The Pest
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I did not want to admit anything when the dishwashing sponge began to disintegrate, because sponges fritter away so easily, catching on the prongs of dinner forks. When the pears in the fruit bowl became pockmarked, I wanted to blame my children, always so fickle about food.
When we found teeth marks in the avocado -- clear chomps through the peel to the soft fruit within -- my husband named what I did not want to say aloud.
Because I had already seen the rat. The charcoal colored rodent was too large to be a mouse, too rotund to be a squirrel. He appeared in the spring, just after the quarantine orders began following surging cases of COVID-19. He hobbled across the front lawn of the boarding school where we live in faculty housing. He descended unhurriedly into a sewage drain. I watched and knew unequivocally that I would see that rat again.
After the avocado evidence in our kitchen, we alerted the facilities management of the boarding school. I was so ashamed--we had only lived on campus a couple of years, and the prior resident of our faculty home had lived to 100 years until he expired in that same house. I was sure he had never had a rat problem. The facilities folks tried to comfort me. The restaurants are all closed, they shrugged. Where else can rats go but into our homes?
Traps were set. Holes were patched. The rat still visited every night.
My son and I decided to stay up late to see if we could detect from where the rat was emerging in the kitchen. With all but one light off, we watched from our perch on the living room sofa. Within minutes we saw the rat slink from behind the radiator and begin his evening rotation, flirting with the peanut butter in a trap, nosing around for other crumbs, and gamely hopping up on surfaces I never wanted to touch again. I began to imagine my son telling his college roommate about the house he had once lived in, describing this very night when he and his mom waited up for a rat.
I couldn’t go into the kitchen that night. I felt stranded on the sofa, until I eventually made a beeline for the bathroom, but then I marooned myself on the toilet for 15 minutes after convincing myself that a radiator pipe was indeed the rat lying in wait for me.
We hid every particle of food we could manage but still we saw droppings. Facilities planted poison box traps outside of our house and one evening I saw a deranged squirrel pirouetting outside of the box.
The next morning, my husband said, “I put some compost on your box garden. And I saved you a surprise.”
I assumed a tomato had finally ripened in the raised bed.
Instead I found a dead baby rat face down next to the green pepper plant. All these months, my home had been a rat’s playground, but now the place that I had been tilling life had become a coffin.
It was time for a burial.
I thought how I might talk to one of my students if they were having this same pestilence in their apartment. I began to speak gently to myself, reminding myself that this was a terrible thing, but this was not a reflection of myself as a terrible person.
A terrible person would not have buried the baby rat, after all.
When did we see the last of the rats? I cannot say. The intrusion came at a time when we all felt significantly more vulnerable than usual.
I have heard and read accounts of people who were careful, so careful, but still contracted COVID-19. Something about their stories, the soft lament in their voices, the hands-up surrender of their tone--it was so familiar. The virus, like the rats, practically knocked at our front doors. Our defenses were up, but not strong enough.
After the rats, I understand hypervigilance and how it exhausts a system. I know what it means to bring in the big guns because every other lockstop has failed. I know how it feels to believe myself a bad steward of property, and for the helpers to remind me that it could have happened to any of us. It was all just a terrible time to have a terrible time.
