Happy Birthday, Liza Bean Bitey; or So No Dessert Then?

Yesterday was Liza Bean Bitey’s birthday. My son has sent me several texts this morning abusing me for knowing such a thing, but how could I have not? Facebook was all abuzz about it.

And so we went out, Liza Bean and I, for sushi. You know, you get a couple of glasses of sake in her, and that cat is hilarious!

Of course, there’s a fine line between enough sake and too much, but before the fist fight, we had a great time.

If you don’t have thumbs, is it still considered a “fist”?

We over-ordered, naturally. We both adore sushi, and it had been so long, with the scariness of the stock markets, the upcoming election, but how often does a kitty turn seven?

Exactly.

What a great evening. By tacit agreement, no mention was made of the late-night calls from Kuala Lumpur or of the strange notebook (all in French, for some reason) I found hidden in the basement. If Liza is a spy or a smuggler of some sort, we both felt it prudent to pretend to forget, if only for the evening. Why ruin a good time?

Liza can’t hold her sake. Oh, she thinks she can, but she started to slur her words half-way through the first bottle and in short order had her head in her paws, bemoaning the state of airline security.

“Take off your shoes,” she mutters. “Yeah, right.” She fixes her bright green eyes on me. “Do I look like I’m wearin’ shoes to you?”

She shakes her head in disgust and the bell on her dress collar – the one with the pink faux-diamonds on it – jingles merrily.

It is at this time that the man at the next table determines that our conversation, such as it was, is his business.

“Hey,” he says to Liza Bean, leaning into the space between the tables. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you go back to where you came from?”

“What?” Liza says, focusing on him. “What did you just say?”

The man pauses. Hadn’t the cat seemed to have an accent just moments ago? He decides to plow forward.

“You heard me,” he says. “If you don’t like it, you should go back to where you came from.”

Liza sits up on her back legs, placing both paws on the table in front of her. The end of her tail twitches dangerously.

“Back to where I came from?” she purrs. “You want me to go back to the farm, is that it? Maybe you” – and here she jabs the gracefully curved claw of her right paw toward the man – “want to go back to the farm, too?”

And with that, she leaps.

What ensued was a melee of yowling and shouting, the sound of breaking glass and overturned chairs as restaurant patrons scrambled out of the way of the belligerent man with a drunken, hissing cat clinging to his shoulders, clawing at his head.

I stood, picked up my purse, and downed the last of the sake.

The police were called, of course; and I was forced to use the money I’d been saving for a flat-screen TV to bail her out. It was, after all, her birthday.

I can’t say that I blame her, but there’s another restaurant we can’t go to anymore.

Oh, well. Happy Birthday, Liza Bean Bitey.