When you put the word “mouse” with the word “woman,” often
what comes to mind is a stereotypical picture of a woman, nicely dressed with
pearls and apron – clearly a 1950s housewife – shrieking for help. Down on the floor is a teeny, tiny
mouse. Mouse 1 – Woman 0.
Many yesterdays ago, that would have been me up there on the
chair. I relied on the men in my life –
my father, my male friends, my husband – to save me from the big bads out
there, even the teeny, tiny mice.
Several years ago, we shared an apartment in Boston with a
teeny, tiny mouse. He was brazen, that
mouse. He would come out into our living
room as we sat watching television, and look at us, daring us to do something
about him. My husband tried all sorts of
traps, from the humane to the cruel, and nothing worked. The one thing that did work? Steel wool, crammed into the crevices through
which that mouse must have entered. We
didn’t see him for several days, and we figured we had locked him out. Success!
But after those several days, we began to sense an aroma in the
apartment. We couldn’t place it, no
matter where we looked. Until one day, I
had a gut feeling, and pulled open the sleeper sofa upon which we’d been
sitting day after day, wondering about that smell. There, beneath the springs, was the
mouse. He’d been locked in, not out, and
had probably died after eating the steel wool.
After shrieking a bit, I had my husband remove him. That was just the way things went. Through the years, whenever one of our cats
made a present of a little critter – birds, mice, chipmunks, baby rabbits – I’d
shriek, and my husband would remove them.
A few days ago, my daughter came to me with a complaint –
something smelled in my son’s room, where she did most of her school work. I went to look, to sniff, but it was just a
small smell at the time. It was vaguely
familiar to me. We thought perhaps one
of the cats had coughed up a fur ball, or been locked out of the basement where
the litter boxes are, and so we had our eyes open for cat puke or poop. Nothing.
But as the days passed, the smell grew stronger. Eventually, it wafted out into the foyer, and
then into my bedroom. Something had to
be done. I called my husband – perhaps he
could come to take a whiff, perhaps our noses had grown so used to the smell
that we couldn’t discern its origin. No,
he said, he’d already told my daughter to clean the room. Once she did that, we would find the source.
I told her I would help her – we could work together to
clean the room and find the culprit. But
that wasn’t going to happen quickly enough, and I started without her. I grabbed a plastic bag and started throwing
garbage into it, picking up her tossed aside socks and making a pile for the
laundry. I’d been at work for only a few
minutes when I found it. No wonder the
smell had been familiar – there was a dead mouse lying on its side beneath my
son’s poker set. My first response? I dropped that poker set back onto the dead
mouse, ran out of the room, and screamed.
And screamed. And screamed.
From downstairs came my daughter’s call – are you okay? Yes, I told her, but I found the source of
the smell. Do I want to know? she asked. Will I cry?
You don’t want to know, I said.
What to do? What to
do? My second instinctual response was
to go for my husband. I picked up the
phone and dialed – and then realized what I was doing and put the phone
down. I was a grown woman, I reasoned,
living on my own, perfectly capable of dealing with this, no matter how
distasteful.
I steeled myself, went back to the room, picked up the poker
set and looked at the mouse. At least it
was a clean kill – no guts spilling out the way these gifts were sometimes
presented, its head still attached to its body.
I picked up a plastic bag, put my hand into it, and gingerly picked up
the mouse. And I dealt with it.
This may not be a big thing to some people. To me, it was a giant step in the reinvention of myself. It was the first time I had handled this kind
of situation without reaching for male assistance, the first time in nearly 30
years I hadn’t called upon my husband to do the disgusting thing. I wasn’t standing on a chair, waiting to be
rescued. Mouse 0 – Woman 1.
