Recalling the Dave Sedaris Mouse

There have been a few times in self’s reading life when she encounters a book that she never wants to end.  In 2012, those times have been powerfully scarce.

Let’s see which books — of the ones self read in 2012 — can fit into this category?  Here are a few:

• Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (the first 3/4 of it), by Rhoda Janzen.
• Dreams From My Father:  A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama.
• Three Cups of Tea (even though this book has been discredited, and poor Dave Relin, the guy who co-wrote it with Greg Mortenson, seemed to feel humiliated by the project)
• A Voyage Long and Strange:  Rediscovering the New World, by Tony Horwitz, one of self’s favorite writers.
• The Last Empress, a novel by Anchee Min.

And —

Self!  Will you never get over your infernal lists ???

Back to the ostensible reason for this post, which is this:

Self has now stumbled on a story about killing an animal that is almost as hysterically funny as the previous Champion of All Funny Animal Killing Stories, Dave Sedaris’s piece about killing a mouse (A herculean task.  As, the mouse Dave encountered really wanted to live.  But —  don’t we all?  Want to live, that is?  Which reminds self of that Morag Joss mystery, the one about the old lady who’s hired to house-sit a castle  —  aaargh!  No, self no!  Back to the topic!).

The one self is reading is in Jeannette Walls’ (very wrenching) memoir, The Glass Castle, whose pages self has been doling out in miserly fashion, so that she can ensure she will still be reading it when the New Year rolls around.

The animal in question is a huge, icky rat, a rat that dived headlong into a punch bowl filled with sugar left on the kitchen counter (Let’s just put it this way:  Walls’ mother is not going to receive any awards for Good Housekeeping).  Walls describes the terribly fraught encounter in this way:

This rat was not just eating the sugar.  He was bathing in it, wallowing in it, positively luxuriating in it, his flickering tail hanging over the side of the bowl, flinging sugar across the table.  When I saw him, I froze, then backed out of the kitchen.

Next thing you know, this intrepid creature leaps onto the stove, then onto a pile of potatoes, then hisses ferociously at the narrator’s brother when he attempts to kill it with a cast-iron skillet, then establishes sole mastery of the kitchen when the children run out the door.

That night, the youngest in the family, a poor lass named Maureen, is whimpering because she is afraid the rat will come to her bed and bite her.

She tells the narrator she can hear the rat “creeping nearer and nearer.”  The narrator calls her sister a wuss and, just to prove it, switches on the light.

There, right next to the sister’s face, is a HUGE NASTY RAT.

After all was said and done, the children did triumph over the rat.  But if they expected any praise from their mother, think again:

“Mom said she felt sorry for the rat.  Rats need to eat, too,” she pointed out.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

NYTBR 15 April 2012: What’s on Dave Sedaris’s Reading Shelf

The NYTBR has inaugurated a new column, “By the Book,” in which certain prominent writers are asked about the books currently on their reading shelf.  Here are the answers from Dave Sedaris:

Book on the Nightstand:   Shalom Auslander’s Hope:  A Tragedy

Last “Truly Great” Book Read:  Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy:  Ordinary Lives in North Korea; Wells Tower’s story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Book that made him want to write:  Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Et Tu, Dave Sedaris?

In which Dave Sedaris chronicles his fascination with Costco:

If anything should be bracketed by matching bookends, I suppose it’s an author tour. The ones I’d undertaken in the past began in one independent or chain store, and ended, a month or so later, in another. The landscape, though, has changed since then, and it’s telling that on this latest tour I started and finished at a Costco.

The first one I went to was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was spending the weekend with my sister Lisa, gearing up for six weeks of travel, when her husband, Bob, expressed a need for light bulbs. “Anyone game for a quick ride to Costco?” he asked, and before he could even find his keys I was panting, doglike, beside the front door.

