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[ CONTESTANT #2 ] THANKSGIVING RAT FUDGE
After my expensive divorce I had a choice: Move to a cute little house in a questionable neighborhood or share a homely apartment in a nice area. I chose the cute little house, a frilly Victorian cottage just big enough for my 2-year-old son, our large dog and me. Though it was one of only two lonely houses huddled on an otherwise commercial thoroughfare, it had just been restored and renovated, and it was painted in soothing, tasteful colors. I needed soothing in my life, and I thought the friendly young landlord was a bonus. But a flare should have gone off in my head when he came by the week after I'd moved in and asked nonchalantly if I'd had any problems: "plumbing, heat, disposal ... rodents?" "No!" I chirped. I loved the house! I loved my mauve bedroom with its Calla lilies growing outside the window. And my little boy could ride his trike on the tiny front porch and the dog could gambol like a colt in the yard. I was perfectly content in my architecturally pleasing fool's paradise. We had lived in the house for about a month when I made a batch of fudge for Thanksgiving and left it out on the kitchen counter to cool overnight. In the morning it had little scratch marks all over the top, as if someone had scraped the surface with the tines of a fork. I knew it wasn't the dog, since she would have eaten the whole thing if given the chance. My son was still asleep in his bed, and he was too little to use forks anyway. I decided it was just my imagination. But rainy season started within a few days and I started hearing scratching noises in the walls. At night I lay in bed horrified: The rats were fighting in my walls. I thought they were mice until I was making breakfast one morning and a fat gray rat with oily fur and a tail that felt like chain mail skittered out of the oven and over my feet before it leapt into the pantry, clambered up over the cereal boxes and disappeared into the ceiling. For the next six months it was war. Though my "nice" landlord cooperatively hired an exterminator, who showed up in white coveralls every three days and emerged from the crawl space under the house carrying a garbage bag heavy with bodies, the rats were winning. They would peep out at us from the heater vent in the dining room while we were eating dinner, and I once found a rat greedily filling its cheeks with kibble from the dog's bowl while my huge but mild-mannered dog lay sighing in defeat nearby. They ran across my bed at night, tumbling off the edge of the comforter and wrestling with their friends on the carpet by my shoes. The last straw was when I discovered to my horror that they'd been living
in the gingerbread house I'd made for my son that Christmas, which we
kept on a shelf in his bedroom. The thought of the rats in the room with my
sleeping baby made me sick, and I gave up and moved out. For months
afterward I had nightmares about being trapped in a playroom with
endlessly multiplying rats -- but my brain was so traumatized by the memory
of the real rats that it cushioned the blow by making my dream rats into
fluffy calico guinea pigs.
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