She Got Up Off the Couch Read online

  Sitting in Rose’s yard that day, I could see her cat Snowball coming and going from the house, sometimes languorous and sometimes agitated. He went in through a broken basement window and came out through a hole in the back door. He sat on the porch licking one paw and rubbing his eyes with it like a sleepy baby; looked up at the sky as if he had just remembered the single most important event in his life, then turned his attention to his butt. I lost track of him for a few moments while looking at Rose, and then heard a scuffle coming from the basement. Snowball made furious hissing and screaming noises, followed by what sounded like a football being thrown against the door of a clothes dryer. Rose and Maggie and I ran out the gate and into the alley as quickly as our plagues and punctures and sutures would allow, just as Snowball emerged from the basement carrying in his mouth the broken body of a yellowish-white rat fully half his size.

  The three of us skidded to a stop a few feet from the cat. Snowball was making a low moaning sound in his throat that was half pleasure and half revulsion. The rat hung upside down as if its bones had all just given up hope. Taking a few more steps toward us, Snowball dropped the rat in the gravel, inviting us to inspect it. We all squatted down around it, our hands tucked protectively against our legs.

  I guessed it to be a male rat, by its general fierce hideousness. He was so menacing he could have been the leader of some outlaw rat posse. His front two teeth were yellowed and long and protruded down over his bottom lip like something prehistoric, and his claws were still engaged in a fighting position. I picked up a stick and turned him over on his belly, so that he was looking at us. Even in death, his eyes were grotesquely intelligent, and they continued to emit a kind of brightness that made my stomach clench. His long tail, a pink cable, lay stretched out behind him, the end of it curved in an imitation of grace.

  I stood up, light-headed. Snowball had gone back to grooming himself. He was, obviously, a solid white cat, and very clean. I guessed he kept himself so beautiful in order to compensate for his deafness. Rose and Maggie continued to poke at the rat as I started home. The afternoon sun was blinding, and I felt like I either needed to eat or had gotten too full. There was no place I was fully safe. My whole life was infested.

  I am sure the mice were always there and I wasn’t aware of them, but as I grew older there were more and more, until finally my life was punctuated by encounters with them.

  For instance, one afternoon I was walking through my parents’ bedroom, on my way upstairs, and as I passed their bed I stepped on something, and the way the stepping on it felt made me lift my leg up slowly, without looking down, and remove my sock, and turn around and walk out of the bedroom as if I was sidling up to a trance state, and go call my sister on the phone.

  “I’ve stepped on something,” I said, clearing my throat to get all the words out.

  “Good for you,” Melinda said. I could hear her stirring her husband’s lunch.

  “I don’t know what it was.”

  She stopped stirring. “Are you hurt?”

  “I think you better send Rick over here.”

  It was my favorite pair of socks, too, white tube socks with a blue stripe between two bright yellow stripes. I considered them my dressy socks, and often wore them to church. They had grown very soft with wearing. I feared, rightly, that I would never see them again.

  When Rick and Melinda arrived, I was sitting on the couch staring straight ahead, my hand still resting on the phone. I pointed to the scene of the disaster, and Rick went straight in and squatted down and lifted up my sock. Melinda was standing a few feet outside the doorway, close enough to gossip with but far enough away not to see.

  “What is it?” she asked, leaning just slightly toward the mess.

  “I don’t know,” Rick said slowly, “but it had an eyeball.”

  Melinda had a way of stifling a hoot that involved quick putting her hand over her mouth and letting it just come out of her nose like a sneeze. It made her eyes get really big like maybe her whole head was going to explode. Her method of unlaughing was actually worse than if she’d just let it come out.

  I pulled my legs up and put my head down on my knees.

  “Lindy, you’d better get me some kind of a bag,” Rick said, “and a spoon.”

  I moaned out loud and Melinda had to turn her back to me to keep me from seeing the devilish transformations of glee her face was undergoing.

  When she came out of the kitchen with a trash bag and a tablespoon, Lindy asked if I wanted to go sit on the porch, but I just stayed where I was. It couldn’t possibly get any worse. I would carry with me forever the feeling of my weight coming down on my heel, and the something underneath it giving way, and the sound it made.

  “What do you want me to do with this sock?” Rick called.

  “Just, Rick, just” — Melinda waved her hands at him — “just put it in the bag.”

  She walked over to me and knelt down. “Let’s take this other one off, sweetie,” she said, peeling it off and tossing it in toward Rick.

  “Those were my best socks,” I said, from between my knees.

  “Well, honey, they were there when you needed them.”

  We kept a fifty-pound bag of dog food on the back porch, and one evening my dad reached in with the dog’s pan, and a rat ran up his arm. Dad threw the pan so hard it broke the light fixture above the door, and in trying to shake the rat off, spun himself around in a circle and smacked his face against the door frame. There wasn’t just one rat, either, there were three, which I believe qualifies as a pod of rats, and the two who had not assaulted my dad became agitated and began to eat their way frantically through the waxy paper of the dog food bag. Dad took off running in the wrong direction, and ended up sprawled over the old wringer washer. All of this happened in just a few terrible seconds, and then he was back in the house, battered and wild-eyed.

