by Bob Tarte
“I can’t get her to talk to me,” he said, shaking the string trimmer to convey his agitation with a slosh of its gas tank. “She spends most of her spare time with the other Indonesian students. But if we were going steady, I could see her on a regular basis.”
“I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.” I glanced at the cloudless sky in the wild hope that the sun might go supernova and interrupt our exchange. Instead, to my horror, I heard myself prolong the moment. “What happened to that Korean girl?”
“She’s too busy with her Korean girlfriends. But I’m sure I have a chance with this one. Do you think it would be too forward if I bought her a ring?”
Substituting for a cosmic calamity, Linda burst around the corner, allowing me to slip into the workroom while she distracted him with a barrage of questions about his string trimming. The last noise I heard before easing the door shut with a soft but fulfilling click was Linda: “You didn’t cut down the weeds around that big yellow spider, did you?”
I gave her a few minutes to sort out whatever the big-yellow-spider matter might involve. Then, fearing that Mr. Bean had entangled her in his gooey web of dating-etiquette questions, I followed Judy Teany’s lead in rescuing my dad from old man Brink so many years ago. Clicking the two-way radio, I informed her, “Telephone, Linda.” Apparently, I hadn’t lied. As soon as she clomped up the stairs, the phone rang as promised.
“It’s your mother,” she told me, passing me the receiver and glowering because I had called her into the house just for that. Then she raced back outdoors to resume her conversation with the hired helper who had earned his secret nickname via his resemblance to sad-sack comedian Rowan Atkinson.
I didn’t know what to make of the phone call with my mom, who seemed levelheaded, if forgetful, as we chatted about her intention to winterize the Buick and the color of Mrs. Teany’s latest wig. Then she announced that in November she would be working at the polls, which she hadn’t done for almost a decade. She had last applied two years earlier but hadn’t been called in, presumably because her old boss had noticed her problems concentrating.
“How did you find out you’ll be working?” I asked.
“It was the funniest thing,” she said. “I was taking a walk to the end of the block, and down by Aberdeen School I saw a piece of paper on the sidewalk with my name on it telling me to report to the polls. I don’t know how it got there.”
“Where did you find that paper?”
“Just down the street. It might have been closer to church. I can’t remember.”
The phone call alarmed me. Before calling Joan to discuss this latest development, I peered out the window and noted Linda and Mr. Bean still embroiled in conversation. From his slumped posture and his longing glance up at the sun, I gathered that my wife had gained the advantage.
“I FEEL SO SORRY for that spider,” Linda told Joan as we sat on her enclosed porch.
Joan made playful kazoo noises with her mouth as she picked up Beethoven from the cement floor and deposited him inside a cardboard box. “Where did your dolly go?” she asked him, even though, like many pure white ferrets, he was as deaf as a deceased composer. Before she could completely remove the stuffed doll, the outraged weasel grabbed it by the arm and yanked it back inside his box.
Her husband, Jack, came out with a piece of popcorn and handed it to me. “Busy Bird will land on your lap if you hold this very still. She loves popcorn.” Instead of paying the slightest particle of attention to me, the house sparrow scolded Jack with a level of invective that only a bird could muster. “She hates it when I wear my glasses.” He said this on the sly from the side of his mouth, so that the sparrow wouldn’t overhear.
“What about the spider?” Joan asked.
While we tended to have animals dumped on us by other people, Joan and Jack stumbled across them as they tried to go about their lives. Driving to work one morning, Joan had noticed a sausage-shaped, white furry form scampering under a van in front of her at a traffic light. The next thing she knew, she had become a ferret owner. Jack had scooped up an abandoned baby sparrow in the driveway after the parents had shoved the featherless pest out of the nest twice. He undertook the daunting task of raising the chick into a sassy adult that preferred lording it over the other pets to sparrowing outdoors. Elsewhere in the house skulked a rescued wolf-dog amalgamation, a couple of adult cats, and three growing kittens that had recently materialized half-starved in the yard—though you couldn’t tell they had ever suffered to see the spoiled things now.
