Forget Puffy - Ginger's voice and personality verged on Linda Blair's in The Exorcist. Unlike the millionaire singer kitty who croons about her love for chicken and liver, Ginger had a grating prolonged meow that sounded like Ethel Merman holding a note and belting, "I can do anything better than you." At any moment I thought her head would swivel and she would inform me that my mother sucked bad things that rhymed with clocks in hell. Every morning at five she would tap my head and hair until I served up her favorite turkey Fancy Feast. On four cans of Fancy Feast a day, sad-eyed Ginger and a furry Dallas Cowboys football soon became indistinguishable. During my life with Ginger, our personalities began to merge; Ginger preferred resting by the radiator to any physical activities, and so did I. Ginger believed all things could be solved by a snack and a phone call, and so did I. After the day's activities, I would call my neighbor Michi to chat, and Ginger would jump on the bed and pull on the phone cord. Finally, I began leaving messages for Aunt Michi from Ginger ranging from her thoughts on Socks the White House cat to her feline opinions of me. During my life with Ginger, I wrote better and more happily than ever before. While I was at the desk, she didn't sit on the windowsill, but on the bed. I would finish the scene, get on the bed to rest, and we would look it over together. I was 36 years old, writing my play The Heidi Chronicles, and she was probably 102, but I always thought of us as a girl and her cat. And at the end of a particularly satisfying Saturday evening at home in a Lanz flannel nightgown, I would watch Ginger's TV idol Toonces, the driving cat, on Saturday Night Live. Toonces was the feline version of George Maharis in Route 66. This kitty - not a computer actualization but a kitty as real as Ginger - got behind the wheel of his convertible weekly and took to the road. Ginger, who had never been impressed by the mention in The Heidi Chronicles (as the famous children's book King Ginger the Lion), sat on my lap for Saturday Night Live because our neighbor, her Aunt Michi, knew someone at the show and therefore could introduce her to Toonces. Toonces died of cancer at age nine. Ginger died of bladder cancer at age 12 or maybe, according to Dr. Lucas, at 14. All I know is that both passed away at about the same time. I found out about Ginger's diagnosis while I was working on a play in London. AS I look back on it, I was told I would have to fly to New York and close my Broadway play and my cat on the same weekend. I know plays have to close, but I had no idea I would be losing my companion, my best source of funny anecdotes, my friend through mostly thick and seldom thin. When Ginger had first arrived at my home, I wrote a song medley for her of Ginger's greatest hits - including "Rootilda," sung to "Matilda" using her nickname "Root," as in gingerroot. I had no idea that the pleasure of Ginger sitting on my stomach over the Sunday Times and our singing a duet of "Rootilda" - her Linda Blair falsetto and my Harry Belafonte - would become a memory. I was very jealous this past Christmas when I saw the MTV video of those caroling kitties. If only Ginger had survived two more months I could have been a stage mother. Ginger was diagnosed for her final curtain in early July. She survived until November. Ginger, who developed a taste for not only Fancy Feast but the dramatic during her stay with me, had an On Golden Pond finale; I believe in the last months of her life, Ginger fell in love. A doctor I respect once told me that treating cancer is like chasing a fish: you watch where it swims and take it from there. Ginger certainly wasn't swimming upstream, but she wasn't drowning either. While I had to be in London, I hired a handsome young man named Ken to move in with Ginger. Suddenly Ginger made a miraculous (albeit short-term) recovery - kidney counts were down and Kenny Cassillo was in the air. She followed him around the house and stared at him lovingly while he sat at the desk. At last, I had a son-in-law. Every week that summer, Cindy, my assistant, and beloved Kenny packed up Ginger and took her in a town car to Dr. Lucas. Ginger always traveled first-class. She was Orphan Annie - the cat who made it from the ASPCA to Fifth Avenue. No public transportation for her. At the end of her life she even switched from Fancy Feast to Hedleigh's Gourmet Shoppe sliced turkey. During the fall, when I lived at home again, she became incontinent, but as long as her blood levels were acceptable and she wasn't in pain, I was still chasing that fish. Finally, in November while I was in Los Angeles for a week, Cindy called me to say she thought it was time. Ken and I took Ginger down to Dr. Lucas for her final visit. She sat in my lap, now very thin and very sweet, and I lifted her to the window. "Look at the world, Ginger," I told her. I wanted her to know where she was leaving so she could tell stories where she was going. I couldn't bear to go home that afternoon. I got back on a plane to Los Angeles and as I looked out the window at a flash of orange in the sky I thought of the Elton John song about Daniel waving good-bye; she was on her way to meet Toonces in his red convertible and drive to visit our friend Harry Kondoleon, the playwright who had been chasing an immune-deficiency fish for the past five years. I imagined Harry greeting Ginger: "It's you. Come in. I have cans and cans of Fancy Feast. How is Wendy? Everyone up here knows you wrote all her plays." And sometimes I think she did. |
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