  The method of extermination my dad chose was to put out so much poison in the basement, where the dogs and cats couldn’t get to it, that my mom feared it would seep into the ground and kill everyone in Mooreland. He had, apparently, discovered quite a nest down there, and he was having trouble sleeping at night for fear the rats would come up the basement stairs, use a credit card and unhook the latch on the basement door, creep into the den past the dogs and the cats, and climb into our beds and eat off our noses.

  “A rat will eat off yournose ?” I asked, horrified.

  “They’re especially fond of noses, as I understand it,” he said, mixing some toxic rat cocktail that was filling up the whole downstairs with mustard gas.

  “What is that you’re mixing?”

  “I don’t know. I found it down at the hardware store. Roscoe said it’s so deadly it was banned about thirty years ago. He had a case of it in the back room.”

  I picked up the papery gray box the powder had come in. Thirty years ago packaging was not so sophisticated, and the distributors had chosen as their brand name Poison. Under the name was a convincing skull and crossbones, and a warning label that stated the contents included arsenic, and that a potential ingestor stood absolutely no chance of survival.

  “This ought to do the trick,” I said, putting the box down and wiping my hands on my jeans.

  The rat carcasses began piling up. At first we just put them in the barrel where we burned our trash, but on the first Wednesday we attempted a rat pyre, a bird flew too close to the smoke and died. We had to find an alternative plan. We couldn’t really bury them, because of what it would have done to the grass. Mom was growing weary of the whole mess, and told Dad she didn’t care where they ended up as long as their wretched bloatedness was out of the house and she didn’t have to smell them anymore. We all had headaches, and my dad had developed a nervous jerk of the shoulders.

  The only option left to us was the county dump, and Dad started driving them there. One day, however, he left for work without the day’s allotment, and when I went outside for the first time I saw two plastic bags sitting on the front ste
ps, the handles tied up tight. I knew if I left them there I would be deviled by them all day, the shapes in the bottom that were just barely discernible, and the fumes rising up out of them like heat off a highway. I was so reluctant to pick them up that my mouth began to water, as if I had to spit, but I grasped the knotted handles and headed for my bike. Just as I was climbing on, my sister pulled up in front of the house and said she was heading for Grant’s department store, in New Castle, and wanted to know if I’d like to ride along. Grant’s meant one thing and one thing only — a frozen cherry Coke, for which I would have compromised any principle — but I had my rats to worry about.

  “I was just gonna ride these rats over and toss them in the gravel pit,” I said, raising the bags enough that she could see them.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Why didn’t Dad take them?”

  “He forgot, I reckon. Anyway, I can’t just leave them sitting there all day.”

  “Well, come on. I’ll go past the dump on the way.”

  I opened the passenger door of her big green Impala and started to get in.

  “Don’t even think you’re bringing those rats inside the car with us,” she said, shooing me back out.

  “What…didn’t you just tell me you’d drive me to the dump?”

  “Yes, but you’re not putting them up here.”

  “Well, unlock the trunk for me, then, and I’ll put them back there.”

  She opened her door and started to get out, then thought better of it. “No. I don’t want them in the trunk, either. I don’t want them anywhere inside the car.”

  I thought maybe she was a little sensitive, because one time she and her friend Terri had set off on a big adventure to Muncie and halfway there the engine started to smoke, and when Melinda pulled over and opened the hood, the source of the smoke was Terri’s cat, Poot, who was permanently affixed to the motor and a couple other hot places onto which he’d leaked.

  I threw up my hands. “I give up. How do you suggest we all get to the dump, then?”

  In the end we tied the two bags to the door handles, one on her side, one on mine. As we pulled away from my house I noticed Melinda was driving rather gingerly, but after a few miles she sped up, and by the time we got to the dump the bags were flying out beside the car like ears, sometimes twisting around and thumping against the doors.

  The man who attended to the dump waved us over as we pulled in.

  “Hey, Larry,” Melinda said.

  “Hey, Melinda. Got some rats there?”

  She nodded.

  “Your dad’s been throwing them right over there. You can see there’s a pretty big pile already.”

  I got out and untied the bags. Melinda sat motionless during the whole operation. I walked over to the edge of the big pit and looked around. The sights in the county dump could take my breath away. There were refrigerators and tires and broken toys, an old pie safe missing its doors, a kitchen chair, all manner of paper and debris. It looked like a shadow house, turned inside out, a life being lived invisibly. I arced my arm backward as if I were pitching a baseball, and threw the first bag of rats in, and as it was sailing, I threw in the second. They were bottom-heavy. They didn’t go far, even though I’d thrown them as hard as I could.

  Another thing every grown-up in my family was obsessed with was conserving heat, a very boring topic, quite clearly. Our house wasn’t insulated, and so my parents were always scheming to keep heat in a room, or move heat around a room, or get heat from one room to another. It was a hopeless task.

