She wanted to say Quit your job today, Step. Get back on the bicycle. Join a health club. Get away from the candy machine.
If only we hadn't moved to Steuben.
It had felt like the right thing to do at the time. Even though she was already pregnant before Step even thought of applying for jobs, it felt right. Almost inevitable. We just have wandering feet, she supposed. We can't stay rooted anywhere for long. Pioneer spirit. It was built into Mormon culture, to be ready to pick up and move to a new land every couple of years. And maybe there was some genetic component to it. People who were born to be nomads.
Then she thought of chopping down trees and building log cabins and sweeping a dirt floor and cooking at a hearthfire and never being able to bathe and having to use an outdoor latrine and giving birth alone in the dark, squatting over the straw, and she decided that she had no desire to be a pioneer. Wanderlust was fine, as long as you could wander from one place with flush toilets, electricity, and a good local hospital to another.
She headed for the kitchen to fix herself a bowl of raisin bran, but when she had the fridge open, getting out the milk, it occurred to her that it was awfully dark. Most mornings the sunlight streamed into the east-facing kitchen window.
The plastic gallon jug of milk in hand, she turned around and glanced toward the window to see what the weather was. Weather had nothing to do with the darkness of the room. Most of the gap between the window and the screen, up to about six inches from the top, was filled with June bugs, their translucent bodies glowing a ruddy brown as the bright sunlight tried to get through into the room.
It was so startling, so repulsive, all those bugs tumbled onto each other, that DeAnne screamed. Then she felt something cold spatter on her legs, and she screamed again. Only then did she realize that she had dropped the milk jug and the cap had burst off, spattering milk everywhere. Now it was lying on its side, gur gling out the remaining milk. She squatted down as quickly as she could to pick it up before it all poured out, but she moved so slowly that before she could get it the flow had reduced to a trickle. About a third of the milk remained inside, but most of the nearly full jug was all over the floor.
I can't deal with this, she thought. This horrible house. The bugs in this place, the milk all over the floor, the cupboard that still smells like coffee after all these months, I hate this place.
She struggled to her feet and used paper towels to wipe the milk off her legs and her bare feet, and then she went back to the linen closet in the hall and got out the old towels, which she then dropped onto the milk to soak it up. Then she laboriously squatted again to pick them up, dripping with milk. "Damn, damn, damn," she said.
"And good morning to you," said Step. He stood in the kitchen doorway.
"I dropped the milk," said DeAnne.
"What a relief. I thought maybe you had poured it out. The world's largest bowl of Grape-Nuts Flakes."
"I was going to have raisin bran this morning."
"Well that explains everything."
She hated it that he was joking when she felt so awful, but then he helped her stand up again, saying, "You shouldn't be doing that, Fish Lady" and she was able to sit down by the table and watch as he picked up the towels and rushed them into the laundry room. While he was gone, she dared to look back at the window, hoping that she had exaggerated the quantity of June bugs. She hadn't.
Step came back, heading for the paper towels to finish wiping up the milk, when he finally noticed the window.
"Oh," he said. "Now I know what you meant by damn damn damn."
"Damn damn damn was for the milk and being pregnant," said DeAnne. "For the bugs in the window I screamed, only you must have been in the shower so you didn't hear me."
"Too bad, it must have been a doozie." Step leaned over the sink to look closely at the bugs. "How did they get in there?"
"I don't know," said DeAnne. "Maybe some bug entrepreneur sold tickets." He laughed, and she laughed too, though it wasn't that funny.
"They're all dead," said Step. "Not one of them even twitching. Weird, isn't it? Like all the June bugs who knew their number was up came here last night to die."
"So we have the world's largest bug collection, only it's all one species."
"Well," said Step, "good thing we woke up early today. This roll of paper towels is nearly out, do we have any more?"
"Yes, but we still ha ve to speak with Stevie," said DeAnne. "I want it to be when you're still here. I can mop the floor later."
"It'll only take me a minute to finish wiping it up," said Step.
"You can't just mop up milk," said DeAnne. "I have to scrub the floor."
"Pregnant?"
"I've done it before, you know," she said. "That's what Bendectin is for. To allow pregnant women to keep scrubbing floors while their men watch mud-wrestling on ESPN."
He looked at her, his eyes narrowed in a mockery of a glare. "Feminist bitch," he said.
She pretended to glare back. "Male chauvinist pig."
"Let me guess," he said, looking at the window again. "You don't want these guys to be up here all day."
"It's more important to talk to Stevie."
"He's not in here yet." Step went to the laundry room and got out a green plastic garbage bag. "This time it's your turn to hold the bag," he said.
"Oh, Step," she said, shuddering.
"It's either that or you climb up on the counter to open the window."
"Can't you do it outside?" asked DeAnne. It made her sick to think of those bugs inside her kitchen.
"I don't have a ladder," he said, "and I don't want to fuss with unscrewing the whole screen when I can just slide this window up. It's not like I have time for a half- hour job this morning."
"I can call Bappy," said DeAnne.
"And have him spray again?" asked Step. "I can do it, and I don't like Bappy doing jobs that I can do. That we can do, if you'll just help me."
She was already up. Step had anchored the bottom corners of the bag on the windowsill using the big red salt and pepper shakers from beside the stove. "Don't use those," she said. "If they get bugs all over them I could never stand to use them again."
"Well, unless you have four hands, Fish Lady, we've got to anchor them with something."
She squatted awkwardly to reach inside the cupboard under the sink and came up with two large wrapped bars of hand soap.
"Excellent work, my beloved assistant," he said. "That's what I keep you around for, your extraordinary resourcefulness."
Now, with the bottom corners anchored, DeAnne held the bag open against the window as Step slowly opened it. The bug bodies rattled out of the bottom of the window, tumbling into the bag like popcorn. The sound of it, the vibration of the bag, knowing what was falling into it, it was all too much for DeAnne. A
bug- loathing instinct far deeper and more powerful than her common sense took over, and for a moment she lost control. She moaned, her body was racked with a huge, irresistible shudder, and she let go of the bag.
At once the top of the bag dropped down below the opening in the window and the bugs started spilling out on top of the bag instead of inside it. "Shit!" said Step. "Can't you-"