THEM!, page 3
This catalog of minor grievances could go on, but you get the point. Still, nothing truly awful had gone wrong until one afternoon, about a month into our moth infestation, when I was in hot pursuit of a particularly large and resilient moth that Fanny had flushed out in the living room. I had a rolled-up newspaper in one hand, and had just bent over to swat the bugger as it made a sudden dive toward the floor, when I felt a ping! in my lower back. And then, everything stopped.
More specifically, my legs stopped. Working, that is. The last thing I remember thinking, as I fell to my knees and cried out for Laurence, was that aging is the absolute worst thing in the world.
Well . . . except for the alternative.
A visit to our neighborhood chiropractor revealed no injuries of a serious nature—no herniated or slipped disk, or anything requiring drastic intervention. “Just a good old-fashioned pulled muscle,” was the chiropractor’s diagnosis. After cracking my spine a few times, he advised, “Spend as much time as possible lying flat on a firm surface. A firm mattress would be ideal. Everything should settle back into place within a day or two.”
At the risk of making my cats sound heartless, it must be said that Clayton and Fanny are always positively elated when I’m sick enough to require a full day in bed. It’s usually a cold or flu that takes me down, and the cats take great pleasure in requisitioning my heating pad (to lie on) and my box of tissues (to tear to shreds). The aspirin bottle I’ll keep on the bedside night table for easy access makes a charming rattle when peremptorily swatted off the table to roll around on the floor—and, no doubt, my cats must ask themselves whether it wouldn’t be more sensible on their humans’ part to simply keep this enthralling cat toy easily accessible on the night table all the time.
But the very best part of my being sick, from the cats’ point of view, is that they get to join me in bed for a full day, or—if I’m really sick and the cats are really lucky—maybe even two full days. Clayton and Fanny are longtime practitioners of snooze-all-day-ism, and they seem to regard my sick days as a possible—and promising—first step toward a permanent embrace of their lifestyle. They’ll pile into bed with me, and frequently on me, like senior members of a cult keeping close tabs on a new initiate, making sure she doesn’t begin to have second thoughts or stray from the path. If they sense that I’m about to get out of bed, one or the other of them will climb onto my chest and bring a whiskered black face as close as possible to my own. You can’t quit now, they always seem to be saying. You’re doing so great! And if I’m sick enough to run a fever, so much the better. Burrowing under the blankets with me, they add the not-insignificant warmth of their own furry bodies to my heightened body heat, until the space beneath the covers feels like a sauna—one that vibrates with the strength of my cats’ purring contentment.
The day that my back went out, however, wasn’t quite like my usual sick days. For one thing, I had no interest in lying under the covers and had Laurence shove them entirely to one side of the bed—along with the piles of clothing we were still cycling in and out of the laundry in an effort to rid ourselves of moths once and for all. Even worse, I never once turned onto my side for a delightful session of cuddling one or the other of my cats in a spoon position. I just lay there sprawled out, flat on my back, in a kind of Vitruvian Man pose. I lay so flat that I couldn’t even see the TV screen across the room, or much of anything other than the ceiling. The number of moths we’d spot fluttering around the house had abated almost entirely but, from time to time over the course of that day, I’d spy one or two hovering above me. Fanny spotted them, too, and leapt onto my belly in order to use my motionless body as a springboard heavenward in her pursuit, each time prompting a loud “Oof!” from me.
Convenient a launching pad as my inert body made, it wasn’t exactly Clayton’s or Fanny’s notion of the ideal day spent in bed with Mom. Nevertheless, there was plenty to be happy about on any day that saw me spending so much time with them. And the heating pad had been duly taken down from its closet shelf and was turned over to Clayton or Fanny every twenty minutes or so, whenever I felt I’d used it long enough for the time being. That, at least, was something.
