A Natural Solution

I first saw the tiny pair of lover beetles that lived in the microwave clock scuttling back home when I flicked on the light. Just the two of them, marooned in the kitchen. Beautiful little things. Lavender with a sheen. I watched them climb the cabinet, envying their singular focus. I had been like that once. Focused. They disappeared inside the microwave, up, up, up, until their small, armored shells began to glow. They would stay like that, held by time, for hours.

There was a sound. Sounds had taken on new meaning in the months after Finn began to walk. A sort of guttural grunt. Not urgent. I breathed. Realized my toe was on something, in something, rather, and I crouched to examine. A sticky mass. A splash of orange juice that had attracted crumbs and, behind it, another lover beetle, this one alone, dashing for a shadow. 

The kitchen hadn’t been properly cleaned in months. Not since the woman my mother-in-law had hired as a gift in the weeks after Finn’s birth. Months had somehow passed, and what had I been doing? Not cleaning the house, that was clear. I had thought of it: you should do this or that. For example: you should answer the phone that rang and rang. You should have that conversation with Alyssa. Should factored pretty heavily into my internal narrative, even as obligation culture had turned post-obligation and “should” got reassigned to a long list of red flags. 

Finn laughed then. Baby laughter, made of tiny joy-particles, whipped to high froth. Laughter! He was whacking his tennis racket against a basket, so his rainbow blocks fell from basket to floor. This was joyous, miraculous. That blocks fell when thwacked. Click-a-clack-clack! So many sensory toys to the tile. A wild bit of fun. And then, just as quickly as the laughter ascended, it was gone. Finn glowered, struggling with his tennis racket, pressing it against the basket, pushing it. That guttural grunt again. 

I went to him, bent to his level. Here was a teachable moment. 

“Use your words,” I said in the voice of a popular online child development specialist. I watched him for recognition but got only his most feral grunt in response. “Use your words.” Repetition was important. It was a cumulative strategy. “USE YOUR WORDS,” I barked in a voice more like my own than the popular online child development specialist. As if these were the only words I knew and I both could and would—and should—bend them to my every meaning. 

The tennis racket came at me then, and I turned my face into the hardest stone version of itself. My stare contained the ultimatums I knew better than to speak. “WE DO NOT EVER EVER EVER HIT ANYONE WITH THE TENNIS RACKET,” I said as Finn wound up the arm that held the tennis racket. 

Suddenly this was hand-to-hand combat. He grunted and I seethed. I told myself I did not want to lose a tooth. This was self-defense. Fight or flight. I had to hold his arm back. I had to overpower him until he gave up and dropped the tennis racket. There was no other way. I would not raise a villain. 

But he was just a baby. I saw that. A baby, almost comically so. His arms around my leg, his head came just to my knee. I lifted him and pressed him to my heart. I held him like that for minutes, until his heaving stopped, and his head popped up, a tear quivering in his duct. 

“I want to show you something.” I pointed to the microwave clock. “See the beetles? See? They love each other just like we do.”

Finn pointed too and grunted. 

“What’s that, Sport?” my husband asked, appearing from outside, smelling of cut grass and gasoline.

I nudged Finn’s pointing finger away from the microwave clock. A protective gesture. I hardly knew what I was protecting. The sanctity of the kitchen? The love between those beetles—what I assumed was love because it took a familiar shape? Voluntary contact. That was love, was it not? 

“Our son tried to hit me with the tennis racket just now,” I said, “and things got dicey. And when I say dicey, I mean to say that I engaged.”

“Sport!” my husband cried, holding his arms out for Finn, but Finn only wanted Mommy. Held tight to the soft flesh of my back. My husband reached instead for a banana, peeled back its skin and took a bite. “I saw the light on in your office,” he said, hopeful, as he chewed.

I nodded. His hope hurt my stomach.

“And …?”

I nodded again. Then shook my head. 

He deflated. It was almost imperceptible, but it had happened. The left corner of his eye collapsed. I saw it. 

