Rearranging the bedcovers in search of a tennis sock peeled off in the warmth of last night, I noticed a strange dark shadow through the 350 thread count. It was moving one way and then the next, a rather frantic mystery. Until I solved it.
I have been living virtually alone since 2003. Some friends, relatives, and the occasional lover, have passed days and weeks with me, but the day to day of significant-other-companionship was over July of 2003 when I left Rome to return to the United States taking a job in a boys’ day school in Baltimore county. It was my first time living alone in my forty one years of life having gone from family to husband, never really having that all important “room of one’s own”, hailed by Virginia Woolf as essential. But I never really knew what I had missed. Furthermore, teaching offers an instant community in a new city: students, colleagues, administrators all are there for the daily niceties and important small talk at a lunch table. At the end of the day, the emptiness of the studio apartment was a comfort from the open dangers of dark Baltimore streets and the space was filled with a small television fueled by the DVD player to lull me into a sense of security and satisfaction as I binge-watched The Wire, the barely fictionalized version of the reality beyond my door. But one never realizes how much a man is needed until he is.
My new apartment was infested with field mice and city rats; being a brownstone with pipes and passageways that ran the length of the city block providing easy access to my kitchen. I had quickly won over my landlord who respected my independent and practical attitude. He was mildly curious about my history of living overseas for twenty five years and landing back in America in his city and in his apartment building. Raimondi had owned the building for forty years and rented mostly to graduate students at the nearby Maryland Institute College of Art. I had secured the lease long distance in a phone call from Rome and moved in, site unseen, to the studio apartment that had been the elegant front room of the brownstone in its hey day as a single family home in prosperous Baltimore.
Conveniently Raimondi had a son-in-law who owned a pest control business. He was a Cypriot, so we conversed about Cyprus and my former home of Athens. His business card featured a furling American flag and the words: The Exterminator – we kill all types of pests, rodents and terrorists. We chatted in my limited Greek and he put down poison and spring traps. The sticky traps would not do, I told him, being too cruel. So up in the loft, high up in the 18-foot ceilinged apartment, I would wake suddenly at the snap of a trap being sprung. The next morning I gingerly backed down the wooden ladder from the loft, dreading facing the bloody, mangled mess of a rodent; but, mysteriously, the traps had not actually trapped anything. And still the telltale droppings would appear on the stove top and along the floorboards with regularity. At one point, my son came to visit and slept on a futon beside the dining table; mice ran over his hand in the night and once he shouted that one had just run through his hair! We called Raimondi.
I had had a pet rat when I was in high school, and gerbils, so the mice thing was not dire, but the unsanitary element urged me to push for a solution. Dimitri the Cypriot put wire mesh around the pipes under the sink to close off the two-inch opening, but after a day or two the wire mesh had been compromised – chewed through cleanly. The poison had failed and having poison under the refrigerator and the stove made me nervous. After all, food was being prepared in close proximity. Then I heard about a new option – an electric device that emitted a sound that rodents could not stand. It seemed clean, humane and reasonable. Soon all the outlets in the kitchen and dining area were fitted with the small plug in. The rodents were driven away. At last.
In a way Raimondi and his son-in-law were surrogate husbands, men who would come to the rescue when varmints or plumbing were involved. I thought that was one of the main benefits of having a man around the house, to deal with plumbing emergencies, wasp nests, rodents, and the dreaded cockroaches that seem to grow to tremendous size in all of my native cities, Baltimore being no exception. Luckily the sound emitted by my devices must have discouraged the rat-sized roaches that I had expected to appear whenever I switched on a kitchen or bathroom light in the night. I was no stranger to that horrible expectation, having grown up in Georgetown where one might never meet the neighbor, but when the neighbor moved out of the row house next door their legion of roaches would move into your house! It was a constant battle as my mother would engage pest control companies for monthly treatments, periodically shriek for my father to come to the rescue and crush one of the disgusting monsters or to spray the offender with a toxic and persistent stream of the best bug killer money could buy, from a safe distance, of course, since this species was known to fly straight into your face if challenged. It was not unusual for me to sit down to practice piano before school in the morning and have the creepy antennae followed by the crusted shiny brown carapace of the three inch roach squeeze through the keys in the treble of the keyboard. My shrieks replaced Chopin and I would find yet another excuse to skip piano practice.
My next home alone was in an apartment at the end of a girls’ dormitory in a co-ed boarding school in Connecticut. The permafrost of winter seemed to control any roach situation; field mice might accidentally wander in out of the cold, but never set up house-
keeping. The only real problem was flying squirrels. Apparently they would chew a hole in the corner of the roof and nest in the rafters. At night you could hear them scurrying back and forth in the crawl space above the ceiling. Since squirrels did not have the nasty ick-factor of roaches and seemed almost cute compared to rats, I wasn’t bothered. Occasionally the school maintenance staff would come in the afternoon and seal up the holes while the squirrels were out and about. However, in the common room, where boys were allowed to visit girls during certain hours and on weekends, we had a dramatic situation.
