That would be expensive, though. Since Companions are leased monthly, I would have to give the full cost back to the company, which would mean we could probably not get a replacement. It was going to be difficult enough helping Lisa to adjust to Spider’s loss. Maybe, instead of breaking it, I could just trap it underneath a mixing bowl and take it back undamaged. That should not be so difficult, I thought. I could buy one of those cardboard pet carriers to use to take it back to the facility.
That was now three weeks ago — or is it four? I am still waiting to carry out my plan. Lisa has been keeping Spider close to her a lot. There have been a few times when I thought I could catch it, but each time there has been some reason that I hesitated too long and lost my chance: Lisa had a bad day at school the day before and I wondered if this was quite the right time; it was late at night and the noise might wake the neighbors. But I will do it sometime very soon. I just have to wait for the right moment.
Through these past few weeks, Lisa hasn’t spoken to me much. It’s not that she’s been sulking or obviously upset. She kisses me goodbye when I drop her off at school, she kisses me goodnight. She helps around the house. She is the same polite and placid child she’s been since we first got her spider. But there is something perfunctory about the way she treats me, something dry, like it would not make much difference to her if one day I went away and did not return. Or at least, I think there is. Sometimes I find myself watching her and she seems to be unnaturally still, as if she has learned from her spider the art of infinite patience. I had a dream in which I saw her walking on all fours, her legs and arms arched up in angles that would be impossible for a human child, so she could scuttle forward at a rapid speed.
Since that one occasion, Spider has not made another web, at least not one that I’ve found. It is as if it learned its lesson, although I don’t think it can learn. It acts exactly like it did before, and in fact there are times when I wonder what it would be like if I did nothing at all and we went on the way we are. Of course, I cannot let that happen. Sooner or later I will have to act. But there are evenings when I’m reading a bedtime story to my daughter and she is leaning against me and Spider is perched up on the wall above her bed and I forget that I am planning to get rid of it. For a moment, it is almost comforting to have another. I was about to use the word “person” but that does not make any sense. It is almost comforting to have another — what? Another someone in the room.
If You Cannot Go to Sleep
First, she tries counting. The numbers move sluggishly through her head in single file like people in a line at the post office or at the bank or at the discount supermarket where you can only pay with cash so the line is always long and she is always frustrated by the time she reaches the counter and so, to compensate, she always tries to be extra friendly to the cashier, to be sure to instruct him or her to have a nice day after he or she gives back her change, because it seems worse, somehow, to be a cashier in a discount supermarket than it would be to do the same job at a place that sold expensive, gourmet foods, although when she thinks about this now, so late at night she doesn’t even want to look at the clock to find out the time, she thinks why would it make a difference whether you ran a cash register at a place where people are buying brie and figs and Ethiopian fair-trade coffee or a place where people are buying Pampers and Wonder Bread? In reality, she thinks, working at the gourmet market is probably worse because of the annoying people who shop there, the men and women in stylish business-casual clothing, or athletic wear because they are coming from or going to the gym, all of them buying organic heirloom tomatoes and the latest variety of ancient grain that is supposed to make you live forever and exuding an air of self-satisfaction, of superiority, of knowing that they are worthy and admirable and enlightened beyond ordinary mortals, and wanting to chat with the cashier about his or her day and about the food they are buying and the fabulous, complicated meal that they are going to make with these ingredients, which is really just another way of showing off when you get right down to it. Do you really want to see those people every day? On the other hand, at the discount supermarket you might see people buying weird, sad, lonely food like the man who’d been in front of her in line the other week who was severely overweight and buying twenty frozen dinners for himself and nothing else, or else the unnaturally skinny woman buying a big crate of caffeine-free diet soda and nothing else, or else the mother with three children trying to figure out what she could afford with her WIC voucher, carefully watching the total as it came up on the screen, putting aside the things in her cart she could not manage to afford that week. For a cashier, that had to be depressing. Add to that the threat that any day now you will be replaced with one of those automatic swiper machines that don’t really work and always require the customer to be assisted before he or she can check out, and you have a pretty unhappy work environment as a cashier one way or another.
Or maybe she is just being a snob and really being a cashier can be a fine job and only because of her particular, privileged background would she assume that it would be miserable to be a cashier, rather than fulfilling, because how does she know? The closest she ever came was waiting tables at a restaurant when she was in high school and that job was not terrible, she still has some good memories of the characters she met among the customers: the man who came up to the counter and asked her if she could recite any Shakespeare and she spoke aloud the prologue to Henry V because she knew it by heart, or the time she. well, actually that is her only good memory of that job, the rest of it was boring or unpleasant and involved mopping floors and stacking dishes and wiping down tables and laying traps for cockroaches and anyway she knew that she was soon going to go away to college and that this wouldn’t be her job for the rest of her life, she would be able to leave and go to something better or at the time she thought it would be better. She did go to college and she majored in French and lived in Paris for a few years after she finished her degree and now she works translating technical manuals and she used to be married to a man who appeared to be steady and reliable if a little dull, qualities that she told herself were a good antidote to her own tendency to fret too much about small and insignificant things, and who had a successful career in hospital administration but who decided suddenly, about six months ago, that he’d had enough of expending his energy and intelligence working in a healthcare system organized for the benefit of for-profit insurance companies and decided to move to France. She found this moderately ironic since, when she had been yearning a few years previously to ditch everything and go back to Paris, he had insisted that they could not do this because he’d put too much time and effort into developing his career in the United States and he did not want to throw away what he’d worked so hard to build. She pointed this irony out to him during the brief period after he’d announced that he was moving out but before he had actually departed for good, and although he readily agreed with her that, yes, there was some irony in his choice, he did not change his mind. He said that she worried too much and that he didn’t want to deal with it anymore. And she said: this won’t make me worry less. And he said: I know but it will no longer be my problem.