Ant Problem
I really thought it was a dog. I swear. I swear I didn’t know.
How could I? Vi never told me anything. She just expected people to know.
Walking into Grandma Vi’s house was like walking into a halloween haunted maze made out of ant traps. Flypaper hung from the ceiling and walls like streamers. The floor was littered in dusty plastic traps, and empty and half-full boxes of borax and liquid ant killer were stacked along the walls. The smell of the place was strange and cloying. Soap and poison.
I never liked being there. She made me uncomfortable, even as a kid, when her paranoia wasn’t her defining trait just yet.
She was a neat freak back then. Her rules were foreign to me, but not as foreign as the genuine outrage she expressed when those rules were broken. I didn’t even know what a coaster was, why was I being snapped at for putting my water cup down? You’re not sleeping in the attic bed, why are you so pissed at me for leaving it un-made? Don’t get mad at me for not drying the entire shower after I’ve used it– I didn’t even know anybody did that.
Grandma Vi would never tell you what weird unusual protocols she expected you to follow, she’d just fly off the handle when you didn’t do it, and that’s how you’d find out that it was disrespectful to wear a hat indoors or not offer to wash the dishes as a guest. She’d turn up her sharp jaw and suck her thin teeth and scowl endlessly.
I could honestly say that I missed that version of her.
Compared to this Grandma Vi, that one was a delight.
This Grandma Vi collected dirty paper dishes in her room. She stacked them high. She sprayed them with bleach. She refused to let me wash them– the sink drains were all clogged in the house now, stuffed with paper towels and borax.
“Ants could get in through there,” she explained.
When I brought Grandma Vi her groceries, they had to undergo a period of “disinfecting,” in which they were double-bagged in black trash bags and sealed for two days. This, Vi reasoned, would suffocate any insects that might be passengers inside the lettuce or the cornflake boxes.
No sugar, obviously. Ants loved sugar.
I tried not to eat in front of Vi. The day I spent as her full-time caretaker, I unwrapped an egg sandwich in front of her and it sent her into a panic attack.
“You’re dropping crumbs all over the floor!” she screamed.
I wasn’t. And even if I was, it’s not like the floor could get any dirtier. Vi would not let me vacuum because I did it wrong. Vi didn’t vacuum either– she couldn’t. Just walking around the house left her fatigued. Her hair had always been long and thick, but it was so hard for her to care for now that she’d had it shaved near to the scalp. She’d struggle to lift anything heavier than a spoon.
I reminded myself of that daily. Grandma Vi was a sick, dying old woman. She was in pain. She was used to independence and solitude. This was the worst she’d ever felt and the most disempowered she had ever been.
And, importantly, my dad was paying me to do this. Because someone had to.
So I tried not to hate her guts. And I ate my meals outside, on the picnic table in what used to be her garden, even in the winter. I refrained from cleaning without her permission. I never, ever, ever used the front door.
The front door could let in ants.
The ant obsession– I never found out where that came from. My dad just shrugged it off as one more drop in a giant bucket of assorted mental illnesses.
“She’s been getting worse ever since Grandpa Joe passed,” dad said to me over the phone while I called him, crying in my car one day. Vi’s husband had been gone since before I was born. If there was a tolerable version of her, I never met it. “Grandma Vi relied on him. When your mom was growing up, Vi was actually a very quiet, mellow person. She was never… nice. But she felt safe. She had security. She didn’t feel like she had to go on the attack all the time.”
I hated imagining my mom as a child in this horrible house.
“Your Grandpa Joe was a nice person,” dad said. “Not like her at all. I believe that missing him is a big part of what made her crazy.”
I didn’t argue with him, but I didn’t think he was right. Because in Grandma Vi’s halloween haunted house of traps and poison, every single photo of Grandpa Joe– a tall, dark, handsome man with a very kind smile– had been turned backwards to face the wall.
The first month I was there was quiet. Then the scratching started.
It sounded like a raccoon climbing around on the roof and walls. Every time I thought it was done, it started up again. It was the deep of night, and I couldn’t sleep. I slipped out of the attic bed where Vi still expected me to sleep and climbed the ladder down to the main floor. There was a porch light outside. I hoped it would scare away any animals.
But as I started unlocking the back door, a sharp, cold hand grabbed my arm. I jumped. Vi was there, her dark eyes wide, her wrinkled face pulled tightly into a mask of pure terror.
“Don’t open the door,” she hissed.
“I’m just turning the light on,” I said. I unlatched the door.
Vi screamed, and I felt a sudden hot pain across my face. I put my fingers to my cheek and felt blood. Vi had scratched me. I swore, and she re-latched the door. I ran to the bathroom to wash my new cuts out in the clogged sink.
When I found Vi again, she was in bed. She wasn’t sleeping, though. And she definitely wasn’t sorry.
“If you attack me again, I’m leaving,” I said to her.
“You oughtta be grateful,” Vi said. “You don’t even know what you almost did, stupid.”
I refrained from calling her the names I was thinking of calling her in my head. I swallowed those teeth and asked,
“What did I almost do?”
Vi laughed.
“You were just gonna let in those ants.”
In Vi’s house, I was never to leave the house at night. I was never to open the back door at night. I was never to open the front door at all. I was never, under any circumstances, to let anyone else inside the house.
The scratching would come every few nights. Once it started, Vi finally started asking me to fix things around the house. She didn’t let me clean, but she did make me go up on the roof and look for holes. Nests. Anywhere ants could be living or trying to get in. And for once, to her credit, I did find some damage. It looked like termites, maybe. I sprayed bug killer and sealed up the chewed spots.
