The Girlfriend Curse

by Valerie Frankel

  The car salesman had her fill out the paperwork, fork over her credit card, and then walked her onto the lot. She tried to focus on his recitation about the past week’s weather patterns, but Peg’s mind drifted like a log on phloem back to Ray Quick. His kisses were spicy (from Doritos) and hot (from heat). They’d made out for the last two hours of the train trip. No need to talk once they’d discovered their mutual defect. Why talk anyway, when their mouths were put to better use in other ways?

  They held hands exiting the train, had to pry their lips apart at the station. He asked, “Are you going straight to your farm? Can I call you there? I’ll sneak off. Whatever I have to do.”

  “I’m not hooked up yet at the farm,” said Peg, “but I can give you my cell.”

  They programmed each other’s number into their mobile phones. “Reception is spotty in the mountains,” Ray cautioned her.

  “Take my address, too,” she said. “Come over, if you can make a break for it.” She scribbled her address on the back of his train ticket.

  He looked at the writing. “You live on Old Dirty Goat Road?” he asked, slaying her with his smile.

  “Better than Young Dirty Goat Road,” she said. “Those young dirty goats, they throw wild parties. Drink. Do drugs. Listen to rock-and-roll music.”

  “From what I hear, the old dirty goats are just as bad,” he said. “In these heah parts.”

  “Is that a Vermont accent?” asked Peg. “Do it again.”

  He cleared his throat, and said, “If you don’t like the weathah, wait an houah.”

  They giggled. She said, “You’ve had quite enough Gatorade for one day.”

  He did the accent again—“I reckon”—and then planted another smooch on her. Peg dropped her suitcase on the ground to put her arms around his neck.

  He pulled back. “Where were you three months ago? I wouldn’t have signed up for Inward Bound.”

  “The program is just four weeks,” she said.

  He looked down at her, toffee eyes sweet and gooey. “I can’t wait that long to have you,” sending Peg’s heart racing.

  “You’ve got five gears, and reverse,” the Subaru dealer said loudly, breaking into her thoughts. He was giving Peg the spiel. “This is the remote. You can lock and unlock the doors, turn on the ignition, start the heater, even switch on the CD player. It’s a nifty little gadget. I tell you, they get more advanced each year.”

  “You don’t have to sell me,” said Peg. “I already paid. Unless you need the practice.”

  He stopped abruptly. “Here it is,” he said. “Two-thousand five Subaru Outback, fully loaded, standard transmission. Metallic black.”

  He dropped the keys into her palm. “My first car,” she said wistfully. “So I put the key into the slot, and twist to turn it on, right?”

  The dealer nodded, and said with all earnestness, “Gas pedal on the right. Brake in the middle. Clutch on the left.”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I was trying to be funny.”

  “What’s funny about not knowing how to drive?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just a little sarcasm.”

  “Sarcasm?” said dealer, as if it were an alien concept. “Oh, yes. I’ve heard they do that in New York.”

  Clearly, they do it in Vermont, too, thought Peg. She got in her car, checked her mapquest directions and drove. She got all the way out of the lot before she stalled. Then she cruised down Manshire’s Main Street—four blocks, with a white steeple church, a general store, a post office, a restaurant, an inn and a bookstore. Another few miles down a paved road, then a left (stall) and a right. At the turn for Old Dirty Goat Road (stall), the road changed from blacktop to graded dirt. Peg thought of an old New Yorker cartoon: an illustration of a car on a highway, passing a sign that read, “Welcome to Vermont. Pavement ends.” She drove along the road narrowing into a single-lane squeeze under a canopy of elms, maples and oaks. Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans and wild daisies dotted the ditches on the sides of the road. Peg drove slowly, getting a feel for her new car, watching butterflies and dragonflies flitting by the flowers. Peg came to a full stop (slam on breaks, stall) to avoid hitting a deer and two fawns in the road.

  She watched the furry family disappear into the woods, her heart thundering from nearly killing them. She’d have to get used to living so closely with animals. But that was how the world should be, she thought, getting the car back in gear. Humans and animals, co-existing, sharing the Earth’s bounty. Peg smiled to herself. Moving was the best decision she’d ever made. She could feel herself shedding the artifice of New York, the overcivilized pretentiousness that defined city life. Bring on the deer. They’d become her prancing pals. Feral pets. She could leave out food for them in a dish on her porch. This is heaven, or Eden, she thought as she turned into her gravel driveway, which was exactly where it was supposed to be, 2.39 miles from the turn.

