The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (35 page)

We didn’t go back to the house for one week after the exterminator sprayed. September passed into October with the weather still unseasonably warm. The annuals, confused, kept going, putting out new blooms, petunias and nasturtiums growing in masses, overtaking boxes and beds. When we finally returned to the house it was the middle of October, apple season, the time when fruit drops to the ground and rots softly in the sun, the juices drawing everything from hornets to honeybees. Pulling into the driveway, I heard, as always, the satisfying crunch of tires on rubble. The first bats were just appearing; tiny mammalian creatures with webbed wings they swooped low and then hurled themselves high into the sky, their symphony octaves beyond what we could hear, the silence illusory, the air in fact teeming with sonar songs. Benjamin turned the motor off and we all just sat in the car for a few moments, the motor ticking as it cooled, the sky draining itself as the sun set in a crimson puddle.

As always, we had left one light on in the house, and as the day grew darker that light grew brighter, warmer, the window a single square lit amber in the night. Our house looked lovely then, the exterminator having come and gone, the corpses cleaned up, we could, it seemed then, manage this, the inside and the out, this cleansed house and sprawling track of land that, as city goers, we in fact knew nothing about.

That night we opened the home’s front door to the sound of complete silence. We slept in our sheets to the sound of complete silence. I awoke at dawn. I felt a finger of sunlight on my face and I heard, outside, what I believed was the soft step of a deer crossing our driveway to drink from our deep pond. Still lying in bed I looked first out the east facing window through which light was now gushing like liquid, so I turned—too much for my eyes—and instead lay on my back, head tilted up towards the skylight to catch some clouds. And that was when I saw. The skylight was blanketed by a moving mass of wasps, their wings erect or flat on their segmented backs, the whole crowd sizzling, a low sybaritic sound, almost alto, maybe mournful. I elbowed Ben. We lay there and watched our wasps, first just covering the skylight, and then, crawling out from between the cracks in our pitched and planked ceiling, crawling out high and low, left and right, the gaps jammed with writhing, the insects marching up and down, going every which way, wave after wave of wasp, the hissing growing louder as their numbers increased, none of them yet flying, although that would happen soon. We got up, left the room, making sure to shut the door—hard—on our way out. We collected our bed-headed kids and our snoozy pooches, and within five minutes we were packed up and, everyone in the car, we headed straight for the city.

Back in Somerville, Benjamin made phone calls, took notes. He spoke at length with the exterminator we’d hired and then called three others for consults. He called the contractor who had put up the cathedral ceiling and came away from that phone call singing. “He’ll wasp-proof the ceiling for free,” Benjamin announced, and then he flipped open his notebook and drew a deft diagram of how the new vaulted ceiling would, this time, suture shut any gaps from above. “And we don’t have to go with sheetrock,” Ben said. “We can wasp-proof the place using planks. It’s possible.”

I looked at his diagram but remained unconvinced, or confused, because I didn’t think it would work, because wood moves, first of all, and second of all because I’d been infected by fear and fear is not logical, and what I needed now was a way to keep the wasps out of both my home
and
my head, and he couldn’t do that, could he? What engineering solution would solve the problem of a hisss-ssss following me here and there, my senses on the alert, so I could smell more smells and taste more tastes and see more sights, everything all in bits, in dots, like a Pissarro painting, the world was made up of tiny blurs and edges. “Maybe we should sell the place,” I said. “We’re not farmers—”

“Maybe not you,” Ben said, cutting me off sharply, in a way that is unusual for him. “Maybe you’re not a farmer, Lauren, but I am, or will be, or …,” he said, “at least I want to be.”