One day, Vi screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night. I ran into her room to find her frantically springing from her bed. She collapsed into a dresser and knocked over the stack of paper plates she kept there, sanitized with bleach. She was staring at the window with pure horror. I didn’t see anything out there. She wouldn’t tell me what she saw. She only wept and shook and cried Joe’s name over and over. The next day she had me cover that window with cardboard and plastic and seal it. And then I had to re-seal it, because she saw a microscopic space that no one else would notice. Big enough for a potential ant to get in.
“You never met your Grandpa Joe,” Vi said to me out of the blue one day. Her room was lightless and stuffy, and she had spent her recent days sitting in bed and doing nothing but listen to audiobooks on an old cd player. “You never saw him.”
“I heard he was nice,” I said.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He’s never coming back.”
“My dad says he’s with us in spirit,” I said. “He says he can feel him sometimes, loving us.”
“Listen, you moronic little girl. He’s dead. He’s not with us. So if you ever see him around, you better tell me. And you better keep the doors locked.”
I was taken aback.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
“No. But the ants have. They’ve seen him and they know what he looks like. And I’ve seen the ants.”
Vi would deteriorate a little bit at a time, and then a lot at once. When I started, I wondered if we’d develop some sort of closeness over time. That was a very silly idea. The more Vi needed me, the less she could stand me. She would snip at me and scream at me. The first time she needed my help in the bathroom, I was punished for helping her with a long string of insults and criticism which, at this point, I had learned to tune out.
I brought her a bowl of corn flakes in a paper plate in bed. She commanded me to spray her stacks of paper plates with bleach while she ate.
“I don’t think that’s safe,” I said. She shot me a dagger glare.
“You want ants in here?” she said.
“I just think this is an unventilated room and it’s not safe to spray bleach all over everything.”
Vi responded to this by throwing her bowl of corn flakes at me. Cereal splashed all over the floor. Milk soaked into my sweater and my hair.
“That’s it,” I said.
I took my wet sweater off. I changed pants. I took the vacuum cleaner out of its dusty closet.
Vi screamed and screamed at me as I cleaned up the mess. I took all of the paper plates and put them in garbage bags. I took down the flypaper. I threw the empty borax boxes in the dumpster.
Vi couldn’t do anything but sob while I took over the house. When I got thirsty, I set my cup down on the table without a coaster.
I was worried the neighbors were going to call the cops with all the yelling and crying going on, but no one did. Once, I looked out the window and saw a dark man in dark clothes standing on the sidewalk across from the house. I couldn’t see his eyes under his cap, but I thought he was looking at me. There was something familiar and disturbing about him which I couldn’t place. And then he was just gone. I looked away for a second and he had disappeared.
The sun went down. I came into Vi’s room with her dinner and her pills.
“You hate me,” she glared. “You really, really hate me. I must deserve it.”
“Vi, I cleaned your house.”
“You’re gonna let in those ants.”
“If ants get in, we’ll just stomp them. Listen, I’m not gonna live here and help you if I can’t live in this house.”
“Then you better let me die.” She scowled at me. I rolled my eyes.
There was a scratching sound at the front door. Vi jumped and pulled the blanket up like a child afraid of the dark.
I stood up to go see the source of the noise.
“Get back here!” Vi shouted. “I’m just seeing what it is,” I said.
“You stupid bitch! Get back here!” Vi screamed louder as I walked up the hall to the front door. The scratches sounded heavy, huge. Not like a raccoon at all, but something bigger. For a second, I had a sudden, irrational thought– it was that man I saw before. It was that tall man with the cap. And when I opened the door, I thought, I would see him standing there, his uncannily and unplaceably familiar face grinning at me. And his teeth would be black, and his eyes dark and gleaming. I got scared. My fingers stopped on the latch.
I flipped on the front porch light.
I peeked through the hole.
Of course there was no man. It was a dog.
A big black lab. He had a collar around his neck. He scratched the door again, tail wagging.
I hadn’t seen this dog around the neighborhood before, but to be fair, I hadn’t been able to get out very much in the past few months. It could very well be a neighbor dog. He was big, but he looked skinny. His dark coat shined slick in the porch light.
I unlocked the front door. The dog looked at me through the screen, its glittering dark eyes docile.
“Hi,” I said to the dog. The dog wagged its tail slowly. “Are you lost?”
The dog didn’t whine or bark, but only pawed at the door again.
Vi would never, in a million billion years, let me help this dog. But Vi wasn’t in charge anymore. So I opened the door.
I only meant to step outside and check his collar. But the moment the door was open, the big black dog strode into the house.
Not a labrador, I realized. Maybe some kind of great pyrenees mix. It was big. Huge, even. It crossed the threshold and I swore it seemed to grow.
Not a pyrenees. A dane.
As the dog brushed past me, I reached my hand down to pet his dark coat.
My fingers passed through something grainy, crunchy, and moving. Something which slithered in rivers around my fingers, millions of tiny legs–chitinous, feathery, pinching.
Not a dane.
Not a dog.
The creature didn’t move right as it lurched down the hall. The legs bent wrong. The body writhed. It moved quickly, with purpose.
I was too shocked to move. The dog-thing swelled up into an enormous, amorphous mass, and flooded into Grandma Vi’s bedroom, where she was already screaming.
I ran to her. I did hate her, but I ran to her. Maybe I meant to help her. Maybe I just wanted to see.
Either way, by the time I got there, there was nearly nothing left of Grandma Vi but a thrashing corpse.
I couldn’t tell when the wild flailing stopped being her death throes and started being purely the erratic undulations and tossings and turnings of millions of tiny black ants, moving her bones.
They crawled all over the floor. They crawled all over the ceiling. They crawled over my arms and legs. Not biting, just moving over me on their way to and from her.
I turned and fled the house.
The ants didn’t follow me. They were far too engrossed in dismantling their quarry.
I really didn’t know. How could I? Vi never told me.
She expected me to just know.
