Everything Looks Like Spiders

On phobia, dreams, honesty and death

I had an assignment from Ariel Gore recently, about copying the style of a writer I admired. Patti Smith has this amazing way of wandering off into her dreams right in the middle of a story in her books. So, I played with weaving in and out of dreams.

Spider Season

This is how it goes, every fall. The only time I’m ever willing to use chemicals around the house. When the spiders, fat and speedy, come into my home, bellies full of spider babies they want to weave into the corners of my life. There’s one place, in my carport, where I allow an enormous orb weaver to make her web every fall. And one near the BBQ overlooking the creek, where a striped garden spider sets up shop. My peace offering is leaving them be, while I spray the baseboards, entries, eaves, basement and foundation with poison.

My hope is that this will keep the motherfuckers out of my bed.

Recently, cleaning up after my twins who moved out to go to college, I ran into some particularly large and excitable spiders in the basement. Too big to fail. The poison hadn’t made an impression on them, but their appearance made an impression on me. Shattered my illusions of control, for one thing.

One, I smashed with so much screaming fear that my foot still hurts. The other I had to chase around and then destroy in a two stomp death dance. There is nothing, but nothing more frightening to me than a large spider that has gotten away, disappeared in my house. Spiders you cannot see are worse than spiders you can.

The panic attacks leave my body in pain. Last night, I suffered a shattered mindset and aches all over. Then, more spiders in the basement the next day. I can barely type this list: Daddy longlegs, jumping spiders, crook-legged wolf spiders, black widows. An infestation.

Poppa and the Hole in the House

My father used to kill the spiders for me, or set them free. He had a case of PTSD that defined our relationship during my youth, since it came out in spasms of unreasonable anger. Or impossible demands on me and my kid brother. But for some reason Poppa, the most cutting person I’ve ever known, always handled my fear of spiders with kindness. Never once shamed me.

He even tracked down the hole in the front of my childhood home, where spiders clearly made their entry, coming across the living room toward my spot on the couch night after night in fall, in the same bee line. Or, spider line. To this day I cannot sit comfortably with my feet on any floor. I sit cross legged or with my feet up. Except in restaurants. It’s rare to see a spider in a restaurant.

Poppa would have been in his mid fifties, the same age as I am now, when he plugged that hole. I always thought I would grow out of my phobia, but it hasn’t yet happened. Now my protector, Poppa, has died. Last December at 100 years old, while I sang Big Rock Candy Mountain to him and the geese were making a racket at 6 a.m. Dawn had rivered the sky in Poppa’s favorite color, for which he coined a name: Skybluepink.

Five days before, he’d been working on his book at home. Then he stopped speaking. Then he stopped responding. Then he died.

A good death.

My Poppa worked as a country doctor. A profession he pursued on the GI Bill, after enduring the end of World War II as a POW. Every other sergeant in his brigade got shot dead at close range during a diversion for the Battle of the Bulge, but Poppa had some kind of rank, so they took him prisoner. When he finally got home after a winter of starvation he said “my shit was white and my weight was feather,” plus he had shrapnel lodged in his neck.

He received a Purple Heart, which he gave away or threw away, not wanting to celebrate war.

Fault

Once, maybe a year or two after my daughter Chloe’s diagnosis with type 1 diabetes, Poppa got angry at me. He didn’t approve of the way I administered and tracked her insulin–all done on computerized devices that he didn’t understand. When he practiced medicine on the Western Slope of Colorado, the way to keep a type 1 diabetic alive involved a notebook full of scrupulous entries along with glass syringes regularly boiled for re-use, plus insulin.

At the kitchen table, I poked my daughter’s tiny finger, squeezed out a pebble of blood and directed it into her glucose monitor. Her blood glucose read high, so I drew up insulin using her carb to insulin ratio and injected it into her arm. I didn’t write anything down, trusting the thumb sized device I kept in my purse to provide data if needed. She scampered off toward the sandbox. At age four, this was old hat for her. Nothing to worry about.

But the air pressure changed in the kitchen as Poppa’s anger accumulated. I tried to get out of the house with the kids ahead of the storm. Mom helped, gathering things, herding the children. Her cheeks (and mine) raised in a pasted expression of bland pleasantry that dared him to interrupt business as usual with the grandkids. Often, it worked. I learned it from my mother and Chloe has learned it from me–a lifesaving skill.

He sat stoic behind a force field of anger, mumbling complaints. The kids chatted with their grandmother, strapped into car seats as I searched the house gathering a few more things, when he got his word in.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat.

Pounding his middle finger in a blunt rhythm on the thick wood of the kitchen table he said:

If she dies, no matter where she is or who she is with,

It.

Will.

Be.

Your.

Fault.

Obviously, these possibilities had already occurred to me. The fault would always be mine. I am a mother. We always blame the mothers.

(Did she take Tylenol while she was pregnant?

Did she spoil them?

Did she dress her twins identically?

Did she work outside the home?

Did she not work?

