Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  Homer didn’t greet them as they wheeled their suitcases into the foyer. He emerged slowly, almost painfully, from his kennel, blinking in the light. “How would you like to have a big yard?” Charlie said, scratching behind his ear. “How would you like to spend the rest of your life off the leash?”

  “Oh, come on,” Nora said. “Really? Using the dog?”

  “Fine,” Charlie said, trudging up the stairs. “You take him for a walk.”

  She supposed if she wanted to move to a gated community with a tennis club and a pool in the backyard this was one of the cards Nora would have played, too. The last dog walk of the night was always more or less unpleasant, trying to pick up after Homer wearing gloves in winter, watching him sniff at and then try to snag some piece of garbage when the weather warmed. He was almost thirteen now and had slowed down so much, especially at the end of the day, that a walk to the corner and back took even longer than it had when he was a puppy and she had felt foolish telling him what a good good good dog he was, making pee-pee off the curb, pooping outside instead of in the house.

  “You are a good dog,” she said aloud, remembering those days, but Homer didn’t turn his head, although his pointed ears swiveled back slightly. Just before the Lessman house, he pulled suddenly forward, hard, and Nora yanked him back. “What are you doing?” Nora asked, and then watched as a large rat trundled from curb to sidewalk and into the shadowed steps down to the well of the Lessman basement. Homer finally turned then because Nora had shrieked without meaning to, a kind of adrenaline charge through her whole body and out her mouth. She had unconsciously put her hand on her heart.

  “Oh, my dear God,” she said out loud, and a man at the end of the block turned to look at her.

  Back at their house she peered into the stairwell toward their basement door, wondering if the door’s join at the sill was tight enough. She thought of the dryer vent to the backyard with horror. Hadn’t Ricky put chicken wire over it so that nothing could get in? What if he hadn’t? Who would do it now? In the foyer she wondered whether to tell Linda Lessman what she had seen, or Charity.

  “I will never go into the basement again,” she said to Homer, who trudged back into his kennel and fell onto his pad with a heavy sigh.

  Several buildings have been cited for vermin infestation. These citations are being challenged before the Department of Health. It is imperative that all garbage containers have tight-fitting lids. Only if all buildings conform to these specifications will the citations be quashed. An inspector will be on the block Tuesday morning at 9 A.M. to advise all interested homeowners about how to mitigate the situation.

  The health inspector was a man named Dino Forletti. He wore a windbreaker with DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH stenciled on the back, steel-toed boots, and a Mets cap, and carried a laser pointer. Their customary little knot of concerned homeowners had broken down into a string of beads around him. George stood apart from the others with an elderly pug under one arm, perhaps because he thought he was somehow in charge, and Sherry arrived only at the last minute and didn’t join Nora and Linda, who had one of the Rizzoli sons and his wife with them. Nora had been afraid Jack Fisk would show up just to show he could, but he was nowhere in sight. One of the landlords was there, too, and he’d tried to get friendly but no one would bite. It was generally agreed that it was the rental buildings with several tenants and not enough trash cans that were causing the problem.

  The inspector made a humming sound in the back of his throat; the group trailed him down the block as if they were fourth graders on a field trip and he their teacher. He said nothing, but sometimes the humming got a little louder or faster and Nora looked around to see if there was a reason for that. She hadn’t wanted to do this in the beginning because she was afraid that somehow the inspector would pull a rat from a hole the way a magician pulled a rabbit from a hat, but Charlie insisted he was too busy at work and he didn’t see the point, that that’s why there were exterminators, and if you lived in New York what could you expect.

  The inspector didn’t speak until he had entered the parking lot and walked from the front to the back, stopping to stoop down here and there. They waited for him at the entrance. Nora couldn’t help it; in her mind’s eye, just for a moment, she saw Ricky broken on the ground, clear as anything.

  “People park their cars here?” the inspector said, and there was a collective sigh.

  “Not anymore,” said Linda Lessman.

