Summerlings

by Lisa Howorth

  “Spiders aren’t insects, you know,” Ivan pointed out, always the smartest of us. “I think they’re arthropods, like crabs and lobsters. And I think scorpions, too, maybe?”

  “Then can people eat all arthropods?” I asked. “We could make a spider stew and get Beau and D.L. to eat some. Or Slutcheon!” Slutcheon was an older kid we hated and feared. He lived on Quincy, one of those “hoity-toity” streets several blocks away. Slutcheon was so bad he made the Shreve boys look angelic in comparison.

  Max said, “Yeah! Slutcheon! Maybe we could make him sick. Or die.”

  “Yeah, the Shreves eat those crappy crawdads all the time,” I said, faking a gag. To us, crawdads were crayfish, small, pale creatures we found in the sandy bottom of Rock Creek, a Potomac tributary that wound its way through the wooded parts of Northwest Washington, a few blocks from us. Estelle had said that crawdads were eaten only by “crazy white folks.” She was not a big fan of the Shreve boys and didn’t like them coming around our house.

  “It would be funny to see Beau and D.L. eat spiders, but not as much fun as killing Slutcheon,” Max said.

  Ivan was ruminating on this. “If we killed anybody we’d have to go to reform school.” He was always so practical. “But if we just make somebody sick, we might get away with it. Let’s just catch every kind of cool spider we can.”

  “We can take them to school and everybody will be jealous of us,” I said.

  “Yeah, and we can scare girls with them,” Max added, inspired as always by visions of mayhem. Girls weren’t afraid of butterflies, but they would be of spiders. I was thinking of how horrified my sister, Liz, would be to find one in her pillowcase. I’d have to make this happen before she went off to boarding school.

  “And if we mess Slutcheon up, maybe he’ll leave us alone,” Max added darkly.

  “Or maybe he’ll want revenge and kill us,” I said.

  Max looked at me contemptuously. “Don’t be such a chicken! Gah!”

  “Takes one to know one,” I said, unfazed. Max wasn’t really mean. He and I both were regularly beaten down by our older sisters, so I understood his need to assert his seniority over me and Ivan.

  Ivan, ignoring the bickering, said, “We have to figure out how to catch the poisonous ones. Our butterfly nets won’t work with them because we can’t touch those.” We’d figure something out—we always did, the way we figured out how to kill the gnats that drove us nuts every day by taking my grandfather’s giant world atlas, holding it open in a gnat cloud, and slamming it shut on them. Of course, Brickie yelled at me when he went to use the atlas and its pages were stuck together with gnat bodies. Then we resorted to making a flamethrower with Dimma’s Aqua Net hairspray and Max’s matches, which annihilated whole swarms of gnats in seconds.

  Ivan said, “Let’s do some research!” We liked to do research. It’s what Brickie spent a lot of time doing. It felt important and scientific. We spread our books out in my living room. Normally, we would have done this on the Goncharoffs’ wide front porch, in hopes of Elena coming out and joining in, but Ivan said doubtfully, “Josef’s home today. He’ll just bother us.” And if Josef was home, chances were that Elena wouldn’t be.

  Dimma came through the living room, still in her robe. “These spiders are simply horrid,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life.” She looked down to see what we were reading. “Good Lord! Don’t even think about it!”

  “We’re not, Dimma,” I said. “We’re just doing research about them, so we can find out how to get rid of them for you.”

  “If I find you bringing any spiders into this house, I’ll be doing research on how to get rid of you. That snake was bad enough.”

  We giggled but made no reply. She said, “You heard me!” and went off in a Chesterfield cloud. Estelle came through in her crisp white uniform, dragging the Hoover. We greeted her, always polite to keep in her good graces, but I protested, “Estelle, we’re doing something important here.”

  “Important—hmpf!” she huffed. “It cain’t be as ’portant as me gettin’ my work done. How I’m gone vacuum in here with y’all all sprawled out?”

  “Can you do it later? Please?” I beseeched her. “We’re trying to figure out how to get rid of the spiders.”

  “You’re not foolin’ nobody!” She began lugging the Hoover away. Then she turned to us and said, in a sonorous voice: “Y’all act with hostility against me and unwillin’ to obey me, I’m gone increase the plague on you seven times ’cordin’ to your sins.” She moved off, laughing and muttering to herself about snakes, bugs, and boys.