That night in the shower, I felt a tiny lump on my chest, just to the side of my implant, a small saline-filled bag that took the place where my breast had been. The lump was familiar in my fingers in both its size and its consistency; it was hard, hard as a pinball, the kind of lump you can squeeze and roll between your thumb and first finger. The lump was painless, and yet its implications sent waves of pain and panic. The thought is not, “Oh my god, a recurrence.” In times of extreme stress, the mind, my mind, makes metaphors that are the handles on a cup too hot to otherwise hold. Hydrangea. I saw the lace-capped bloom, but before I could lock onto it, it dissolved into Pissarro points and went down some mental drain. I stood there, then, without anything for balance, the bar of soap slipped from my grip and foaming at my feet as the shower shot me, again and again. Steam rose around me and then I felt my body fade back, become tiny. I have always understood my flesh, myself, as a primary player on this planet, but in fact, I could now see, all our bodies are in some senses small; they are, we are, just the random vacant vessels for microbes and all other manner of minutiae with plans that, in all likelihood, not only diverge from ours but trump our intentions in almost every way. When I stepped from the shower I was swaddled in steam and needed to see myself in the mirror. I swiped the fog from the glass. Here I was, my body a host to billions of beings who simply could not care less.

We met with the contractor and picked out new planking, I, hearing everything through the hiss in my head. When I called the oncologist it was with that hiss in my head, so I had to keep saying, “Excuse me, could you repeat that?” so often I wondered if my ears were bound up by wax or otherwise infected with fluid. “She can’t see you until the eighth,” the receptionist kept saying, and I kept saying, “She doesn’t have anything sooner?” and she kept saying, “I’ve checked; she doesn’t,”
hssssssss
. In the meantime the planking we picked was cedar, for its aromatic oils and resistance to rot.

The eighth was a Thursday—five days away. Certain tumors are especially aggressive and can grow millimeters in a day, but most proceed along a far more measured path. Tumors can lie dormant in the rafters of your bones for years, only to suddenly take flight and allow sight, the malignancy spreading in accretions too tiny to count, all the way down where quarks and nanos live. Such is the terror of tininess, and our huge super-duper newly planked ceiling seemed to me a sad effort against inevitable seepage. Our bodies, by the way, are all seep, ancient seep, we being made of atoms that were once a part of the Milky Way’s stars, atoms as old as the big bang itself; picture it, if you can. Once the whole world was tinier than a teaspoon, the solar systems, the galaxies, all of it folded up into something so compact it was probably not visible. And then someone flicked a switch, or said,
Now
! and the dark, dense dot containing all the universe within it exploded across the sky with such force that it all continues to expand today, pushed outward by its own original velocity. Anyone can look up into the night sky and see the hugeness of streaming space, but how often do we reflect on the fact that everything around us, including the mind-boggling grandeur of the universe, is powered by atoms, and that atoms exist at a scale so small we cannot quite measure them? People wonder: Is there life in outer space? The stars wobble in response. Is it not just as logical to ask, “Is there life in inner space?” Who’s to say that there are not entire societies living out of our sight, in another dimension, or simply at a scale so small we fail to see them or to consider their plans?

In the meantime, the ceiling was being sealed with our aromatic “rot resistant” cedar, terms I knew were not absolute, because cedar does rot if you keep it wet for long enough; it’s all relative. The size of the lump in my chest was tiny compared to the one that had come back cancerous several years before, but then again large tumors are often pseudo tumors; it’s the small ones that aren’t playing around. They have to be tough if they’re to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of nanoville. It was like I could see that world, a series of swerving tunnels hanging in a mist in the air, everywhere. And then my daughter began to have nightmares, trapped in tunnels, or the great plates of the earth crunching together so beautiful mountains blew their tops and spurted golden magma. Her dreams at night echoed my vision during the day, although I never did I tell her I was stuck with seepage, living in quarkdom, worried about wasps overtaking the home we’d bought.

And no, never did I tell her, but daughters read their mother’s minds, the pair hitched by a hook, it’s clear. My daughter dreamt she fell down a pin-prick hole, her whole self sucked into something no bigger than the nose of a needle, she fell and fell, passing through layers of earth, the red hot embers of the center rushing up to meet her, and she screamed.

“It’s just a bad dream,” I said to her, stroking back her hair as she lay in bed. “Don’t be scared, there’s no need to be scared.”

And then, propping herself up with her elbow in bed, so I could see her hair cascading in the darkness, she said, “You’re scared. So why shouldn’t I be too?”