  “It will be open for parking again soon,” said George. “Very soon.”

  “Yeah, they like to go under parked cars,” the inspector said. “You’ve probably seen them come out from under one at the curb at night.”

  Nora wasn’t sure she was going to make it through the session. Her stomach was somewhere between morning sickness and roller coaster at the very idea.

  “Anyhow, I’ve seen worse,” Dino Forletti said. He turned on the laser pointer and indicated the back of the SRO, with the pints of milk and bags of bananas perched on the windowsills. One of the residents was peering down at them. “The food storage situation there is obviously an issue, especially since it looks as though some things fall into this area.”

  “I knew it,” said George. “That building is an eyesore.”

  “But it’s not the biggest issue,” the inspector continued. “The building they’re doing the gut renovation on at the end of the facing block is a big part of the uptick. Once they start digging up underground waste lines, excavating the foundation—” He shrugged. “The rodents get displaced.” The laser pointer traced a thin red line along the perimeter of the parking lot to the dull brick of the building on the far side. It ran along what Nora had always thought was a line of dirt. “You got trails here,” said Dino Forletti. “They like to rub along the sides of the walls. I saw one of those light-colored limestone buildings on the East Side once, it was like someone had used a piece of charcoal to draw a stripe.”

  “On the East Side?” said the Rizzoli daughter-in-law.

  “They are no respecters of class, believe me,” the inspector said solemnly. “I remember we got a call from the mayor’s office because one got into a lobby on—”

  Involuntarily Nora made a little flapping motion with her hands, and shivered all up and down her body. “Are you all right?” whispered Linda.

  “Aw, you got a thing,” the inspector said to Nora. “It’s okay—lots of people have a thing. My girlfriend has a thing. She tells everybody I’m a homicide detective because she thinks it’s easier for people to deal with. I always tell her, If you got to understand them a little better, they’re actually really interesting, they’ve got a family structure, social habits, they’re really not—” Nora flapped again, her eyes wide. It was an automatic reaction, like a sneeze or hiccups, even though Nora was not a particularly squeamish or timid person. She and Charlie had spent a week at a vineyard in Tuscany for their twentieth anniversary, and Nora had gone running through the forest and encountered a wild boar. She had no idea what you were supposed to do when faced with a wild boar: Keep running? Stand still? Climb a tree? Yell loudly? For an instant she thought she remembered she should rap it on the nose if it came close, then realized that that was what she had always heard you should do if a shark approached, which was absurd. Who would have the wherewithal to hit a shark? Or a boar, for that matter.

  The boar made a noise like an old man clearing his throat and then disappeared into the undergrowth with a tremendous amount of thrashing that made her realize, a bit late, how large it really was. The people who owned the vineyard were horrified, although they had been serving boar in various guises at nearly every dinner. Pappardelle with cinghiale. Cinghiale ragù. They wanted Nora to stop running every morning. “Good luck with that,” Charlie had said to one of the owners.

  “As long as it’s not rats,” Nora said.

  “Rats?” said one of the owners with an accent that tu
rned the word into something else, not as recognizable or somehow as terrible.

  “Or snakes,” Charlie said.

  She shivered again, standing at the entrance to the parking lot, although the sun was warm on her shoulders. Dino Forletti shook his head.

  “I’ve done a lot of research,” George said. “One for every person living in New York City, correct?”

  “She’s got a thing,” Dino repeated, putting a dot on Nora’s chest when he turned the laser pointer toward her. “Maybe not the best conversation for a person with a thing. Besides, no one’s done a census—you know what I mean? We’re just making assumptions.”

  He put the pointer in his back pocket. “The bottom line is, there’s a lot you can do here. I’ll make sure we keep the bait boxes current. All of you be vigilant about the garbage cans. Bags, lids. Don’t offer them access to food, you know? Get whoever works on your house to go into the basement and make sure there’s no way to get in. I’m a big fan of the feral cat, but you can’t convince New Yorkers on that. Next thing you know, someone’s rounding them all up, taking them to the shelter, spaying, finding homes. I say let feral cats be feral. They’d take down all except the biggest ones.”