“You’ll work on it when you’re ready,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“You’re tired,” my husband said, which was something I had told him. I was tired. I was. Finn hadn’t been sleeping well, and so I hadn’t been sleeping well. But I didn’t like how it sounded coming out of his mouth. 

“I feel like you’re not just saying what you mean,” I said. 

“I am,” my husband said, taking another bite of his banana. “I actually am.”

I chewed the lining of my cheek and said nothing. I didn’t tell my husband that the light was on in my office because I had misplaced my phone charger and gone looking for another. That when I caught sight of the giant papier-mâché heart with floppy arms that had, instead of hands, a pair of acrylic stilettos, I shuddered. The work of many months, what was to be the centerpiece of an exhibition that had been postponed and postponed, a piece I had once described as my attempt to undress the mythos of womanhood—I could no longer stomach my own bullshit. I didn’t tell him that Alyssa called twice a day since I had missed my deadline. 

I didn’t tell my husband about my days—they sprawled, and he would have no metric for their length, their breadth, their slip or their sag. How I managed to do almost nothing, and yet, somehow, everything. Such was the mystery of early parenthood. It defied any kind of story logic. I didn’t tell him about my saved Zillow search for a stucco box in New Mexico. My husband would never understand that I imagined myself something of a Georgia O’Keeffeian character. Especially as Georgia O’Keeffe chose—quite specifically chose—not to have children. I had read this on my near-dead phone during one of Finn’s naps—he would only sleep if our bodies remained in constant contact—and I had wept for the art I would never make. All the papier-mâché beginnings that filled my studio, begun before Finn’s birth. And I understood how mother characters in children’s cartoons had their wholeness flattened down into something that served the story. Then I blinked away my tears so I could witness the specificity of my sleeping son. The shapes of his unconscious hands, the miracle of his breath. 

I didn’t tell my husband about the microwave clock lovers, and I didn’t tell him when I saw another pair, lovesick, chasing each other around the dishwasher door. An instinctive omission. He wouldn’t understand. Perhaps there was something of a lie about it. But if that was a lie, well, I lied a lot. 

I also omitted this: I had maybe sneezed up one of those lover beetles, purple and delicate in a wad of tissue not two days ago. Or perhaps I sneezed into a tissue that had already held the beetle. Either way. I had held it up to the light, amazed at my capacity. Had watched it shiver, preen one wing over the other and leap to the floor.

And what of his life did he omit? I asked myself this question when he got up from bed that night. His shadow moved along the wall. His ankle popped. The bedroom door swung open. Finn shifted inside the cage of my arms. His head, a thing of greatness, pressed hard on my upper arm, numbed it almost completely. And I was just supposed to stay here, arm going dim until sleep found me, while my husband did whatever it was a person did at this hour of the night.

There it was: the resentment the popular online child development specialist warned against. I could say nothing, she said. Do nothing. And my resentment would multiply and become resentments plural. Her recommendation? I should use my words.

I heard dishes shift in the kitchen sink, and suddenly all I could think about was food. Food I didn’t even have in the kitchen. Greasy meat folds and wedges of thick cheese. Olives! An expansive charcuterie board! I heard my husband’s voice all the way down the hall and through the closed door. The generic shape of his voice, not what specifically he had said. Apparently, my husband was a late-night eater who spoke loud words into the void. Having no idea how long it had taken me to get our child to sleep, and with what excruciating technique. Nobody knew. Nobody had ever known in quite the way that I knew. I resented them all. And then the bedroom door opened: my husband backlit in the doorway.

He made a gesture like, come with me. I made a gesture like, are you insane? His gesturing intensified. Hand waving, pointing, flailing. Fine, I assented with my hand. Fine. I moved myself in delicate increments from the pressure of Finn’s warm back. Untangled my arm from under his head. Waited. When nothing happened, I propped a pillow against Finn’s back, a fluffy and uncomplicated stand-in, and rolled off the bed. 

My husband was warm and uncomplicated, smelling of face lotion. He gazed down the hallway in the direction of the kitchen. “Prepare yourself,” he whispered into the hair that covered my ear. 