  “Did you hear that! Seven times as many spiders!” Ivan said.

  “That’s just some Bible stuff,” Max said. “The Bible always talks about plagues.” We went back to our work, happily discussing spider facts until Estelle returned and evicted us. But we’d found what we needed; we had our list of the poisonous spiders we intended to trap: black widows, brown recluses, and tarantulas.

  * * *

  ——————

  Over the next few days Estelle’s prophecy came true. The Washington Post and The Evening Star reported on what was apparently a citywide spider infestation. Not content with festooning the streets, spiders were now inside people’s houses, offices, and cars, making all the grown-ups crazy. The papers said that experts weren’t certain why it was happening. There was speculation that it was the unusually hot weather, or less rain, or more smog, or, because some of the spiders being found weren’t native to the Washington area, that immigrants and refugees were bringing them in. (Max had been right: Scorpions were being found, and we added them to our list.) Brickie had his own theory—insect warfare. He might have been kidding; sometimes it was hard to tell. But however they got to Washington, spiders were everywhere: in shops, restaurants, trains, and planes. It was all people talked about. They were in corners, dressers, mailboxes, pots and pans, pianos, bookshelves, lampshades, and shower stalls. Everyone walked around thrashing and sputtering through the webs, which hung invisibly in doorways and stairwells and clung to faces, arms, and knees. Estelle reported it was the same down in Southeast DC, where she lived, and that the bus she rode to work was full of spiders and webs, “An’ people lookin’ like lunatics tryin’ to keep ’em off!” When Estelle arrived at our house those mornings, Dimma helped her check her clothing for spiders, and plucked webs off Estelle’s sleekly curled hair. Then when Dimma came back from an outing, Estelle did the same for her. They both were terrified of spiders.

  * * *

  —

  Brickie and I were having breakfast when he told me he’d found a brown recluse in a file drawer in his office. He was not happy about it, to put it mildly. He had his face in the Post, drinking his morning coffee. I was trying to eat the scrambled egg he made me every day. “Eating a good breakfast is like lighting a fire: It will keep you going for the rest of the day” was Brickie’s credo. One of many. But I’d already eaten two bowls of Frosted Flakes before he was even up.

  “Did you see the little violin on his back?” I asked, slamming down my juice glass in excitement.

  Not looking up, he said, “No, because I immediately smashed the hell out of it.”

  “Gah, Brickie! You could have caught him for me! We need a brown recluse!”

  Brickie lowered his paper and peered at me thoughtfully over his reading glasses. “Sometimes I wonder about you, son.” He went back to the paper.

  “Why do you think it’s happening, Brickie?” I ate some scrambled egg—now cold—and spit it back on my plate. “And if you didn’t see his violin, it might not have been a brown recluse.”

  “We don’t know what’s going on. Yet. I have a theory, though, and if I find one more damn spider in my office we’re going to see World War Three. It was a brown recluse because the lab said it was.”

  “Why do you have a lab at your off
ice?” I couldn’t imagine why there would be a lab at the USIA office. “You think some Russian spies are doing it?”

  “The lab is not in my office, it’s…just close by,” he said. “Russians have a long tradition of poisoning their enemies. In fact, they have a place called Laboratory 12 where that’s all they do—figure out how to poison people.” He looked at me again. “Don’t leave the table until you finish your breakfast—every bite.”

  “There’s a common house spider up in that corner, over your head,” I said. “At least I think that’s all it is.”

  While Brickie craned his head to look, I took the opportunity to scrape my cold egg onto the floor. “Jesus Christ. Estelle! Can you come in here, please?” he called.

  Estelle appeared with a broom and dustpan and quickly knocked the web down, stepped on the spider, and swept it up. “Thank you,” Brickie said. She spotted the egg on the floor and swept that up, too, giving me a look. “Uhm, uhm, uhm,” she said, and bustled off.

  “Why doesn’t anybody just ask the Russians if they’re doing it? Don’t they always love to brag about stuff?”

