“Oh my gosh, ROBERT. We just saw the biggest mouse in our apartment!”
“Aw, man. That’s too bad. You need some glue traps?” He was smiling and giving off a very friendly vibe, being polite not to show any discomfort or alarm at my braless, wild-haired appearance.
“Yeah, thanks. I don’t know, I might not put them down tonight. You know, the baby will wake up in the morning and get into them,” I said.
“Right, sure,” he said, nodding knowingly like all doormen do, making it clear that they know what you mean when you talk about your baby or your in-laws who visit every month or your recent bunion surgery, even if they’ve met you twice and have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s a talent.
I lingered, telling a story of another mouse we caught, the effectiveness of these particular glue traps, which I liked, except for the faint, sweet smell they give off, while Robert pretended that this 4:00 a.m. interruption to his peace and quiet wasn’t irritating. I was just so happy to see him; I can’t explain it. I’m always comforted thinking that there’s someone awake at our front door at all hours, in the same way walking into a 24-hour Walgreens in the middle of the night makes me feel like nothing bad could happen, because someone’s on the job.
Back upstairs, I got into the bottom bunk with James. Michael lay down on the couch that’s along one wall of their room, and we all tried to go back to sleep. It took me about an hour, so I’d barely dozed off when Julia sat up on her top bunk at 6:00 a.m. and asked, “WHAT is that SOUND?” My eyelids felt like Post-it Notes. “Please go back to sleep,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“No. Mom. There’s a scratching sound,” she insisted.
“It’s Sam. He’s probably up. He’s tapping against the rails of his crib.”
“Mom, it’s not Sam. It’s coming from the hallway.”
Michael got up and walked around the corner. “What the . . . Elizabeth, you need to come look at this.”
The creature in our bedroom was loudly gnawing and clawing at the bottom of our door, trying to get out—which, yes, meant that it was too big to fit under the door. Across the floor of the hallway were wood chips he had chewed and scattered. The sound was somewhere between what you hear in your skull when a dentist is scraping your teeth and the way a neighbor might knock to tell you that the building is on fire. He was hitting the door hard enough to make it bang against the frame. I don’t believe in curses, but I do believe in the devil. This rat had to be his doing.
“EVERYONE GET DRESSED WE ARE GOING TO THE DINER!” I yelled, turning on Sam’s light and lifting him, dazed, out of his crib.
While the kids and I sat at the diner eating French toast and egg sandwiches, Michael sat on our couch listening to the rat try to claw its way through our bedroom door. He couldn’t leave, lest it get out and go God knows where. And our building manager, Jeff, was trying to get an exterminator as quickly as possible, but it was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. When the exterminator did arrive, a couple of hours later, he told Michael that it “must be a roof rat,” a comment that did not generate nearly enough follow-up questions from my husband. The best our building manager could venture was that the rat had somehow climbed (up or down—who knows) on ropes that were running along the outside of the building, part of some scaffolding for a construction project. He said in his twenty years working in New York City, he’d never seen a rat above the first floor.
Later that day, after we’d returned home, he asked, “Are you sure you didn’t notice water splashed around your bathroom? You know they can come up through the toilets.”
“I always thought that was an urban legend,” I said. Still, no water. He’d come in another way.
After breakfast, the kids and I wasted some time at Michael’s sister Susan’s house. They played and kindly woke up their teenage cousin, Beatrice, and her friend. I paced the kitchen, waiting for Michael to text me to say the exterminator had caught him. Eventually, Michael said we should come home and pack a bag; we’d sleep somewhere else that night. The exterminator had set traps all over the room, but the rat had retreated back under our bed. When we arrived, the exterminator took the extra bacon we’d brought home from breakfast and tossed it around our bedroom; on top of the remote control and the book I’d been reading, both dropped on the floor and now compromised, tainted. He placed a thick piece of plywood across the door, so the rat couldn’t get out. Even so, I sprinted past the door every time, dashing to the kids’ room and our closet, grabbing underwear and T-shirts and flip-flops.
