Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (9 page)

I’m not afraid of one little mouse. Two mice is a different story.

I called my mom.

“Call your super,” she said.

“I feel bad bothering him.” I hate to bother people. But I love to bother my mother.

“Don’t feel bad, honey. It’s his job. And I can’t really do anything to help from here.”

Just letting me bother her is a help, but practically speaking, I see her point.

An hour later, my super, Ervin, arrived. He’s a lovable lug with an Eastern European accent. He said, “I’m surprise you have mouse problem with dog.”

I looked over at Pip snoozing on the couch; he hadn’t lifted his head since my super came in.

Some surprise.

Ervin helped me pull out the oven and the dishwasher, where we discovered holes in the wall behind both appliances.

This is what counts as “newly renovated” in your first apartment.

After we plugged the holes, Ervin started to unpeel what looked like a giant sticker. “Glue trap. Mouse walk on glue, it stick. If one stick, it gonna make noise. Don’t be scared. Call me, I come get it.”

“That sounds sad.”

He shrugged. “You can try get human traps.”

He means
humane.

“Do they work?”

“No.”

I thanked him and said goodbye. But I did feel sorry about the cruelty of a glue trap. So I went out and bought the old-fashioned wooden traps, and I even found some humane traps. I set both, so the mice could choose their fate.

This mitigated my guilt, but I still hated having traps, period. Pip is unfazed by rodent activity but highly alert to peanut butter activity, so he was whining behind the baby gate I’d put up to bar him from the booby-trapped kitchen.

I couldn’t just sit and wait. My apartment was clean, but I started cleaning anyway, and the more I cleaned, the more convinced I became that everything was dirty. Every place was a new place touched by mouse feet.

My neighbor told me that mice hate the smell of Irish Spring soap, so I bought three bars, peeled them with my vegetable peeler, and sprinkled the soap shavings all over my bedroom, at the back of my drawers, around the laundry bin, in the corners of my closet.

It smelled like a teenage boy exploded in my bedroom.

Then a friend on Facebook told me that mice hate the smell of crushed mint, so I bought fresh mint and made a mint moat around my bed. Within hours, it had wilted and dried out, so it looked like I was composting on my bedroom floor.

Then I read online that you must use 100 percent oil of peppermint. It said to apply it with a cotton ball. In retrospect, this direction probably indicated that I should use it sparingly, but I got carried away. When I was finished, my bedroom smelled like a candy-cane factory.

God knows if it’s keeping the mice out, but at least my sinuses are clear.

That night, I tried to go to sleep in my Irish peppermint wonderland, but at every tiny sound, my body would go rigid, my mind hyper-alert, waiting for proof of mice. So despite the October chill, I turned on my rattling air conditioner, shoved cotton in my ears, and pulled a pillow over my head. Finally, I fell asleep and dreamt of a handsome Irish lad working in Santa’s workshop.

Later, I awoke to a clicking sound. I reached for my glasses on the nightstand and slowly raised them to my face.

My worst nightmare was brought into focus:

A mouse, chomping on my baseboard.

It’s
on.

Pilgrim’s Progress

By Lisa

There is such a thing as too much progress. The proof is what happened to me the other day at the airport.

Before boarding, I make a quick trip to the ladies’ room. Every woman of a certain age knows what I’m talking about. Whether we need to or not, we’re going to the bathroom, just in case we need to in the foreseeable future, which is defined as the next fifteen minutes.

I’m talking about the preemptive pee.

This is similar to our equally adorable habit of carrying a water bottle everywhere, because it’s important to stay hydrated at all times. It goes without saying that the water bottle and the preemptive pee are related, but that’s not the point herein.

The point is that the ladies’ bathroom is now fully automatic, which is a sure sign of progress. The world has gotten so damn smart that the toilet knows when to flush, the soap knows when to squirt, the water knows when to turn on, and the paper towel knows when to dispense.

In theory.

