Whom would I tell? If I got them again, I mean. The bugs.
What is the truth now, at this moment?
It is true that the cat has fleas.
It's true that something was crawling on my sock while I was in the back yard, out in the sun, just last weekend.
It's true that when I crushed it to keep it from getting away, it left a red spot like blood.
It's true that I found a bug right next to the bed this morning. I didn't even know it was a bug until I put a pair of tweezers near it to pick it up and it moved. It was trapped, running around in circles. It was so small and covered in the slick talc that I had to kill it with a drop of rubbing alcohol to try to see it. I couldn't make it out, but I could have brought it for free to the exterminator, to ask him to have a look.
I smashed it. It had been dark in color but left no blood.
Everyone knows that anyone sane would never tolerate these things in her house -- would spend any amount of money and time getting rid of them, over and over again and into infinity. So if it turns out to be true, I must not say anything unless I am prepared to go through this again. If I confess it to anyone, I must, also, in my next breath, explain exactly who will be coming to save me and exactly when and exactly for how much money for this time.
The truth is that I feel alone.
And so of course it would be just my luck if these things were in my bed again now. If the truth was that I wasn't alone after all.
It would have been after school, and GeneralHospitalwould have been on downstairs – in which I imagined that I was Holly, slowly but surely falling in love with Robert Scorpio, to whom I had originally only pledged myself as part of a marriage of convenience. Upstairs, in my actual house, (which did not have a sauna as their apartment did), our damp laundry was hanging on a clothesline all along the dark and narrow hall. Perhaps it was the case, also, that an earlier load -- finally dry in the modestly heated, rented townhouse (an awfully fancy word for the leaky wreck this house was) -- had just been taken down. And maybe that batch of clothing had been folded by now and was stacked neatly for me on the top bunk, in the small room where the old red dresser that my mother had been given by her landlady back in art school just barely fit against the end of the stacked beds, just enough to allow the door to shut.
This was the shared bedroom where, on a weekend afternoon, I'd climb to that top bunk in my jeans and sweater, reading Little Women, imagining myself first to be the sickly Beth – having done my own time nearly failing out of third grade, home, sick with my chapped lips and a fever for half the year – and ultimately always the eccentric Jo -- tomboyish, defiant, intellectual, odd, running off at the end with an older European man.
At the end of the hall was in my mother's bedroom, also known as the “laundry room,” though of course I did not really understand what that was really supposed to mean -- didn't know that really that a laundry room was supposed to mean a place with a washer and dryer, not just a room where my mother kept the clean clothes all in baskets for us to sort through and where she simply requested that we just throw our dirty clothes on the floor for her to deal with later. Really the “laundry room” should have been the oft-flooded basement, where one would find the washing machine that my mother bought, the same year she finally bought a couch -- which she still owns thirty years later (now all clawed up by generations of house cats) -- with the few thousand dollars she received after my grandmother died and her house was sold.
And if calling the bedroom -- or even that leaky dungeon -- a “laundry room” had already been quite the exaggeration to begin with, then this would have become a doubly absurd descriptor for the place once the machine stopped spinning and had to be drained by a sad system that involved lowering a hose to the drain in the corner of the cement floor.
In my mother’s room, the “laundry room,” there was a closet, and in that closet hung the musty polyester suits of the father I had no memory of ever having lived with us. They were pushed all the way to the end, against the wall, out of use, but still they there, still smelling of a stranger. They followed my mother from one house to the next when we moved, and I would see and wonder about them whenever my sister and I played dress-up or, more likely, bored with our threadbare thrift store clothes, looked inside that closet yet again, the way a hungry person continues, against logic, to open the refrigerator door again and again as though something satisfying will finally, magically, suddenly materialize.
I never knew the right way to feel about my father’s suits or my father himself, since I knew the fact of his being my father but did not know him. And so I remember how puzzled my sister and I both felt the day when my father, on one of his rare visits, brought over a bag of hand-me-down clothing from the young strangers who would, now that (he also announced) he was remarrying, become his stepchildren – and we began, as soon as he left, crying hysterically, not knowing why. Our eyes watered as though in reaction to some type of allergy.
Maybe his announcement and his bringing of the clothing didn’t happen on the same day; I put them together in my mind, though.
And after he left, my mother bitterly took away the clothing, perhaps saying something about them being tainted or evil or cursed. I can’t remember whether I knew what ever happened to them after that, whether they got added to her closet perhaps, sealed up in plastic below my father’s suits.
When exactly did clothing, things, belongings, become haunted for me, become so troublesome? Was it when bedbugs entered my own home, twenty-five to thirty years later, or was it sooner? Had it already happened? What day did I wake up and realize that all the daydreaming about Little Women from my top bunk after school or in the middle of a Saturday would just end? When did I decide I could no longer just look in my mother’s closet for some piece of fabric that would take me back in time, that would give me hope, that would allow me to live, even for a little while, someone else’s life?
