The Plague of Termites

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I would occasionally see houses covered in tents. Jolly, festive-looking tents covering the entire house, decorated in broad jousting tournament stripes of scarlet and yellow or royal blue and gold. They looked like they would be filled with merriment inside, with minstrels strumming in the gallery, jesters tumbling in the hall, and bold knights raising tankards of foaming ale to pledge their love to maidens fair

Photo by Casper Johansson on Unsplash

“What’s that?” I asked my friend Candi brightly as we bowled down Santa Monica Blvd to the laundromat one sunny Saturday (we led an exciting life back in the day).

“That,” she said, “is someone being fumigated for termites.”

Termites, I was to learn, are an ongoing affliction in Los Angeles life. They are a particularly repulsive form of bug, distantly related to the cockroach, that burrows deep into the wood of a house to live and eat there, and eventually, if left untreated, can pull down the entire structure. Mr. Los Angeles and I had known for some time we had termites because of the piles of dusty droppings we would find heaped in corners of doorways and windowsills; sometimes, when the sun shone after a gloomy period, we would pull back a curtain to find a whole gang of the little wretches out and about and celebrating the fine weather by throwing a party. Not only on our windowsill, but eating our windowsill while they were about it.

Recently, it became apparent that something must be done; and since there seem to be no effective natural ways to drive away these particular parasites, and since, as Mr. Los Angeles has pointed out, they are disappointingly unreceptive to the suggestion of a civilized chat over a cup of coffee and a croissant, the only option left was to seal off the house for a couple of days and fumigate the bejesus out of the disgusting little pests.

Of the many experiences I have had in my long and not uneventful life, I may say that preparing a house for fumigation is among the strangest and most unsettling. First you are required to track down every single ingestible item in your home that isn’t sealed in a bottle or can, bag it up, and remove it. And by everything, I mean Every. Single. Thing. Not just the cereal and the rice and the pasta and the tea and the coffee; but the contents of the refrigerator, the fruit from the fruit bowl, the vegetables from the vegetable racks, the herbs and spices, the medications – yes, all of them, the aspirins and alka-seltzers and cold-eeze from the bathroom, the allergy inhalers from beside the bed, the vitamin supplements from the shelf above the kitchen sink – the opened liquor from the cabinet, the protein bar from your travel bag, the inspirational chocolate pretzels you keep in your bottom office drawer for when the creative spirit flags, the butter in the dish, the salt and pepper in the shakers, and don’t forget the toothpaste and mouthwash while you’re about it – every single darned thing you can think about that you might for whatever reason or at any time put into your mouth during your average day or month or year, and then think some more and remember some more. You’ve been living in the house for twenty years, and one of you (naming no names, but a beard might be involved) is an obsessive earthquake preparer and not-noticeably-borderline hoarder. You have a lot of stuff.

The task would be onerous in the best of circumstances; but what elevates it from the simply laborious to the flat-out eerie, is the reason why you’re performing it. Because you’re not doing it for an everyday event, like a seasonal clear-out, or a donation to a food bank, or to make room for a new kitchen appliance. You’re doing it because your home is about to be flooded with a cloud of noxious poison. Yes, your home – the place which has been your refuge for the last twenty years, where you keep your books and your photographs, entertain your friends, and flop after long journeys, where you have celebrated your birthdays, thrown countless dinner parties, and made up spare beds for visiting cousins and passing journalists and globe-trotting gap year students and, once, for a deeply tanned military officer newly returned from parts unnameable who promptly disappeared for several days with a handful of dvds and his girlfriend, emerging only to grab pizza slices and refill their coffee mugs – is about to become a death chamber.

Speaking of which, don’t forget to find somewhere to house the cat.

At last – and with a giant shout-out here to your next-door neighbor in a million and space made available on his living room floor and refrigerator shelf for each and every dumped off bag of your spillover – all but your very final items will be packed up and ready to go, the cat settled, safely if not a little indignantly, with the pet sitter, the house plants all accounted for and arrayed on the patio table, the jasmine trimmed from the wall trellis, and it will be nearly time for you to leave. You are doing well, you will think; the tenting people have said they will arrive at 3.00, and here you are at 2.30 with only the inevitable last minute items left to attend to; all things considered, you will think, you are doing very well indeed.

At 2.31, a large truck will draw up, and out will climb the tenting people.

“Please go away,” you will say. “You said 3.00 and we’re not ready for you yet.”

“We’ll start to set up anyway,” they will reply.

“Please don’t,” you will say, because there is a distinction between, for instance, having the tree trimmer start early on pruning the Scotch pine, and having a gang of fumigators start early on filling your living space with sulfuryl fluoride.

“We’ll start now,” they will agree.

You will suppose there are experiences that are more disconcerting, when you’re in the middle of changing your clothes in the privacy of your bedroom, than having that same bedroom turn abruptly blood red because someone has just thrown a scarlet tarpaulin over your skylight in preparation for saturating your home with poisonous fumes; but if there are, they will not immediately spring to mind.

Similarly, you will presumably experience realizations more irritating than that because you were distracted at the last moment, you have left behind you half a shelf of your very finest cooking oils and most carefully curated gourmet vinegars, which you will later discover tossed into a bag with a bunch of expired medication and dumped onto the patio in full sunlight for a day and a half; if anyone has suggestions for these, please feel free to write in.

Off you will go to stay with friends, who luckily are the sort of particularly good friends who will overlook your falling asleep headlong into your chicken enchiladas at 8.00 in the evening. You will return two days later to reunite with your food. You will haul bags from your neighbor’s house and open the refrigerator door to return them. This will be the first time you have seen your refrigerator empty since you bought it a decade ago. Stark, spare, and bare, with not a jar of tomato sauce or bottle of orange juice to camouflage the multi-hued array of stains, drips, splashes, daubs, and mystery marks that over the years – and despite what you will swear on Monica Geller’s cleaning caddy to have been regular and diligent attention along the way – will nevertheless have formed themselves into a stomach-churning Jackson Pollock tour de force clear across its interior. As you gather the materials to conduct an in-depth industrial-scale hygiene attack, you will try not to think of all the food that until just two days ago you have been blithely consuming from that very same environment. You will wonder how long it takes for salmonella to show symptoms. You will guess you’ll find out.

“Well, at least it’s over,” you will say at long, long last to your husband.

“Until the termites come back,” your husband will reply.

You will decide that marriage is an overrated institution.