The Kissing List (20 page)

Kindness is a scarce resource. She appreciates this about Dale. But the human in her still sees mice as pests, little carriers of germs. She sets a trap, half hoping the mice will not recognize the feta as cheese, and places it underneath the sink. She eats dinner—salami, bread, two glasses of milk—standing at the counter. Then she goes into the children’s room. Two sets of bunk beds snake along the walls like railway cars. The dresser is filled with games from her childhood—Mastermind,
Blockhead, Battleship. She pulls herself up onto the top bunk, remembering how tall and scary it seemed when she was young, but now it seems less risky than the bottom, where mice might attack her in the middle of the night. The master bedroom is out of the question. Without Dale, the king-size bed would be too vast.

A
lmost no light comes through the heavy curtains. The clothes that Deirdre piled on the folding chair slump like a depressed man. “Dale?” she asks. She closes her eyes, hoping that when she opens them she’ll recognize where she is. Something rustles outside her door, and she quickly remembers the wooden trap, the morsel of feta. Emerging from the dark cave of the room, she goes into the kitchen, which is flooded with pale early-morning light, and very tentatively opens the kitchen cabinet. There is a mouse, still very much alive, scrambling back and forth, trying to free its tail from the triggered wire. Deirdre can barely bring herself to look at the gray coat, the black beadlike eyes, the frantic movement of tiny legs and nose. She takes a step back, focusing instead on how the contents of the cabinet have been turned over and scattered in much the same way a tornado rearranges trees and cars, houses and bicycles. During the time she does nothing, the mouse sees an opportunity and makes a break for it, leaping out of the cabinet and racing across the floor, banging the trap behind it. Deirdre hesitates—she is not without fear of mice—before she grabs
The Nation
and attempts to herd the mouse into a paper grocery bag, but it outmaneuvers her, heading for the refrigerator,
the trap scraping across the floor like sled runners over rocks. It suddenly stops, the wooden base of the trap wider than the space between the refrigerator and the wall. The mouse claws the floor furiously, though to Deirdre it sounds like nothing more than a handful of broom bristles, trying to find traction, trying to break free, and squeals.

The mouse is trapped, and the trap is trapped, and all she needs to do is bend down and pull back the metal wire to free the creature. His high-pitched cry is painful, and his movements are panicked. At one point, the mouse contorts his body as though he is trying to back up or do a U-turn, and Deirdre may be fortuitously free of the responsibility of doing anything. There is a clatter, and the mouse is gone, but the trap remains, and pinned between the wire and the wood is the mouse’s tail, longer than her middle finger and healthy pink except for the bruised and bloodied stump where the mouse chewed it off. She flees the kitchen.

On the deck, she sits bundled up in clothes that other people have left behind and tries to distract herself by reading about gastropods in
Marine Life in the San Juan Islands
, about how the keen intelligence of the octopus allowed it to evolve and shed its shell. What about mice? Does losing a tail disrupt their balance, make them vulnerable to sneak attacks from behind, cause them to misjudge distance and get stuck in awkward spaces? Without a tail, will a mouse survive?

What would she be willing to sacrifice to stay alive? Her arm? Her eye? She wonders what she is willing to sacrifice for
the baby-to-be, or the baby-who-might-be. Or for her relationship. The night before she left, Dale’s reflection appeared inverted in the Steuben crystal cat in their living room. “Whatever you need to do,” her upside-down boyfriend said to her, “you must do.”

The thought of his generosity makes her vomit off the deck. Her stomach is tight and angry. The doctor says the nausea is good: the baby is settling in, taking hold. In a month, at the end of her first trimester, her queasiness should go away. In the kitchen, she rinses her mouth out with water before she sweeps the trap and the bloody mouse tail into a dustpan and throws them both over the railing of the deck. Then she calls Dale. She thinks she will tell him she is pregnant, and this is why she has gone away, though this is not the whole story. She doesn’t understand the whole story, only that now that she is pregnant, she feels the need for certainty—not absolute certainty but enough.

“I thought we were incommunicado,” he says bravely.

“Señor Avocado, how did you know it was me?”

“Señora Mango,” he answers, “don’t be a fruit case. We salsa together rather too well for me to have forgotten your juicy flesh so quickly. You haven’t met a spicy jicama, have you?”

