What was the calico cat's name?

"The calico cat" had no name. Although the dog is called Ranger, the kittens are called Puck and Sabine, and other animals in the story also have their own names, the main character of the mother cat never has a name.

Notice how the narrator describes the cat throughout the first several chapters as "the calico cat" and simply with the pronouns "she" and "her." After the calico cat gives birth to her kittens, the narrator sometimes calls her "the mama cat." It's interesting that the narrator continues to explore the cat's feelings and reactions, as well as her plans and ideas, while the story takes shape all around the cat--and yet she never gets a name!

Why?

Well, the humans who owned this cat have abandoned her, as we know for certain from this opening passage:

"There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road."

So perhaps those owners were all-around insensitive people who never bothered to name the calico cat in the first place.

Or perhaps they did give the cat a name, but when they abandoned her, maybe the cat wanted to shake off whatever name they had given her, in anger.

Or perhaps she didn't remember what they had called her. That's a possibility, since we know that her memory of being with the humans is fuzzy from when the narrator describes her recollection of the abandonment as "Something about a car, something about a long drive."

Regardless of why she has no name, her namelessness moves forward with her in the story as a distinctive character trait. The lack of a name marks her, in a sense, as having had a different sort of infancy than the other animals she associates with.

We know that names and the lack thereof play an important role in the story. Consider Gar Face. We don't know his real name, though we're told by the narrator in Chapter 6 that he "had a name once, a real name," but that after suffering the worst abuse from his father, he carved it into a tree, walked away from it and from his father, and never looked back. Did the calico cat do the same thing and leave her name behind with her abusers? This raises a question to consider throughout the story: Is a regular name a mark of normalcy, or possibly an indication of acceptance from others? What else does a name mean?