The only real moment of consternation on that first day came in the evening, when Laurence helped me into a hot bath that I hoped would help soothe my knotted back muscles into something resembling their previous shape. Proper baths—as opposed to showers—are a rare event in our house, and Clayton and Fanny peeked anxiously over the side of the tub, occasionally daring to rise up on hind legs (or hind leg, in Clayton’s case) and dip a tentative front paw into the water before quickly withdrawing it. Their little brows furrowed in anxiety and confusion. Whatcha doin’ in all that water, Mom? IT’S WATER!!!
Eventually, however—having clearly concluded with a mental shrug that humans were just weird sometimes, and there was no explaining them—they sprawled out in front of the tub like two ebony-carved centurions. Perhaps they’d decided that, with my having taken this foolishness into my head, someone had to make sure I didn’t drown. In any case, their refusal to leave the tub area so long as I was still in there made Laurence’s job getting me out of the tub, a half hour later, needlessly complicated. (“Just step around them,” Laurence kept saying patiently. While I—trying vainly to move sideways a leg that refused to go in any direction other than backward or forward—replied through gritted teeth, “I can’t step around anything!”) The cats seemed relieved as, with Laurence’s help, I finally hobbled back to the bedroom and the three of us settled into bed.
They weren’t nearly so sanguine, however, by the following morning. Like all cats, Fanny and Clayton are wedded to the routines that make up their typical day. One of the most important items on our daily agenda is when I get out of bed at five a.m. precisely and head down from the third-floor bedroom to the first-floor kitchen to give them their breakfast—tossing Clayton’s toy mouse for a few preliminary rounds of fetch along the way.
Even when I’m down with a cold or flu, I still manage to sneeze and cough my way downstairs to feed the cats on time. So nothing in their previous experience had prepared them for this first morning after my back injury. The pain in my lower back did feel distinctly lessened when I initially woke up—although possibly that was the lingering effect of the Vicodin (left over from some dental surgery Laurence had had a few months earlier), which I’d taken before going to sleep.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t sit up. I had to sort of rock from side to side until, eventually, I rolled out of bed and onto the floor in a semi-crouching position, at which point I stood up as straight as I was able and limped to the bathroom at the end of the hall. After that, staggering back to bed was all that I could manage. Walking down two flights of stairs to feed the cats—and then two flights back up again—was as unattainable a goal as climbing Everest.
The cats appeared flabbergasted as I got back into bed without having fed them. Laurence was sleeping in the guest bed in his office next door—to allow me the full and undisturbed span of our bed—and I’d advised him the night before to keep his door closed, anticipating that, when the cats found me unresponsive, they would be disinclined to wait for him to wake up on his own. There was a solid five minutes of caterwauling in the hallway as the cats did their best to rouse at least one of us—but Laurence, a sound sleeper, kept dozing undisturbed. Thanks to his closed door, they were unable to deploy any of their more aggressive tactics, like stomping onto his chest and meowing loudly into his ear.
They could, however, still use both maneuvers on me. “Laurence will be up soon, you guys,” I assured them over the loud and increasingly desperate cries that were beginning to make my eardrums hurt (although I knew that “soon,” given that Laurence kept a much more normal schedule than I did, wouldn’t be for at least two more hours). “You’ll get your breakfast—I promise you will.”
Vexed and baffled by this unprecedented state of affairs, they were obviously working hard to figure out a way of getting me onto my feet, down the stairs, and pointed in the direction of the pantry where their food was kept. Clayton seemed to be of the opinion that if he kept doing the things that he normally does in the morning, then inevitably I would also fall back into my normal routine. Accordingly, he kept bringing over the rattling toy mouse he likes to play fetch with, hauling himself up onto the bed so he could rattle it a few times in his mouth and then drop it into my hand. I would toss it half-heartedly as far across the room as I could without moving any more of my body than my arm. Clayton was patient with me at first as he dutifully retrieved the mouse, climbed back onto the bed, and dropped it into my hand once again. No, see, you’re doing it wrong. You’re supposed to get up and throw it for me—and then you’re supposed to keep walking. After four or five repetitions, however, he was stumped. He looked over to Fanny for guidance. Got any ideas?