  Brickie snorted. “John, the Soviet idea of truth is very different from ours. They call their newspaper Pravda, which is Russian for ‘truth,’ and it’s nothing but propaganda. They lie to their own people, which is something we’d never do in America. Russians are the greatest storytellers on earth. They can’t help but lie.”

  I squirmed in my chair, desperate to get away and report Brickie’s news to the boys, so I stuffed the last corner of toast into my mouth and washed it down with the last of my orange juice. “Well, if the Russians were trying to get you they would put more than one brown recluse in your office because just one bite probably wouldn’t kill you unless your ‘health is already comprofied,’ ” I said, trying to quote from the Britannica.

  Brickie sighed. “That word is compromised. And my office has been thoroughly sprayed now.”

  He made a dismissive sound. “This conversation is over. You’re excused.”

  I hopped up and tried to run off but was intercepted in the hall by Dimma, who said, “John, don’t put your feet in your shoes without checking! Don’t put an arm through a sleeve or your leg through your pants without shaking them thoroughly! Look between the cushions before you sit on the sofa! Check the drawers! Check your toys! And don’t collect any of them!”

  “We decided to be exterminators, Dimma. We’re going to hunt them and kill them. You should be glad.” A lie, of course. I went on, “Also, spiders are actually good because they eat roaches and mosquitoes and moths.”

  Recognizing a lost cause, Dimma said, “Is that right, Otto the Orkin Man? Just as long as you kill them and keep them out of the house. Please be extremely careful, and wear gloves. Your mother won’t appreciate it if you die of a spider bite.”

  Calling on our research, I said smartly, “Since 1950, only fourteen-point-one percent of bites from vemonous insects were lethal. Most bites won’t kill anybody. They might make you sick, or your arm might rot off, but that’s all.”

  “Oh, I see. I guess your mother would be okay with that,” she said sarcastically. “It’s pronounced ve-no-mous.” Then, always her last words, “And you heard me!”

  * * *

  —

  Ivan and Max were on the Friedmanns’ bottom step, waiting on me, for a change. Ivan was idly turning over rocks. A daddy longlegs and a few roly-polies were under a concrete chunk and Max picked them up, wrapped them in a piece of Popsicle trash, and stashed it in his pocket to feed Tallulah Flathead, the yellow queen snake whose head had been stepped on and mangled a little bit by his sister. For some reason Tallulah refused to die but loved to eat.

  I blurted out what Brickie had said, or what I’d decided he’d said: “Brickie thinks the Russians planted all the spiders to poison everybody in Washington!”

  “Really?” Max exclaimed. Then he asked skeptically, “How does he know that?”

  “Um, I’m not sure. I guess he knows people who know.” I looked apologetically at Ivan. “And he said Russians are the biggest liars on earth.”

  “We’re not Russian. We’re Ukrainian,” Ivan corrected. “And not all Russians lie—I think just the government.”

  Max said, “Well, Russian and Ukrainian people hate Jews, and tell lies about them all the time.”

  I was getting confused about all of this—Soviets, Russians, Ukrainians, and why did everybody hate Jews?—and I said, “Let’s not talk about that stuff.”

  “Yeah,” said Ivan. “Let’s just collect spiders.”

  After gathering some peanut butter and mayonnaise jars from Max’s kitchen, we went over to the old stable behind my house, which seemed like the perfect place for spiders to hide, particularly up in the hayloft, with its crumbling rafters. After a couple hours of scrounging, we hadn’t caught much. One or two good specimens—a leopard-legged silver argiope in a zigzag web, and a wolf spider under some bricks—but mostly it was the same boring spiders we didn’t care about. We hadn’t even glimpsed anything dangerous. It was dawning on us that spider-collecting was tougher than we’d expected—hot, sticky, and frustrating, with mosquitoes, flies, and gnats feasting on us.

  “It must be nine thousand degrees up here!” Max complained. “I quit!” He began descending the ladder.

  “Yeah, me, too,” Ivan said, clambering behind him. “Too bad we’re not collecting horseflies.”

  “I know,” I said, sighing. “The spiders in here sure aren’t doing much to kill all these stupid mosquitoes, either.”

  “These butterfly jars are too big to carry around,” Max said. “And how are we going to keep the grown-ups from seeing the spiders, since we’re keeping them alive?”

