How are we to explain the fact that what repels us most can be at times—at the same time—inordinately attractive? Why is the cobra poised to strike so beautiful? The fascination of the abomination is something that. . . . Something which we would rather not account for. The subject borders on the obscene, and there is no need to deal with it here, except to note the breathless wonder with which Marcia observed these first roaches of hers. Her chair was drawn so close to the sink that she could see the mottling of their oval, unsegmented bodies, the quick scuttering of their thin legs, and the quicker flutter of their antennae. They moved randomly, proceeding nowhere, centered nowhere. They seemed greatly disturbed over nothing. Perhaps, Marcia thought, my presence has a morbid effect on them?
Only then did she become aware, aware fully, that these were the cockroaches of which she had been warned. Repulsion took hold; her flesh curdled on her bones. She screamed and fell back in her chair, almost upsetting a shelf of odd-lots. Simultaneously the roaches disappeared over the edge of the sink and into the drain.
Mr. Silversmith, coming downstairs to inquire the source of Marcia’s alarm, found her supine and unconscious. He sprinkled her face with tap water, and she awoke with a shudder of nausea. She refused to explain why she had screamed and insisted that she must leave Mr. Silversmith’s employ immediately. He, supposing that the pimply stock-boy (who was his son) had made a pass at Marcia, paid her for the three days she had worked and let her go without regrets. From that moment on, cockroaches were to be a regular feature of Marcia’s existence.
On Thompson Street Marcia was able to reach a sort of stalemate with the cockroaches. She settled into a comfortable routine of pastes and powders, scrubbing and waxing, prevention (she never had even a cup of coffee without washing and drying cup and coffeepot immediately afterward) and ruthless extermination. The only roaches who trespassed upon her two cozy rooms came up from the apartment below, and they did not stay long, you may be sure. Marcia would have complained to the landlady, except that it was the landlady’s apartment and her roaches. She had been inside, for a glass of wine on Christmas eve, and she had to admit that it wasn’t exceptionally dirty. It was, in fact, more than commonly clean—but that was not enough in New York. If everyone, Marcia thought, took as much care as I, there would soon be no cockroaches in New York City.
Then (it was March and Marcia was halfway through her sixth year in the city) the Shchapalovs moved in next door. There were three of them—two men and a woman— and they were old, though exactly how old it was hard to say: they had been aged by more than time. Perhaps they weren’t more than forty. The woman, for instance, though she still had brown hair, had a face wrinkly as a prune and was missing several teeth. She would stop Marcia in the hallway or on the street, grabbing hold of her coatsleeve, and talk to her—always a simple lament about the weather, which was too hot or too cold or too wet or too dry. Marcia never knew half of what the old woman was saying, she mumbled so. Then she’d totter off to the grocery with her bagful of empties.
The Shchapalovs, you see, drank. Marcia, who had a rather exaggerated idea of the cost of alcohol (the cheapest thing she could imagine was vodka), wondered where they got the money for all the drinking they did. She knew they didn’t work, for on days when Marcia was home with the flu she could hear the three Shchapalovs through the thin wall between their kitchen and hers screaming at each other to exercise their adrenal glands. They’re on welfare, Marcia decided. Or perhaps the man with only one eye was a veteran on pension.
She didn’t so much mind the noise of their arguments (she was seldom home in the afternoon), but she couldn’t stand their singing. Early in the evening they’d start in, singing along with the radio stations. Everything they listened to sounded like Guy Lombardo. Later, about eight o’clock, they sang a cappella. Strange, soulless noises rose and fell like Civil Defense sirens; there were bellowings, bayings, and cries. Marcia had heard something like it once on a Folkways record of Czechoslovakian wedding chants. She was quite beside herself whenever the awful noise started up and had to leave the house till they were done. A complaint would do no good: the Shchapalovs had a right to sing at that hour.
Besides, one of the men was said to be related by marriage to the landlady. That’s how they got the apartment, which had been used as a storage space until they’d moved in. Marcia couldn’t understand how the three of them could fit into such a little space—just a room-and-a-half with a narrow window opening onto the air shaft. (Marcia had discovered that she could see their entire living space through a hole that had been broken through the wall when the plumbers had installed a sink for the Shchapalovs.)
But if their singing distressed her, what was she to do about the roaches? The Shchapalov woman, who was the sister of one man and married to the other—or else the men were brothers and she was the wife of one of them (sometimes, it seemed to Marcia, from the words that came through the walls, that she was married to neither of them— or to both), was a bad housekeeper, and the Shchapalov apartment was soon swarming with roaches. Since Marcia’s sink and the Shchapalovs’ were fed by the same pipes and emptied into a common drain, a steady overflow of roaches was disgorged into Marcia’s immaculate kitchen. She could spray and lay out more poisoned potatoes; she could scrub and dust and stuff Kleenex tissues into holes where the pipes passed through the walclass="underline" it was all to no avail. The Shchapalov roaches could always lay another million eggs in the garbage bags rotting beneath the Shchapalov sink. In a few days they would be swarming through the pipes and cracks and into Marcia’s cupboards. She would lie in bed and watch them (this was possible because Marcia kept a night-light burning in each room) advancing across the floor and up the walls, trailing the Shchapalovs’ filth and disease everywhere they went.
One such evening the roaches were especially bad, and Marcia was trying to muster the resolution to get out of her warm bed and attack them with Roach-It. She had left the windows open from the conviction that cockroaches do not like the cold, but she found that she liked it much less. When she swallowed, it hurt, and she knew she was coming down with a cold. And all because of them!
“Oh go away!” she begged. “Go away! Go away! Get out of my apartment.”
She addressed the roaches with the same desperate intensity with which she sometimes (though not often in recent years) addressed prayers to the Almighty. Once she had prayed all night long to get rid of her acne, but in the morning it was worse than ever. People in intolerable circumstances will pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray to the bombs that they may land somewhere else.
The only strange thing in Marcia’s case is that her prayers were answered. The cockroaches fled from her apartment as quickly as their little legs could carry them— and in straight lines, too. Had they heard her? Had they understood?