"And good morning to you," said Step. He stood in the kitchen doorway.
"I dropped the milk," said DeAnne.
"What a relief. I thought maybe you had poured it out. The world's largest bowl of Grape-Nuts Flakes."
"I was going to have raisin bran this morning."
"Well that explains everything."
She hated it that he was joking when she felt so awful, but then he helped her stand up again, saying, "You shouldn't be doing that, Fish Lady" and she was able to sit down by the table and watch as he picked up the towels and rushed them into the laundry room. While he was gone, she dared to look back at the window, hoping that she had exaggerated the quantity of June bugs. She hadn't.
Step came back, heading for the paper towels to finish wiping up the milk, when he finally noticed the window.
"Oh," he said. "Now I know what you meant by damn damn damn."
"Damn damn damn was for the milk and being pregnant," said DeAnne. "For the bugs in the window I screamed, only you must have been in the shower so you didn't hear me."
"Too bad, it must have been a doozie." Step leaned over the sink to look closely at the bugs. "How did they get in there?"
"I don't know," said DeAnne. "Maybe some bug entrepreneur sold tickets." He laughed, and she laughed too, though it wasn't that funny.
"They're all dead," said Step. "Not one of them even twitching. Weird, isn't it? Like all the June bugs who knew their number was up came here last night to die."
"So we have the world's largest bug collection, only it's all one species."
"Well," said Step, "good thing we woke up early today. This roll of paper towels is nearly out, do we have any more?"
"Yes, but we still ha ve to speak with Stevie," said DeAnne. "I want it to be when you're still here. I can mop the floor later."
"It'll only take me a minute to finish wiping it up," said Step.
"You can't just mop up milk," said DeAnne. "I have to scrub the floor."
"Pregnant?"
"I've done it before, you know," she said. "That's what Bendectin is for. To allow pregnant women to keep scrubbing floors while their men watch mud-wrestling on ESPN."
He looked at her, his eyes narrowed in a mockery of a glare. "Feminist bitch," he said.
She pretended to glare back. "Male chauvinist pig."
"Let me guess," he said, looking at the window again. "You don't want these guys to be up here all day."
"It's more important to talk to Stevie."
"He's not in here yet." Step went to the laundry room and got out a green plastic garbage bag. "This time it's your turn to hold the bag," he said.
"Oh, Step," she said, shuddering.
"It's either that or you climb up on the counter to open the window."
"Can't you do it outside?" asked DeAnne. It made her sick to think of those bugs inside her kitchen.
"I don't have a ladder," he said, "and I don't want to fuss with unscrewing the whole screen when I can just slide this window up. It's not like I have time for a half- hour job this morning."
"I can call Bappy," said DeAnne.
"And have him spray again?" asked Step. "I can do it, and I don't like Bappy doing jobs that I can do. That we can do, if you'll just help me."
She was already up. Step had anchored the bottom corners of the bag on the windowsill using the big red salt and pepper shakers from beside the stove. "Don't use those," she said. "If they get bugs all over them I could never stand to use them again."
"Well, unless you have four hands, Fish Lady, we've got to anchor them with something."
She squatted awkwardly to reach inside the cupboard under the sink and came up with two large wrapped bars of hand soap.
"Excellent work, my beloved assistant," he said. "That's what I keep you around for, your extraordinary resourcefulness."
Now, with the bottom corners anchored, DeAnne held the bag open against the window as Step slowly opened it. The bug bodies rattled out of the bottom of the window, tumbling into the bag like popcorn. The sound of it, the vibration of the bag, knowing what was falling into it, it was all too much for DeAnne. A
bug- loathing instinct far deeper and more powerful than her common sense took over, and for a moment she lost control. She moaned, her body was racked with a huge, irresistible shudder, and she let go of the bag.
At once the top of the bag dropped down below the opening in the window and the bugs started spilling out on top of the bag instead of inside it. "Shit!" said Step. "Can't you-"
He didn't finish the sentence, as he reached down and lifted up the corners of the bag again, so the bugs went back to falling inside it. Of course, the ones that had already spilled onto the outside of the bag now slipped off onto the counter and into the sink and onto the floor, still damp with spilled milk.
"Can't you do anything right," said DeAnne, finishing his sentence for him.
"That's not what I was going to say," said Step.
"Yes it was," said DeAnne.
"I was going to say can't you at least hold it open again, and then I realized that you couldn't, and so I did it.
Don't put words in my mouth, especially when they're mean and nasty words that I didn't even think of saying."
"Now you're supplying the mean and nasty words just fine by yourself," she said.
"Just get out of the kitchen until I get this cleaned up, will you?" said Step. "Do you think 1 enjoy handling dead June bugs? Do you think it makes it any easier to have you standing there not helping at all and trying to pick a fight with me in the meantime?"
Struggling against tears of anger, biting off the retorts she thought of, DeAnne fled the kitchen. Had any of the bugs touched her hands? She rushed into the kids' bathroom and washed with Lava soap, gritty and rough, trying to get them clean. Only it wasn't bug-touches she was washing away, it was the pointless argument.
She rinsed and dried her hands and then went in to waken Stevie. During the school year she had started the custom of waking him by rubbing his back as he lay asleep. Usually at some point his eyes would suddenly fly open and he'd say, "Morning." Today, though, his eyes stayed closed and he murmured, "No school."
"I know there's no school, honey," she said softly. "But your father and I want to talk to you about something this morning before he goes to work."
Now his eyes flew open. "OK," he said.
She knew now that he would quietly climb down from the upper bunk and get dressed without waking Robbie. She headed back for the kitchen.
Step was using a paper towel to pick up dead bug bodies from the kitchen counter and put them in the garbage bag. In the meantime, water was running in the sink and the disposal was on. She imagined him hosing dead bugs into the drain and then the garbage disposal blades chopping them into tiny bits. It made her shudder again, and she felt her empty stomach churn with nausea. "Thank you for taking care of that," she said.
"You might want to wipe off the milk carton and put it back in the fridge," he said coldly.
Well, she deserved to have him speak coldly to her. She had let her revulsion about the bugs turn into sniping at him, and he hadn't deserved it. Still, she had to eat something to settle her stomach, and she couldn't eat it in the kitchen, not till all the bugs were gone. "Step, I'm sorry," she said.
"Fine," he said.
She knew that when he was angry with her, it was better not to try to force a conversation. Better to wait, to let him calm down, and then he'd be gentle with her and they'd apologize to each other and he'd insist it was his fault and that would be fine. But sometimes she just couldn't stand to do it that way because while he needed to be alone after a quarrel, she couldn't bear to be alone, she felt the separation as sharply as if he had struck her and so she had to speak to him, had to explain herself, had to get his reassurance that he didn't hate her, that he still loved her and wanted her with him. It was completely irrational, she knew. But then so was his need to be alone after a fight.