  We thought. Then Ivan said, “I know! Prescription bottles! We catch them in those, because nobody will notice them in our pockets. And we transfer them to jars to keep.” This seemed like a good idea to me and Max, although we said the grown-ups would kill us if they found them. It was decided that Ivan would keep them, because no one was paying much attention at his house.

  There were plenty of pill bottles around all our houses; mostly for Miltown, the most popular of the new “Mother’s Little Helper” drugs, which I’d seen advertised for the “tense and nervous patient.” My mother had certainly been tense and nervous, and she’d had the pills for as long as I could remember, but it surprised me that Dimma, Mrs. Friedmann, and Elena took Miltown, too. But I’d also seen the drug recommended for a disease called menopause, so I thought that maybe Dimma and Mrs. Friedmann had that. Elena had even more Miltowns than my mother. She said they helped with her asthma, but she still suffered from attacks, and always carried her inhaler with the pills.

  Feeling better about things, we gathered up all the Miltown bottles we could find, putting nail holes in the tops. Max and I had orangey pill bottles and Ivan had Elena’s green ones, from Mexico. We were set, but we knew that the spiders would die soon, and, unlike Charlotte, they wouldn’t be leaving babies behind because of all the DDT the newspapers said was being marshaled against them. We’d have to find our prize spiders fast. School would start in a couple weeks.

  3

  A few days later, we were in my kitchen slapping together some potato-chip sandwiches: take two pieces of Wonder Bread, slather them with Miracle Whip, place a fistful of Wise potato chips on one slice, put the other on top, and mash down firmly. Estelle frowned upon this, so we sneaked them up to my room. After dispatching the sandwiches, we were lying on my twin bed in front of the fan, depressed because we still hadn’t found a poisonous spider. We had a crablike spiny orb weaver, and Max had thought he’d seen a scorpion, but it had skittered away under his porch. We knew Wiesie was too smart to mess with it.

  “And we haven’t done anything about the Beaver Plan yet,” Ivan said.

  “You mean the plan to get invited to the De Haa
ns’ swimming pool,” Max said sarcastically. My bedroom window was open, and we were tortured by the sounds of the Dutch boys enjoying a refreshing swim.

  “Anybody got an idea?” Ivan said.

  “Nope,” Max said. “The only idea in my head is to pee in that pool if I ever get in.”

  “What about presents for everybody to make them like us?” I asked. “Like maybe mounted butterflies?” I’d mounted a handsome zebra swallowtail and sent it to my mother. “We’re through with them, right?”

  “No! I don’t want to give any of mine away!” Max complained.

  “Plants?” I said. “We can pick Brickie’s peace roses and put them in Dixie cups? Peace, get it?”

  Ivan said to Max, “Or maybe your dad will give us some of his watermatoes to give out?”

  “He’s not going to do that,” Max said. “Plus, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.”

  “What if we did drawings for everybody?” Ivan offered. “Like maybe”—he paused—“what if we drew maps of our street? With everybody’s houses looking nice?” This excited him—he was good at drawing.

  “Nah,” said Max. “John and I are bad drawers and nobody will want ours.”

  I said, “Is Elena home yet, Ivan?” She’d been visiting “friends” in Miami for one of her projects; I wondered if they were unsavory refugees.

  “She just got home this morning, but she might be asleep. She was tired.”

  We spilled out of my house, but not before stealing some Twinkies from the kitchen, which we stopped to eat, hiding in the porte cochere behind Dimma’s Cadillac. Crossing the street, we were delighted to see that Elena had taken up her usual spot on the long swing on Ivan’s front porch.

  Elena spied us and lifted a long arm to wave. “Come see me!” she called. We ran up the lichen-covered concrete steps to where Elena reclined on her side, so exotically regal—an earthy Madame Récamier. Her shiny hair was tied back with a blue scarf, a long cascade falling down the back of the silky flowered kimono she wore all day because she didn’t have to go anywhere. “My job is going to parties!” she’d say—and that’s what she did many nights. Her brilliant red toes and fingernails—Sports Car, she said the color was called—always gave me a thrill, a new color every few days. I felt a kind of wiggliness about Elena, too, and was confused about it.