Here’s how you know you have mice in your kitchen:
1. You wake up to find grains of black rice on your stovetop. But you don’t eat black rice. Is there such a thing as black rice? You Google it. There is. But how did black rice end up in your kitchen?
2. You hear your husband (a grown man with a job and a reasonable head on his shoulders) scream. No, not like a little girl. Your man screams like a man. Somewhere between a bellow and a bark. That’s what you hear.
3. You see a mouse run from behind your toaster, and you scream. An unending make-the-neighbors-call-the-police scream. And in the course of your marathon scream, this mouse is so startled, it falls off the counter, clings to the edge like Tom Cruise doing a Mission: Impossible stunt, drops three feet to the floor, and then scurries under your oven.
Here’s what New York City exterminators will tell you, verifiable or not:
“It’s New York. I can’t keep mice out of your building. It’s my job to keep ’em out of your apartment. Everybody has ’em. I’ve seen droppings on three-hundred-thousand-dollar Italian green marble.”
“They have collapsible bones. They can fit through a pinhole. If they want to get in, they get in.”
“They’re smart. If you have thirteen mice and set thirteen traps, you’ll catch twelve mice. The thirteenth mouse will kick the trap and knock the food out.”
“Your cat died? You should get another.”
I’m sorry to report that we lost both our old cats, Big Boy and Tang Tang, what felt like mere moments before the mice showed up last year. But to this exterminator, I said, “Sir, I am not going to walk around in a prairie skirt and long johns so I don’t get sexually assaulted. And I’m not going to get a cat so I don’t have mice.”
Oh yes, that is exactly what I said. I may be a country mouse from Alabama, but I’m not going to put up with or take the blame for any city mouse crap.
A country mouse defends her turf. The exterminator and I pulled back every appliance and sealed holes around pipes with steel wool (foam doesn’t work—they eat through it). We set snap traps with Snickers bars (cheese doesn’t work; cheese is a myth). We laid poison pouches (and prayed the mice didn’t rot and stink up our walls). And I, always eager to go the extra mile, plugged in ultrasonic night-lights, spritzed every crevice with peppermint oil, and glued sweeps to the bottom of our front and back doors in case the mice had been shimmying in limbo-lower-now! style.
I racked up a body count, but the mice seemed undeterred.
A country mouse never loses her sense of humor. For Christmas, we had our Christmas card designer make cards with two mice that read, “Season’s Greetings from these city mice (and Lex and Helen).” And yes, I have a Christmas card maker like I have an exterminator, a gynecologist, and a guy I take the train to see in Brooklyn who sticks needles in me.
A country mouse is ever curious. Just as I want to know about stationery stock, hormone therapy, and the benefit of my body looking like a pin cushion for half an hour, I want to know what draws a person to kill mice for a living. My exterminator explained: “Twenty years ago, I worked for IBM and was visiting my girlfriend on the Upper West Side. There’s a knock on the door and the guy standing there says he’s an exterminator. Ten minutes later, he hands us an invoice. When I saw how much he made, I quit my job on the spot.”
He later returned to “rodent proof ” our apartment. And indeed, this service cost more than what our building had contracted him to do, but I paid it. In cash. I would’ve paid ten times his fee. It took four hours, a staple gun, wire clippers, a roll of chicken wire, and two boxes of Brillo pads for him to fence the walls behind our counters, oven, dishwasher, and fridge. These walls now look like homecoming floats. But we haven’t seen a mouse since.
See, a country mouse never gives up.
But we did get a new cat—just in case. Her name is Sweet Pea. She comes in at four months, four pounds, and four ounces, and we can already tell she’s a killer.
