Susan Senator

Wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

–Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”

I was sitting at the dining room table thinking what to write when off in the pantry I heard a rustling noise. I froze. Then I unfroze and stood up and walked over to the kitchen. Rustle, rustle, again. I leaned in, heart beating in my throat.

It was coming from the picnic basket on my counter. The one that has little furled up bags of cookies, chips, and some candy. The one that has the little bag of chocolate-covered peanuts with a small hole chewed through the bottom, that I found a few days before. When I discovered that chewed-up bag of candy, I looked at it and thought, “Hmmm, looks like the work of a mouse. I’ll just throw it away, problem solved.”

Ah, the powers of denial. De Nile is just a river in Egypt, it turns out! And I’m the Queen of Egypt, too!

Problem not solved. Rustle, rustle. My mood of fear flipped right over into anger. Why do we have animal problems in this house? Am I such a bad housekeeper? Is our house falling apart? I took out my frustration on the poor — thing. I yelled, “I hear you! I know you’re in there! How dare you?” Or something pathetic like that.

The rustling stopped (of course). Now I had a chewed up basket of snax and a scared critter on my hands. Well, on my counter, anyway. I called Terminex for a home termite inspection, because we have a pest account as well as a termite account with them.

It was the main number. “That’s okay,” the guy said, “We can help you, anyway!”
So helpful was he. I told him my problem and he listened, clucking sympathetically.
“Do you think it’s just a mouse?” I asked, waiting to be petted and soothed.
“Oh, there’s no way of knowing,” he said, and I swallowed hard. “We can send someone out right away,” he cooed. I gave him my address gratefully and hung up.

Then I thought, “That was too easy.” I looked at the basket, which sat inocuously on the counter, as quiet as a — mouse. I dug around my phone numbers and called the local office. A woman answered. I told her about what the other Terminex guy said, about sending someone out here.

She laughed. “Oh, he can’t do that!” she scoffed.
“Well, can you send someone out right away? It’s kind of urgent.”
“Umm, not today. How about tomorrow, between 12 and 2?”
“Okay. Do you think it’s something other than a mouse?” I couldn’t help but ask in my little girl voice.
“No. It’s mouse season.”
“What can I do about this?”
“Just throw the basket away.”
“How?”
“Put it in the trash.”
Oh.

Next I called Ned. I told him about the thing. A lot of silence on his end. The unasked question loomed: Will you come home and take care of this?
And his unasked question hovered nearby: Do you really need me to do that?
I was so mad at him that I hung up.

Okay, Princess, I thought. Get to work. I did not have any gloves. I slipped ziploc baggies on my hands and took out a big garbage bag. I gingerly pushed the basket into the bag, praying nothing would spring out at me and give me rabies. I tied up the bag and ran outside and tossed it in the trashcan. Scrub, scrub, scrubbed my hands. Even though they had touched nothing. You never know.

Today the Terminex guy showed up right on time but a day late. Never mind. I let him in, so happy to see him, and directed him to the empty counter. He looked underneath and in all the bait traps. “No, no action,” he said. He puttered around a little in the basement, looking even in the Silence of the Lambs room (this is what Ned and I call the old basement pantry, a tiny horrible room with gorgeous old brown floor-to-ceiling woodwork matted with cobwebs, one bare lightbulb, rotten wook underfoot, and corners that have never seen the light of day in all 120 years of this house’s life. “Nothing,” he said, coming back upstairs.

“So, what was it?” I asked. “Do you think it was a rat?” My biggest fear: rat or bat.
He looked at me with something I can only describe as pity. “No, you’d know if it was a rat.”
“How?” I couldn’t resist asking. Call it the journalist in me, or call it the scared little girl begging to hear more of the scary story.
“Because they’re big,” he said.
“So what do you think it was?” I asked again.
He shrugged. “Don’t know. You should have looked.”