  “What about dogs?” George asked.

  “Oh, they won’t mess with a dog.”

  “No, I mean what if a dog goes after them? Should we let them?”

  Dino Forletti looked at the pug. “I wouldn’t,” he said. He’d turned back to Nora. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone had a thing,” he added.

  It had gotten to the point that Nora could scarcely bear to walk Homer at night, although she couldn’t say anything to Charlie because she didn’t want to add to his big-house-in-the-warm-south arguments. Even after Dino Forletti had had a pair of his men bait all the backyards, speak to the contractors on the building under construction about not leaving trash around and being sure to cap waste pipes, cite the landlords with too few or flimsy trash cans, she still responded to every stray ad flyer blowing along the curb, every shadowy break in the pavement, as though it were a bullet of a body, a thread of a tail. When she was running in Riverside Park one Saturday and saw an enormous hawk overhead, dappled and proud, one of the men picking up trash in the playground had ruined the sight by saying with a grin, “That guy eats his weight in rats every damn day.”

  “It’s become like the plagues of Egypt,” Nora said on the phone to her sister, forgetting that Charity was in the kitchen wiping down the cabinets. “The dog-poop bags are back on the stoop, there are rats running rampant on the sidewalks, and two of the men in the SRO died in the last month. Not to mention what happened with Jack Fisk and Ricky.”

  “New York is like the plagues, Nonnie, which is why lots of us won’t live there. But it’s your place. It’s always been your place.”

  “There are times when I can’t imagine why,” Nora said. “My husband certainly can’t imagine why. His attempts to make me leave have reached critical mass.”

  “Even if he wanted to move to Seattle I’d have to veto it. You belong there. It’s like chemistry. You either have it or you don’t. There’s no explanation.”

  “Rachel asked me about that last year. ‘Mommy, can you develop chemistry with a guy if it’s not there in the beginning?’ ”

  Christine laughed. “Oh, that. The really nice guy who is like kissing the inside of your own arm. I hope you told her no, absolutely not, if it’s not there, it’s not there.”

  “What else could I say?”

  “So, okay, on this other thing. The guys in the SRO are old and are bound to die sometime, and the bags on the steps are just a nuisance even though you’re making them sound so sinister.”

  “They feel sinister. They feel hostile, as though someone is out to get me.”

  “Okay, whatever. But the other thing—”

  “Which one?”

  “I won’t even say it or you’ll freak,” said Christine. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t get this. We had a huge spider in one corner of the garage last summer, and I didn’t put the car inside for two months. The boys acted like I was a monster because I wanted them to go in there with a broom and knock its web down. ‘Maybe it had babies,’ Jake said. Reading Charlotte’s Web has been terrible.”

  “Did you kill it?”

  “I ran in there one day really fast and emptied an entire can of Raid onto it. They’re still mad at me. I thought I could get away with it but, boy, the smell of that stuff really lingers.”

  “Plagues of Egypt numbered ten,” said Charity dismissively once Nora was off the phone, passing through on her way to the basement. “From God. Rats we take care of with poison. God takes care of Mr. Fisk.”

  “So now we’re on top of the situation,” George said triumphantly the morning after the Health Department visit, when he ran into Nora. He seemed to be baiting her, trying to tell her how many litters a year, how many babies in the litter. She was accustomed to George’s nonsense, but she had found Dino Forletti disconcerting. He seemed more agnostic about rats than Nora would have expected, or appreciated. She couldn’t imagine anyone talking about how termites built their homes, or what stamina cockroaches had. “Live and let live” had been his valedictory words.

  When Nora got to her office, she went down to the basement, the bowels of the building, to the windowless office where Declan, the facilities manager, sat in front of a wall of grainy security monitors. Declan was a small, very precise ginger-haired man with leprechaun tendencies so obvious that Bebe had signed off on his hiring with the words “I hope the road-show production of Finian’s Rainbow where you found him won’t want him back.”

