“It’s hideous,” I say, because I’m too sleep-deprived to be polite.
The stuffed cat is just the sort of gift a carefree, childless sister would buy for a newborn. It regards us now from its place on the changing table with huge, glassy eyes. Its sparse black fur covers an anatomically unlikely body that emits a tinny meow when squeezed, and its tag confirms my suspicions: made from 100% unnatural substances, probably carcinogenic. My sister must have purchased it as an afterthought from some overpriced airport store as she jetted out to see her new nephew.
“Charlie’s going to be your only nephew, so get a good look,” I say over my baby’s open-mouthed screaming.
My husband relieves me of our red and writhing offspring and does a series of deep knee-bends until Charlie quiets. Sweet silence reigns—for the moment—and I sink to the floor and rest my throbbing forehead on the cool bars of the crib.
“My maternity leave is almost over,” I say, my voice catching, “I can’t teach in these conditions.”
My sister pats me awkwardly on the shoulder, probably making a mental resolution never to reproduce.
My husband lays the baby in the crib as if he’s setting down a stick of dynamite, but Charlie startles awake the moment he touches the hypoallergenic organic fair trade cotton sheet, and the wailing resumes. My husband swears, and I moan.
From its vantage point on the changing table, the stuffed cat’s otherworldly eyes seem to take in the scene—one that has played out many times in the last two months.
Faster than you can say contamination, my sister catches up the toy and shoves it into the crib in front of Charlie’s face. An electronic meow makes its way through the sound and the fury.
Charlie stops mid-wail, and his angry little body relaxes. Tiny fingers grasp the cat’s spun-plastic fur, and tiny eyes flutter closed.
The adults in the room tiptoe to the crib rail, and for a full minute by the Winnie-the-Pooh clock on the wall, no one makes a sound. Then …
“‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’” my husband, the British Literature professor, says.
“No, it’s still the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m willing to take a utilitarian viewpoint in this case,” I, the philosophy professor, say.
“You’re welcome,” my sister, the pragmatist, says.
“Ontology,” I say through a yawn, “is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being: the essential nature of things, their existence and reality.”
As I click to the next overcrowded PowerPoint slide, my yawn spreads through the lecture hall of Philosophy 110 students like a plague. I can see it in their eyes; they’re counting the minutes until the period is over so they can go back to living their best unexamined lives. To be fair to them, my pedagogy has been less than inspired since Hurricane Charlie came through.
“What would we do without that wonderful, awful cat?” I ask my husband that night as we gaze down at our chubby six-month-old sleeping with his dimpled hands locked around the object.
“We’d be dead or—” he blows his nose “—insane. It’s the strangest thing, though. Have you noticed the purring?”
I tear my eyes away from the tableau in the crib. “The what?”
“Listen.” He reaches in and compresses the cat’s stomach, and a noise like a faraway train fills the nursery.
“Weird,” I say.
“Electronics,” shrugs my Luddite spouse. He sniffs and scrubs at his eyes. “Is the pollen especially bad this year?”
As Charlie grows, that bit of mass-produced plastic becomes a sine qua non.
“Tat” is Charlie’s first word, and from this time forth, he insists we address the toy as such.
“Where is Tat?” becomes a constant question in our household, and woe betide the parent who attempts to broker an outing, bedtime, or diaper change without it. We launch whole-house man-hunts—or rather, cat-hunt—for that stuffed animal.
“Some thinkers distinguish materialism from physicalism, and some do not,” I tell my glassy-eyed students. “But both forms of philosophical monism hold that matter or related—”
A pimply boy in the front row starts snoring like a chainsaw, and I lose my train of thought. I’ve lost my audience too, and if my departmental reviews don’t start improving, I can kiss tenure goodbye.
My excuse: I’m exhausted from the double load of work and family. But I know I can do better.
“Hey, Charlie,” I say, coming through the door after a long day of delivering bone-dry lectures.
“Tat wants you to say hello to him too,” Charlie tells me, a frown gathering like a stormcloud on his brow.