The bedbug discussion forums are full of detailed descriptions of rituals in which people strip in their garages when they get home, standing on a rubber mat and placing each item into a new plastic bag as they disrobe. One woman describes rubbing a comb dipped in rubbing alcohol through her hair when she gets out of bed each morning. Bedbugs make people behave as though they have obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially if they actually do. People lose track of reason; they can't even remember the logic behind their actions anymore.
There's some strange new pseudo-kosher set of rituals being invented in which everything is kept separate from everything else; everything is kept somehow pure.
I'm tired of being pure. I want to whore around; I want to wallow in my own filth. I want to be dirty.
***
I don't know where the piles of dishes come from. Except that I do.
I've made a bargain with myself, though: no more scolding myself over them. Instead, I've devised a plan; if I go into the kitchen to eat something and see that there are dishes in the sink, the rule is that I cannot be lazy and simply take a clean plate or spoon or knife or bowl from the dish rack; I have to wash whatever I'm about to use, plus at least two other items.
Under this system (washing more dishes than I dirty each time), the pile will always get smaller. It's simple math. A story problem.
If that sounds obsessive-compulsive, I say, truthfully, in my defense, that my bargain with myself is, on the contrary, progress away from obsession and compulsion. I refuse to let the desire to make my house perfect take over my mind anymore, especially when I'll never even come close. Life is too short.
Except for the past year -- which was far too long and which I'll never get back.
No one should live in fear that waiting another day to change the sheets will become all the difference between a few thousand more dollars in extermination bills, the difference between life and death -- or at least the difference between life and no kind of life.
It may be that dirty dishes attract roaches. Fine. But I'd rather leave crumbs in the drain and put out the sure-fire roach traps, "birth control for roaches," the inventors called it. It works; call me a slob, but I treasure the luxury of my dirty dishes now.
When will someone invent the equivalent for bedbugs? Something that will allow the people of New York City to just live a little again, leaving ourselves out for food at night and thinking, go ahead; it's fine. You'll die trying.
After returning from Abu Dhabi, Samantha realizes she has bedbugs. The ladies go out to brunch, and everyone gangs up on Miranda, implying that because she lives in Brooklyn, she surely must be the source. Miranda, attorney that she is, sites the recent trip abroad and all of Carrie's shopping in NYC, which gets everyone thinking.
Carrie sits at her Mac that night, at the window of her penthouse apartment, reflecting on the recent tensions among the group of best friends. Just as she types "I couldn't help but wonder," she notices a small insect climbing out of her USB port. Big comes home to report that his office has been shut down, the trading floor currently being sniffed over by a beagle who earns a modest income rivaling that of Carrie, a mere writer.
Meanwhile, Charlotte has not only had all of her upholstered furniture encased but has begun putting all of the toys and clothing in the house in giant Ziploc bags.
The rumor that Miranda has bedbugs has somehow reached her hired help, Magda, who calls in sick the next day and then returns on the first flight back to Eastern Europe without a word.
Samantha, in the middle of inspecting her suitcases, receives a phone call from a lover from a few months ago who lives down the street from the Mayor; he says that while in the process of moving, he found some of her lingerie stuffed under his mattress and that she should check with her doorman, as it should be arriving in a package for her the next day.
Samantha picks the package up on her way to the elevator the following day while talking on her cell phone, explaining in a hushed voice that no, the person on the other end of the line can't come spend the night with her. "Well, yes," she says, "I was surprised to be getting my period after all of this time too, but they say that that can happen. In fact, I was told that it will probably last for at least the next three weeks. I'll let you know when it's over."
She hurries off of the phone and gets on the elevator, beginning to open the package as the door closes. As she makes her way into the apartment -- where all of her things are in clear plastic bags -- she pulls the leopard-print negligee out of the envelope to see a family of bedbugs crawling on the fabric.
Aiden calls Carrie to tell her that he's been forced out of the antique business, people being too afraid now of second-hand items, and is wondering if Big would be interested in collaborating with him to find some investors to start a pest control company. One thing leads to another. Carrie tearfully confides in Aiden that she has thrown all of her Manolos in the garbage and that the big walk-in closet her husband had gifted her in lieu of an engagement ring has now become a horrible place to her. He and Carrie end up checking into a midtown hotel for an illicit romp.
That night, after taking her Mac out of a plastic bag, Carrie types "I couldn't help but wonder why my life totally sucks" and then checks the online bedbug registry to discover that every hotel in midtown Manhattan is on the list.
The film ends in a sequence in which one partner in each couple opens his or her front door to find out that he or she is being served divorce papers.