One of our doormen, Julio, and Tomas, a handyman, checked the traps periodically throughout the day, calling us with updates. “We haven’t caught him, but we will! Don’t worry!” Tomas told me. As it began to get dark, Michael worried that the rat would never come out of hiding because one of our bedside lamps was still on. Julio offered to breach the plywood barrier, walk into our room, and turn it off, because he is a saint.
The next morning, while at a soccer tournament for Julia, we got a text. The rat had been caught, smashed in a trap, a piece of bacon from the Metro Diner hanging off to one side.
When we came home later that day, the building guys had cleaned up, scrubbing the floor and removing all of the traps. I hugged Julio and Tomas for a long time, longer than was appropriate. I tiptoed into our bedroom and began throwing away everything that was touching the floor, including our rug. Jeff called to say that he could sand down the teeth marks along the bottom of our door. Tomas came over the next day and pulled furniture, cabinets, and appliances away from the wall, looking for holes, until he found a large one under our kitchen sink that we’d never noticed before. The rat had apparently chewed through a piece of plastic that was covering some pipes. How he climbed to the eighth floor remains a mystery. I mopped the floors with bleach and tried to feel less violated. “I know it doesn’t make you feel better,” Jeff said, “but pretty much every time your kids play in a sandbox, they’re playing with rat feces.” Actually, that did make me feel better. When I think I’ve gone from grandiose heights to hard times, the distance feels so unfair. When I realize I’ve been living in the rat feces all along and doing okay, the actual rat part doesn’t seem so bad.
. . .
Less than a week later, on a Friday morning, I was waiting for Sam to wake up from his nap and decided to take the compost down to the basement, where we empty it into the large plastic bins that the city then collects. I know parents who have never left a sleeping child in an apartment, even to go to the lobby and pick up a package or to the basement laundry room. But I follow the wisdom of my friend Ashley, another Southerner who lives in New York, which is this: In suburban houses all over America, kids are napping on the second floor of a 5,000-square-foot home, while their mothers or fathers are pulling weeds on the edge of their two-acre backyard or talking to a neighbor at the end of the driveway. When we go to the basement, we are no farther away from our children than those parents are from theirs.
My mistake was that I didn’t bring my phone.
I emptied my bag of compost into the communal container, got back on the elevator from the basement, pushed the button for 8, and then felt the elevator bounce dramatically and clunk to a stop between the basement and the first floor. No big deal, I thought. I survived a rat. I pushed the call button on the elevator that I assumed one should push in an emergency. I knew there was a camera on the ceiling that transmitted to a screen near the front door. “I see you! We see you! It’s okay!” said Jose, the doorman on duty, through the speaker on the elevator panel. “Tomas is coming!”
A minute later, I heard Jeff and Tomas outside the door. “Passa!” Tomas called. I’ve never known if this is his nickname for my family, or if he thinks that is our full name, but it’s been years now, so I can’t ask. “You okay? We’re going to get the doors open. Everything okay?” he said.
I was fine, not nervous at all, I said. Take your time. The only problem, I explained, was that Sam was at the tail end of a nap and would de
finitely wake up in the next few minutes. If I had remembered my phone, I could have called Michael, whose office is fifteen minutes away. Several friends live within walking distance. Sam couldn’t climb out of his crib, but someone needed to get him—eventually. “No problem,” said Jeff. “We’ll have you out.” I sat down and waited. I could hear Jeff and Tomas wedging something between the outer doors, straining, and then letting go, exhaling with a huff.
“Elizabeth? We can’t seem to get the door open manually. I’m not sure what is going on. You okay? Just sit tight,” said Jeff.
I thought about having Jeff call Michael and tell him to come home. But that would take more time, and I was pretty sure Sam was already up. And our door was never locked; I just needed one of the guys to go upstairs and check.
“Tomas, can someone go see if Sam is awake?”
“Yes, Allan is here. He can go.”