  Peg turned off the ignition and stepped out of her new car to look at her new home. The photos did not do the place justice. The small two-story house, white with navy trim, had a triangular aluminum roof, four-panel glass windows, dormers, extended eaves. It was a classic country home, modest, muscular, neat, no frills. Just like me, she thought proudly. They were a perfect match. And then, another notion: Won’t Ray be impressed?

  Peg approached the front door with some trepidation. Sure, the outside looked great, exactly like the photos. But she hadn’t seen any pictures of the inside. All she had to go on was the word of Bertha the broker. Peg was a realist. She expected to find something wrong. Water damage. A rotting floor.

  She used her key (the broker had mailed it to her in New York). No problem with the lock, or the solid oak door. She entered a square mudroom: terra-cotta brick floor, white walls with a few wrought-iron hooks. She hung up her purse and dropped her suitcase (full of clothes, some sheets and her brokerage account info—all she’d brought to start her new life). She ventured straight ahead, into the kitchen. She peeked at the deep, stainless-steel sink. She turned on the faucet. She’d expected a clattering blast of liquid rust. But the water flowed soundlessly, colorless and odorless. The downstairs bathroom looked good, too. She flushed the toilet. No muddy backflow.

  Peg started to relax. Faster now, she prowled from room to room on the first floor. The ceiling beams and wide-plank floors were solid, seamless. The mantel and fireplace were swept. Peg lit a match in the flue, and watched with joy as the flame fluttered and then steadied. Chimney clear, good. Good. She walked through the French doors of the living room and out onto the deck to look at her land.

  Seeing her property, that first look, almost hurt from the beauty. Ten acres, all hers. The view directly in front—the four acres of flat pasture—would be turned into her flower farm. Peg admired the swell of a hill to the left, about an acre or two, covered in a carpet of yellow, purple and white wildflowers. A wind lifted suddenly, and she caught the scent of mint and grass. Peg cast her eyes on a pond to the right of her future garden, water surface rippling, a willow tree bending on the bank, a frog leaping into the water. More ripples. It was a small pond. Barely big enough for swimming laps. But plenty sizeable for cooling off.

  Peg scanned the horizon. She couldn’t believe she was the owner of all she surveyed. She had to see it up close. Deciding to take a wander through her pasture, Peg ran back to the mudroom to grab her suitcase. She carted it up the steep, banisterless staircase (built over two hundred years ago, when people were shorter—and narrower), up to second floor.

  The upstairs had two bedrooms and another bathroom. She entered the larger bedroom, and threw her suitcase on the floor. As per her instructions, the real estate broker had arranged for a mattress to be delivered pending her arrival. And there it was, wrapped in plastic, leaning upright against the wall.

  Peg stripped out of her traveling clothes. In the privacy of her own home, she stood naked, arms stretched to the ceiling. The months of planning, the excruciating decisions, the stress of selling,
buying, all seemed worth it now. This was the life she wanted, in the setting of her dreams. The fact that she’d met Ray on the way up was a sign that she’d done the right thing. No mistakes, no surprises. It was all going off without a hitch. Maybe the pieces of her life were finally coming together.

  Peg rummaged in her suitcase for a towel, toothbrush and toothpaste. She had a million things to do, buy and see, but first, before anything, she’d shower.

  The upstairs bathroom had a toilet, a sink and a big, clawfooted tub. The window by the tub let in beams of light as the sun slowly sank into the mountains. She could gaze out of this window at her pasture while taking long soaks, smelling the minty air. Her entire body softened, her muscles unclenching for the first time in ten years. Smiling at herself in the framed mirror above the sink (she’d have to buy a medicine cabinet), Peg was bursting with pride. She loved her car, her house, her previously untapped adventurousness. She even loved her bangs.

  Peg brushed her teeth quickly. She decided that, in the absence of a medicine cabinet, she would store her toiletries in the cabinet under the sink. She opened the cabinet door. Light from the window shined into the space.