It was autumn and the crisp sunny Saturdays meant pick-up lacrosse games in the field next to the dorm. I would open my kitchen to the girls for cupcake baking or popcorn popping. On this particular Saturday afternoon I was just pulling a tray of cupcakes out of the oven when I heard shrill screams and shouts from the common room down the hall. Somehow a flying squirrel had gotten into the dorm and was running amok under the sofa and chairs as girls were leaping up on desks and screaming. The several boys were swatting at the terrified squirrel with lacrosse sticks trying to catch it in the net in order to fling it out an opened window, almost certainly killing it, albeit, unintentionally. I ran interference and urged the kids to back into a corner of the room and I would try to “herd” the squirrel toward the door and hallway. Then I propped open the door to the outside, hoping the squirrel would understand that it was the only way to safety. The boys were stamping and the girls softly whimpering. The squirrel finally took the hint. Problem was I was standing between the common room and the open door, not realizing how quickly things were about to unfold. The next thing I knew the small creature had run up the outside of my corduroy trousers and I was running in circles trying to stamp my leg to shake it off. Finally getting my bearings, I ran outside. I brushed at the squirrel that was clinging to the texture of the corduroy. At last I was able to knock it off with my hand and the squirrel ran up the nearest tree, as startled and frightened as I had been. The kids had a good laugh at the sight of my frantic “dance” and things settled down. The lacrosse jocks had come off as heroes and the dorm damsels smiled demurely and carried on flirting. I retreated to my apartment, somewhat shaken and somewhat embarrassed at my own panic over the harmless little squirrel.
Now, once more living on my own, in a small cottage near the Rio del Plato in Montevideo, I have faced possums trying to climb in the kitchen window, plagues of seasonal mosquitoes that were seriously biblical, and even killed a spider the size of tablespoon with a handy flip flop in my bathroom whilst sitting on the toilet. Having lost my filter a while ago, I blithely announced at the administration meeting the following day that I had discovered I did not need a man after all. Noticing the horrified look on the Principal’s face and realizing how my remark could be misconstrued, I quickly relayed the spider adventure, leaving out the part of being on the toilet, and won the admiration of my Principal who is deathly afraid of spiders, even tiny ones, and has his Brazilian wife come to his rescue periodically. This spider was most likely a wolf-spider, he said, considering the color and size. I guess wolf-spiders are common here in Uruguay and aggressive, their bite creating a nasty lesion that takes forever to heal. I was sort of relieved that I had not known this information prior to my flip flop finesse.
But tonight was a further test of my metal. I brazenly untucked the top sheet to get to the bottom of just what was happening at the foot of my bed, somehow unconsciously knowing what was in store, stealing myself for the worst, but fearlessly going forward. The errant sock fell softly to the floor just as a four inch brown cockroach ran up and over the top of the sheet. I stared in stunned horror, frozen, but mind racing. Did I have a can of Raid under the kitchen sink? Dare I leave the room and let the thing go somewhere unseen, causing me to spend a sleepless night fully expecting to wake up in a sweat with the roach crawling across my face?
I had to act quickly. I grabbed the heavy Julia Child’s French Chef Cookbook from the bedside table and slammed it onto the cockroach, which was moving down the side of the bed heading for the soft landing of the dust ruffle to disappear under the bed to safety. The book hit home and killed the disgusting bug, or at least stunned it, as it was motionless, lying on its back in the welcomed posture of death with legs in the air. On close inspection, it seemed the legs were not moving. That aspect of killing is stomach churning, when the thing looks dead, but the legs are vibrating or even swimming in the air implying that if the bug can right itself somehow, it will be off and running. The next step was one for which I feel most proud. I am truly a reborn, independent, self-sufficient woman. I took a thick wad of toilet paper, all the while keeping a close watch on the incapacitated insect, and, holding my breath, dropped it over the bug. Then gently squeezing and grasping the roach through the paper, I quickly carried it into the bathroom, dropped it in the bowl and flushed. My heart was pounding and my gorge rising, but I did it. I did it!
I pulled all the sheets off the bed to look for any relatives; all clear. Then I remade the bed, tightly tucking the sheets in on all sides. All the while I am wondering: how did it get into my bed and under my covers? Does this mean there is a nest of roaches in the box springs? Gross. Gross. Why? It isn’t as if there is food or anything to attract them in the bedroom, much less into the bed sheets. Surely it is an anomaly. Roaches stay in the kitchen, no? Okay, they might be drawn to the bathroom where there are suspicious looking drains in the floor, but the bedroom? in the bed? This may bear further investigation, but not tonight. I just need to get to sleep, assured that, at least for the moment, there are no more bugs in the bed. I settle myself under the covers, content in the knowledge that even if there was a man in the house, he would be of little use in solving the mystery of the roach in the bed. As I flick off the light I unconsciously think of what I used to say each night to my children: Good night. Sleep tight, don’t let the…Gross.
Kommentare