She brought out the black bag on a Thursday evening, the crinkly kind that lives folded up under the sink next to the dustpan, and I want it noted for the record that I did not like the sound of it from the very first crinkle. That bag has never once, in my experience, contained anything good. It has contained old newspapers. It has contained the remains of a broken picture frame. It has never contained anything a reasonable animal would want to keep, which is precisely why I was alarmed to see it appear on the bed, mouth open, waiting.
Then she started pulling things out of the closet.
I want to be clear that I have no formal objection to her closet. I don’t go in there often — it smells like cedar and something plasticky from the shoe boxes and it’s dark in a way that doesn’t interest me, unlike the excellent dark under the bed. But I do keep a mental account of what belongs where, and when she started laying things across the comforter in two piles, I understood immediately that something was being decided, and that I had not been consulted.
One pile she folded and put back. The other pile she looked at for a second too long before she set it down, and that was the pile I didn’t trust.
It had a cardigan in it I don’t care about. It had a scarf that smells like nothing, which is its own kind of insult. And it had the gray sweater.
I need to explain about the gray sweater, though I suspect anyone who has visited this apartment already knows it by reputation. It is soft in a way that very few of her things are soft, gone a little thin at one elbow, and it lives on the back of the reading chair — or it did, before the chair’s unauthorized relocation, and it still does, wherever the chair happens to be sulking that week. When she isn’t wearing it, I sleep on it. When she is wearing it, I sit as close to it as the laws of physics allow. It is, by my accounting, one of maybe four objects in this entire household that reliably smells like her at full strength, undiluted by soap or the outside, and she was folding it into the bad pile like it was the scarf that smells like nothing.
I did what any animal in my position would do. I got on it.
I would like to say I did this thoughtfully, that I weighed my options and selected sitting-on-it as the most dignified available intervention, but honestly I just moved. One second the sweater was folded on the comforter and the next second it had thirty pounds of cat on top of it, immovable, magnificent, going nowhere. She laughed — I remember that specifically, the laugh, which told me she thought this was cute rather than understanding it as the serious act of civil disobedience it was — and tried to slide the sweater out from under me. I redistributed my weight to make this as difficult as possible. This is a skill I have.
She got maybe six inches of sleeve free before she gave up and went back to the other clothes, muttering something about how I was going to have to move eventually. I did not intend to move eventually. I intended to move never.
The problem with never is that it’s very hard to maintain when there’s a bathroom involved, and at some point I had to get up, and the second I did she scooped the sweater off the bed and folded it properly into the bad pile before I could reoccupy it. I sat at the edge of the bed and watched her do this with what I can only describe as profound personal betrayal. She had waited me out. She had used my own biology against me.
I considered my remaining options. There weren’t many. I am not permitted in the bag itself — I tried, briefly, at the start of all this, and was removed with a hand under my belly and a firm “no, not you” that I chose not to dignify with a response. I couldn’t out-sit her again, not with the bag right there gulping down whatever she handed it. What I could do, and what I did do, was go get the sock.
The sock lives under the radiator in the back room. I don’t fully know why I keep it there instead of somewhere more central, except that it seems like the kind of thing that should live somewhere a little private, a little serious. I retrieve it for occasions that call for it. This was, in my judgment, exactly that kind of occasion. I carried it back down the hall — it’s a short walk but I made noise the whole way, the low announcing kind of noise, so she’d know something important was arriving — and I put it directly on top of the donation pile, on top of the sweater, on top of the scarf that smells like nothing.
She stopped what she was doing and looked at the sock for a second. Then she looked at me.
“Is this a bribe,” she said, “or a donation of your own.”
I didn’t have an answer for her, because I hadn’t fully worked that part out myself. I think it was meant to be a bribe — an offering in exchange for the sweater’s release — but I can see, in retrospect, how it could’ve read as generosity, me matching her sacrifice with one of mine, and either way she picked the sock up, turned it over once like she was checking it for a return address, and set it aside on the nightstand rather than in the bag. So the sock, at least, survived the evening. It has since been returned to the radiator, no worse for its trip.
The sweater did not come back out of the pile that night. I watched her tie the top of the bag and I want the record to reflect that I did not make a scene about it, because I had already made several scenes and a cat only gets so much credibility to spend in one evening. I went and sat by the closet instead, in the spot where the smell was strongest, and I stayed there long enough that she eventually came and found me and sat down on the floor next to me, which she doesn’t usually do, sitting on floors not really being what floors are for as far as she’s concerned.
She didn’t say much. She scratched behind my ear the way she does when she already knows what the problem is and doesn’t think it needs a whole conversation. Then she got up, went to the bag, and dug around in it until she found the sweater and pulled it back out, and put it back on the hook where the cardigan used to be, next to the scarf.
I’m not going to pretend I understand fully what changed her mind, whether it was the sock or the floor-sitting or something that had nothing to do with me at all. I’ve decided not to ask too many questions about it and just accept the outcome, which is that the sweater is back, smelling exactly the way it should, and I have already reclaimed my position on it twice since, once for a full and satisfying nap.
The bag went out the next morning without it. I watched it go from the window, the way I watch most things leave, without much feeling one way or the other, because it had already stopped being my problem the second the right thing came back off the hook.