“Perfect.”
Allan was well over six feet tall, a huge, lanky presence, but soft-spoken and gentle. He had two young children, one not much older than Sam, and could certainly soothe an abandoned toddler if necessary. I could hear Tomas, Jeff, and Allan communicating through their walkie-talkies.
(crrrrch) “Allan, can you go check on the baby?” (crrrrch)
(crrrrch) “Yes, I am here.” (crrrrch) “Baby is awake. Baby is awake.” (crrrrch)
“Passa! Allan says the baby is up.”
“Okay, can you just ask Allan to get him up and play with him until I’m back?” I asked.
(crrrrch) “Allan! Passa says get Sam up and play with him.” (crrrrch)
(crrrrch) “Okay!” (crrrrch)
It took forty-five minutes to get me out. Jeff had to call the elevator company, who was able to release whatever was keeping the doors jammed, and the cab finally moved, smoothly, back down to the basement. “I’m bad luck,” I said to Jeff and Tomas as I got off.
I went upstairs and found Allan sitting on the floor of my living room, wedged in a corner with his legs stretched out on either side of my coffee table, like overgrown Alice in Wonderland, his work boots still on. Sam was cackling and throwing an Old McDonald figurine, perfectly delighted that the guy who normally empties our recycling and waters the landscaping along the side of the building had appeared to get him up from his nap.
When I was thirteen, I wanted to live on a farm in the middle of nowhere. I’d probably be dead, lost in a cornfield, or locked in a barn with a rabid cow. My type belongs in a heavily staffed building with call buttons.
“Sorry. He got all the toys out,” said Allan.
“It’s okay. My floors are really clean.”
SEVENTEEN
THE DEVIL WORKS OVERTIME ON SUNDAY MORNINGS
MY MOTHER USED TO SAY TO my sister and me when we were getting dressed for church, “The devil works overtime on Sunday mornings, girls.” She’d say this as I complained that my tights were bunching in uncomfortable places around my toes or my hair bow wasn’t close enough to the ponytail holder in my halfback. “He’s trying to make us late, and he’s succeeding.”
Now, you may not go to church, and you may not believe in the devil, but you know what I’m talking about. There are evil forces trying to keep families across the world from making it on time and in one piece to a school play, a grandmother’s eightieth birthday dinner, the airport. If you have ever had a child strip naked because one side of his shirt collar touched his earlobe in a funny way exactly six minutes past the time you needed to be out the door, you know what I’m talking about.
I’d like to blame most of the devil-colluding on my children, but the truth is that I’m part of the problem. I like to sleep late on Sundays. By “sleep late,” I mean I pretend not to hear Sam on the baby monitor until my husband gets up, and then I pretend not to hear everyone chattering in the living room, which is right outside my bedroom door, until my husband brings me coffee. Then I get up and wonder, aloud, why no one has eaten breakfast, and why everyone is just sitting on the couch watching Planet Earth.
“We need to leave for church in twenty-five minutes!” I say, in a not-so-nice tone.
Good morning, sings the devil.
My children really have it easy when it comes to church clothes. It’s not like my childhood, when I had to wear stiff Mary Janes and a dress with a sash. Our church is casual. As my friend Carrie said about watching a bunch of babies be baptized, “You have a kid in an antique christening gown right next to one in his fire truck pajamas. Anything goes.” I tell the big kids, “Please put on something sort of nice,” which means a collared shirt for James and, maybe, a dress for Julia, although she often has a soccer game directly after church and wears her uniform and shin guards all morning.
No one has moved from the couch.
“Ca-CAW!” Michael says, squatting and popping up from the living room floor with his arms stretched wide. “I’m wooing you. I’m a bird of paradise.”
“You’re not helping,” I say.
“Mom, I’m going to tell you a riddle,” Julia says. She’s very into riddles these days. You know, Two men order the same drink at a bar. One drinks his right away. The other man goes to the bathroom, then drinks his and dies. How did it happen?*
“A girl is murdered on the first day of school—” she starts.