“I’m scared to death of those big yellow spiders,” Linda told Joan. “I can’t even stand to look at a picture of them in a book.”
“Golden orb weavers,” I added.
“Every time I go out to the barn, I have to look the other way, because it terrifies me just to see that spider by the door. But one of the college students cut down all the weeds around her web, and now there aren’t enough insects. I don’t know how she’ll feed herself.”
“She’s a spider,” I pontificated. “She’ll take care of it.”
“That is worrying, about Mom,” Joan said.
“Where did Dusty Marie go?” asked Jack.
Joan pointed to the snaking coils of plastic tubing that covered the floor of the porch and concealed the second ferret. “I don’t believe she found that piece of paper about the job at the polls, either. It really concerns me, Bob.”
Swiveling at the sound of Busy Bird pecking her cage bars, I caught sight of the building across the street; large letters painted across the bricks proclaimed FOSTER GRAVE VAULT CO. I flinched to face such an unvarnished reminder of where my father currently resided. “I didn’t tell you about Mom’s visit last week,” I said to change the subject inside my head.
“What happened?”
“To start with, she couldn’t remember how to get to our house and had to write down the directions.”
“She almost hit someone,” Linda added.
“Even then, she had trouble following the instructions and ended up coming a roundabout way. When she was leaving, though, she pulled out into the road directly in front of an oncoming car, swerved to miss it, and nearly clipped the postman’s station wagon.”
“She nearly hit the postman,” Linda said.
Joan’s attention drifted to Beethoven in his box. He lay on his back holding a tennis ball in his paws, like a sea otter about to crack an urchin’s shell for lunch. A few inches from him, the plastic tube wiggled as Dusty Marie navigated the tunnel. “She probably shouldn’t be driving, except around the neighborhood, maybe.”
“Next time we ask her over, I’ll just pick her up.”
“Or we’ll come and get her,” offered Jack.
“Watch this,” said Joan. Standing in the center of the porch, she recited in a singsong voice, “Busy Bird, fly, fly.” The sparrow launched herself in circles around the room, landed on top of her cage, and puffed herself up with pride. “If you think that’s something,” Joan told us when we had finished laughing, “you should hear her sing her heart out to a Journey CD.”
I hadn’t come to appreciate animals until I married Linda, in 1990, and even after that they had crept upon me unawares. But Joan had long enjoyed the company of all manner of creatures, wild and tame, and so had Jack. A female squirrel that they had hand-fed and befriended once made a special trip down the tree to the picnic table to show off her babies, and a pigeon they had rescued a few summers ago hung around the yard for weeks. As we drove home, I expressed my deep regard for the two of them to Linda. “Those people.” I shook my head and sighed. “They’re even worse than we are.”
IN ADDITION TO HER talent with animals, Joan had invented the purse finder.
Tens of thousands of years ago, disparate cultures scattered around the world had developed basic inventions like the plow, the irrigation ditch, and the collapsible umbrella entirely independent of one another. Similarly, when my mom started losing her purse on a regular basis, my sisters and I al
most simultaneously came up with the idea of planting some sort of noisemaking device in her handbag. I got the ball rolling by buying a gizmo off eBay designed to help people locate a TV remote control that had slipped behind the couch to keep the stray beer cans company. I triumphantly stuck the beeper inside her purse and from across the room pushed the red button on the transmitter. A faint but clear high-pitched tone harangued us from the handbag. But when I stashed the purse beneath a cushion or buried it at the bottom of mom’s sweater drawer, the alert tone turned into an ineffectual lisp.
Meanwhile, from a pricey high-tech gadget catalog, Bett ordered a fancy-pants Never Lose Anything Again doohickey that turned out to be a glorified redesign of the TV-remote-control finder. The manufacturer must have used the same cheap signaling microchip. We couldn’t detect the telltale beep unless the purse hid in plain sight surrounded by several cubic feet of open air. In a stroke of near genius, I considered subscribing to a paging service. That way, when Mom lost her handbag, Bett, Joan, Linda, Stanley Sue, or I could simply punch in a phone number from the comfort of our home or cage, and the pager tone would reveal the latest hidey-hole. But none of the pagers that I investigated on the Web boasted of having the type of high-decibel tone that the job required. So I abandoned the idea.