  “Declan, do we have rats?” Nora asked. Even the word made her shiver.

  “To my knowledge we have never seen a rat inside this building,” Declan said, his brogue making the horrid word sound like a small throat clearing.

  “Thank God,” Nora said, turning to go.

  “Is this about the charge for the exterminator in my monthly budget?”

  “What? No.”

  “Because he does come on a regular basis. This is New York City. We are near the river. I have to be prepared for every contingency. It would be a disaster if one of those ladies saw a wee beastie.”

  “Stop,” Nora said.

  Nora had been delighted to discover that Richard, too, had a rat thing. “Mrs. Nolan, no offense, but can we not talk about this?” he’d said. “Absolutely,” Nora said. Charity did not want to discuss it, either, except to say that on her island there were no rats or snakes because the mongoose killed them all, and that there would be no rats on the block if only Mr. Fisk had not attempted to, in Charity’s words, “bash Ricky’s whole head in.”

  “I just had a drink with Jack,” Charlie said one night. “He says Charity hates him. He says Charity is why Grace quit.”

  “You went over to see Jack?” Nora said. “Did he tell you that he refused to write Grace a recommendation after twenty-one years?” Which had been immaterial, because Sherry had written a fulsome recommendation, according to Charity, and Grace was already working for a couple who lived on Central Park South and, according to Charity, were paying her more for less work.

  “Don’t start with me about Jack. And tell Charity to leave the Fisks alone.” Nora would do no such thing, although she felt a slight spasm of sympathy for Sherry. Having Charity angry at you was like being caught in a thunderstorm.

  Charlie didn’t know about the men in the SRO or the dog leavings, which had stopped all winter long and now had appeared again. But George had told him all about the rats, and Nora suspected that Charlie was glad of the news. He was certain there were no rats in gated communities in North Carolina. “I bet there are lots of snakes,” Nora had muttered to herself.

  “You’re not really moving, are you?” Rachel, home for a few days, had said that morning.


  “What do you think?” Nora said as she packed up her tote bag and waited for Rachel to find her jacket, which was somehow under the coffee table in the den, and was somehow actually Nora’s jacket.

  “I think Daddy is a little crazy for some reason. I think pretending he believed Mr. Fisk’s ridiculous story made him crazy. I also think if you move to the places he’s talking about moving you’ll scarcely ever see me because why would I go there?”

  “I hope you told him that,” Nora said as they left the house.

  “Are we getting a cab?” Rachel said.

  “I always walk,” Nora said.

  “Okay,” Rachel said.

  “It’s a long walk,” Nora said, and Rachel just shrugged, which was how Nora knew that something was up. Even if Rachel was amenable to a walk, tradition would dictate that she should argue about it: a cab was more comfortable, what about the subway, no one else walked to work, whatever.

  “Doesn’t she know that she’s only feeding rats?” Rachel said when they came upon the woman with the baguettes, surrounded by a gaggle of geese and a cloud of rapacious gulls.

  Nora shivered. She could still see the rat in the Lessmans’ stairwell, the shadow of its long, hairless tail. Rachel was almost as crazed about rats as her mother. “I don’t get you guys,” Oliver had once said; he had spent a good deal of time with lab rats. “I bet if you got to actually hold and watch rats you would get over this.”

  “Are you insane?” Rachel said.

  “What she said,” Nora added.

  “Okay, Mommy, no, don’t try to be cool,” Rachel said. “It’s so so sad when you do that.”

  The pieces of French bread hit the ruffled gray water and then were hidden beneath the flapping wings and snaking necks. A spring breeze was blowing Nora’s hair around her face, and Rachel’s hands were pushed deep into the pockets of the leather jacket she’d worn despite the fact that Nora had told her she would need a heavier coat. True spring came a little later right along the river. Two windsurfers in wet suits went by, waving at them. “Insane,” Rachel said.