by Rachel Toor
9. It took until nearly the twentieth century before anyone knew what caused the Black Death. Alexandre Yersin found the bacteria responsible for the bubonic plague, and the name of the disease was changed from a description of what happened (you grew buboes, or lumps) to Yersinia pestis, in honor of the guy who figured out that the bug appeared in people who were bitten by rats, who, as we know, were bitten by fleas, who were the delivery system. So it’s only been about a century we’ve been blaming rats for plague, and that’s not even right, since the real culprits were the fleas.
Who got blamed for plague before anyone knew it was carried by fleas on rats? Jews. Who else? Foreigners, beggars, and lepers. The usual suspects—the people at the margins. Prejudice and bigotry depend on ignorance to survive.
Maybe that’s why I was so attracted to rats—aside from the part about loving Walter. I felt a connection to those who are marginal.
The popular kids made me nervous. They wore their “normal” like outfits. I could never find anything that would make me fit in with them.
So I colonized Jenni. I made her my territory. Often, when she was with the Brittanys, I engaged in competitive friendship. In any random conversation, I might insert something that proved I knew Jenni better than anyone else. If we were going to get ice cream, I’d point out that Jenni’s favorite flavor was mint chocolate chip. I’d talk about the jewelry box she made for my mother. Sometimes, when I was feeling really threatened, like when Tiffany was making plans for a double date with her Neanderthal boyfriend and Jenni and Kyle, I’d mention Jenni’s mom.
I’d also bring up things Jenni had told me about them. I’d say to Tiffany, “So how’s your brother’s knee healing?” even though I’d never met the brother. I’d ask Brittney if she’d finally finished reading Fifty Shades of Grey. The message was clear: Jenni is my best friend. She tells me everything. Don’t even try to compete with me on this because I will crush you.
But it also made me appear to be interested in what the Brittanys were up to and I thought this made it okay. Sometimes they would look at me like, How do you know this stuff and why are you bringing it up?
Sometimes I probably came off as a bit of a stalker.
There were, though, parts of Jenni I didn’t understand or even know much about. She was big into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and had about a zillion friends and followers. She was always mentioning something she’d seen on some site, or using my computer to show me an unbearably cute video of an animal. I pretended I didn’t care about any of this. I pretended I didn’t want to go to football or basketball or baseball games with Jenni and the Brittanys and paint my face and scream my head off for Kyle and the Charleston High School Wasps. I said it was an insipid waste of time. (Insipid was an SAT word I got fond of and tend to overuse.)
I said I’d rather spend my nights at home reading a novel than going to a party on state land where someone had brought a keg and everyone stands around outside drinking and disappearing into the woods to make out.
I’d made such a big deal of my opinions on this stuff I felt like I couldn’t back down from them.
Part of me kind of did want to go to games and drink beer—even though I hate football and can’t stand the taste of beer—and smooch with a boy and talk about what everyone was wearing to prom and who hooked up with people who weren’t their dates.
But I proclaimed my marginality so much and so loudly I got stuck with it.
15
Out on the www I found all these sites for professors at different universities who were doing research with rats on animal behavior and emotion. Some were in psychology departments, some in biology, some in neuroscience, and some in health sciences and even veterinary schools.
The site I loved the most belonged to a professor at a small college in Boston I’d never heard of. There were all these photos of her with rats that had markings similar to Walter’s. You could tell she liked working with them. She’d written a book called Tales of the Laboratory Rat and I ordered it for my e-reader and started devouring it. She said that we could learn a lot from rats. Not just the usual stuff—like for science and medicine—but about how to live, things like emotional resilience and having a strong work ethic and developing effective parenting skills and staying healthy. She maintained that the lab rat is an unlikely but powerful role model. She told stories of experiments her students had helped to design.
In fact, on her Web site she had a whole page of the biographies of students who had worked with her as undergrads and gone on to graduate school in neuroscience, biological psychology, neurobiology, clinical psychology, pediatrics, criminal justice, and veterinary medicine.
Not only that, she was a runner. She had links to her favorite races, including a bunch of marathons and a whole bunch of ultramarathons—the races longer than 26.2 miles.
On a Wednesday after school, when I should have been studying differential equations and trying to understand the meaning of the Arch of Constantine, I decided that I would be more focused if I went for a run.
I started missing Walter like crazy. He was always so happy when I came back and kicked off my running shoes so he could play in them. He really liked it when they were sweaty and stinky and that had made me want to run more. It was easier when I believed I was doing something for him.
Thinking about Walter made me start out too fast.
I was trying to run away from my sadness and it caught up. After only about a mile, I was already winded and hurting.
So I slowed down.
I imagined that the sadness could leave my body through my sweat, that with every exhale I was breathing out the grief and loss I’d been holding on to.
I thought about that scientist’s Web site. How cool would it be to work with rats?
During the last part of the run, I thought about writing a letter to her. Before I knew it, I was back at home, sitting at the computer, looking at her Web site again. I clicked on the Contact button, and there was her e-mail address. I clicked on the address and had a blank e-mail ready to go, just like that. So I wrote to her.
