Infestation
July, 1981.
We left the caterpillar jar in the house for weeks. Andy put tiny holes in the top for air. For the first few days, we observed them every meal. First, they ate the tiny blueberry leaves. Then the big one ate one of the little ones. Then we lost interest and the jar ended up on the junk table amid papers, receipts, and sundry boxes. When I give a look again, I see that it’s empty except for a single dry twig. I throw the evidence away.
On advice from the TV and newspapers, I get Andy to put aside his thesis for a morning and join me in the backyard. We wrap the bases of the surviving trees in aluminum foil and smear them with vaseline. They say the caterpillars can’t crawl up the greased foil. I tell Andy that we should be using this stuff on our genitals. Andy’s hair sticks to his damp forehead and he curses the time he could have spent writing. He said that it wasn’t even our house, couldn’t Grandma Harriet hire someone to do it instead? I curse a summer without shade. I curse Andy’s irresponsibility, not wanting to help take care of this place. He counters that we are homeless this summer. I joke that we are gypsies. I tell him about Mom in the 60s following bands around and all the hairy folks with beards and things who seemed ancient to me, though they were probably younger than we are now.
Two days later, the roots below the aluminum are thick with caterpillar masses. Gray bands of softness like winter socks around the trees. Crawling on top of, eating, sticking to each other. We don’t hear cicadas this summer. Or birds. Or crickets. I almost take my mother up on an invitation to visit her in Boston, where there are no caterpillars, but she goes missing for two weeks when I call to confirm that she’ll pick me up at the train.
“Just a few more days now,” Andy keeps saying. “I’m almost there.”
Sometimes he is annoyed with me for no reason. As if I’ve said that it’s not really going to happen, your dissertation, is it? and we’ll be this poor forever. As if I haven’t told him daily that he is my genius no matter what he does. After all, I put up the ads to sublet our apartment near the university. I convinced Grandma Harriet to let us stay in her country house instead of her renting it by the week to some stranger. I thought the quiet and the cheap and the remove from the library would do his writing some good. We should have been celebrating Heather’s first summer. But no backyard. No nature walks. No friends for miles. Just the memory of our courtship in cafes, bars, cars, theater seats, and cross country trips to hold me over.
“I’m losing weight,” I say. “Notice anything? Hmm?”
“Have you noticed that they’re eating the lawn now? The patches of brown are everywhere.”
I tune the radio to the sixth inning of the Yankees-Red Sox game and get Andy to settle down next to me for a few hours until he yells at me for seducing him into beer.
One evening, we have visitors from out of town—Andy’s friend Roberto from the department, his wife, Zoe, and their daughter, Anabelle, just two months older than Heather. I know the plan was for me to commiserate with Zoe about babies while Andy and Roberto talked shop, but I like Roberto better. The way he rattles off facts and tales. He’s set to defend in the fall. He jokes about Mexico and Latin America, about migrant waves of brown people flooding the Wasps out of the Northeast. He says that that’s what the gypsy moths are doing: moving into the neighborhood from abroad, having a bunch of babies, taking over the natives’ jobs. I laugh so hard that I joke to Zoe. “I’m liable to steal your husband away.”
Roberto knows everything about everything. We talk in the corner like old friends conspiring. He tells me about his dissertation, something to do with Easter Island. I let him gab on like an encyclopedia, joking that he should go back in time before Diderot. I even stop him halfway through and take notes. He’s a natural born story-teller. He’ll make a wonderful lecturer some day. He’ll write books and articles that will change the world.
After dinner, with the babies sleeping in the playpen, we sit around glasses of wine and talk softly. Roberto and Andy take turns boasting about their research, and Roberto leans in towards me as if this is a private explication. He tells me that normally, population growth equals increased lifespan, nutrition, and health. But in the twentieth century, the poorest, worst fed, least healthy countries—India, China, most of Africa—have the most explosive population growth. These days, Homo sapiens increases more rapidly every ten years than it previously had every one thousand years. At what point does a population’s density adversely affect its ability to advance economically and demographically? And how is it going to stop? Easter Island is Roberto’s control group, the economist’s wet dream, his chance at science and truth.
This is the way Roberto talks to me—he’s not nearly so secretive as some of his colleagues, who insist that I won’t understand with my measly sophomore’s education—and I believe that knowledge can conquer everything, that, perhaps more than family and love, knowledge is all we’ve got to fend ourselves against the world.