While I soldiered on with a device that emitted a feeble, quavering tone when it detected the distinctive sound of a handclap—or a door slamming shut, or a fork clicking against a dinner plate, or a parakeet chewing a millet seed—Joan came up with the breakthrough notion of using a wireless doorbell. About the same size as a pack of cigarettes, and about the same weight, too, if the pack were made of heavy plastic and contained a trio of AA batteries plus electronic circuitry, it did add major heft to a handbag. But, boy, was that sucker loud. Joan could stow the purse beneath the mattress in an upstairs bedroom, and from the living room downstairs we could hear the friendly bing-bong. To keep doorbell and pocketbook from going their separate ways, Joan wrote across the front and back of the unit in large letters with an indelible marker: PURSE FINDER—KEEP IN PURSE.
“A purse finder,” remarked my mom with a mixture of interest and suspicion. “What will they think of next?”
For weeks the purse finder worked brilliantly. My mother would phone and confess in sorrowful tones that somehow, quite remarkably and unexpectedly, she seemed to have misplaced her purse, and what was she going to do? Joan or I would hightail it over to the house and retrieve the push-button unit from its Mom-proof hiding place in my dad’s file cabinet, behind his collection of road maps. Within moments, a reassuring chime would lead us to her purse, tucked behind the dehumidifier at the bottom of the stairs, concealed inside the slide-projector box in the bedroom closet, or nestled in the bread drawer with a boatload of paper bags, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Then we’d stand back and wait for the praises.
• • •
LINDA HADN’T EXAGGERATED her fear of the golden orb weaver spider. Up north at her cabin in Morley, I had once teased her by asking, “Have we ever seen this kind of vireo before?” And then, instead of showing her a photo of a bird, I thrust a picture of the black-and-yellow spider at her. She shrieked. I laughed. Oh, the fun we had.
I had always assumed that she was overacting for the sake of our mutual amusement. But when I found her in the pumpkin patch a few days after our visit with Joan and Jack, she insisted, “I really am terrified of them. When I was little, I saw one in the grass in my mom’s backyard and thought that it was dead. I couldn’t stop myself from touching it out of a sort of morbid fascination. But it wasn’t dead, and it came at me like this.” She held her hands at chin level and wiggled her fingers at me. “I was absolutely traumatized, and after that, I never wanted anything to do with them again.”
“But you’re not exactly afraid of insects,” I observed as she plucked a squash bug off a pumpkin, examined it in the light, and discarded it over her shoulder.
“Bugs, snakes, salamanders, they don’t bother me at all. There was a ditch in front of my mother’s house, and I practically lived in there. I would collect snails in a bucket, and when I found those big male ones, I was in absolute heaven. I kept them in a Shedd’s peanut butter pail that had dirt and grass in it, and I would check on them every day.”
“And are we keeping that in a pail?” Having selected a squash bug that met with her approval, she cupped it in her hand.
“No, it’s for the spider.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I called Mrs. Martini today, and she told me that spiders won’t eat insects with hard shells, and I’d been putting Japanese beetles in her web. But she won’t touch them.”
“Mrs. Martoni.”
“Martini, Martoni.” Her voice trailed behind her as she marched toward the golden orb weaver. “The web scares me almost as much as the spider does.”
I had to admit that if the spider didn’t look sinister enough with the black-and-yellow tribal mask painted on her back, the toothy zigzag down the center of her web clearly suggested danger. Linda screeched to a halt as she came up on the weaver. From two feet away she aimed her insect, tossed it at the web, and missed.
“Your hand is shaking too much.”
“Feel my heart. It’s beating like crazy.” Her bug had disappeared into the tall grass beneath the web, and she couldn’t find it. “Now I’ve got to get another one.” Next to the web and tacked to the side of the barn with wisps of silk, the spider had spun three brown cocoons each about the diameter of a nickel. I didn’t see how they would survive a hearty gust of wind, much less a typical Michigan winter, notorious for its inhospitality toward arachnid egg sacs. You can hardly sit down in a restaurant in the middle of January without hearing someone at the next table comment, “I don’t know about them spiders’ eggs in this awful cold.”
