ShavinA couple of weeks ago I came home from a lovely night out, tired, happy and ready for bed. I dared to think it might be one of those rare, cherished nights that would pass in delightful oblivion, which is to say that I would sleep, all the way through, until morning.
I took a hefty dose of melatonin and put the dogs in bed. Just as I was about to climb in after them, I heard it. And I knew sleep was just a dream.
"It" was a chihuahua-sized flying cockroach. It was clinging to the molding around my husband's closet, making a noise so far below the human hearing register I can only assume some pre-evolutionary part of my brain was awakened, causing my head to ricochet around and my eyes to lock onto it. The roach fluttered its wings. I shuddered. It chattered. I tiptoed to my closet and got a shoe. I swung. I missed. It flew off the wall and dove under the bedside table.
I hate roaches, as does everyone I know who is not an entomologist. A little research turns up the fact that tens of millions of people have something called katsaridaphobia - intense fear of cockroaches. Entomologist Richard Kaae even suggests that cockroaches are the most feared of all insects.
Our fear goes back to ancient Egyptian times, when "spells" against cockroaches were the Raid of the moment. Documentary producer Emily Driscoll says she once became trapped in a hotel room in India because a roach was sitting on the door handle. A computer programmer in New Orleans reportedly paid his roommate $10 to "take care of" a cockroach in the bathroom, later saying this was "possibly the most emasculating thing" he'd ever revealed.
According to science writer Rachel Nuwer, it does not make sense to fear cockroaches. "Unlike mosquitoes, ticks or fleas, roaches aren't disease vectors, and they do not feed directly on our blood, skin or fluids." My husband echoed this when I called him to tell him about the roach.
"Roaches don't bite," he said from his pristine hotel room in roach-free California. Which was not the issue. Many things don't bite but I still don't want to share my home with them, including daddy longlegs, sloths and Kim Davis. I did not worry the roach would bite me; I worried the roach would crawl on me.
I am not new to critter wars. Thirty years ago I wrote an essay called "Mice Follow Me," which was about how, no matter where I lived, mice always made an appearance. I would realize later that mice did not follow me so much as I followed them. Meaning I repeatedly chose to live where mice had already staked their claim but, in a case of Christopher Columbus-esque reframing, I twisted the circumstances to imply that I was the first arrival.
And roaches, I failed to mention in that long-ago essay, also "followed" me. In my struggling 20s I lived in a trailer so dilapidated the floor in the spare-room closet was completely rotted out. One morning, showering, I tilted my head back to wet my hair. There on the ceiling was an enormous winged one, fluttering, chattering, giddy with anticipation for the moment I would catch sight of it. Another morning I awoke to discover one sleeping in my cupped hand.
The cockroach, it seems, has an image problem. They are unattractive, creepy and dwell in darkness, and the large ones, of course, also fly. Which seems tremendously unfair. Like giving a criminal the superpower of invisibility, making what is already hideous especially talented.
But here's a fact: Although I hate and fear them, the other night, shoe in hand, I missed the roach on purpose. Because I really don't want to kill. I recently set out ant traps in my kitchen after it became clear I was hosting them by the trillions, and still I was visited by sorrow.
What matters is that we wind up there together. Happily, my husband is home from California. And I don't have to pay him to take care of the roach.
Contact Dana Lise Shavin at danalise@juno.com. Her memoir, "The Body Tourist," is available on Amazon.