The light was on. The lover beetles, everywhere. Every size of them. Every color. As if the kitchen was a snow globe that had been turned upside down and shaken. Shaken very hard. On the countertop, in twos, in threes, sucking upon a particularly gratuitous crumb constellation. On the floor, surrounding the sticky patch in a fairy circle. On the walls. The ceiling. My god. 

“I came in to get a snack,” my husband said, “hit the light, and they were everywhere. Roaches, I think.”

“Not roaches.” I remembered roaches mainly from college. From the dingy stacked apartment where other people’s noises bled through the wall. Bottles of liquor and decisions I had made by not making them. People I allowed in and experiences I had not refused and art I had made freely, wildly, art that was heavily inspired by other people’s art. And on hot nights, something might dart between the canvases, between the papier-mâché. They ran when the light came on. They resisted scrutiny. 

“They’re not roaches,” I said. “Look at them.” 

His face screwed up, and I could not believe we were looking at the same thing. These bugs were something else: sparkling, gleaming. 

“Maybe water bugs.” He held up his treaded slipper, a weapon he was prepared to use. 

He whacked the wall. The lovers darted, shimmied to shadowed crevices, to the underbellies of appliances. Up into the microwave. The slower ones became oil slick streaks. 

I watched him for a moment. The place where his beard connected to his sideburns, like the line of demarcation between two suburban yards. Was he changed, or was I? Or had we both changed, independently grown our own ways? I was aware of my equilibrium. Of trying to stand on an incline. The color of the lover beetles shifted. Purple to the savory green of malachite. 

“Where the hell are they coming from?” he asked as he handed me his other slipper. 

“I have no idea.” I smelled foot. Inside, the mashed fur of his pressure points.

“Everything seemed fine.” He turned and smacked the cabinet door. Down came his slipper on the damp edge of the sink. Two writhed. “Business as usual. Until I turned on that light. How’s that for a metaphor?” A final thwack. “That’s it. I’m calling someone first thing.”

“No.” I dropped the slipper to the floor, just missing a cluster of lovers. “I don’t want those people in my house with their little contracts and their little waivers and their little spray units.” It wasn’t only that, but here was a stake I could stab into the ground. “They say it’s safe for children and pets, but have you ever noticed they wear hazmat suits?”

We were silent, gazing at the beetles’ retreat. Their sheer numbers. How much darkness must there be if they all fit inside it?

“Okay.” He swallowed. “How about we tackle it ourselves? We’re good at that, right?” He touched my arm. Once there had been a substantial muscle there. From forming giant papier-mâché sculptures made dense and heavy with glue. Pounds of glue. Once I had flexed whenever my husband touched me. Rising to the occasion. I had prepared myself for his daily returns home—the secret was a balm highlighter applied without restraint to the tops of the cheekbones, the inner corner of the eyes, the cupid’s bow. 

“I’ll do a natural solution,” I said. “Maybe some kind of an herb spray?”

“You know natural isn’t regulated by the FDA, right? Natural could mean literally anything.” 

“Something light and fresh,” I said. “Something safe.” I meant something that might encourage the lovers to seek shelter elsewhere. We didn’t have to be so binary: either harbor them or kill them. We didn’t have to be so obtuse.

“Safe isn’t regulated either, you know.” My husband wiped the tread of his slipper with a wet paper towel. 

The next day, in the grocery aisle that held all the poisonous substances in all the gruesomely colored bottles, I selected the one that was not like the others. This bottle was orange. Like the sugar candies my grandfather had bought in bulk and doled out. Natural in big curvy letters. There was a long and unbroken paragraph that took up half the bottle warning me to only use the contents of the bottle in the following way: from a distance of 18 inches, using the pointer finger of the dominant hand, confidently depress the spray nozzle into the aura of the offending bug. Repeat as many times as necessary, not to exceed three times in the span of 24 hours. 

At home, I would spritz their auras as they darted across the floor, the wall, the ceiling. If I missed, I missed. My aim had never been good. 

