I saw my
first cockroach in a New York City apartment when I was 19. Having grown up in
the country and the suburbs, I was acquainted with insects: a praying mantis,
aka “walking stick,” in the schoolyard when I was 10 (so big, and so oddly
human-like); crickets everywhere, with their nighttime trills; fireflies, who
we chased and collected in glass jars and mysteriously were gone the next
morning, even though we’d screwed on the top. Ants, mosquitos, ordinary flies,
deer flies at college.
The
cockroach in my kitchen was ugly. And its reputation was ugly as well. I only
knew about them from books, where they were stand-ins for poverty, filth,
nastiness. “Is that a cockroach?” I asked my roommates, though they were
suburban kids themselves, how would they know? But they knew. In my first
apartment a few years later with Jack, we’d leave glasses with the dregs of Coca-Cola
or gin and tonic in the living room; in the morning, there would be a jumble of
dead roaches who’d gone for the sugar.
One day
Jack was home and decided to exterminate the buggers. He called me at work in
the middle of the task; “Call in the air force,” he said. He’d taken the books
out of the bookcase between living room and kitchen and disturbed a nation of
roaches, who fled in many directions. We didn’t know that cockroaches liked
paper.
I visited a
friend one evening after work. As we sat in the kitchen, roaches ran up and
down the wall just inches from my head. I pretended I didn’t see them, and my
friend pretended she didn’t notice me pretending not to see them.
One day in
another apartment, I was reading a book while lying on the bed. Feeling a
prickly feeling on my thigh, I looked down and was horrified to see a cockroach
crawling along my leg. I brushed it away, but couldn’t help the creepy sense
that the roach thought I was a dead thing.
Cockroaches
are really, really ancient. They’ve been on Earth for 320 million years, while
Homo erectus appeared around two million years ago. We’re the newcomers to this
planet. But we still try to eradicate them. Sprays, traps, folk remedies, we’ll
try anything. It took quite a while for us to try the cleanliness route, making
sure we washed the dishes every night and wiped off the counters. In our
current apartment, Jack would wake up in the middle of the night and go to the
kitchen to get water. Turning on the light caused the brown creatures to run for
the walls, where they slipped through invisible-to-humans openings.
One evening
I noticed a large bug (cockroach? waterbug?) meander toward the couch I was on.
I dropped a heavy book on it, smashed it dead. But I couldn’t get rid of it. It
seemed almost a tiny animal. I called Jack to take it away. We had a succession
of cats, but only played with cockroaches, didn’t eat them. Perhaps they had a
bad taste.
Did we get
cleaner or neater? Or did our building staff do a better job at extermination?
For many years now, cockroach sightings have become rare. Mostly when there is
work being done on nearby apartments, anything that disturbs the natural
ecology of the building. I did see a cockroach crawl out of a hole atop the
bathtub where grout had come loose; it was easy to make sure its family stayed
inside the wall.
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This year there is
another essay a week challenge, 52EssaysNextWave. If you’d like to try it, go
to the Facebook page for 52EssaysNextWave and sign up. Or just read some of the
essays that will be linked to there.
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