Gotham Diary:
Roughing It
21 July 2015
Shall I tell you about the mouse?
Or is it mice? If it’s mice, it’s now mice minus one. That’s to say that a mouse was removed from the apartment — alive.
Before she left the office last night, Kathleen told me that she wanted to order Chinese — she has become fond of the neighborhood restaurant’s Kung Pao Chicken. So, when she came home, I was reading in the bedroom, and not fixing dinner. We chatted for a moment, and I excused myself for a moment to refill a tumbler of wine. The light was off in the dusky kitchen. Standing at the fridge, I heard something. I was pretty sure that I knew what it was, and I was right: there was a mouse crawling around in the recycled Fairway bag of refuse. I gently detached the bag’s handles from the hook, well off the floor, from which I hang garbage bags, and managed to tie them in a knot even as I was coursing toward the front door. By now, I could see the mouse through the plastic bag. It was very small. It was squeezing itself along the inside of the bag. My hope was to reach the garbage chute before the mouse chewed its way out. I wasn’t running, but I was moving much faster than I normally do, even to catch a train. From the old apartment, the garbage chute was almost across the corridor. It’s more of a hike from here.
We never had mice in the old apartment.
I can’t remember just when we first saw a mouse down here, but it was well after we settled in. A long time passed before the second sighting. Recently, however, I’d been seeing a mouse, or catching its darting out of the corner of my eye, just about every other day, and I was steeling myself to say something to the management office about it. Why, you might ask, was I hanging garbage from a hook, however “well off the floor”? Did I not understand anything about mice? Had I forgotten “Hickory Dickory Dock”? And how to square the rather disappointing answer to these questions with the precautions that I had been taking, such as emptying shopping bags as soon as I got home from the store, whether anything actually needed to be put away (in the fridge, say) or not? I am forced to conclude that it was curiosity. The mouse was, first of all, not a rat. It was small and brown and not repellent, and aside from a gnawed piece of cheese (this led to the prompt emptying of shopping bags), it left no traces. If I hadn’t seen it, I shouldn’t have known it was there.
I was learning its route. Its destination, of course, was the kitchen. Several times, my walking in from the living room triggered a dash across the floor and under the dishwasher. I was fairly certain that the space beneath the dishwasher was a dead end for the mouse, because I never saw it scurry in the other way. It would wait until things got quiet, and then work its way back to the point of entry, which, from a series of observations, I concluded must be through one of Kathleen’s two closets. I also concluded that it did not live or linger in that closet, because Kathleen never encountered it there.
Every time I saw the mouse, I was a little bit upset — there really ought not to be mice in the apartment — but the upset was always outweighed by curiosity. Let’s see what happens next.
Now you know why I was in trouble all the time as a child.
(Speaking of curiosity, I did think about buying a cat. I rejected the idea every time — Kathleen wouldn’t have it; the upholstery would be scratched to shreds; kitty litter — but it kept popping back up. I thought about mousetraps, too, and the trip to the emergency room that would inevitably follow trying to set one.)
Moving almost as determinedly as the mouse, I reached the garbage chute, opened it, and pushed the bag through. I doubt very much that the fall of four floors hurt the mouse, although it’s always possible that the bag landed on shards of glass. In any case, I don’t expect that particular mouse to return. All in all, I’m quite pleased at the way things worked out, quite literally tied up with a bow.
Nevertheless, returning to the apartment from the garbage chute, I worried about having a heart attack. The spigot of adrenaline had unquestionably been opened. Carrying a living, squirming thing in a tied-up bag was very disconcerting. What if it burst through the bag and bit my hand in a fit of pique? I was reminded of the lobster, the lobster that wasn’t dead yet.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read that killing a lobster with a chef’s knife is easy. Even Julia Child says so. (Or maybe what she says is that “French chefs get used to it.”) You hold the lobster on the counter with one hand, while you plunge the sharp knife into the interstice between the shell on the head and the shell on the thorax. This, you are assured, kills the lobster “instantly.” Well, maybe. But the one time I tried it, when I flipped over the lobster to cut off the tail, the tail flipped, with a great deal of energy, and it’s a good thing that no one else was in the kitchen, because who knows where the chef’s knife flew. I had been sufficiently macho to plunge the knife into the lobster’s neck, but only on the understanding that this brutal act would put an immediate stop to all signs of life. The idea that a lobster that I was trying to kill might fight back did not bear processing.
I have since learned that, if you need to start a recipe with dead but uncooked lobster, you can cheat: a few minutes in boiling water will kill the thing without doing much cooking. I have also learned that uncooked lobster meat clings to the shell. As if glued on! I haven’t found out how French chefs deal with that.
The moral of the story is: now you know why I always say that my idea of “roughing it” is staying at home.