How (not) to hide the bodies🐭

Mousetrap

 On Thursday, I called my friend, Dan, from on top of my kitchen island, hoping he could tell me what to do about the mouse running around my kitchen.
 
I’d been on a video call with a girl from work when I spied it a few feet away just looking at me from under the oven range as I sat at my desk. “Go away!” I yelled and looked around for something to throw at it before it slipped under the stove.
 
When we had logged onto the call a few minutes earlier, I told my young coworker that I had just seen a mouse scamper under the stove and that my heart was pounding a little. I’d caught movement out of the corner of my eye as I was working on my computer and when I turned, saw a little brown blur moving across the floor and then disappearing from view. When the call started, I remember thinking, “Did I really just see that?” then I turned and the mouse was just sitting there looking at me with its little pink face.
 
My teammate and I carried on with our conversation after the mouse went again under the stove at the far side of my kitchen, and I tried to listen as she went over the outline for a project. But the whole time, I was looking over my left shoulder to make sure I wasn’t under attack.
 
That’s when I saw it had moved even closer and was peering at me about three feet away from under the dishwasher.
 
“Fuck!” I screamed. “Go away!” I yelled, as my coworker watched me clamber on top of my desk chair to get my feet up off the floor. The mouse magically disappeared into some very small crack and my teammate suggested we wrap up the call.
 
That’s when I got on top of the granite island and called Dan, and why in my mind it had to be a man to help me with the mouse is a conversation for another day.
 
But Dan did not answer, so I called my sister instead and kept her on speaker as she screamed in sympathy, just so the mouse knew to stay away and not try to ambush me again.
 
Right around the same time, my neighbor texted to see if he could drop off the local weekly paper. He is a lovely older man who lives a few doors down and when I mentioned to him one day that I used to be a reporter, he offered to share his paper with me when he was done reading it. So now that’s our routine. He comes by on Thursday afternoons and drops it off on my porch.
 
So when he texted, I said it was perfect timing because of the mouse, and he said he’d be right over. The guy had been a Jersey City firefighter for decades, so I had a feeling he enjoyed emergencies and felt good about enlisting his services.
 
After assessing the situation, my neighbor said that there were a ton of mice around because we live so close to a nearby lake. “He’s more afraid of you than you are of him,” he told me. “But we’re still going to have to kill him.”
 
He left to get some mouse traps and when he came back, he pulled a jar of Skippy peanut butter with honey out of his pocket to use as the bait. “They love peanut butter,” he told me.
 
It was then that I realized that I had summoned my mouse earlier that day when I had slathered a hard plastic dog toy with peanut butter from my own jar of (sugar-free) Skippy, since my dog is a prince and I watch his sugar intake. I put the toy down on the tiled kitchen floor and the golden doodle’s tongue dug deep into every nook and cranny of that thing, licking all the peanut butter off and when he was done, he dragged it off the floor and into his nearby Costco bed, where he fell into a deep stupor. He must have been drunk on peanut butter when the mouse first made its entrance, zipping around not far from the dog’s bed, while my pooch’s head lolled off the side and his eyes rolled back. Absolutely useless.
 
Before my neighbor left, he told me that I didn’t have to worry about disposing of the mouse’s corpse once we caught him. “You call me and I’ll come over and take care of it,” he said.
 
I left to go out to dinner and when I returned around 9:00, I was sure I was going to find a rodent garroted by the metal arm of a mouse trap. Actually, my bigger fear was that I was going to come home to find it stuck to my dumb dog’s nose after he made his way through the barricade I had built out of metal stools to keep him out of the kitchen.
 
But neither was the case. The dog anxiously greeted me at the door sans mousetrap clipped to him and when I cautiously peered over the long kitchen peninsula to see if a dead mouse awaited me on the other side, I saw the empty trap, but with all the peanut butter cleared off.
 
I also saw all of the dirty dishes that had been collecting in my sink throughout the day. Because of the mouse assault, I hadn’t emptied the dishwasher from the night before, so everything I had used throughout the day was still sitting there. The oatmeal bowl still covered in blueberry-stained glop and the giant mixing bowl I like to eat my salad for lunch out of. Coffee cups with dried brown drips and the milk frother I’d used to make my frothy coffee at 5 a.m., hardened half and half caked into its metal coil.
 
Mouse or no mouse, I could not come down the next day to that messy scene. That apparently is a very hard boundary for me and something I'm willing to risk my life over. So, I began to quickly throw the clean plates/forks/glasses into their proper storage areas and began to tackle the pile in the sink.
 
The diva in me cannot handle the sink in this place. In my old house, I’d redone the kitchen and installed a giant farmhouse number, with the charming apron front that was so deep you could pile a bunch of things in there and it would never seem like a lot. There was a metal grid on the bottom which lifted everything up so you could rinse debris right down the drain and I hung a rack on the left side where I kept the sponge and left smaller things to dry off.
 
I tried to replicate that setup in my beach house but the measurements of the small square sink don’t seem to align with any metal grids on Amazon to keep things off the bottom, and that side rack now takes up about a third of the sink and I can't see everything that's sitting under it.
 