“I know!” I say. “Her mother killed her because she was taking too long to get dressed!”
“Ugh, fine.”
I toast some stale bagels from our breakfast the day before and yell for someone to dress the baby. I don’t eat breakfast, because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to say to my children, “I can’t eat breakfast because I’m too busy feeding YOU,” and, also, I don’t like breakfast very much. I drink my coffee in the bathroom while I run a baby wipe under my armpits and wash my face.
I’d give anything to wear fire truck pajamas to church, I think. It’s not that I think God cares all that much about my clothes, but I do believe what I tell my children: that we should put some effort into our appearance for worship. It shows respect. In a small way, I think, our outward appearance can put our minds in a respectful posture. The devil tells me that I don’t have a single nice outfit that looks good on my body, that I’m slovenly and only wear gray T-shirts and Birkenstocks, and it’s embarrassing. For a few minutes, I stand in front of my closet in my underwear feeling pitiful and annoyed. Then I put on the one summer dress I own, which I wear every Sunday, hoping that when we greet our pew mates during the service, no one is saying to her spouse, “That woman in the blue and white striped wrap dress wears that literally every week.”
We need to leave in five minutes. James is sitting at the dining table in his pajamas making origami butterflies.
“Oh my word, JAMES. Get dressed NOW,” I scream.
“That’s my girl,” says the devil.
I grab an extra diaper to leave in the nursery with Sam, and I write “Sam” across one side with a Sharpie. As we are finally getting into the elevator, I realize that I forgot his sippy cup.
“Hold it! Hold the elevator!” I rush back inside.
“Mom! We can’t hold it! There are people in here!” My family rides down to the lobby, and I wait for the elevator to come back up.
“I was thinking we would drive,” says Michael. For people who value parking spaces like gold bullion, it seems foolish to take the car out of one in order to drive twenty blocks to church. We are late, though, and the buses don’t run as frequently on the weekend.
“When is the next M10?” I say.
He looks at the bus app on his phone. “Twenty-eight minutes.”
“Fine. Where’s the car?”
There are a couple of reasons I don’t like to drive, starting with the fact that it takes us as long to buckle Sam into a car seat as it does to get to church. So we don’t buckle him in. I know, it’s illegal and careless, but I want to be honest here. Instead, we let him perch backward on his knees, so that he’s facing forward in his rear-facing car seat, and play with Michael’s hair or rea
ch up and turn the overhead lights on and off. The other reason I don’t like to drive is that our church is on the same block as a fire station and several rental car companies. All of the street parking on that block is reserved, even on Sundays. Michael usually drops us off in front and then circles around to find a spot. This makes me angry.
“Here you are, walking into church alone. Again. I bet everyone thinks your husband doesn’t come to church with you. They’re judging you,” says the devil.
I have a little bit of a hang-up about sitting in church without Michael, stemming from all the years of my childhood, sitting in church with my mother and sister and no father. No one in my church is paying attention, but I feel insecure. Maybe if I look over my shoulder at the sanctuary door, expectantly, every few minutes, people will know that I have a husband, and that he loves Jesus, and that he’s only parking the car, I think.
We’ve dropped Sam in the nursery, but the big kids sit with me in the service for the first third, through a few hymns and the prayers of thanksgiving and confession. After the first hymn I look over and see that Julia has brought Harry Potter with her, even though I told her to leave it at home. I grab the book out of her hands a little too forcefully and mutter, “I swear to GOD, Julia.” Then I feel terrible about taking the Lord’s name in vain. Still no husband. The devil is winning.
“Can I have a pen, please?” asks James, poking my thigh. He sits and draws on his bulletin instead of standing up for the prayers of the people, and I feel terrible again. Other people’s children have their eyes closed. Other people’s children don’t play tic-tac-toe during the responsive reading. I look down and see that James has written “sex” multiple times on his paper and then scribbled over it. Good heavens.
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