Hell hath no fury like a toddler thwarted, so I say, “Hi, Tat.”
Tat, it turns out, has quite a lot of opinions about the colors of sippy cups (red yes, blue no), food (chicken nuggets yes, spinach no), and books (Calvin and Hobbes yes, The Velveteen Rabbit no).
Charlie takes his toy cat everywhere, but I draw the line when he asks me to set out food and water. After a frank exchange of ideas, I erase that line and purchase a small bag of kitty chow and two metal dishes.
“You caved,” my husband accuses me later that night as we lie in bed, exhausted by a day of teaching a few hundred students and parenting one small child. “You’re spoiling him.”
I roll to face him. “But in Charlie’s mind, Tat is real. He’s picked up on the societal norm that it’s immoral to starve an animal. So if you think about it, he’s being extremely prosocial.”
“Hm,” my husband says.
“Think about how easy potty training will be once I get Tat a litter box.”
We high-five and fall asleep.
“Descartes suggests that ideas possess objective reality—that they are representations of things. Even an imaginary creature like Pegasus represents something…to the…mind.”
I trail off. Based on the number of students’ heads on desks, I gather my lectures have a soporific effect. I’m phoning it in these days, and they know it. Guilt pricks my conscience, and on an impulse, I switch off the projector.
“Who here had an imaginary friend growing up?” I ask. Heads come up off desks, and a few tentative hands go up. “Maybe a toy or doll?”
The reminiscing begins. We cover not a single slide, but my question sparks a lively discussion about perception and reality.
I come home, buoyant with success, and go over to where Charlie sits pushing a train around a wooden track, his favorite toy clamped in his armpit.
Crouching down, I say, “Hey, buddy. Can I see Tat?”
Charlie passes the precious object to me with ceremonial solemnity.
Tat is starting to show his age, his coat faded to a particolored gray and worn to a silky texture from four years of constant handling—almost like real animal fur. He’s missing one ear, and his electronic sounds have mellowed to something almost pleasant.
I hand the toy back to Charlie, who’s been watching me like a hawk. “Thanks, bud.”
He holds up the cat. “Thank Tat too.”
I clear my throat. “Thank you, Tat.” Brushing a few gray hairs from my cardigan, I get to my feet. “Almost dinner time, love.”
“Tat wants chicken nuggets.”
“He can have them.”
That night, over a sinkful of dishes, my husband asks, “Do you think Charlie is getting too old for Tat?
I glance around in case Charlie overheard us, but our son is busy hauling Tat up to the top of the curtain rod with the blinds cord. “What do you mean?”
My husband scratches the back of his neck. “He starts kindergarten next month, and I’m worried he’ll get teased.”
I sweep the sprinkling of nugget crumbs from the counter and frown into the trash can. “Right. Maybe if we wean him off Tat now…”
But Charlie will have none of it. We endure one eternal hour of screaming, tantrums, and tears, then Tat miraculously appears again.
One of the great privileges of parenting is the chance to watch your child as he sleeps. Charlie’s round cheeks are flushed a hectic red from the day’s vocal exercise, his hair is matted with sweat, and his fingers are locked around his stuffed cat even in sleep.
My husband bends to smooth Charlie’s hair. “He fell asleep before I finished reading the chapter from Pinocchio.” Then he grimaces and shakes his head, sucking in a breath.
His sneeze detonates in the room, and we freeze. Charlie whimpers and hugs Tat tighter, but he stays blessedly asleep. We both release a breath.
“Have you been around a cat?” my husband asks, scrubbing his fists into his eye sockets.
“No, why?”
“I must be getting sick, then.”
One day, as I cruise through a series of slides on Kant, a tall girl in the back of the room raises her hand. “What is reality, anyway?”
I smile and flick off the projector. These days we rarely make it through a slideshow, because the kids have realized I’m a sucker for metaphysics. I don’t care, no matter what my department head thinks.