“How many tries does it usually take you?” I called after Linda.
Deciding to undertake an insect safari of my own, I slipped inside the barn and, ignoring the disdainful glare of our Rhode Island Red hen Rosie, headed for the dusty windowpane where I had discovered the swallowtail butterflies during the summer. Sure enough, a quartet of flies bounced against the sunlit glass in search of a way out. One of the four didn’t bounce so much as weakly flail. It had become caught in the national historic ruins of a web whose owner had vacated the site years ago.
“Sorry,” I told the fly as I grabbed it by a wing and carried it outside.
Linda still hadn’t returned from her search for the ultimate squash bug, so I proceeded to attach my insect to the web. While I didn’t share Linda’s terror of the large spider, I was nervous that at the first tremor of a silken strand, the golden orb weaver would awaken from immobility and launch herself onto my hand in the blink of a fly’s eye. Instead, I had plenty of time in which to learn that adhering a now deceased Musca domestica to the web of an Argiope aurantia required more Dexteritie manual than I possessed. Finally, after turning the web into a small trampoline but still not raising the hackles of its builder, I managed to adhere a single hair of the housefly’s leg to a microscopic picture-hanging hook attached to the living room section of the web.
The next afternoon I checked the web only to find that my fly had fallen off. Linda had replaced it with a bug that met with the spider’s approval. Encased in silk, it dangled within millimeters of her jaws. “Oh, no,” Linda moaned.
“What’s the matter? You wanted her to eat the bug, didn’t you?”
“Not that.” She waggled a finger at the cluster of cocoons stuck to the side of the barn. It took me a moment to realize that a fourth egg case had joined the other three.
“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. If she’s still having babies, I’m going to have to start feeding her twice a day now.”
LINDA WASN’T THE only one troubled by an irrational fear. When we sat down to eat dinner that evening, Dusty crawled down the bars to warily pace the floor of his cage and refused to climb
back up to eat the vegetables that he loved. He didn’t seem sick. Moments earlier, just before I had walked into the room, he had been imitating a train whistle and repeating his favorite phrase, “What does the duck say? ‘Quack, quack, quack,’ “in an embarrassingly perfect imitation of my voice.
Our furnace man, Greg, had recently been working in the basement while Dusty talked about the duck and inquired over and over again, “Who’s the big grey bird?” After Greg had finished tuning up our oil burner and I was writing him a check in the living room, he asked, “Was that you I heard talking upstairs?” I had always considered Greg to be a genius, but I realized at that moment that he probably didn’t hold a similar opinion of me.
Linda and I tried to figure what could be spooking a macho bird like Dusty. He kept staring at something from the bottom of his cage, but when I tried following his line of vision, I came up blank. His focus shifted whenever I got up from my chair to investigate, and he eyed me eyeing him.
“Dusty, eat your green beans. Do you want Jell-O?” Linda asked.
“Is there anything new in here that might be scaring him? Whatever he doesn’t like isn’t staying in one place.” I walked to the window and scanned the treetops for a hawk or crow.
“Maybe he sees a ghost. Is Agnes in here?”
“She’s sleeping on the couch.”
We finished our dinner, fruitlessly cajoling him to eat as we went along. Not until I was standing at the sink, scraping my leftovers into a dish of table scraps for the ducks and hens, did Linda’s mood brighten. “He’s climbing up to his food dish. Good boy.”
I peered around the bulkhead that separated kitchen from dining room only to witness his retreat back to the cage floor. An odd thought hit me. Popping into the bedroom, I peeled off my bland black-and-grey sweater and replaced it with an even blander yellow-checked shirt. Upon my return to the dining room, Dusty treated me to his typically unfathomable “squid at the bottom of the sea” glare. But then he made his way up to his perch and tore into his bowl of vegetables.