Infestation
In the afternoon, the three of us go down to the lake and splash around the shallow end, eat snacks on the beach. The moths are not so bad on the sand. There are few people out there to stare much at Mom and her man. Malthus dashes into the water and paddles around with his head up.
On the blanket, I tell Mom about Etienne Trouvelot. I tell her about Roberto’s dissertation, Easter Island, human overpopulation, the changing earth. She listens intently, as she is apt to do with the facts of impending tragedy—Mom has a wonderful intelligence when her mind works right. She nods approval. Asks questions. I answer all I know, promise to show her the articles Roberto sent me in the days after his visit. She says, “And they know about this, don’t they? They know about this and they’re keeping shush. Reagan’s not going to do anything, those bastards. Some virus will appear and infect half the plant and they’ll say thinking about it is bad for business. We’re all gonna die and it’s all their fault. Oh dear, I know that death is in us. I’m just sorry that I had to meet your father when I did and pass it on to you.”
On the third day of Mom’s visit, Andy storms out of his office, gets into the car, and drives off. Not a word about where he’s going, but he’s refused to talk to me since I let Mom in. He’s been sleeping with his back to me and yelling at me for the way I make the bed, fix the tuna, breathe loudly through my nose. He makes midnight calls to his folks in LA, and I fear he’s plotting something big.
Ronnie and Mom seem to know what Andy’s ill humor is about. I’ve told them that his completion date has been put off until May at least. When Andy takes off, Ronnie decides it’s time to go and let us work out our problems alone. They pack up their things and say they can lay low with friends in Providence until it’s safe for Ronnie to return home. They tickle Heather and she bubbles up.
Andy returns at three in the morning, breath stinking of wretchedness, and falls to sleep on the floor of the baby’s room.
Surely he suspects something from the correspondence between Roberto and me—all those envelopes from Boston with my name on them and a university return address. He keeps yelling and saying things like, I’m a Jezebel, I’m just like my mother, like I think I’m so smart but I know nothing about the way the world works. I tell him that I’m not a child, that he’s the child in some ways, that I’m smarter and better read and more of a scholar than he’ll ever be. The last thing I need now is another baby to look after and that’s just what he’s being: a big baby about this whole thing. He thinks he can disappear?—well, I can disappear too. You wouldn’t, he says, and I’ve got him. What is it about you and Roberto, he says, and I say what does it matter because the world is screwed anyway, it’s not like I go around trying to make it worse, and what you do and don’t know won’t change anything about that, so you should just shut up and let me be your wife.
By mid-month, an illness has broken out among the caterpillars. Some have managed to cocoon themselves, appearing as the only fruit of the summer—two-inch red pods, like dried Mexican chilies. But others begin to starve during the scramble to grow fat before cocooning and molting begin. They move onto secondary and tertiary food sources, stripping some of the evergreens bare like the tails of diseased squirrels. The scarcity of good food leaves them vulnerable. They begin to prey on each other. They begin to die, wilting, as a vegetable or old woman might.
This is what the books call an epizootic: Holocaust proportions of collapse, spectacular droves of dying, piling up like foliage, dropping from the tree trunks into buckets that I throw atop bonfires and curse. They crunch under foot on the driveway, squash on the lawn, splatter on the back porch. Andy and I collect them as we would blueberries on a normal summer’s day. Heather, no longer frightened by the lifeless caterpillars, crawls around the back deck and enjoys the sunshine. I put a nozzle on the hose and spray the driveway and furniture clean. And Andy palms a muddied tennis ball, chucks it into the air and hoots aloud when Malthus grabs it on the first bounce, earning applause from his wife and little girl.
For a moment, it seems that the worst must be over: nature will give us our earth back and order will restore itself. Human-kind will emerge victorious once again, and this episode will remain a tiny footnote in the books, future fodder for the naysayers and predictors of doom.
And then one day— the day that Roberto and Zoe are supposed to make a second visit—it happens. A beige-out like a Nor’easter inundating the sky. The hushing sound of movements too small, too delicate to be heard individually. The ash-like dance of gypsy moths in flight. And the feeling of rebirth and release as the earth is abandoned, the sky cluttered, and the horde sweeps the horizon like a storm.