Living in cities, it’s easy to avoid the big-box superstores. Their merciless lighting, their stench of rubber and cheap molded plastic — it’s not the way I normally like to shop. At Costco, though, I’d found displays of pain relievers: Anacin, Bayer, Tylenol. Eight major brands were represented. Pills were paired into single-serving envelopes, then stapled in rows to a bright sheet of poster board. It looked like something you’d see behind the counter at a gas station. There the packets might cost two dollars each, but here the entire display — maybe a hundred and fifty doses — went for just twelve bucks.

— from “Author, Author?”, in the 30 March 2009 issue of The New Yorker

Self can’t help wondering if the aforementioned Lisa is the sister with the feet, as described in an essay in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Self is sooo glad she is the only writer in the family!

And, apropos of nothing, did dear blog readers know that Benadryl is not sold anywhere in Hong Kong? This self found out the hard way, during one of her extreme bouts of insomnia in that hectic city.

Self, too, has written about shopping in Costco, at Christmastime, no less (in a story, “Door to Door,” in Mayor of the Roses). Alas, she cannot continue posting. She has to make dinner.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

About That Mouse . . .

A page further in David Sedaris’ “Nuit of the Living Dead”:

This mouse had nothing going for him, and yet he struggled, using what, I don’t really know.

And yet further:

A creature that determined, you want to let it have its way, but this was for the best, whether he realized it or not.

Self wishes this story would never end. She wishes that David Sedaris were always in his house in France, that it would forever be 3 A.M., that Hugh would never return. So that Dave could write, over and over again, about all the various ways in which it is possible to kill a mouse.

Dave, You Kill Me

It is late. Judging from hubby’s position on the couch, self has just succeeded in inducing in him a massive headache. A few minutes ago, self insisted on reading to him the following hilarious (self thought) passage from the Dave Sedaris piece, “Nuit of the Living Dead:”

. . . I went upstairs and found a mouse caught in one of the traps Hugh had set. The steel bar had come down on his back, and he was pushing himself in a tight circle, not in a death throe, but with a spirit of determination, an effort to work within this new set of boundaries. “I can live with this,” he seemed to be saying. “Really. Just give me a chance.”

I couldn’t leave him that way, so I scooted the trapped mouse into a cardboard box and carried him down onto the front porch. The fresh air, I figured, would do him some good, and once released, he could run down the stairs and into the yard, free from the house that now held such bitter memories. I should have lifted the bar with my fingers, but instead, worried that he might try to bite me, I held the trap down with my foot and attempted to pry it open with the end of a metal ruler. Which was stupid. No sooner had the bar been raised than it snapped back, this time on the mouse’s neck. My next three attempts were equally punishing, and when finally freed, he staggered onto the doormat, every imaginable bone broken in at least four different places.

@@##!!!

Alas, dear blog readers, all good things must come to an end. The aforementioned essay is the final piece in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. And self has found the book a great comfort to her (especially after reading two exceedingly violence-steeped novels by E. L. Doctorow). Reading this book, and encountering a brother like Dave’s Paul — who cheerfully informs his family, after his wife has just given birth, that “Mama’s got some tubes sticking out of her pussy, but it ain’t no big thing. She’s lying back, little Maddy’s sucking on her titty just as happy as she can be” — self is beginning to think her own family is not that bad after all. Oh how she will miss Dave’s descriptions of his sisters, one of whom has “appendages connected to her ankles. They feature toes and arches, but I cannot call them feet. In color they resemble the leathery paws of great apes, but in texture they are closer to hooves.” Thank God, self thinks — thank God Dear Bro did not look askance at self’s feet while they briefly shared the apartment on Ruppin Street and at least he did not take notes on her appendages, as Dave apparently did after quickly glimpsing his sister’s feet.

But, as self has said, all good things must come to an end. And though self arrived at this juncture by reading the book ever so slowly, it has come. The end is near. Next on her book list: a novel about a circus, with the intriguing title Geek Love. Because self knows, as everyone from a dysfunctional family knows, and as Dave Sedaris has demonstrated once and for all time: there is a strong connection between families and circuses.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.