I go into the stall and do my thing, but when I get up, the toilet doesn’t flush. I sit up and down, twice, but it still doesn’t flush. I wiggle my tush in front of the sensor and nothing happens. Well, maybe the sensor covers its eyes or throws up, but the toilet still doesn’t flush and I’m done exercising for the day.

I press the red button, then hit it with my hand. Still, nothing. You would think I’d give up, but I don’t want to be the woman emerging from the stall with an unflushed toilet. Guaranteed I’ll run into someone who either reads my books or, more likely, remembers me from French II in high school.

Bonjour!

And you know the first thing she’ll tell everybody at the next reunion.

Scottoline is a pig.

So I sit in the stall, wishing for a toilet handle that worked the old-fashioned, mechanical way. In other words, always.

But no.

Because now we can make toilets that flush automatically, so we do, proving that not every improvement improves anything.

So I wait in the stall until the ladies’ room is empty, then I slink out and make a beeline for the sink. These days, I wash my hands after the preemptive pee, now that there’s something called H1N1, which is a virus disguised as a computer password.

I wave my hands under the automatic soap dispenser.

No soap.

I wave my hand under the dispenser again, but still no soap. I go to the second, third, and fourth dispensers, waving my hands back and forth, then up and down, then around and around. Still no soap, even after the hokey pokey.

Okay, fine, I figure I’ll do without the soap and just rinse my hands. So I wave my hands under the faucet at the fourth sink, but no water.

You know where this is going.

I try the third and second faucets, moving back down the line of sinks, and I end up at the first faucet, where a tiny jet of water splashes into my hand. We used to have faucets that you twisted on and off, using an anachronistic device called a knob, but those worked too well and got replaced by progress.

Even so, the water I finally got isn’t enough to fill a thimble and I’m committed to hand rinsing, so I wave my hands under the faucet, but my water ration has expired. I use the water from my water bottle.

Yay!

Then I wave my dripping hands in front of the automatic dispenser to get a paper towel.

No towels.

I go to the second and third dispensers, but still no towels. I engage in some creative profanity and remember with a stab of longing the ancient dispenser for paper towels, which had no sensors, moving parts, or computer chips. You would see the edge of the towel and simply pull it free.

It was all in the wrist.

But those dispensers have gone the way of typewriters.

Which is what we had before laptops that crash.

You Can’t Touch This

By Lisa

Here’s what happened to me, last weekend. I’d just finished the draft of my next book, which left me with nothing to do and a residual feeling that I should still be productive. I’d been working on the same book for a year, and even so, wasn’t ready for it to end, even after I’d typed:

The End.

Please tell me this happens to you, no matter what you do. That once you’ve been working full-tilt, it’s hard to bring it to an abrupt halt. It’s not that those of us similarly afflicted are Type A, because we’re too nice for that. I prefer to think of us as adorable cartoon characters like Wile E. Coyote, who keep running in the air after there’s no more cliff.

Meep meep!

Either way, when I finally finished working, I noticed some scuffmarks on the walls of my entrance hall and I couldn’t forget them. I kept looking at them, and though I wanted to relax, sitting down in my favorite chair to read a book, the scuffmarks stayed in the back of my mind. I remember when the back of my mind used to be occupied by men, but in recent years, they’ve have been replaced by carbohydrates.

And, now, scuffmarks.

Five scuffmarks in all, covering the wall in the entrance hall, and God knows how they got there. They bugged me, though I’d never noticed them before. It struck me that scuffmarks shouldn’t be the first thing people see when they walk into my house, even though nobody is walking into my house.

And under the scuffmarks, I noticed a line of paw prints. You don’t have to be a mystery writer to know how they got there. Little Tony, my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who thinks he’s Little Tony Soprano, protects me by resting his dirty mitts on the wall and barking at the window. And whenever I leave the house, Peach, my other Cavalier, body-slams the door.

Plus I detected a generalized griminess around the baseboards that I couldn’t ignore. That would be from Ruby The Crazy Corgi, who rolls against the wall like a hotdog on a rotisserie.

I should have been picking up the nice thick book I’d wanted to read. It was going to be my reward for the nice thick book I’d just written.