To: Marnie Horowitz
Subject: Rodentiaphilia
* * *
Dear Professor Horowitz,
This may seem like a crazy, out-of-the-blue message, but I found your Web site, have read most of your book, and wanted to thank you for making me happy during a really difficult time.
This year I was rejected Early Action by my first-choice college (Yale), and then rejected from almost every other college I applied to (not enough extracurricular activities, nothing special about me, though I had excellent grades and test scores, yada yada yada), and then my rat, Walter, died. I know I don’t have to explain to you how great rats are. I’m a rodentiaphile, which is a word I made up to express how much I love rats. (As I’m sure you know, rats are in the order Rodentia; phile means “one that loves.”)
Walter was fearless and friendly, he tried new things but was cautious enough never to get hurt. He was always in a good mood. I am not always in a good mood and, recently, I’ve been wallowing in my own misery. I’ve tried to be more like Walter but in that, as with everything lately, I’ve been failing.
Just wanted to let you know that finding your Web page was one of the few highlights I’ve had recently. I’ve been doing a ton of research on animal behavior and emotion, and have been reading the textbook Affective Neuroscience by Jaak Panksepp. I guess his big thing is describing the brain circuits in rats that are similar to those of humans. If we have similar neurochemical pathways, why wouldn’t we have similar emotions? I’m surprised people think his findings about rats giggling when they are tickled are controversial—anyone who’s ever spent five minutes with rats knows they have deep emotional lives. And that’s what Darwin thought, right?
Sorry. I’m rambling. I get all fired up about this stuff and then go on and on and bore everyone around me.
Sincerely,
Alice Davis
P.S.: Also, I saw that
you are a runner. I started running this year.
16
Jenni brought her prom dress over. It had turned out incredible.
She’d eighty-sixed the bow in the front and had replaced it with a band of fabric, textured and intricate and delicately pretty. When she tried it on, she glowed like a Project Runway model who had already been to the L’Oréal Paris Makeup Room.
We went downstairs to the kitchen to show my mother, who looked at it, yelped, and said, “Wait right here.” I knew she was running up to the shoe sanctuary. She came down with a pair of strappy high-heeled sandals hanging from her finger.
“These will be perfect.” She presented them to Jenni with a kiss on the head. “Wear them well.”
Jenni squealed.
Then she looked at the brand—a brand that even I recognized as crazy expensive—and tried to hand them back to my mother. She said, “Sarah, I can’t.”
Mom said, “Jenni, honey. I got them, tried them on, and they just don’t fit. But they were on sale. On supersale. I didn’t send them back because I thought that one day they might come in handy.”
“Or footy,” I said, but no one was paying any attention to me.
“If you don’t want them, they’re going to Goodwill,” Mom said. “But it would be a shame because, I mean, they’re perfect for this dress.”
And they were.
Not much more than a couple strips of leather—very expensive, very soft leather—they matched exactly the blue and black of Jenni’s dress.
I remembered that not long after Jenni first showed Mom the sketch and a swatch of the dress material, I saw a shoe box from Zappos in the front hallway.
Jenni said, “Thank you so much.”
Mom grabbed her and threw an arm around me as well. “Group hug,” she said.
Normally I’d squirm out of this kind of huddle, but Jenni was so happy about the shoes and the dress and going to prom I allowed myself to be swallowed up in their corny embrace. For a few seconds.
“I wish you’d come,” Jenni said to me when I’d had enough and shook myself like a wet dog.
“I. Am. Never. Going. To. Prom,” I said. “Could I be more clear?”
“You could ask Miles,” Jenni said, and Mom looked at me and I could tell if she could have, she would have hoisted her eyebrows to her hairline.
“Right.”
When it was obvious I would entertain no more discussion about this, Mom said, “Dad’s out of town that weekend. You and I can get some M&M’s and a movie.”
“Peanut,” I said.
“What?” Mom said.
“They have to be peanut M&M’s,” I said.
“What else would they be? Everything else is a pretender.”
I tried to be really casual when I said, “Can we watch a movie called Harold and Maude?”
I generally vetoed all of her suggestions and rarely had any of my own. We’d spend so much time trying to figure out what to watch that often it got so late we ended up settling on an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Which was kind of fun, because Mom liked to point out the many ways their procedures had gone bad—too much Restylane in the lips, Botox in the wrong places.
Mom cocked her head and said, “Sure.”
But she seemed unsure.
She said, “I haven’t seen it in years. I used to love that movie.” I could see her thinking. “I wonder if it’s the best—I mean, right now might not be—”
She stopped.
She glanced at Jenni, who was no help because:
1. I knew she hadn’t seen Harold and Maude.
2. She was busy caressing the straps of her new shoes.
3. If I didn’t know what the problem was, why did my mom think Jenni would?
Then Mom said, “Yes, let’s watch it. That sounds great.”
Jenni, in her prom dress, in those altitude-sickness high heels, beamed. Nothing seemed to make her happier than when my mom and I got along.
Then Mom looked at Jenni and said, “Wait.”