During my cleaning sprint on Thursday night, my first order of business was to spray down all the errant oatmeal glops and salad leftovers stuck like glue to everything to start loading the dishwasher. I turned the water on hot and used the pull-down sprayer to hose down the sides and directed everything toward the garbage disposal in the middle of the sink. I picked up a dirty fork to direct everything through the black rubber gasket and saw that in the center of it was a wet brown lump, which gave me pause. “Did I eat anything today that looked like that?” I wondered, thinking it looked almost like a big used tea bag or overripe plum, and then I pushed it through the rubber gasket’s opening with the back of the fork and reflexively flipped the disposal’s switch.
 
I’m not going to lie. There was a part of me that wondered, “Was that my mouse?” as I reached for the switch. But then I reasoned that a garbage disposal has disseminated a number of hard things since I moved in. A bunch of lime and lemon halves comes to mind. Surely the blades would make quick work of a little mouse skeleton.
 
But later, I worried about all that fur. And the tail. I thought about that a lot the next day when I saw the empty trap. Had I gone all Dexter and disposed of my mouse’s carcass like I was being watched by the FBI?
 
As you do, I began to Google whether one could dispose of a dead rodent via one’s kitchen garbage disposal, but that does not seem to be a popular search on the internet. The SEO for “can I put dead mouse down garbage disposal” must be pretty low in Google’s rankings.
 
I did, however, find a recipe for cleaning one’s garbage disposal, which I decided to perform during my lunch break, but did not have the heart to pull out the rubber gasket to find what was lurking beneath by myself. I decided to Facetime one of my daughters to lend moral support should I uncover a long tail at the bottom or maybe a big ball of fur. Apparently, I needed somebody to bear witness.
 
I tried my older daughter, who did not pick up, so quickly called the younger one, who did, and I explained the situation.
 
“What the fuck, mom?” she asked, as the older daughter called back and now we had a conference call about my predicament. The younger filled the older in on what I’d been up to in my empty nest of late, and her jaw dropped a bit in horror. “I’m worried about you, mom,” she said, her face coming closer to the screen.
 
“I have to get back to work, Mom, so let’s get on with it,” said younger, and I brought the phone stand alongside the sink and picked up our long metal tongs. “Not the tongs!” they both cried, thinking I’d use the same kitchen utensils to pluck a mouse carcass out of the garbage disposal that I would to turn a piece of chicken frying in a skillet.
 
“I’m just pulling the rubber thing out to look inside,” I assured them, and then plucked the black gasket from the drain and pulled my reading glasses on top of my head to get a good look.
 
Nothing. I mean, a lot of grey gunk coating the sides of the drain opening but nothing on the bottom except a small piece of clear plastic that must have slipped in from one of my many takeout meals. No fur. No tail. No tiny little skull left in the rodent’s wake.
 
Later, I poured a half cup of baking soda into the drain and topped it with a cup of white vinegar, like the internet told me to do to get a garbage disposal clean. I let it sit for 10 minutes and then ran the hot water and flipped the switch and watched the suds swirl around, clearing all the gunk off the sides.
 
My neighbor came back and set a second trap, this one by the oven range, and this time he put a little piece of chocolate chip cookie, maybe in case the mouse wanted some dessert. I floated the idea that I might have ground the mouse up in my garbage disposal, and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Maybe?”
 
Once again, I came down this morning to find two empty traps. I’m still wearing boots when I walk around the house, in case the mouse darts out from a dark corner and tries to bite me. But so far, I haven’t seen any sign of him.
 
I do, however, have a very clean garbage disposal.

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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy

• Nothing is perfect. When I wasn't fighting mice this week, I finished a fun book by my friend Liz Alterman wrote called The Perfect Neighborhood and it had me guessing to the very end! Oak Hill is the kind of town where all the denizens' lives seem perfect until there's a small nick and all the sludge begins to ooze through. Crappy neighbors who bring casseroles to your front door to get a front seat to your tragedy. A well-known actress who lives among them goes missing, which gets all the tongues wagging until two little kids disappear as well. Keenly observed hoity-toity suburb shenanigans and worrying about the kids kept me turning pages to the very end. 

• Hello lovely. This week I went with the Ladycationers to eat some sushi in Asbury and then go across the street to see the loveliest little documentary. Hello, Bookstore is about a little bookshop in Lenox, MA that struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic and the community that came to the rescue. Delightful. The internet says you can rent it on Prime and Apple TV. Delightful.

• There's an app for that. The next night, I went back to Asbury for dinner with two lovely women at Talula's and had the yummiest kale salad. My friends are also sober and I was reminded as we sipped peppermint tea at the end of the meal how lovely it was to have my wits about me. Plus, there's great intimacy being with other women who have struggled just like you. Anyway, one of the gals shared she'd been getting a lot of inspiration from a motivation app and I went home and downloaded it and I really love when little things pop up on my phone's home screen throughout the day. It's like my very own cheerleading section.

• What moves you? Speaking of good company, my friends at In Good Company Dance are celebrating their first year of inspiring dancers and lovers of movement alike with an evening of inspiration. Join them on Nov. 17 to see how they are bringing the community together to explore what moves them. You can get your tickets right here!

• Need to know. Did you, in fact, know that you can get my Sunday emails delivered right to your inbox? It's like the Uber Eats of newsletters.

Wow. Thanks for reading. Seriously, you're the best.

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