THEM!
A Story in Five Parts
Gwen Cooper
BenBella Books, Inc.
Dallas, TX
Copyright © 2018 by Gwen Cooper
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
BenBella Books, Inc.
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e-ISBN: 9781948836036
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THEM!
A Story in Five Parts
1. The Bowl Boy
Laurence and I uncovered an infestation of moths in our closets and drawers a few weeks ago. It was the kind of thing I thought only happened to people in sitcoms and movies—having never personally known anyone with a moth-ridden house in real life. Turns out, it does happen in real life. When I first started finding holes in the cashmere sweaters I was prepping for summer storage, I blamed the cats—Fanny, in particular, who dearly loves sleeping on articles of my clothing, especially when that clothing is made of cashmere or angora (Fanny having very posh tastes). I’ve occasionally observed her remorselessly “making biscuits” on said clothing—her claws at full extension—preparatory to lying down. It seemed like a plausible theory.
But when I then found identical holes in T-shirts, sweatshirts, silk blouses, pajamas, socks, workout togs, and all manner of other clothing that neither Fanny nor Clayton had access to, I began to doubt the cats’ guilt. And when I finally noticed two teeny-tiny moths, perched upside down on the bedroom ceiling above my head, I knew I’d found my culprits.
Tearfully, I consigned a large pile of expensive cashmere sweaters—accumulated over some fifteen years—to the trash, the holes in them so numerous that no amount of clever crocheting could have salvaged them. I walked from the bedroom closet to Laurence’s home office, right next door to our bedroom, cradling in my arms the moth-eaten corpse of a much-beloved cranberry cowl-neck as tenderly as if it were the bullet-riddled body of a comrade fallen in battle. Throwing it across the desk where Laurence was working, I informed him of the moth-y new development in our lives. “We must kill them,” I announced. My voice quavered with the intensity of my desire for vengeance, and I struck my fist on Laurence’s desk for dramatic emphasis. “We must kill them with fire!”
The only ones who seemed pleased at this turn of events were the cats. My manic tear through our closets and drawers, after I’d discovered the first moth holes, had sent airborne perhaps another half-dozen moths who’d been disturbed from the cool, dark comfort of their hiding places. Small as they were, their frantic, looping cartwheels in the air around us made the catching of them a delightfully tantalizing prospect for Fanny and Clayton.
Poor, stocky Clayton, who has only one hind leg, is a mediocre jumper at best, and most of the moths evaded him easily enough. But his littermate, Fanny—slender and leanly muscled—is our resident jock. Able to leap from a starting point on the ground to the height of my hairline, with as much dazzling speed as if she were a black-furred bolt of lightning, Fanny was in her element as she made short work of one moth after another.
It’s possible that Fanny is the actual sweetest cat in the world—a devoted lover who coos and cuddles and looks at me with her whole heart in her round, golden eyes—but she is, conversely, also the most murderous cat I’ve ever lived with. If Fanny has a bucket list, that list consists of only one item: to kill something worth killing before she shuffles off this mortal coil. Every spring, when the sparrows who nest in the eaves of our Jersey City brownstone push their fledglings down into the little patch of grass in front of our bay window, I have to lock Fanny in the upstairs bedroom for a couple of days, legitimately afraid that she might crack her skull from striking it repeatedly against the bay window’s panes, so desperate is she to dispatch those temptingly plump and flightless baby birds as they hop around helplessly on the other side of the glass.
As a strictly indoor cat, Fanny never gets a chance at the birds or squirrels who seem to take a certain delight in taunting her from safe perches just outside our windows. And since I’ve never seen a rat or a mouse in any home I’ve shared with my cats—not even when we lived in Manhattan, dubbed “Worst Rat City in the World” in 2014 by Animal Planet (presumably the rodents catch our home’s cat smell and clear a wide berth)—Fanny is forced to expend her bloodlust on toy mice and whatever live insects manage to make their way indoors. The moths, therefore, were a bonanza for her.
They were, however, anything but a bonanza for me. I hadn’t been kidding when I’d proclaimed, “We must kill them with fire!” A cursory check of Google revealed stories of people who’d been fighting moth infestations for years. I quickly outlined for Laurence what seemed to me an entirely rational plan of attack, involving roughly a metric ton of kerosene and a single lit match.
Cooler heads eventually prevailed, however. We ultimately embarked on a far more sensible course of action, purchasing dozens of boxes of mothballs, plastic zip-up storage bags, cedar hangers, two cans of repellant cedar spray, and another two cans of a pet-safe insecticide. We backed these up by emptying every single item out of every single closet and drawer and either putting them through three entire laundry cycles or, in the case of delicate fabrics, sending them out to the dry cleaner. Once everything had been cleaned, I then completed a thorough visual exam, sitting beneath a strong lamp with a magnifying glass in my hand as I pored over sweaters and wool dresses like a Talmudic scholar, searching for any telltale signs of moth larvae.
Having undertaken such an early and unexpectedly aggressive round of spring cleaning, Laurence and I decided we might as well give the entire house a thorough scrubbing from top to bottom and, in the process, dispose of all the superfluous stuff we’d accumulated over the years. Since we were, thanks to the lepidopteran pestilence visited upon us, getting rid of so many things we actually cared about, what was the point in hanging onto things we were indifferent to?
And here’s where an old and familiar series of arguments began: Is it technically fair to call something “unused” if we never use it ourselves, but the cats use it all the time in some way other than its original intended purpose?
“You made me go out and buy that special cast-iron frying pan so you could make us omelets,” I said to Laurence, “and we’ve still never had a single omelet in this house. The pan’s been gathering dust on top of the kitchen cabinet for three years now.”
“You really think we should get rid of it?” Laurence gestured across the room to indicate Fanny who, as if on cue, made a nimble leap from kitchen counter to cabinet top, then stepped neatly into the middle of the frying pan in question. “Someone might object.”
It’s true. Fanny has a fondness for high places—probably because the higher up she is, the less likely that Clayton will be able to pester her—and that frying pan had become her favorite kitchen napping spot. And I’ll confess that, once I noticed how much she loved curling up there, I’d lined the pan with an old T-shirt, hating the thought of Fanny trying to make herself comfortable in a “bed” of cold, hard metal.