The Fifth Woman. Nona Caspers
I wanted to prove something to Michelle. But I stayed outside searching for the rat for another hour. Then I sat on our front steps in the dark with the beautiful neighbor in silence. I might have put my hand on the back of her neck.
When I finally went inside the apartment, Michelle was not in the kitchen or in our bedroom or living room.
Then I heard a sound in the bathroom—it wasn’t a sound I had heard very often in the three years we were together, maybe a few times. Michelle was crying. In a minute she washed her face, and came out of the bathroom, and climbed into bed. Suddenly I didn’t feel angry. And even though I didn’t understand, I put my arms around her, and I whispered in her ear, “If you ever get lost, I’ll find you, Michelle. My little Whitey.”
That last morning I was a block away. The morning sun and air fell on my shoes, my arms, my face. The concrete glistened. Our neighbors at the end of the block grew jasmine and ferns in front of their house. That street was full of trees, and flowers planted around the trees, and people spraying Maxsea fertilizer. My work was only four blocks away, across the park, and I never had to hurry.
Michelle was carrying her orange helmet because she had left her bicycle at the site and planned to ride home early and make us dinner—I remember seeing orange. She yelled, “Don’t forget to buy cinnamon!” For months we would put cinnamon on our toast, and then for months we would have no cinnamon. We would look and look and then we would say, “Someone needs to buy cinnamon.” And then we’d forget. I did most of the grocery shopping.
Michelle was standing on one leg, clowning, or was she showing off? She looked so solidly there—she looked bound to the concrete: her rangy hips and low-slung work jeans and T-shirt. Her brown round arms.
The ants were winding their ribbons around the table or were washed up under our sponge and drowning in the kitchen sink.
When I arrived at work, the boss was out ill and the phones were ringing and ringing. Between calls I sat in my office chair and typed and edited several articles and letters. At three o’clock, exactly at three, the phones suddenly quieted. I looked at the clock, and then I looked out at the trees and the shadows moving over the trees. I didn’t have much thought, or the thoughts I was having were buried deep in those trees.
At 3:15 the phone in my office rang. I picked it up and heard our neighbor the art major’s voice. She has found her rat, I thought, and for a moment I ballooned with gladness for her. What a feeling that must be, to find a lost animal, even a rat, that you had loved and cared for daily and then suddenly lost and thought vanished forever.
She spoke very slowly and carefully, measured and loud, the way the landlord did, as if she were afraid I would not hear her the first time and she would have to repeat the words and that would be unbearable.
“Your girlfriend is hurt,” she said. “You come home now.”
Very few people speak in direct imperatives, except on television commercials, and then the sentences are usually happily directing you to buy some product. I hung up the phone. I couldn’t move. I sat in my office chair next to the phone for what felt like a long time but was probably only a few seconds.
As it turns out, the connection between rain and the appearance of ants in one’s home is a myth. This I read in “House-Infesting Ants and Their Management.” As a group, ants are the most difficult household pests to control, and treatment methods such as spraying ant trails can make the problem worse. The best solution, according to the article, is to keep your house meticulously clean so the ants have no resources. Ants are social insects, and when they find resources they release a chemical letting everyone know where to feast. Although most ants consume a wide variety of foods (they are omnivorous), certain species prefer some types of foods and some even change their preferences to the preferences of the homestead. Common ant species include the fire ant, carpenter ant, thief ant, odorous house ant, crazy ant, little black ant, tramp ant, pyramid ant, big-headed ant, acrobat ant, ghost ant.
The article said nothing about ants coming in from the rain or cold, or about the danger of ants, except those ants that sting or eat the wood, and of course no one wants ants to infest her food supply.
I wonder if I would remember anything about that day if Michelle were still alive. Or about the Chinese landlord and his notes, or the man we never saw. I wonder if I would remember the morning sun, the sidewalk, the jasmine and ferns, Michelle carrying her orange helmet. I wonder if I would remember the run home through the park, the beautiful play of light and shadow, the majesty of the eucalyptus trees, and the four pillars of sunlight that streamed through them from the top of the hill. I was running and breathless and then boom—four pillars of light, filled with dust and floating debris, appeared, and I ran through the momentary warmth and shimmer.
When I reached our street—it could not have taken me more than five minutes—I didn’t have to ask any questions. There was a small crowd of pale, vibrant-looking people who must have been my neighbors, and then five or six police officers, and a man in a car weeping, and a paramedic who grabbed my arm as I pounded on the ambulance door just after they raised her into it on a hydraulic gurney. She was wrapped in a blue blanket so she would not get cold. Michelle died in the ambulance, and by the time I reached the hospital, was already heading for the morgue.
I believe the ants we had that November were odorous house ants. Tapinoma sessile. They live under stones or boards in walls or under floors. They eat sweets, meat, dairy products, seldom have swarming seasons, do not bite, do follow trails and are about one-eighth of an inch long. They resemble fire ants, but when crushed emit a pungent rotten coconut smell.
A trail of cinnamon on the windowsill and countertops will deter ants. Ants don’t like cinnamon.
Someone told me that cinnamon also prevents high blood pressure and heart attacks; you should eat a spoonful of cinnamon every day.
After Michelle died, I knew I had to move out of the expensive apartment. I would sit on the sofa and stare at the table and out the window—I thought if I waited long enough in one sitting, the ants would return, and she might become undead. She had been a willful person. The air would be gray and solid, a gray wall of winter fog, and then suddenly Michelle would walk out of the fog, looking straight at me, smiling, exhausted, happily exhausted and almost home. Time might change its mind and go backward, just this once. We see it in movies. We read about it in the Bible. I had grown up on the story of Lazarus. Even if she were bloody and decayed, I would have welcomed her. Maybe she didn’t know that.
My fingers went numb. Sometimes my lips also went numb.
The day was officially described as follows: sunny and calm with highs of seventy degrees and a twenty-degree drop in temperature in the evening. A perfect seventy degrees. No fog or wind—or at least, on the City weather reports for that day, no fog or wind was recorded.
There is a kind of wailing that sounds like singing. It comes from the hollow parts of the skull, and from the roots of the hair, and even from the thumbnails.
I was living in a third-floor studio apartment on a block that was said to have had the highest crime rate in the City. Even on the third floor the landlord, who lived across the country, had placed bars on the windows. Some of the bolts attaching them to the building had rusted and broken, and so bars were missing here and there. Whenever I left the building, I wore an oversized coat and knit watchman’s cap with my hair shoved inside so you couldn’t tell I was a young woman. There was an alley off one side that the tenants unironically called “toilet alley,” and it was also useful for selling drugs and sex, dumping garbage, and occasionally, or so I had been told, for dying. I had moved into the apartment over the alley after Michelle died; I wanted to live alone—I wanted to be alone—and after three months of looking I realized a