“In philosophy, reality is the sum of everything real within a system.” I hold up a hand. “Yes, that’s a bit tautologic. It’s anything not imaginary. And note that word imaginary. That doesn’t mean reality includes only what is known or perceived. Quite the contrary. We can’t depend on our senses to give us a representative realism.”
The girl gnaws her lip as she takes this in, then asks, “So we could all be viewing the world differently?”
I knock on the cheap particle board of my lectern. “That’s a question almost as old as philosophy.”
That launches another spirited debate, and my PowerPoint is forgotten. I return home fizzing with energy, but my good mood evaporates when I come through the door.
Charlie lies prostrate on the floor, his vocal cords working at full capacity, while my husband turns kitchen cabinets inside out.
I pick my way through utensils, dry goods, and saucepans. “Bud, what’s wrong?” It takes a few minutes to understand what Charlie is trying to say through great, hiccupping sobs: Tat is gone.
My husband rakes his fingers through his thinning hair. “We’ve been looking for hours. We even retraced our steps to the playground, but–”
I join in the search, but to no avail.
As the grownups shift into panic mode, Charlie goes quiet. He rummages about in the detritus on the floor and holds out a pen and paper to me.
“Put up signs, like old Mrs. Adebe did when her dachshund ran away.”
I crouch down. “Honey, that was a little different. Weenie is real.”
Charlie’s lip trembles. “Tat is real too.”
We stare at each other for a moment, and I look away. “Tat is real too,” I repeat.
My husband and I sacrifice our dignity on the altar of parental love and have a hundred signs printed with Tat’s picture. Missing, $50 reward.
Charlie sobs himself to sleep in our bed that night, and he sleeps like a baby, which means he wakes up half a dozen times, crying his little heart out. This time there’s no toy cat to comfort him.
The next morning, my husband and I hold an eyebrow-conversation across the breakfast table over top of Charlie’s curly head.
Looks bad for the good guys, his eyebrows say.
I raise mine. Maybe Tat will turn up.
Unlikely.
I know.
We watch Charlie lick butter off his toast, his little face and his eyes red after our rough night. I must look like something the cat dragged in—and thinking of the idiom makes me wince. If we find Tat, I will never cast aspersions on that toy ever again.
There’s a knock at the door.
I open it to find a massive man in a blinding yellow jumpsuit on our doormat. He’s holding something large and gray in his arms.
“Hi, Trash Man,” hollers Charlie, upsetting his milk in his rush to get to the door.
“Hi, Charlie Boy,” said Trash Man. He holds out the something-large-and-gray: a tom cat, one ear gone missing, no doubt in some back-alley feline gang war.
“Tat!” Charlie screams, reaching for the disreputable-looking creature.
My husband sneezes.
I try and fail to intercept the cat handoff. “Sorry, I think there’s been a mistake. That’s not—”
“Tat!” Charlie cries again, squeezing the large animal’s middle. The cat takes this in stride; in fact, he begins to purr, a low rumble like a faraway train. He’s almost as big as the five-year-old holding him.
Trash Man, already a hero in Charlie’s eyes, leaves with godlike status and fifty bucks.
My husband and I carry on another short, frantic eyebrow-conversation as Charlie settles on the floor, Tat purring like a Porsche in his lap.
What do we do? I ask silently, eyebrows at my hairline. Charlie thinks his precious toy has come back. Tat was already alive to him, so in his mind nothing has changed.
My husband gives an infinitesimal head shake that means We can’t keep that cat.
I push out my lower lip. But think of the child.
“Fine,” my husband says out loud. He doubles over with another explosive sneeze. “I’m going to the pharmacy for antihistamines.”
When he’s gone, I crouch down beside Charlie. With one trembling finger, I stroke the top of the cat’s head, and he leans into my hand. “Welcome back, beautiful boy,” I say.
Taryn Frazier lives and writes in the Philly Metro area with a D&D-playing husband, four imaginative children, and one very real cat. Her short fiction is published or forthcoming in places like Apex Magazine, Podcastle, and Mysterion. Find out more at tarynfrazier.com or connect on Instagram @tarynrose.writes and Twitter @tarynrose.writer.
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