the dim evening light the street and sidewalk looked black and oily.
“Hey, what color is your rat?” Michelle suddenly asked.
It struck me that she often asked questions I never thought to ask. I had assumed the rat was white and so I had been looking for a white one, but what if the neighbor’s rat was brown or black? I thought it odd that we hadn’t asked before.
“White,” the neighbor said.
“What’s its name?” Michelle asked.
“Whitey,” the neighbor said.
She was quite beautiful, despite decapitation, with bright black eyes and wide, friendly cheekbones.
“Whitey,” Michelle started calling. “Whitey, Whitey, Whitey.”
There was a certain kind of sadness in her voice; I could hear the sadness even though she was loud, which she could be in public; the sadness seemed to drift over the streets and vanish. We circled the building searching in all the interstitial spaces, tamping down the damp weeds and coarse grass beneath stairwells and between buildings with our shoes.
After searching for a long time Michelle threw from her pocket into the street a rock she had collected at her work site. “The rat’s dead,” she said too loudly. I saw the young woman pull her hood further over her face. I remember feeling embarrassed, and angry, not because Michelle was rude, necessarily, but because she felt so at ease saying what we all thought. I felt I had to resist her somehow.
“Rats are resilient,” I said. “They’ve lived in worse situations.”
Michelle clamped her hands over her ears as if she couldn’t bear my point of view, something I’d only seen her do a few times. “Dead dead dead,” she shouted, and stomped off back toward the apartment.
Before she reached the door, she turned around and looked for me. I remember thinking, for a moment, that I would go inside. But then I turned away. Maybe I was still angry, or maybe I felt sorry for the neighbor, or maybe I wanted to prove something to Michelle. But I stayed outside searching for the rat for another hour. Then I sat on our front steps in the dark with the beautiful neighbor in silence. I might have put my hand on the back of her neck.
When I finally went inside the apartment, Michelle was not in the kitchen or in our bedroom or living room.
Then I heard a sound in the bathroom—it wasn’t a sound I had heard very often in the three years we were together, maybe a few times. Michelle was crying. In a minute she washed her face, and came out of the bathroom, and climbed into bed. Suddenly I didn’t feel angry. And even though I didn’t understand, I put my arms around her, and I whispered in her ear, “If you ever get lost, I’ll find you, Michelle. My little Whitey.”
That last morning I was a block away. The morning sun and air fell on my shoes, my arms, my face. The concrete glistened. Our neighbors at the end of the block grew jasmine and ferns in front of their house. That street was full of trees, and flowers planted around the trees, and people spraying Maxsea fertilizer. My work was only four blocks away, across the park, and I never had to hurry.
Michelle was carrying her orange helmet because she had left her bicycle at the site and planned to ride home early and make us dinner—I remember seeing orange. She yelled, “Don’t forget to buy cinnamon!” For months we would put cinnamon on our toast, and then for months we would have no cinnamon. We would look and look and then we would say, “Someone needs to buy cinnamon.” And then we’d forget. I did most of the grocery shopping.
Michelle was standing on one leg, clowning, or was she showing off? She looked so solidly there—she looked bound to the concrete: her rangy hips and low-slung work jeans and T-shirt. Her brown round arms.
The ants were winding their ribbons around the table or were washed up under our sponge and drowning in the kitchen sink.
When I arrived at work, the boss was out ill and the phones were ringing and ringing. Between calls I sat in my office chair and typed and edited several articles and letters. At three o’clock, exactly at three, the phones suddenly quieted. I looked at the clock, and then I looked out at the trees and the shadows moving over the trees. I didn’t have much thought, or the thoughts I was having were buried deep in those trees.
At 3:15 the phone in my office rang. I picked it up and heard our neighbor the art major’s voice. She has found her rat, I thought, and for a moment I ballooned with gladness for her. What a feeling that must be, to find a lost animal, even a rat, that you had loved and cared for daily and then suddenly lost and thought vanished forever.
She spoke very slowly and carefully, measured and loud, the way the landlord did, as if she were afraid I would not hear her the first time and she would have to repeat the words and that would be unbearable.
“Your girlfriend is hurt,” she said. “You come home now.”
Very few people speak in direct imperatives, except on television commercials, and then the sentences are usually happily directing you to buy some product. I hung up the phone. I couldn’t move. I sat in my office chair next to the phone for what felt like a long time but was probably only a few seconds.
As it turns out, the connection between rain and the appearance of ants in one’s home is a myth. This I read in “House-Infesting Ants and Their Management.” As a group, ants are the most difficult household pests to control, and treatment methods such as spraying ant trails can make the problem worse. The best solution, according to the article, is to keep your house meticulously clean so the ants have no resources. Ants are social insects, and when they find resources they release a chemical letting everyone know where to feast. Although most ants consume a wide variety of foods (they are omnivorous), certain species prefer some types of foods and some even change their preferences to the preferences of the homestead. Common ant species include the fire ant, carpenter ant, thief ant, odorous house ant, crazy ant, little black ant, tramp ant, pyramid ant, big-headed ant, acrobat ant, ghost ant.
The article said nothing about ants coming in from the rain or cold, or about the danger of ants, except those ants that sting or eat the wood, and of course no one wants ants to infest her food supply.
I wonder if I would remember anything about that day if Michelle were still alive. Or about the Chinese landlord and his notes, or the man we never saw. I wonder if I would remember the morning sun, the sidewalk, the jasmine and ferns, Michelle carrying her orange helmet. I wonder if I would remember the run home through the park, the beautiful play of light and shadow, the majesty of the eucalyptus trees, and the four pillars of sunlight that streamed through them from the top of the hill. I was running and breathless and then boom—four pillars of light, filled with dust and floating debris, appeared, and I ran through the momentary warmth and shimmer.
When I reached our street—it could not have taken me more than five minutes—I didn’t have to ask any questions. There was a small crowd of pale, vibrant-looking people who must have been my neighbors, and then five or six police officers, and a man in a car weeping, and a paramedic who grabbed my arm as I pounded on the ambulance door just after they raised her into it on a hydraulic gurney. She was wrapped in a blue blanket so she would not get cold. Michelle died in the ambulance, and by the time I reached the hospital, was already heading for the morgue.
I believe the ants we had that November were odorous house ants. Tapinoma sessile. They live under stones or boards in walls or under floors. They eat sweets,