She left again, and while she was upstairs, Jenni and I tried dancing in the kitchen. She was able to walk and yes, even to dance, in those strappy shoes.
This time Mom came in holding a small quilted leather purse with two interlocking C’s, one backward and one normal, on it.
“This is a loaner, not a gift.”
Jenni yipped and did a cheerleading leap, and I was afraid we were going to have a serious shoe injury.
“Wear them well,” I said to Jenni.
My mother smiled.
So I said, “And if you break your leg, I’ll decorate your cast.”
Jenni said, “Alice, you can be a real downer, but I love you anyway.”
And then the three of us rocked out to imaginary music.
17
On prom night, Mom and I helped Jenni get ready. Well, Mom helped and I cracked jokes.
Her dad had stopped drinking again—at least temporarily—and he’d gotten Jenni a flower thingy, which Mom pinned to her dress.
By the time Kyle picked Jenni up at our house, she looked better than Heidi Klum.
Since Dad was out of town, Mom made us eggs with hats for dinner. It was one of the few things she could cook.
Eggs with hats are not something you find on restaurant menus. It’s kid food. Even though I’d seen my mom make it a thousand times, I would never cook it for myself. Eggs with hats is the kind of food that only tastes right when someone else makes it for you. Someone like your mom.
First you take a slice of bread—I prefer white bread, the unhealthy kind, but you can use any type. Sometimes, when she wants to get fancy, Mom will substitute sourdough, and when she’s on a health kick, the multigrain kind with lots of seeds.
You take a glass and use it as a cookie cutter to punch out a hole in the middle of the slice of bread. Then you put butter in a pan and you fry the bread—plus the circle made by the hole—and crack an egg into the cutout space. It’s tricky, because you have to cook the egg to the perfect consistency and then flip it and not break the yoke.
Then you put it on a plate, the bread with the egg in the hole and the cutout bread, which you put on top of where it used to be. That’s the hat. If it’s cooked right, the egg will be slightly runny, and you can use the hat to soak up extra yolk.
Once when we were having it Jenni said, “Why is this called eggs with hats? Isn’t it that the whole thing, when you put the circle on top, becomes a hat? It’s hat eggs.”
“Stop talking now,” I said.
You don’t mess with someone’s childhood by trying to come up with reasons for why things are called what they’re called. “This is an egg with a hat. Period.”
I later learned that some people call them other things, like toad in the hole, or egg in a hole, or piggies in a basket, or even picture-frame eggs or window eggs. That’s all just wrong.
They’re called eggs with hats and that’s that, people.
Jenni said they were delicious. But sometimes, when she was feeling frisky and wanted to tweak me, she’d whisper, “The egg is the hat.”
Mom and I took our plates of eggs with hats into the living room. We also had glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, going with the whole breakfast-for-dinner motif, and Mom made some bacon, cooked so it was crispy and not at all rubbery. Dad likes it slimy but Mom and I both like it cooked to within an inch of its life.
We put the pound bag of peanut M&M’s into a crystal bowl for the sake of elegance and queued up the movie.
Before she hit Play, Mom touched my arm and said, “Why did you pick this one?”
I didn’t want to tell her about Miles, so I raised my palms and said I’d heard it was good.
After it started, I was uncertain.
The kid, Harold, tried to kill himself twice in the first seven minutes, and then tried about fifty-seven more times.
Mom kept looking at me during the movie. I knew she was worried that a movie about death, about a young guy obsessed with dea
th, might not be the right thing for me. I didn’t look at her—just kept my eyes focused on the screen.
The music was amazing, all these great Cat Stevens songs. When Harold went to a funeral and saw Maude, who was a week away from her eightieth birthday, a woman so delightful and full of life, and Cat Stevens sang, “Miles from Nowhere,” I gasped.
I think Mom thought I was upset because they were at a funeral.
But no.
I loved the idea that Miles, my Miles, who lived with his hippie parents out of town and off the grid, was Miles from Nowhere.
Maude was maybe the most beautiful old woman I’d ever seen. The wrinkles on her face, the light in her eyes, the way she twitched her mouth when she was being all flirty—you could only watch her the way Harold did, with awe and admiration and love.
By the end, I had to cover my face with a napkin because I was crying. I snuck a look at Mom and saw her cheeks were wet with tears. She had her hand on her forehead and her shoulders shook.
As Cat Stevens sang out at the end, Mom reached for me, and this time I let her hold me. I kept thinking of when Harold said, “I love you.”
And Maude, beautiful Maude, wise and amazing Maude, told him that was wonderful, and that he should go and love some more.
Exactly what Walter would have said.
Walter and Maude were a lot alike.
18
Now that the weather was good all the time, it was easy to go for runs.
I found myself waiting until late in the afternoon because I liked looking forward to it and if I ran too early, I’d be disappointed it was already over and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself after. School had gotten ridiculously easy once AP exams were over.
And running was going well, most of the time.
I still had bad days, days when it felt like I was harnessed to a thousand-pound weight that I had to drag behind me, and days when I didn’t feel warmed up until just before I was finished. But a lot of the time I was able to cruise happily along.