  Built, apparently, during the period of American history when human height often exceeded ten feet, and no one, ever, cared about conserving heat, our ceilings were twelve feet high. As soon as the trend arrived, in the seventies, of lowering ceilings with a flimsy metal frame and papery sheets of pressed fiberglass, my dad was all over it; he started in the den, where all of our heat began and ended.

  When he was finished we were astonished to discover that finally, one single thing in our house looked normal, like the houses of other people. We had a uniform, white ceiling. My mom was so moved by it that she threw caution to the wind and invited her prayer cell over to our house for coffee one afternoon. I don’t think any of the church women had been inside our house before.

  By the time they arrived, the house was as respectable as we could make it. Rather than sitting in the living room, which was large and airy and managed to belie what was actually happening in the rest of the house, Mom chose to have everyone sit in the den, under the new, pristine ceiling. My job was to hover, offering more coffee or more sugar cubes.

  Even straightened up, the den was shocking. There was almost no light; the furniture was old, unmatched, and beaten to a pulp; cats and dogs lay about coughing and scratching and attacking their dander. Most of the room was taken up with the black enamel coal stove. Beside it, in a strange alcove, stood a tall metal medicine cabinet that wouldn’t fit in our one, tiny bathroom. The doors to the medicine cabinet had long since ceased to close, so from anyplace in the room one could see the stack of thin towels, boxes of sanitary napkins, and various sundries that took up the top shelf. The church women were kind and fond of my mother, but the situation was clearly worse than they had expected. One woman, Betty Hardaway, seemed especially disconcerted by the omnipresence of weapons: above one of the couches my dad’s gun rack loomed, the rifles and shotguns polished to a deadly shine, boxes of ammunition stacked up on the bottom shelf. Hanging next to the gun rack was the bow and quiver of arrows Danny had left. Fishing rods and tackle boxes rested against the wall behind the television, and on Dad’s little table next to his chair, where he kept his brown radio, his ashtray, and his glass for whiskey, was his jar of animal teeth.

  At what probably would have been the midway point of the ordeal, the ceiling began to emit a strange sound. I froze, desperately trying to pinpoint the source of it, but my mom continued to talk as though she heard nothing unusual.

  It was mice, and from the sound of it, about fifty of them. They were apparently being disgorged from one of the holes in the original ceiling that Dad hadn’t bothered to patch when he hung the new one. It sounded as if they were all getting off a big mouse bus, happy and friendly and looking forward to their vacation. They skittered and dug around a moment in one corner of the room, and then took off running as a herd, right over our heads. When they reached the opposite corner, they turned and ran back. All of our cats leapt up on the backs of the furniture in agitation, staring at the ceiling and making growls deep in their throats. The dogs watched the cats, interested.

  The sound of the little mouse claws running over the hollow ceiling was deafening. I looked at Mom, my mouth open in horror, and saw that the prayer cell women were all biting their lips and staring at their coffee cups. Mom continued to speak, seemingly unfazed, about her plans to lead a local boycott against the Nestlé corporation.

  Soon enough, one of the women with leadership potential announced that the prayer cell was of one mind on the Nestlé issue, and that they ought to be going. My mom saw them to the door, and then came back in and began picking up the coffee cups and plates.

  “Have youever ?!” I said, my arms raised in surrender.

  “It sounded like they were playing football,” Mom said, carrying dishes into the kitchen.

  I flopped down on the couch, sending up a cloud of dust. “Do you think the church ladies will ever come back?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  I looked up at the ceiling where, it suddenly became clear to me, all of the heat in the room would go. The mice had come to a sauna, and there was no doubt in my mind that, as the months grew colder, they would tell every other mouse in the world. The whole flimsy structure trembled under their collective weight.

  I grew phobic of mice, just as there were more and more of them to fear. My cat, PeeDink, who my father swore was retarded simply because of a combination of unfortunate physical characteristics, was a terrific mouser, and becaus
e of the crazy and abiding love we shared, he naturally wanted to give all of his dead mice to me. My parents walked in on many scenes of PeeDink chasing me around the house, me screaming and waving my arms in the air, the poor captured mouse kicking its hind legs, trying to free itself from PeeDink’s jaws. Like most cats, he wasn’t interested in flat-out killing vermin; he wanted to kill them just a little bit and then play some really fun games which involved the mice trying to get away while he killed them a little bit more. Once when my dad came home from work I was up on the back of the couch and PeeDink had left three dead mice on the floor for me. He had grown so fat on mice that he no longer showed any interest in eating them.

  One summer night, after I had moved back upstairs to my bedroom, I awoke from a deep sleep and discovered that the absolute worst thing had happened. Mom was asleep in the bedroom at the bottom of the stairs, and without moving a muscle I began to call for her. She heard me, even over the deafening racket made by the fans running between every room.

  When she reached my bed, after tripping and kicking her way through the wreckage on my bedroom floor, she asked me what was wrong, and I told her that there were twenty-seven dead mice on my bed. They were completely surrounding me, so that I couldn’t move any part of my body without touching one. She stood up straight and looked me in the eye. I appeared wide awake and lucid, but was not.