“Well, there is a yam here who is stripped to his starched underwear,” she answers, sickened by how easily they banter even under difficult circumstances. They should know better.

“I’m getting jealous,” Dale says.

“Don’t be. He’s rotten. I threw him away.”

“So cruel.”

Deirdre begins to cackle but can’t keep up the game. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Dale asks. “You can’t help it. You needed some time to yourself.”

She hates him for saying this, for being so reasonable. She should try to explain. What? She’s not sure—that she is pregnant and this, along with a slow accumulation of other things, has made her question whether they should stay together. But doubt, fear, something—what is it?—keeps her quiet, makes her cowardly. She would like to punch herself in the stomach, but she can’t. “There are mice. The cabin is overrun with them.”

Dale snorts.

“They’re driving me crazy,” she continues. “I caught one this morning, but it gnawed off its tail and got away.”

“You maimed a mouse.” Dale sounds offended. “Great. Now he’s dying slowly somewhere in the cabin.”

She groans. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Just live with them.”

“But they’re small. They’re always underfoot, or worse, they’re not underfoot, and then I’m worrying about where they are, when they’re going to surprise me.”

“They sound just like children,” Dale snorts.

This silences Deirdre. If Dale knew of her pregnancy, he would, she thinks, happily insist on having the baby, even though in the abstract he supports zero population growth and draconian quotas on births. He would behave gallantly, mustering
a smile and proclaiming, “Rules are made to be broken,” just as he’ll eat vegetables cooked in butter when they are dinner guests of people unacquainted with his recent transformation from vegetarian to vegan.

“Just don’t kill them,” Dale pleads. “They haven’t done anything to hurt you. Do the dishes and keep the food put away. Next time, we’ll bring catch-and-release traps and figure out how they’re getting in.”

His plan is so reasonable. “I love you,” she says.

He doesn’t say anything back. Of course she loves him, though something has changed. She loves him from habit. She loves him because he is her boyfriend, and she has loved him for five years, and it is difficult to imagine a life that does not involve loving him.

“Be nice to the mice,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “I guess I’ll go.”

“You go.”

“I’m going.”

“Okay, you’re gone,” he says, getting in the last word. This irks her.

She thinks about the moment she started to feel differently about Dale, how insignificant it was. They were on vacation, up here on vacation, and she was lying on the couch, reading the
Rough Guide to Australia
because she wanted to go diving on the Great Barrier Reef, and popping chunks of dried pineapple into her mouth. Her tongue hurt, her gums stung, but she couldn’t stop herself from reaching for another piece of pineapple. And then Dale came in and said, “Wanna shoot some
hoops?” And she agreed because she had to get away from the pineapple, and she’d read everything she could about the reef. What if the circumstances had been different? What if she’d been eating grapes and reading a mystery? She might have rolled her eyes at Dale’s offer. Playing basketball wasn’t her idea of fun. But they walked to the basketball court (where they also occasionally played tennis), and Dale taught her how to bend her knees, flick her wrist. “That’s right, baby,” he said, “it’s all in the follow-through.” She sunk that first three-point shot, and later she made a whopping three in a row and felt so giddy, so suddenly sure of her ability to learn all kinds of new things after telling herself for many years that she was the kind of person who liked knowing things, not learning them. After the ball’s third swish, Dale jumped in the air, doing an impromptu cheer: “Two, four, six, eight! To whom do I masturbate?” He came down so hard on his ankle, it sounded like Velcro being ripped. If none of this had happened, if she’d just stayed put, maybe she would not have felt the unbearable weight of him on her arm as they walked together back to the cabin.

Of course this is not the real reason she wonders whether they should split up.

It is one among hundreds of reasons. People change in all kinds of small ways. What can she say? My boyfriend turned into an animal rights nut. He refuses to try new things. He’s started exaggerating the seriousness of his hobbies. He’s lost his edge. Each on its own is so petty, so insignificant. What’s the point of saying anything?

F
or several days, Deirdre treats the mice like houseguests who have overstayed their welcome. When she finds a mouse in the deep tub in the master bedroom, she gets a bucket. Leaning against the porcelain side, she senses the limit of her stomach’s give and imagines the thing inside her solidifying, forming opinions, mouthing, “Stop doing that.” The mouse refuses the invitation of the yellow bucket tipped on its side.

