Salon.com > Laura Bogart

I’m terrified of the cicada onslaught

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:45:00 +0000

I hadn’t begun to worry about the locusts until the end of winter. Sure, I had a peripheral awareness that a brood of cicadas was expected to swallow up the Northeast come summer. And I knew that, as an avowed insectophobe, I’d be in trouble when they came. (I once asked a cable guy to stop installing my high-speed Internet and please, please, please kill the spider that had crawled into my closet). But winter was so bone-splintering cold that the threat of summer and all its beasties seemed like a dimly remembered dream.

The locusts became real to me one evening as a friend and I walked my dog Tova, our boots treading on the hard-frosted ground. She asks me how I’ll keep Tova from eating them.

“They’re canine delicacies,” she says with a laugh, driving her heel into the grass to make the crunch-crunch-crunch of snapped shells, teeth clicking shut. She describes a Biblical plague: Cicadas clustering on light poles and canopies; flying dumbly into car windshields, into people’s open mouths. They are prehistoric monsters muscling their way through the earth: fat-bellied locusts with hot coals for eyes.

My best relationship is with my dog

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 14:00:00 +0000

The bag of ashes is no bigger than a dimebag, but dense with the gray remains of what had been a beloved dog. The woman beside me murmurs his name—Poochie—when she takes the bag from a vet tech who can only say that he’s sorry. I instantly wish I hadn’t heard the name, as if the mere mention of poor doomed Poochie will jinx my Tova, my German shepherd. She’s flattened all 80 pounds of herself against my legs, smacking her mouth and whimpering.

We are here because Tova began pacing my apartment, her tongue shooting out of her snout; she worked her jaws and licked the air. The vet tech who answered the phone, the same one who hands Poochie’s owner a leash and collar with a heart-shaped tag, told me to bring her in right away: “It could be gastric torsion.” Gastric torsion: The belly, swollen with gas, crushes the diaphragm, pinches blood from the heart. It could kill my sweet girl—the one who finally wakes me with head-butts and nuzzling after the alarm has gone off; the one who dances when my key turns in the door—within an hour.

Curse of my birthing hips

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I first heard that I had childbearing hips before I even got my first period. One of my middle school classmates — a beauty with a coltish build — assessed my dumpy, dough-pale body in the locker room, and declared, without malice, that I had what her grandmother called “birthin’ hips.”

At 13, I had no idea what my thick hips had to do with birth, but I was terrified by the prospect of having to care for (another) someone else. I was the loud one who drew my father’s ire — and his fists — away from my brother. I was my mother’s “little hero”: the one who powdered her black eyes and told her she was still pretty, the one who swallowed her secrets so she could shimmer in the eyes of her fellow PTA members. She taught me to draw and to drive, to bake lasagna that would make men lick their plates and to fill up with Crystal Light and water so I wouldn’t be too hungry, wouldn’t eat too much of my own food.

She’d been, in her words, “flat as a board” until plumping up while carrying me; then, she said, she “looked like a spark plug.” Her body was as soft as her will; she yielded to buttered biscuits and apologies whispered in the dark. When I was a teenager, both of our bodies embarrassed me equally. I remember the sight of us in one fitting room mirror: Her hips, narrow; her belly puckered by a Caesarean scar. My hips mocked hers with their abundance.

So much for “family values”

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

My father asks me what four times four is, and all I can think is “eight,” though I know that’s wrong; whether it’s better — safer — to be wrong or to say, “I don’t know,” depends upon his mood. The way my mother smiles at me as she clears my plate is of no help, there’s no telltale tightness in her eyes. He drums the flashcard against the tabletop and sighs. My fingers worry the edges of the iron-on patches — a rabbit and a duck — that Mom has fixed to my corduroy jumper. I gamble on “eight,” but a yawn slips out instead. I haven’t even closed my mouth before he smacks it open again. He backhands me hard enough to blot out the world.

The family at the kitchen table is an indelible image, classic Americana. It sells pancakes and life insurance, and every four years, it peddles politicians. Each election cycle, the steely female narrators of campaign ads ask us to consider which candidate is best for American families, families that might’ve looked like mine until my father’s hand left me deaf and reeling for days.