Thomas M. Disch - The Roaches

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The Roaches

by Thomas M. Disch

Miss Marcia Kenwell had a perfect horror of cockroaches. It was an

altogether different horror than the one which she felt, for instance, toward

the color puce. Marcia Kenwell loathed the little things. She couldn't see one

without wanting to scream. Her revulsion was so extreme that she could not

bear to crush them under the soles of her shoes. No, that would be too awful.

She would run, instead, for the spray can of Black Flag and inundate the

little beast with poison until it ceased to move or got out of reach into one

of the cracks where they all seemed to live. It was horrible, unspeakably

horrible, to think of them nestling in the walls, under the linoleum, only

waiting for the lights to be turned off, and then ... No, it was best not to

think about it.

Every week she looked through the Times hoping to find another apartment,

but either the rents were prohibitive (this was Manhattan, and Marcia's wage

was a mere $62.50 a week, gross) or the building was obviously infested. She

could always tell: there would be husks of dead roaches scattered about in the

dust beneath the sink, stuck to the greasy backside of the stove, lining the

out-of-reach cupboard shelves like the rice on the church steps after a

wedding. She left such rooms in a passion of disgust, unable even to think

till she reached her own apartment, where the air would be thick with the

wholesome odors of Black Flag, Roach-It, and the toxic pastes that were spread

on slices of potato and hidden in a hundred cracks which only she and the

roaches knew about.

At least, she thought, I keep my apartment clean. And truly, the linoleum

under the sink, the backside and underside of the stove, and the white contact

paper lining her cupboards were immaculate. She could not understand how other

people could let these matters get so entirely out-of-hand. They must be

Puerto Ricans, she decided--and shivered again with horror, remembering that

litter of empty husks, the filth and the disease.

Such extreme antipathy toward insects--toward one particular insect may

seem excessive, but Marcia Kenwell was not really exceptional in this. There

are many women, bachelor women like Marcia chiefly, who share this feeling

though one may hope, for sweet charity's sake, that they escape Marcia's

peculiar fate.

Marcia's phobia was, as in most such cases, hereditary in origin. That is

to say, she inherited it from her mother, who had a morbid fear of anything

that crawled or skittered or lived in tiny holes. Mice, frogs, snakes, worms,

bugs--all could send Mrs. Kenwell into hysterics, and it would indeed have

been a wonder, if little Marcia had not taken after her. It was rather

strange, though, that her fear had become so particular, and stranger still

that it should particularly be cockroaches that captured her fancy, for Marcia

had never seen a single cockroach, didn't know what they were. (The Kenwells

were a Minnesota family, and Minnesota families simply don't have

cockroaches.) In fact, the subject did not arise until Marcia was nineteen and

setting out (armed with nothing but a high school diploma and pluck, for she

was not, you see, a very attractive girl) to conquer New York.

On the day of her departure, her favorite and only surviving aunt came

with her to the Greyhound Terminal (her parents being deceased) and gave her

this parting advice: "Watch out for the roaches, Marcia darling. New York City

is full of cockroaches." At that time (at almost any time really) Marcia

hardly paid attention to her aunt, who had opposed the trip from the start and

given a hundred or more reasons why Marcia had better not go, not till she was

older at least.

Her aunt had been proven right on all counts: Marcia after five years and

fifteen employment agency fees could find nothing in New York but dull jobs at

mediocre wages; she had no more friends than when she lived on West 16th; and,

except for its view (the Chock Full O'Nuts warehouse and a patch of sky), her

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Thomas M. Disch - The Roaches

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