My daughter was eight, almost nine when she said that, young enough to lie to. “I’m not scared,” I said.

“You’re scared almost all the time,” my daughter said and then she lay back on her bed, staring up at the ceiling to which she’d affixed phosphorescent stars and the perfect crescent of a moon. During the day you couldn’t see them but once the light was out in the night they popped into perfect view.

“Sometimes,” I now said, staring at her little solar system overhead, “Sometimes I admit I get a little nervous, but that’s normal.”

“You’re scared of the wasps,” Clara said, and she was right. For five days the contractor had been out there, installing the new ceiling, and not once had I gone up to check on his progress. And prior to the wasps I’d always insisted we go to the “second home” every weekend, counting down the days until we could get there, my hands missing the ancient till and the pond’s cool water, but now I stopped insisting, and we passed our Saturdays and Sundays in the city, where I worked my small plot, pulling weeds and watering my hydrangeas, all of which were in beautiful bloom, some stippled red, others in fat clusters of sky blue. Even when the contractor called to tell us he’d finished our ceiling and the wasps were for the most part gone, their means of egress now nailed shut with rot-resistant cedar, the whole house smelling sweet, no, not even then did I want to go back.

In my life I have had more phobias then I have fingers to count them on. I might go so far as to call myself a professional phobic, except that I’ve made no money at the job, and it brings me no esteem. Nevertheless, when I start avoiding something, I know just what it is I have to do: its equal but opposite reaction, this cure as sure and steady as the physical law it imitates. If you are afraid of fried eggs nothing will cure you except frying and eating the egg, not even knowing the etiology of the egg fear will help you so don’t spend money dreaming on an analyst’s couch. Spend your bucks on a flat frying pan and Pam. As for my wasps, who wouldn’t be frightened? But my daughter was right; my fear was infectious, even as I felt it stiffen me, constrict me and what I was in the world. We had bought this country house to live in, not avoid. We planned to move there at the end of this school year, motivated by a desire to know the earth more intimately before it disappeared in clouds of carbon and waste. Were there wasps in my childhood? For sure, but who cares? I could not recall a single one. Were the wasps some sort of misplaced fear, their swarming like cells? Of course, but this nonrevelation brought me no bravery. Thursday I had my meeting with the oncologist, but Wednesday was free, and blue and bright, the kind of crisp October day that you wish you could preserve in a bottle.

I did what I knew I needed to do. I did it not out of bravery but superstition. If I was good enough to face what had become a full-blown fear of the house, then maybe my oncologist would palpate the little lump and say,
That? It’s just fat
, or some such thing.
Gristle
, or some such thing. So I went up to the house that Wednesday, in the morning, 10 a.m., the roads empty, me in my little car flying down the highway. It was such a pretty day. I rode with the windows down, so the speed had sound, like ripping silk, fields on either side of me, orange tractors pulsing in the strong sun.

I pulled into the driveway, the familiar crunch of its gravel, the apple tree surrounded by fallen fruit, bruised and brown and smelling sweet. The sky was always bluer here, in the country, and today not a single cloud in sight. Overhead hung a transparent daylight moon.

The front door, when I got to it, was open. The contractor had failed to lock it, I suppose, but there’s a difference between an unlocked door and an actual open one. There it was—the door—open, just like it might be in a storybook, a fairy tale, the little door open, the golden glow inside, the pull of the place,
go in now
; the necessary hesitation because what else might be in there, what with the open door and all.

By the side of the door hung a copper bell, the clapper going green from the elements. Now I reached up and rung the bell, the sound pure and pealing in the lovely mid-morning, I rang the bell three times,
one
,
two
,
three
, and when no one came to get me, I stepped over the threshold, one hand on my chest, where I often found it these days, pressing the little lump, feeling for its contours and intentions.

The contractor had left the home extremely clean. I could see that immediately. In fact the home was cleaner than we’d ever left it ourselves. The kitchen was shining, the stovetop a wet lacquered black, our old oak table covered with a sprightly red checked cloth. The stairs had been scrubbed down and the whole place smelled of sawdust and pine pitch and cedar.