Part Two

The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It
by Geneen Roth

(Page 2 of 2)

When friends walk into my house and see that I have a kitten, they turn to mush immediately, talk baby talk, tell Blanche they love him. My friend Nancy, a suit-clad district attorney, crawls around on her knees, trying to lure him with a penguin stuffed with catnip. My painfully shy friend Louis pulls a string on the floor, from room to room, letting Blanche pounce on it. My hip, edgy friend Maria picks him up, cuddles him, and coos, ignoring me altogether. People change around him, the way they do around babies. Blanche seems to provide an opening from which their love, coiled like a rope at the bottom of a basket, can wave its vulnerable, tender head.

By the time he is two years old Blanche weighs twenty pounds. He looks like a furry pyramid or a goat with curly stomach hair. Since my books are about emotional eating, everyone who walks in the house has a comment about his size. They all say the same things:

• Your cat needs to read one of your books.

• Your cat needs to come to your workshops.

• Your cat needs to go on a diet, but oh yeah, I forgot, you don't believe in dieting.

It doesn't help that Blanche has a girl's name and I have to keep correcting everyone that she is a he. They take it as an opportunity for further speculation: Does he eat because he's confused about his identity?

But I know this is Blanche's real shape, his natural weight, since I only feed him half a cup of dry food a day, plus little bits of butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and dried sardines. Blanche is a nibbler, a delicate eater, an epicure.

He is also the kind of cat you can dress up in a bonnet and wheel around in a baby carriage, which my eleven-year-old neighbor, Rosie, does several times a week. As soon as you pick him up, he relaxes his body and purrs; when Rosie isn't out wheeling him up and down the block, I walk with Blanche around my neck like a monkey, like a second heart.

I feel like a cliché. For the first time in my life, I am not afraid of being too intense, too effusive, too needy. No matter how many times I kiss him, hug him, pull his tail, and turn him upside down, he doesn't turn away. Blanche is a love sponge with a thousand petal-pink lipstick marks on his head.

Three months after Blanche's second birthday,

I meet Matt at the Association for Humanistic Psychology conference, where we are both speakers. Though he is sexy, funny, kind-and here's the linchpin: AVAILABLE-he needs to pass the Blanche test before I let him into my life.

When Matt comes to my house on our first date, Blanche is out carousing in the neighborhood. Matt and I sit in the blue striped chairs on the deck and tell each other about our lives, the usual first-time stories. We discover that we had been to movies at the same theater in Fresh Meadows, New York, and must have passed each other on the lines for Dr. Zhivago and A Hard Day's Night when we were in high school. I tell him I didn't think I would have liked him, though-he is too nice, and I only liked boys who were mean and loved someone else. He happens to mention that he doesn't like chocolate, and I wonder whether I can ever love him.

A few seconds later, Blanche comes hopping over the fence, swaggers to Matt, and jumps on his lap. I am sorry I haven't asked Matt if he has a hernia, because when Blanche lands on you, it feels as if a truck has crashed on your legs. Matt doesn't flinch. He begins to talk baby talk.

Then, looking at me, he says, "You know, I really don't like cats."

I glance at my watch to see when I can kick him out.

"But there is something very unusual about you, Blanche," he continues, stroking him under the chin. "You seem to be more than a cat."

I decide to wait a few weeks before I ask him to marry me.

After our first date, Matt flies off to Hawaii on a business trip, and I get ready to go to New York to teach. As a treat for Blanche, and because I feel guilty about leaving him the next day, I open a can of tuna fish, and when he doesn't come tearing to my side, I know that something is wrong. I call the vet to tell him that Blanche is dragging his bottom across the deck and won't eat his favorite food. Dr. Mike tells me to bring him in immediately; he says it sounds as if Blanche has a blocked kidney.

Fortunately, my assistant, Maureen, who is working in the house, has a three-year-old child and is practiced at being calm in emergencies, because I am suddenly hysterical and can't remember where I put the cat carrier. We end up wrapping Blanche in a towel, tearing out of the house, honking through red lights, and running into the vet's office. Dr. Mike feels Blanche's kidneys, asks me when he peed last (I have no idea), and confirms the diagnosis: feline urinary disorder, a condition common in male cats.

"A few more hours and you would have lost him," he says, "his kidneys would have burst." Since by now I cannot imagine life without Blanche, I put all my emotional energy into setting up a visiting schedule for Blanche's upcoming week in the hospital. Each day a different friend will read or sing to him, bring a stuffed toy or catnip, and call me in New York so Blanche can hear my voice. It is the calling-me-in-New-York part that makes it apparent I've gone over the top.

Back at home, my feelings for Matt grow stronger, which is becoming a problem. Not only am I, a self-proclaimed curmudgeon, unexpectedly and boundlessly attached to a cat who is probably going to die before me, I am now falling for a human as well, and it scares me. I worry I'll get soft around the edges, begin getting used to his smell, the lilt of his voice, the crinkles around his eyes-and then wham! I could lose him. He could meet someone else (someone nicer, someone less intense, someone with big hair and long legs) on the street, in an airplane, at the grocery store, and break my heart. Or he could die in a plane crash, or a car accident, or from cancer. The statistical odds are against us. Men die before women. I feel utterly exposed, as if I am peeling back my skin and opening myself to the center where wounds are born.

Avoiding this state is the very reason I was obsessed with food for seventeen years, the reason I used to zing up and down the scales by ten pounds every few weeks. It seemed to me that being thin was like wearing my insides on my outside, while being fat gave me protection. People thought they were seeing me but I knew they were seeing my fat; I was safely inside, watching, waiting, assessing the situation. When they rejected me, they were only rejecting my fat. The real truth was, they couldn't touch me, which was exactly what I wanted. I was able to stop eating compulsively, in part, by telling myself that being thin didn't have to mean relinquishing my control about who touched me, who hurt me, who came close, and who stayed away.

Copyright © 2005 by Geneen Roth. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Geneen Roth is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller When Food Is Love. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, 20/20, and many other national television shows, and her work has been featured in numerous publications. She lives in northern California, writes a column for Prevention magazine, and maintains an active lecture and workshop schedule.