At first, I liked the smell. Lemongrass and sweet oranges. It was uplifting and nostalgic. I sprayed it in corners and under appliances. I sprayed it into Finn’s top drawer where I had seen one dart under a burp cloth. 

It was only after a few days that I smelled death. Inhaled it all over the house whether I had sprayed it there or not. In the fresh laundry that lay in a rainbow swirl. In the unmade folds of our bed. Lemongrass and sweet oranges underpinning the rancor of death. 

I held up the bottle and read the ingredients. I had never heard of most of them. And, of course, death was natural. The daily decomposition of personas and agendas. The gradual loss of whole selves.

In the space of a few days, Finn went from crying sometimes to crying constantly. The pitch of his screams turned all the way up until the knob would not turn anymore. A treble preoccupation. The sounds he made soared. He seemed affected by almost everything, and as I looked into his bloodshot eyes I thought I understood how he must feel. Existing. The pressures mounting as they were, almost constantly. I held him. Did he even know he existed yet? How confronting it must be. How exhausting. I sang to him. I tried to sing louder than his screams. Louder than the phone which kept ringing and ringing. But nothing helped. 

I looked around for something I could blame. What had changed most recently? I saw the bottle of natural bug spray. Natural my ass. Finn grasped my leg and screamed. Could he smell it too? The poison all over the house? Floating in little particles and falling into his airfield. This was exactly what I was trying to avoid. Sprays with as-yet-unknown side effects. Complications that might balloon into class action lawsuits, and it would all trace back to now. 

The phone rang as I pitched the natural bug spray into the garbage. As I washed Finn’s burp cloth over and over. As the remaining lover beetles danced in the darkness and mated and gave birth to their strange and beautiful babies somewhere inside my house. 

From that point, unchecked as they were, their numbers only grew. 

I watched them run in a line along the ceiling of Finn’s room during naptime, his body draped over mine, his head pressed into my inner arm. While he slept, my eyes opened wider. And they stayed open like that. More open than they had ever been before. 

And what I saw was shimmering beetle lines raying out across the whole house. Geometric in design. Along baseboards, in deep grout lines, and finally, I saw that each line fed into a single line, long and unbroken, trailing into my office. The phone rang. Finn began to cry. I scooped him up and looked at my phone. It was Alyssa. It was always Alyssa. I also wanted to cry. Instead, Finn and I followed the line of beetles into my office where I confronted the papier-mâché heart that Alyssa was so concerned with. I had meant something when I created this form from strips and strips of tissue paper and glue. Had had some kind of thesis, but I couldn’t remember now what it was. Mom Brain is what they call it. The gradual rot of an otherwise perfectly functioning organ. 

I turned on the office light, and Finn abruptly stopped crying. Mesmerized by the giant heart with its flopping arms, its translucent platform heel hands. In the light it was clear that the line of beetles was a two-way superhighway inside the heart and back out again. I turned my ringing phone into a flashlight and shined it up into the crude hole that had been bitten into the heart’s pointed base.

I set Finn down and lifted the giant heart. Outside we went, out close to the fence line where I took a hammer to the papier-mâché heart. Hammered it to bits. Finn watched me from the doorway. His face still splotched from crying. He seemed startled to see me take such action. Had he ever seen me move this much? The lovers ran about in the sun and disappeared into the grass, color shifting from green to common roach brown. 

My phone rang in my pocket. Would those beetles tell stories about the old days when their love ran wild, and time was simply a container that held them while they slept? I answered the phone. I finally had an update for Alyssa. Her voice, so much kinder than I remembered. The heart, I told her, had performed its highest calling and now must die. Must change. Must transmute. And Alyssa, adept at working with artists, at interpreting our mostly dead language, accepted that as truth. 

When I looked back to the doorway, there was my husband holding Finn. 

“It’s done,” I said. “It’s finally done, and I can move on.” 

My husband gave a thumbs up as if my behavior was normal, was appropriate, was perfect. And he took Finn inside, leaving me to my process.