Did you let her go out wearing that?)

In dreams, I often tried to save my children from the terrible ends I imagined. And failed.

Lake Dillon Dam

The car slid off the dam road. Into the reservoir. I thought the ice would hold us, now it was late December. I told the kids we’d be ok, to move slowly. Keep their heads. Leaned back to help them out of their car seats, face to face with four eyes wide with fear and trust. We heard the crack. The car lurched, passenger side, nose-end first, into the lake. Max’s seat was on the downside. I undid his buckles first and opened the window above him on Chloe’s side.

Scramble over Chloe, I said, and crawl like a lizard across the ice to shore. Flag someone down. He went.

I pivoted and put my feet in front on the passenger side to properly reach Chloe’s child seat, weighting the car further into the water. The engine cut leaving an underwater silence followed by the sound of water glugging into cavities under the hood. We saw the cracked edge of ice sliding past the front passenger side window. A black band of freezing water below that.

I lost balance and only got Chloe halfway unlocked. Max’s feet disappeared as he crawled away from the car, and I started Lamaze breathing to stay attuned to my task. Chloe’s other clasp released and she wriggled out. Little monkey!

The car began to sink, so I crawled upward against gravity across the front seat toward the closed window of the driver’s seat, and hoped it would roll down. If only I was 15 pounds lighter, if I had been working out, if only….

The window came down. I scrambled out and looked ahead expecting to see Chloe’s shoes scuffling away from me on the ice. I could hear it, surely, I could.

Ssssh-shhhh-shhh….

But, I couldn’t see Chloe anywhere. The car gulped under the water behind me, a diving whale.

Chloe?

My fault.

By Way of Apology

Poppa and I made peace not long ago. Once he even apologized for his years of cruel remarks and frightening moods.

He said “I can be a bit of a brontosaurus sometimes. I get very passionate.”

Over beans and squash later that week, I brought up his so-called “passionate” outbursts. I said: “Can we have a new rule? When you feel so passionate about things, wait 24 hours to tell me about it.”

His adoption of this rule added years to my life. Possibly to his as well. I observed a sincere effort by him to slow his roll after that, when the going got tough. With this new spider season, however, I feel some of the added years have been subtracted again.

After the brontosaurus apology, the days of Poppa’s ‘passion’ expressed with the blunt instrument of insult ratcheted down. His reactions to difficulty improved starting at age 86; by ninety-five he hardly ever had an outburst.

He’d changed.

We’d changed.

I like to remember that. People can change.

Infantryman Carl

I never asked him why he had been so kind to me about the spiders. I should have. But, while editing his book during the last five years of his life, he often shared things we never discussed before.

He described to me the size of the shit infantryman Carl took in the house they used for cover as a German tank came shelling toward them. They had nowhere else to hide. Carl howled with laughter tearing his pants down to his boots. Figuring they were all dead, he left an oblation of steaming waste, stove up inside him for days, at the only open doorway still standing in the crumbling house. Then he and my dad got back to shooting toward the oncoming tank.

Once in the ER at age 99, Poppa’s recently pulled molar wouldn’t stop gushing blood. Poppa told me with an icy stare, that he shot down the barrel of that tank and killed the gunner that day. I interrupted him to insert the suction catheter into his mouth. Blood pooled inches deep into a plastic canister humming at his bedside. When he opened his mouth again he said, “Most mother’s aren’t afraid of blood. Like you. women are the medical heads of the household.” Then he obediently clamped his mouth down again for suction, grinning through it all.

He didn’t return to the story of Carl until we got home.

As Poppa edged toward dementia, he glorified these memories. Perhaps he needed that toward the end. Or, maybe it wasn’t glorification at all. Because he also said “People need to know.”

Carl was shot dead that day, but only after the Nazis waded through a pile of shit.

Poetry

I asked Poppa how he survived the war?

He said,

I never missed

I asked him for his first memory of Mamanette, my mother, and he said,

That dress

The first poem he memorized?

James, James, Morrison, Morrison

Weatherby George Dupree

Took great care of his mother

Though he was only three

James, James said to his mother

Mother he said, said he

You must never go down

To the end of town

Without consulting me!

The first poem I memorized, too. Milne.

His rage could poison our entire rambling mountain home. He didn’t hit. He never called us stupid or cursed. He vibrated with fury. So why, during his angry years in my youth, when we kids waited at the door holding our breath to see what kind of evening might be on the menu: tea, John Phillips Sousa and poetry after dinner or dread and sorrow for dessert–why did he so consistently empathize with my greatest fear?

I wasn’t allowed to be afraid of the howling coyotes.

“Stop that! It’s the beauty of the wild!”

He banned any show of fear during terrific mountain thunderstorms.

We chanted, “One-one-thousand, two-one-thous… BAM!”

“WeeeeOh! what a good one!” he would say. “CrackBOOM,” and a smack on his own leg for emphasis. “Isn’t this fun!!??”

I wonder, did it feed my fear? His kindness?