“Little guy,” she says in a voice she reserves for children. “You’re a cute little guy, and I want to help you get out of there.”

The mouse scampers to another corner of the tub, as if they are playing a lighthearted game of tag: he skitters away, she moves the bucket; she reasons with him, he ignores her. Her belly hurts—she is hungry or sick. “Get in!” she shouts, pressing the lip of the bucket into the corner, edging it under his body, trying not to do internal harm.

She drapes a towel over the bucket, not because she fears the mouse escaping, but because she is afraid of being infected with his panic. It doesn’t work. As soon as she walks outside and into the trees, tiptoeing around the nettles and keeping an eye trained on the ground for slugs, she starts to worry about separating the mouse from his mouse friends, about his nestbuilding and foraging-for-food skills. She thinks of the raccoons wearing their bandit masks ambushing the mouse. She peeks down at him. He is already vibrating like an old-fashioned alarm clock.

Her only choice is to take him back inside. The mice have moved to a foreign country, learned the language, and now the
place that was once home is strange, full of potential peril. She will have to adjust. Back in the living room, she tips the bucket on its side. The mouse rushes underneath the couch.

As though to test her resolve, another mouse is quivering beneath the eye of the bathtub drain that night. She frees her in the walk-in closet, then sets out finger dishes of water and feta crumbles for her miniature guests. The mice emerge in packs. Tucked into the top bunk, gently rubbing her stomach, she listens to the cabin rustling. Knowing that the mice are responsible for the noise doesn’t lessen her fear. Sometimes the unexpected happens, and you have to decide if it’s a miracle or just the opposite.

T
o give the mice their space, she contemplates sleeping on an air mattress on the deck, but that would mean contending with the slugs, who might be tempted to lay a sticky silver trail across her pillow in the middle of the night. Slugs do not interest her; though gastropods, they are all body and no shell. She moves her meals from the table to the couch, where she can keep her feet in plain sight. After eating, she naps. Then she combs the beach for treasures. Her collection of shells has taken over the kitchen counter: the clamshells come in two varieties like potato chips: traditional or ridged. Mussels are shaped like thumbs and so intensely green they appear black. The spiraled snails are as small as a baby’s pupils, and she can find them only by sitting on a log and studying the sand in the small area between her feet. The big snail shells are thick with calcification and brilliant white and soft from being dragged
back and forth across the sand. Faded browns and grays pattern Chinaman hats, and the warty exteriors of oysters hide their iridescent insides. She wonders whether Dale would object to her collecting shells on the grounds that she is appropriating creatures’ homes for her own selfish pleasure. Probably. She arranges them in pleasing designs.

One night as she eats—her plate of steak, steamed asparagus, and dirty potatoes balanced on her stomach, her feet propped up on the armrest of the sofa, her sparkling water on the floor—the baby kicks. This is impossible. Her mind must be playing tricks on her. At this stage, the heartbeat is barely visible, the baby just a four-inch wisp of cells, buds of baby teeth, soft nails. And yet she is sure. She puts her plate on the ground and cradles her stomach, even though it is still mostly flat, and waits for the baby to move again. Now there is no denying the something inside of her, the thing that kicks, the baby, the baby that she and Dale have made. Another tiny ripple. She begins to cry. In the kitchen, the mice are scrambling, scratching, gnawing. They are sampling everything, wasteful little creatures. They nibble a corner of a granola bar before they change their minds and break into a box of cereal for a flake or two.

Deirdre’s clothes are strewn across the floor along with piles of books and magazines, glasses choked with cherry pits and orange rinds and shriveled slices of lime and cucumber. Dale would be appalled. The baby is quiet now, gone, turned back into a motionless thing sleeping inside of her. What do you think of mice, little one? She pushes herself up from the
couch, filled with resolve to tidy up, but just then three mice mosey around the corner and stop in the middle of the living room, sitting back on their hind legs and waving their pointy noses in the air like orchestra conductors. That night Deirdre sleeps on the couch, shifting uncomfortably and dreaming of small things:
Our cupboards are emptying
, they tell her.
Soon they will be bare
.