Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life by Quinn Cummings Page B

things without spending money on unnecessary stuff. Typically I avoid them like Consort’s illness, but if I blew off my friend’s fund-raiser I could never guilt her into coming to ours. That’s how it works. So there I was, standing in a bustling auditorium trying to decide which I needed less: a free-trade baby rattle or hemp oven mitts. Then I noticed a small collection of cat toys in a basket. Tuning out the poncho-clad mom explaining how these were made by indigenous Peruvian villagers—people who must have been slightly baffled by the concept of “making toys for food to play with”—I grabbed the smallest object on the table.
    “And this…?” I asked, holding up a small plastic bagof something I could only hope was legal in the state of California.
    “Organic catnip,” she said, pleased I had noticed. “Grown by a prison outreach program. They also raise beets and make fruitcake.”
    I was unclear of the connection unless it was Things Most People Don’t Eat, but I didn’t care. For less than ten dollars, I could catch my friend’s eye as I slid out the door, waving the unbleached-paper bag indicating I had bought something, and feel no guilt over ambushing her with a fundraising Tupperware catalog later in the year.
    When I got home that night, Lulabelle was sleeping on our bed, a black dot of contentment. She wanted nothing more in this world than to continue in a state of perfect bliss. So, naturally, I woke her. I shook out one of the rather suspicious-looking buds and put it in front of her without any expectation of enthusiasm on her part. I had tempted her with catnip toys before, but Lulabelle’s attitude had always been, “Wake me when it’s thrashing and screaming in fear.” The woman who sold it to me swore that its freshness, its lack of pesticides, and its general good karma from having been grown by the formerly oppressed gave it extra moxie.
    Lulabelle flicked an ear, extended one paw, and patted the flower around. She stood up and batted it around a little more vigorously. Then she jumped straight into the air, pounced on the bud, flung it skyward, leapt after it, and turning in space, flopped on top of it like a drunken acrobat. I was delighted. For once, I had given a gift where the recipient didn’t ask for the receipt. In fact, she was getting a little too pleased with her present. Somewhere between the frantic biting of the bud—followedimmediately by attacking my knees—and a series of frenetic wind sprints accompanied by weird guttural shrieks, I decided Lulabelle had enough personality as it was. She didn’t need a psychotropic jump-start.
    I hid the bag in the office. I was washing dishes an hour later when the cat flew into the kitchen, leapt at my shoulder howling in pure delight, then ran off toward the bedrooms. Something told me she might be driving under the influence again. I checked the office. Lulabelle had pushed open the door, located the bag on its high shelf, torn it open with her claws and teeth, and eaten a few more buds. Summoning my inner drug trafficker, I packaged the bag inside another bag and placed it first in a hanging basket over the kitchen sink and then inside a high cupboard. Both times, within an hour, another bud had been scored and I had a nine-pound, cranked-up Hell’s Angel terrorizing my home.
    I scanned the house trying to think of a single drawer or cabinet that even the most determined addict couldn’t tease open. The linen closet! The doors of the linen closet have been painted so many times over the past eighty years that the accumulated paint has added another quarter-inch or so to each panel. Once they are closed, it takes a very specific Lift, Twist, Pull maneuver to open them without injury—a move that had taken me six months to perfect. If Lulabelle figured this out, my concern would not be how to keep her away from the catnip but how we were going to afford college for both the kid and the cat. I toyed with the idea of just