A tale of two kitties

I used to have two black cats, sisters from the same litter. My friend Kara and I had stopped in a pet store when we had some time to kill."Are you sure?" she asked me. "Last time I went into a pet store for no reason, I came out with Freddy." Freddy was her dog.I laughed. "What am I gonna do? Get a pet and take it home on the plane with me?" I was visiting her in Virginia from Florida.We went in.Then I saw them. In a box near the front of the store were two tiny balls of black fur, with clear blue eyes. "Mew!" they squeaked. I fell in love. I hadn't had a cat since I'd gone to college and my cats stayed home with my parents.I figured that asking the price would cure me, so I did. Big mistake.I forget the price, but I think it was less than $10 for the both of them, because a friend who worked down the block at brought them in the day before, asking if the store owner if he could help find them a home. The money was just for the cost of what he'd spent on them already, cleaning them and feeding them and the like.Still, I'd have to get a carrier, collars, pay to fly them home, it all seemed crazy. So Kara kicked it up a notch and offered to buy me the cats, their carrier and collars as an early birthday present. It was done. I was in love and we left with two little black fluffballs who went "mew!"What to name them? Well, Kara and I were like sisters, and at the time one of our favorite TV shows was "Sisters." The four titular stars had feminized versions of traditionally male names, and were called by nicknames. Francesca was Frankie, Theodora was Teddy, Georgina was Georgie, and Alexandra was Alex. Kara and I both favorited Frankie and Teddy as characters. So the kittens' fate was sealed: Frankie and Teddy they were.Over the years, they did lots of very cute and cat-like things, but as they grew into cathood, they went from being nearly identical (Frankie had a tiny dot of white in the center of her chest and had yellow eyes, while Teddy was completely black and had green eyes) to being pretty easy to tell apart.Teddy was fluffier and Frankie had some awkward in-between years where her head was basically an equilateral triangle. Teddy was the one everyone exclaimed about, how beautiful she was.But there was another significant difference between the two: Frankie was quite bright. Teddy was decidedly not. "Dumb as a bag of rocks" has sometimes been the way I've described it.There are many examples of Teddy's intellectual shortcomings, but the most significant one came one Halloween.I dressed as a black cat that year. Not too hard for me - a New Yorker by birth, I had lots of black clothing. My tail was a belt hanging off the back of my pants. I bought one of those little headbands with cat ears on it and some black eye pencil to color my nose black and add whiskers.I used the eye pencil in the bathroom and came out into my bedroom. Teddy was on my bed, Frankie was sitting on a nightstand. Teddy took one look at me, arched her back and hissed. I mean, she hissssssed and her tail blew up like a bottle brush.Frankie was a bit startled, too, and meowed. Mostly because she was confused about why Teddy was so freaked out, and she wanted to make sure she wasn't missing anything. She sniffed me and was satisfied that all was normal. Except for Teddy.I went over to Teddy and petted her. I had to grab her so she didn't run away. She sniffed me, I talked to her, and she finally seemed satisfied that I was not some gigantic black cat from another dimension who'd come to take over the world.Good.I went into the other room to grab a bite to eat before I went out to my friend's party. I went back into the bedroom to grab my purse.About five minutes had passed.Teddy took one look at me and arched her back and hissed. Her tail? A bottle brush again.  I had to grab her and calm her down again. Oh, you're Mommy, she seemed to say when she calmed down. Gotcha.I made sure, before I came back into the apartment later that night, that I took the headband and belt off.Poor Teddy. So pretty, yet ...Photo by Patrick Feller via Flickr Creative Commons. I don't have digitized versions of my cat's photos and have to find them.