The first time I saw a mouse in my apartment, I mistook it for a leaf. As it skittered across the living room floor, I glanced toward a closed window and wondered, “Is there a breeze in here?” There wasn’t, and yet the tiny brown leaf kept blowing. I screamed and jumped on the couch just as the mouse was jumping under it.
Once or twice after that, I spotted a mouse slipping behind a bookcase or into the molding as I entered a room and flicked on the light. Afterward, I’d bait a trap with peanut butter and hope to catch nothing?#34;and succeeded. The mice would retreat, either leaving the apartment or simply leaving no trace. I didn’t try to find out which.
But this year’s murine invasion wasn’t so easy to escape. The first sighting came in late March, when an unnervingly nonchalant specimen sauntered onto my living-room rug. I was curled up with a blanket and a bowl of noodle soup, watching the final moments of The Godfather: Part II. Pentangeli was dead in his bathtub. Hyman Roth was dead at the airport. Fredo’s fishing boat was motoring ominously away from the dock. And the mouse was marching toward the couch. I leapt to my feet and flung the blanket behind me, startling the mouse back into hiding. Then I declared victory and went to bed. The next morning I pretended nothing happened.
Three days later, another sighting: this time in the study. I responded by filling a gap in the floorboards with some ancient caulk a previous tenant had left under the kitchen sink. My pet rabbit, Sampson, a truly worthless mouser, watched from a safe distance. That night another mouse appeared. Lounging next to his supper of mustard greens and kale, Sampson never flinched, but I’d had enough. I got out the broom and began sweeping wildly, jabbing at every dark corner. Lights blazing at 11 p.m., I vacuumed under all the furniture and shoved the coffee table and couch together in the middle of the room. My apartment was beginning to feel less like my own.
Then I saw the mouse scaling the radiator, making a dash for the potted plants standing shoulder to shoulder on the 6-foot-long windowsill. I froze. The mouse hopped from the radiator to the asparagus fern and into the African violet. I flushed it with the broom and for 30 minutes chased it from one pot to another. Finally grabbing a bucket and a newspaper, I prepared to improvise a capture. But before I had the chance, the mouse sprang toward the curtain and (this image still gives me the willies) shimmied all the way to the top.
Now it was staring down at me from two feet overhead, and there seemed to be only one option left. Opening the window and snatching the curtain from the wall, I hurled the whole contraption?#34;rods and all?#34;into the courtyard three stories below. Then I took a shower and called it a night.
Unfortunately, I would discover later that the mouse I’d sent sailing out the window (which doubtless dusted itself off and strode back into the building) was only one of a whole colony that had taken up residence in my apartment. Hearing a squeak one late night, I pulled the stove back from the wall to see two mice bounding into the broiler along the gas line. It was time to call in reinforcements.
The landlord came to the rescue with new caulk, a box of poison and expert-sounding assurances. Don’t worry, he said. These were simply field mice seeking shelter from a chilly spring?#34;as opposed to habitual house-dwellers?#34;and anyway, they’d be gone within a couple of days. “I baited the basements,” he said. “You won’t see them again.” And I didn’t. But the apartment had already lost a familiar feeling. I now saw the couch as a mouse-hop away from the windowsill. The chair by the closet seemed to conceal something that might pounce with tiny, needled feet. I cleaned the oven three times but haven’t used it since April.
Fifty years ago, poet Richard Wilbur stood in a hole a carpenter had made in his parlor floor and felt like Schliemann “when his shovel/Knocked on the crowns of Troy.” The “buried strangeness” of unsanded boards, joists, sawdust and radiator pipes thrilled him, and he recounted his experience in a poem called “A Hole in the Floor.” Standing in that hole, Wilbur saw an exotic otherworld invigorating the known one:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask loveseat
And the whole dangerous room.
For me, the mice provoke a similar sensation. In a dry apartment with hot water, automatic ice, high-speed Internet and plenty of floor-lamps (although no damask loveseat), field mice riding out a cold spell hint at the wildness inflaming?#34;and upholding?#34;all this urban domestication. Peel up, Chicago, and you’ll still find marshland underneath.
Not that I’m looking forward to another invasion. Next year, I hope the poison in the basement keeps the wild mice wild and buried strangeness buried.
