Do you ever talk to roaches? The baby ones? I say, "Go on, get outta here!" so I don't have to squish them. I like to give them a chance at life, because when they're small they're almost cute, with their jaunty upturned hind ends and their curious faces.
The famous Mexican song La Cucaracha celebrates a roach missing a leg or two. I always let those go, too, if they're small, especially if they've obviously been attempting to scale the steep smooth sides of the tub for hours. I give them a finger ride for a second to help them get over. Somehow it doesn't seem cricket, as my Scottish grandparents would say, to smash a roach incapable of getting away.
But I'm not consistent; with menace and glee I wash roaches down the tub drain, drown them in torrents, then seal their doom with the plug.
A few weeks ago, I had a dream in which a football-sized roach perched on my arm and accosted me with its large, inquisitive eyes. I can't remember it speaking. It didn't call my name. But it knew me. It was a rather Gregor Samsa-like bug, all in all. I guessed it was the ugly part of me, maybe the needy part, the child, like an angel disguised as a stranger. What could I do but gaze back, in the dream, and wonder?
I believe roaches are quite intelligent. After thousands of years of human predation, natural selection has made them resilient, resourceful. Roaches think outside the box: One suddenly leaps, say, to his escape rather than flat-foot it to a corner he has already cased. That superhero's flight, that hail-Mary pass, that do-or-die casting of self into space - it's admirable.
The biggest ones, compellingly frank about being in view, have their own complexity, but I know they are out to inherit the earth, and so I kill them. Off comes the sandal and into my hand, by the heel. I move in stealthily, keeping my eyes on the roach. It is watching; I am watching it watch. Its feelers are on point or, if it has gotten into the poison we pay a guy far too much to spray, its feelers will be a limp drool on the floor. It is then simply waiting to be whacked, and I whack it. Once. Hard.
That usually does it. I am not interested in making a mess, nor in smelling what we kids used to call "that Jergens lotion smell." To clean it up I use a paper towel. Dry. My husband always uses a wet paper towel, in fact gobs of paper towel. I use just one, carefully crumpled like some complex origami that will keep my hand from detecting even the outline, the lump, of the smushed body, the stiff legs, the splayed and nearly delicate wings.
Somehow it never occurs to me to get the spray. The spray is, obviously, far, far away in the moment of need, downstairs on the back porch, next to the wasp spray, the mosquito repellent and the sunscreen.
In Genesis, it is the snake that is condemned to a life of eternal enmity with woman. Maybe translators should try the domestic Floridian variant: palmetto bug. And it is usually Eve who has the conniptions - Mom screeching in the kitchen while making for higher ground (such as the countertops), quite overcome with panic and dread. Which makes perfect sense if you've ever had a roach fly into your face, cling with barbed feet to your neck, get tangled in your hair. Or if you've ever been bit by one. Dad, always the one to do the dispassionate dirty work, would appear in short order. Dad, who as I remember it went always with deliberation to the garage to get the spray, as if giving the bug due process under the law.
Which is not the same as aiding and abetting. One afternoon, the neighbor kid Steve invited Eric and me over to his garage. Cue the crescendo from Jaws: Steve shrieked with pleasure, then announced, "A roach motel!" and slid open a drawer. I held my breath. There were hundreds, a teeming, seething, pulsating mass of brown and albino children of all ages and their equally vibrant 2-inch-long parents, pale egg cases sticking out of their rears. I knew that these cases would ripen and finally be extruded later, when the prying eyes of impressionable 10-year-olds had departed the scene. We never did that again, not even to sort of check on them.
The plumber, prying out wallboard beneath the sink, is impressed. "No bugs," he says. We spray like crazy. So why do the little ones stay my hand, especially since I know they will become big ones? Because when I am in the tub, mornings, trying not to contemplate the difficult day ahead, or the arduous day just survived, it seems a failure of grace to begin the day by killing something.
- Melanie Hubbard lives in Ruskin and teaches writing at the University of Tampa. She is a frequent contributor to Sunday Journal.