  What came out of the space: a gray swarm. A few at first, and then scores of mice raced out of the cabinet, darted around the bathroom, across her naked toes and into the hallway, where they dispersed like scattered marbles.

  Part of her brain realized how terrified the critters had to be. She was a 125-pound woman, and they were tiny creatures. The rest of her brain was going on pure instinct, instructing her muscles to jump up and down, setting off her vocal cords to emit an ear-piercing scream with the power and wind of two healthy lungs behind it.

  Peg wasn’t afraid of water bugs and cockroaches. She’d killed many large, hard-shelled insects, even taking pleasure as they crunched under her shoe. Rats were horrible. But Peg saw them only at a safe distance—in sewers, running along subway tracks. A rat sighting, while waiting for a train, could be entertaining.

  Nothing entertaining about these mice, scurrying over her unshod feet, spilling from the cabinet as if poured from hell’s bucket. Into her bathroom. The place where she would do personal, naked things. She watched a mouse crawl across the toilet seat. This unleashed a surge of horror in Peg. The surge careened inside her blood and bones, like the mice on the floor, maniacally and without direction or purpose, until she thought she would pass out or throw up. Or both.

  Stumbling on pure adrenaline, Peg ran out of the bathroom and slammed the door. In a blind panic, she rushed back into the master bedroom and bumped into the mattress leaning against the wall. It fell to the floor with a violent splat, letting fly another burst of gray. More mice darted in wild fright from the underside of the mattress.

  A new blast of screaming and the hot-foot dance from Peg as disgust crept upward from her toes to the ends of her hair. The plastic wrapping of the mattress had been gnawed away, along with a plate-sized hole in the padding. A family of rodents had fashioned a comfortable nest of stuffing and droppings there. One brave mouse hadn’t fled. He remained in his nest, chewing unfettered at the padding upon which Peg was to have slept. He stopped for a moment and looked up at her with his black bead eyes, as if daring her to make him stop, even for a second.

  Peg grabbed her suitcase, her purse, her pile of clothes on the floor, and rushed down the stairs, out the door and into her Subaru, where she sat in the front seat, leather sticking to her bare bottom, screaming.

  She used the nifty remote gadget to roll up the windows and lock the car doors.

  Chapter 9

  “You’ve got a little mouse problem,” said Chuck Plenet, Manshire’s “One and Only Exterminator,” or so it said on his truck.

  He met her on the porch of the Manshire Inn. Peg had been living there for two days. That was how long it took to get Chuck Plenet to get out to her house and investigate the vermin scourge.

  “Well, which is it?” asked Peg. “Do I have a little mouse problem, or a little problem with mice?”

  Chuck chuckled, and adjusted his baseball cap with the logo of an ant with X-es for eyes. His other style choices included bib overalls, filthy Nike sneakers, a blonde mullet and a fine layer of dust. His face had more wrinkles than a Thomas Pynchon novel, but he didn’t seem that old. He could have been any age from thirty to fifty, impossible to tell.

  “The mice are small,” he said. “The problem is big. That’s what happens when a house is empty for too long in the warm weather. You get uninvited guests.”

  “So you’ll get rid of them,” Peg prompted. “Use the strongest poison you’ve got. Go in there with napalm. Nuke them to vapor.”

  Chuck shook his head, kicked a post with his sneaker and said, “I don’t like to kill a mouse for no reason.”

  “Aren’t you an exterminator?”

  “Only one in town.”

  “Do you exterminate pests,” she asked, “or just the competition?”

  Chuck said, “I prefer to relocate mice. To a better place.”

  “To Jamaica?” she said.

  Chuck said, “These mice were just doing what comes naturally. It’s wrong to kill them for being animals. I’m sure you don’t want the murder of hundreds of mice on your record when you go to meet your maker.”

  “Hundreds?” Peg asked. And then, “My maker?”

  Chuck whispered, “God.”

  She would have laughed, had she not been dumbfounded. “Wouldn’t the mice be in a better place, as you say, with their maker? Who, I assure you, is not the same one who made me.”

  “Can’t do that,” he said. “Mice have souls, Ms. Silver. Insects don’t. I’m fine with killing bugs. But I have a strict policy about mammals.”