That, and lots of carbohydrates.

But no, instead I went to the kitchen cabinet and grabbed the spray Fantastik and a roll of paper towels. I got busy cleaning the entrance hall and the baseboards, to no avail. The scuffmarks still looked grimy and dirty, and now, wet.

I realized that the entrance hall hadn’t been painted in five years.

An hour later, I had a new plastic drop cloth on the floor, a girl-size roller dripping with fresh latex, and a slim paintbrush for getting in the corners. I started painting the entrance hall and blasted music on the iPod. I sang while I worked, and the dogs watched, all of us happy. I was happy because painting is more fun than cleaning, and the dogs were happy because they had a whole new wall to mess up.

I finished painting the entrance hall, and it looked so great and smelled fresh and new.

But then I noticed more scuffmarks in the family room.

And there were still songs left on the iPod.

So I got busy in the family room, which was the same color, called Beethoven. Though it was Sinatra on the iPod.

A few hours later, I had finished painting the family room, or at least as far up each wall I could reach, making do-it-yourself wainscoting. Also I didn’t bother moving the pictures and painted around them, which saved a lot of time.

Still everything blended okay, and it all looked so terrific.

And since I had plenty of Tony Bennett left, I went on a scuffmark hunt upstairs, where there was more Beethoven. I found a ton of scuffmarks in the second floor hallway, and I painted it through most of the night and the next day, after the dogs had fallen asleep and the iPod had segued into old MC Hammer.

Yes, I was Too Legit To Quit.

And by the end of the weekend, I had a freshly painted house.

And I knew I was Type A.

The End.

Security Complex

By Lisa

Most of the time I think I’m in sync with the rest of the world. And then there’s the times when I’m not.

Security scanners.

I just watched the TV news, and everybody is outraged about the new body scanners and pat-downs as they go through airport security. I’m not criticizing those people, but I travel all the time and I don’t feel that way at all.

On the contrary.

Scan me. Search me. Bend me over. Stick your finger in my ear. Do anything you absolutely have to do.

I’ll get over it.

Here’s what I won’t get over:

Being dead.

Yes, I know, the body scanners are an invasion of privacy. Yes, I have gone through them at three airports so far. And yes, TSA guys have already seen my ten-year-old underwire and my saggy white Carter’s, not to mention my butt mole.

And you know what?

I lived.

They may not have. At least, they have indigestion or nightmares, and I feel for them.

In fact, I’d like to bring a little sunshine into the life of those TSA types. All they get to do is look at driver’s license photos all day long. Can you imagine how much that stinks, especially given how we all look on our driver’s licenses?

So here’s what I say: Check it out, TSA dude. Knock yourself out. If looking at my scanned body does it for you, you have bigger problems than terrorists.

I’ve also had the new and improved pat-down, and I’m a fan.

Er, I mean, I’m not opposed.

Was it intrusive? You bet. I’ve had dates that didn’t get as far, and they’d bought me dinner. I felt embarrassed, giggly, and silly. How could I not? Someone I hardly know got to second base with me, in Terminal A. But you know how long it lasted?

Three minutes.

I forget, how long are you dead for?

Oh. Right.

Now, I’m betting that most of the people bothered by the security scanning are women, at least they were on the news. It makes sense to me. We’re congenitally modest, and even if we’re not, we tend to worry about someone running their fingertips over our muffintops.

I feel the same way. This would be a good time to let you know that I sucked in my stomach during my pat-down. I wanted my TSA date to think I was thin, even though she was a girl.

Old habits die hard.

The women on the TV news said that the pat-downs had no “dignity,” but here’s what I have to say to my sisters:

Remember when you gave birth? Remember when you were in labor? Remember when you were in the hospital gown, with your legs in the air? Plus you were fifty pounds heavier and retaining more water than most swimming pools?

You sweated, you cursed, you pushed, and you know what else happened. I know I wasn’t the only new mom who left a present on the delivery table.

If you don’t know what I mean, you’re lucky. If you haven’t yet given birth, you’ll understand when you do. Recall that I warned you.