Mantis Thoughts

New York. Summer 2001

No matter where Isabel’s thoughts began, they ended with her husband meeting sudden death. Sometimes it was she who killed him. This surprised her, because she had a visceral certainty of both the sanctity of life and the actuality of reincarnation. She never killed spiders, and would always save and relocate them. After she read a biography of Albert Schweitzer in 5^th grade, she stopped killing ants as best she could, although she continued to dislike them, especially at picnics. And although she had long loved the British murder classics, Tey, Christie, Conan-Doyle, she had never suspected that contemplating her own husband’s death could be almost as exhilarating as a good read. Her thoughts were drawn to his demise again and again, as irresistibly as a child’s tongue to a loose tooth. At breakfast time, as she dashed about getting herself and the kids ready for work and school, she imagined him drowning in his bowl of fiber cereal and 1% milk. In her corner office cubicle overlooking Grand Central where she talked to clients all day, she watched from the corner of her eye as Alex repeatedly tumbled slow-mo through the air against the backdrop of the Chrysler Building.

A smidgin of peanut butter stirred into one of the fabulous dinners she tossed together every night was all it would take. By the time she’d return from reading the children to sleep, he would have croaked from anaphylactic shock. Isabel would find him face down in his penne al’ Amatriciana, beard flecked with basil and a bit of pecorino, and she would be a widow. So much simpler and cheaper than divorce. What’s more, if he died that way, the children would be given the chance to remember him, in time, in a more sympathetic, if mythical, light. There would be an autopsy, because healthy men in their forties, even nationally-ranked alcoholics, are not expected to die in their dinners. The results would confirm death by peanut butter. Their son Jack’s favorite food, and poison to Alex. A tragic accident. But although killing him wasn’t a possibility, it was an enticing option, and such an easy one, that her mind kept leading her back to it and her hand kept reaching for the Jif. Only the conviction that she’d get away with it stopped her from doing it.

Isabel was in the kitchen in Southampton cleaning up the kitchen according to Daisy’s framed “Rules of the Inn” checklist on the wall, before the Sunday evening drive with the sun in her eyes back to town. The children were frolicing in the pool, swimming underwater in the deep end. She had taught them both to swim at six months, and they were as comfortable in the water as the penguins at the Central Park Zoo.

“The parakeets died again,” Alex said as soon as she picked up the phone

“It wasn’t my fault. Ex-birds, you know, like the dead parrot on Monte Python.” Through the phone, she could see his big yellow teeth talking in his beard.

“You killed the children’s pets two weeks in a row and you bring up Monte Python? Don’t you see anything wrong with that?” She concentrated on remembering to breathe. It frequently happened that she caught herself forgetting to altogether, or doing it wrong, and not getting enough oxygen to her brain. She inhaled til her lungs were fully expanded, then exhaled through her mouth. Good in, bad out. And again. The breathing exercise soothed her overbeating heart, allowed her to think, kept her from screaming. She was shocked by the intensity of her revulsion, how it contrasted with how she had once loved him.

“I was reading on the couch. I went in to check if the water was boiling for the pasta. They were lying in the bottom of the cage, with their little bird feet up in the air. Dead. They’re so Jurassic when you look at them closely, have you noticed that?”

Isabel could hear the ice cubes in his glass clinking before he continued. “It must have been the exhaust from the buses idling. I left the window open.”

She had read a quote once from David Frost, the British television journalist, who said something about how Kissinger lied because it was in his interest, but Nixon lied because it was in his nature. Her husband, Alex, was a Nixon to the core. He was both pathologically incapable of recognizing fact from fiction and free of any moral compunction to do so.

“Jesus, Alex, you lousy son of a bitch, you got drunk and fell asleep and the pasta water boiled away. The fumes from the overheated non-stick lining poisoned the birds. Like canaries in a coal mine, you stinking bastard.”

“What a load of crap! It was the fumes from the crosstown bus.”

“For crissake, we live on the 11^th floor. The same thing happened last weekend, Alex. Surely you have some memory of it. Can’t you just admit it’s your fault?”

He laughed. “That’s my Isabel, so quick to judge. I don’t care what you think, but you have to tell the kids. I don’t want them to walk in and be traumatized.”

“You might have thought of that earlier. I’m not covering for you anymore.”

“This is no time to let your feelings for me prevent you from doing what’s best for the kids, Isabel. You tell them the fumes killed them, and Daddy made a mistake by leaving the window open, and that it was an accident.”

“Drop dead, Alex.” She hung up, pushed open the screen door, and dove into the sparkling pool.