Fanny is unquestionably the smarter of the two. She had evidently reasoned out that I couldn’t solve their problems until my own mysterious problem—whatever it was—had also been solved. She leapt nimbly from the bed, and I heard her descending the stairs. She returned a few moments later and, with the “hunting” cry that generally meant she was about to leave Laurence or me a “gift” (usually Rosie the Rat, which she thoughtfully places on our pillows every night before bedtime), returned to my side and gently deposited a white plastic spoon on my stomach. She watched me expectantly for a few seconds, seemingly disappointed that her gift had produced no immediate effect beyond my saying, “Thank you, Fanny,” and handing the spoon back to her. Undeterred, however, she departed again and returned with another white plastic spoon—and then, about three minutes later, with yet another.
I’m still not sure what these plastic spoons symbolized to Fanny (or even where this stash of hers was being kept, given the thorough moth-related housecleaning we were still in the process of undertaking). Perhaps, I reasoned, trying to follow the logic, she knew that humans use spoons for eating and thought that if I ate something, I might be able to get up? Whatever effect she’d hoped the spoons might produce, when it failed to occur she must have decided that a more drastic intervention was called for.
It was perhaps a half hour later, and I’d just drifted back into sleep, when I was roused once again by the sound of Fanny ascending the stairs with her hunting cry. I felt her land beside me on the bed, and she once again placed something on my belly. I blearily half-opened my eyes and raised my head as far as I could without engaging any more of my beleaguered spine than the very top portion of my neck. It was hard to make out what it was at first, although . . . was I imagining it? Was whatever it was moving? The room was still dark in the pre-dawn hours, so I switched on the bedside lamp.
It took me a second to realize what it was—primarily because my brain, for a moment, flat-out refused to confirm the report my eyes were sending. What Fanny had so lovingly deposited on my stomach was an enormous palmetto bug—otherwise known in the Northeast as a “water bug,” or simply a “huge ugly cockroach”—on its back AND STILL ALIVE as all six of its legs waved feebly in the air.
Now, I was born and raised in South Florida. I’ve seen plenty of giant cockroaches in my day. I’ve seen—and dispatched without flinching—cockroaches so big you could’ve saddled and ridden them in the Kentucky Derby. I had even, once or twice, awakened with a kind of prickly sensation on my arm and realized it was just such a cockroach crawling across me.
And, as would normally be the case in finding an enormous cockroach on my person, my instinctive first response—which, without thinking, I immediately undertook—was to attempt to bolt upright into a sitting position so as to dislodge the thing and get it off me.
Except that I couldn’t bolt upright. I couldn’t sit upright at all. The instant and painful wrench I felt in my lower back as I tried to rise quickly—an effort that would end up costing me another two days in bed—was a forceful reminder of just how futile this attempt was. “Son of a—!” I swore loudly, as I fell back into a supine position.
So there I was, flailing about helplessly on my back, while the giant cockroach on my belly was also flailing about helplessly on its back, the two of us acting out a scene from some cat-and-cockroach remake of Misery, in which Fanny was playing the Kathy Bates role and either the cockroach or I—or both of us—were James Caan.
Ultimately, the palmetto bug was more successful than I was. It soon righted itself and began a rapid scurry up my body in the general direction of my neck. I tried to brush it off with the back of my hand but, with a brief flutter of wings, it scuttled right over the top of my hand, down my palm, and—clearly as startled and disoriented as I was—continued its trajectory up my torso with an increased dash of frenzied speed.
I had a friend in Miami who’d once awakened in the middle of the night to find that a palmetto bug had crawled into his ear, and both his own and the cockroach’s combined efforts had been unable to get it back out. He’d wound up in the emergency room where the doctors irrigated his ear canal—effectively drowning the palmetto bug while my friend was forced to listen to its excruciating death throes inside his own head—before they were finally able to extract its corpse from his ear, chunk by chunk, with a small pair of forceps.