  “You’ve got a gun rack on your truck!” Peg protested, pointing at his truck.

  “Hunting is different,” said Chuck. “I eat what I kill. I don’t eat mice. Do you, Ms. Silver?”

  “Not yet,” she said, getting frustrated, missing the exterminators of New York with their crush, kill, destroy, scorched earth policy with vermin.

  Chuck said, “I recommend cats.”

  “You eat cats?” she asked.

  “Cats eat mice,” he explained. “What they don’t eat, they’ll scare away, into the field. That way, you won’t have mice dying in the walls. They’re small, but the rotting bodies stink. The smell never quite goes away. You’ll need about thirty cats. Should take a month.”

  “Where am I going to get thirty cats?” she asked. And then, “A month?”

  “I can rent you the cats,” he said. “For two hundred a week.”

  “Eight hundred dollars,” she said, incredulous. Chuck obviously thought her a rich urbanite—or, in the native Vermont tongue, a “flatlander”—who would pay anything.

  She said, “I can go to an animal shelter and get thirty cats for free.”

  “Four hundred?”

  “Two hundred,” she said.

  “I can work with that,” he said. “I’ll bring the cats over sometime next week.”

  “Next week?” she asked. “Do it today!”

  Chuck said, “It takes some time to rustle up thirty cats, Ms. Silver.”

  It takes Vermont time, where everyone moved at the speed of tort reform. The concierge at the Inn made Peg wait two hours for her room. The bartender took half an hour to mix a martini. Bertha the broker, who’d sold her the mousetrap, hadn’t returned her multiple urgent phone messages for two days. Chuck Plenet, forty-five minutes late for their appointment, apologized by saying, “Inside an hour is on time” to her, before shaking his head in bald disgust at her impatience. Manhattan to Manshire was like going from sixty to zero in one second flat. She felt the emotional skid marks on her soul. Despite the martinis and Jasper Ale (the Inn’s home brew), both of which she’d been guzzling since she checked in, nothing erased the sight of mice rampaging around her bathroom, the sensation of their claws on her toes.

  “Do it,” she directed to Chuck. “Send in the cat
s.” Peg reached into her purse, removed her wallet and slapped some twenties into his open palm. He wrote her a receipt.

  Peg glanced back at the Inn. Charming, quaint, floor-to-ceiling floral. It was enough to drive a city mouse insane. Plus, her room wasn’t cheap at $100 per night, and at the rate she was going, she could look forward to another $50 a day in bar and restaurant charges. She was flush, but Peg Silver hadn’t been raised to throw her money out the chintz-curtained window. “Where am I going to live?” she asked herself out loud.

  Chuck arranged his cap again and smiled, showing off his countrified dentistry. He said, “You can stay with me if you like. I’ve got an attic room that’s comfortable. Shower behind the barn. Clean outhouse. No charge.”

  Peg could see it now. Chuck, the mammal lover, trapping her in the attic. Spying on her barn showers. Doing what came naturally. “Tempting offer, Chuck,” she said. “But I’m partial to indoor plumbing.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said. He got in his truck and drove away.

  Hating the idea of going back into the Inn, Peg wandered off the porch, and across the parking lot to Dombit’s general store. The store’s slogan, painted in big letters on the side of the building, read, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” She’d see about that.

  Peg perused the organic produce aisle, the Cabot cheese department, the racks of flannel wear (from panties to slacks). She picked up a hummus-and-sprouts sandwich and a Diet Coke and took them to the register. The cashier, skinny in a tank top (no bra), flipped her three-foot-long braid and asked, “Need anything else?”

  “You don’t have it,” Peg said.

  “Then you don’t really need it,” chirped the cashier.

  Peg said, “In which aisle can I find a habitable place to live? A friend? A man who will love me unconditionally?”

  The cashier blinked. “I can check our inventory,” she said.

  “Don’t bother,” said Peg.

  After paying, Peg left with lunch. The cashier was glad to see her go. Raw emotional vulnerability unsettled the locals (it was stock-in-trade in New York). Once outside, Peg noticed the giant bulletin board on the wall of the store. By rote, her eyes scanned the colored flyers tacked on the board, selling used tractors, teams of draft horses, cords of wood, steer slaughter service. She took out her cell phone. No service.