This palmetto bug—the one that I was dealing with in the here and now—was closing the distance between itself and my chin at an alarmingly swift pace.
“Laurence!” I shrieked. “LAAAAUUUUUUREEEEEENNNCE!!!”
Fanny and Clayton—who’d been sitting next to me with an eager air this whole time—darted off and under the bed so quickly, they practically left spinning dust clouds behind them. From the guest room, I heard the sound of feet hitting the hardwood floor and then a rapid thud of footsteps. In a flash Laurence was standing in the bedroom doorway, clad only in his boxer briefs and brandishing the baseball bat he always kept next to him while he slept (a holdover from having first moved to New York in the ’80s, at the height of the crack epidemic).
So poised and ready did Laurence look to club somebody bloody with that baseball bat that I had a wild, momentary fear he might use it on the cockroach while it was still on top of me.
“Get it off me,” I whimpered, gesturing to the bug on my chest. “Get it off me!”
Dropping the bat with a clatter and grabbing a handful of tissues from the box on our night table, Laurence snatched up the hapless cockroach. He clenched his fist with a satisfying crunch and swept it from the room, the sound of the toilet flushing a moment later confirming that it had been given a burial at sea.
“How did it get all the way up here, anyway?” he asked, as he returned to the bedroom. During the warmer months, we were usually good for one or two palmetto bugs a week squeezing into the basement-level kitchen through the French doors that led out to our tiny backyard. But the only time we ever saw one up on the third floor was in pieces, after Fanny had thoroughly mauled it and left its remains for us as an offering.
“Fanny brought it up,” I confirmed. “I think she thought she was ‘helping.’ She didn’t even eat any of it before she gave it to me.” The thudding of my heart had finally slowed to its normal rhythms, and I smiled at Laurence. “That was damn manly, by the way—how you raced in here ready to beat an intruder to death to protect me.”
Laurence smiled back. “I probably would’ve tried to talk my way out of it first.”
Clayton and Fanny, having determined that the coast was clear, peeked out from beneath the bed’s dust ruffle, then tentatively crept over to sit in front of Laurence. They craned their necks to gaze up into his face, their yellow eyes wide and hopeful. “You know,” I suggested, “as long as you’re awake . . .”
Laurence looked down at the cats. “Come on, guys,” he said, his tone resigned. “Let’s go get breakfast.”
Fanny gave Clayton a look that could only be described as triumphant. See? I knew I could get at least one of them out of bed!
As the three of them headed downstairs, one lone moth fluttered out of a dresser drawer to perch on the ceiling above my head—a solitary soldier in the enemy army taunting me, a fallen warrior, as I lay helplessly on my back remembering the day, one pleasant but otherwise ordinary day, just over a year ago when the whole thing had started.
5. In the Beginning . . .
It was a dreamily perfect spring afternoon. The sky outside the window of my writing nook was as pure and crystalline a blue as God had ever intended. The tiny pink roses on the climbing bush, wending its way up the wooden fence enclosing our small backyard, were in full, festive bloom. After a particularly cold and difficult winter, the entire backyard had exploded into a riot of glorious green leaf and multihued flower. I’ll admit that there are still days when I think to myself that nothing will ever be better than living in Manhattan. But, on days like that one, I can’t imagine any place on Earth I’d rather be than in my lovely little brownstone, here in Jersey City, with Fanny napping on the sunlit windowsill of my writing nook and Clayton dozing peacefully on the desk beside me.
A sudden commotion of sparrows split the silence outside, and I swiveled in my desk chair to see what had them so agitated. A wispy, fast-moving cloud of some kind was rising from the other side of the fence that adjoined our neighbor’s yard. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but I soon detected the fluttering of small, almost imperceptible wings. It looked as if an egg sac of infant moths had burst open into the stillness of the springtime air—and the sparrows, grateful for the bounty, had stationed themselves in a cluster around the newly hatched insects, gobbling up as many as they could in their small beaks as the moths tried to beat their way skyward.