Bedside Manner

Looking back on it, I worked to be a stoic girl. I stopped crying about his anger early on. Into adulthood I did not cry for that man. I clamped my teeth onto my tongue, jutted my jaw, withstood it, walked away.

After I had kids, sometimes I would let him finish his tirade, and then say “Ok. Bye. I love you.”

Always afraid of what my last words to him would be.

But one day, I couldn’t hold back.

He derided my son. Lecturing me with ferocity, after a year of enveloping panic during which at 8, my boy child left school by force in the back of a police car. Repeatedly.

When he discussed suicide and got locked up, even his blankie stripped heartlessly from his hands. Psych hold.

I can’t recount what Poppa said because I can’t recall. I remember snow on the ground and the heat from the whole house rising upstairs into his office. Granite eyes. The air alive with judgement.

The day prior, my ex-husband had excused himself early from a meeting about Max’s stay in the psych unit, due to his responsibilities in the recovery tents at Burning Man.

“I already know how to help young people through trauma,” he’d said.

I stayed. Listened. Took some advice from the doctors. Pushed back on some too. Whatever happened to the kids would be my fault. I was the only one there.

When I lost my stoicism, Poppa had criticized my parenting, Max’s behavior, my diet, Chloe’s diet. Our entire lifestyle.

The snowflakes floated down large as potato chips.

I broke down. Began to cry, quietly at first, but I couldn’t stay quiet. I tried to say, “Stop it!” but a whine came out, a baby wolf caught in a trap.

Poppa paused.

His aspect changed.

His mouth opened and closed, a snapping turtle. The quiet that only a foot of falling snow bestows magnified. He stopped pacing and sat across from me on the futon in his office. He became the country doctor. The family therapist. The man that bore the sorrows of generations of families and told them what they were feeling was normal, that indeed their hurt would keep hurting for a long while.

That it wouldn’t last forever.

I had seen him like this. When he took me on rounds weekends, or when he saw patients on Saturday, who came from hundreds of miles away and couldn’t come at any other time. Who would pay him occasionally with a whole lamb, or a painting.

He treated me like a patient that day. The ice storm eased in the shelter of his empathy.

I wonder, if I had cried more as a child, would he have softened sooner? If I had shown my feelings, as I did my fear of spiders, would he have shown his true feelings too? In my family anger is often a first-line transmission of emotion that might indicate anything living underneath. Sadness, fear, loneliness, regret. Vulnerability.

He knew too much. Had seen too many people die in war, as victims of his gun or of genocide and torture. Had seen too many die before diabetes treatment became effective, when machinery often killed workers unprotected by unions, when animals stampeded or guns went off at the wrong time in a rancher’s hand. He had seen too many people take their own lives in sorrow; held hands with the survivors. The Little Doc, as he was known on Colorado’s Western Slope, knew he didn’t have all the answers. His bedside manner leaned on truth spoken with authority, respect and his devotion to healing. People suffer. People recover. People die.

I believe Poppa professed anger so often because he lived in constant dread.

Everything looked like a threat to the people most precious to him. In this way, he understood mothering.

Now, he is dead. Not here to soothe me or kill spiders. In fact, no one is. Well, Boo Boo the chihuahua stayed behind. The poor thing cries right along with me because the other dog, Skywalker, went away to college too, along with the twins. Falling asleep alone except for a grieving chihuahua, in a cabin in the woods, makes for strange dreams.

The Babies

The babies, hundreds of them, some the size of ticks, others like beetles. Embryos really. Squirming in the brown shag carpet. Crying and writhing, wanting their mother. All the babies I never had, or aborted, or might have abused or given away or raised into perfect angels if I hadn’t aborted them, or morning-after-pilled them. Or cut them off in a condom. Dozens, or a hundred. Scores.

On hands and knees on the brown shag carpet of my kid brother’s room, just outside my dad’s workshop in the basement I searched. It hid spiders too well. I like white things. White carpet, couches, towels, bedspreads. Where spiders cannot hide.

But I had to save these babies. I prayed I wouldn’t reach down only to come up with a leggy spider’s squirming body held in my fingertips instead of a helpless baby.

I couldn’t stomp on anything in this dream, I knew that with lucidity.. Because there were so many babies in the carpet. I would never be able to save them all. But Poppa came out of his workshop, despite his recent death

I said through tears, “Poppa there are too many!”

He smiled at me with his famous crooked teeth and said, “Hello chipmunk!”

He had his cowboy hat on, the one with the hole in it. Muddy work boots with the soles I helped to superglue back on. Levi’s and his old wool sweater shrunken in the dryer; pearly buttons on the front. I knew in my dream that the sweater only fit my daughter now, since he had died. She wore it all last winter without giving it a wash.

He stepped cautiously toward me, grasping the twisted branch he used for balance. Looking like a cowboy wizard, he kneeled beside me, put his hand on my shoulder and said:

“Can I hold the babies for you?”

Everything Looks Like Spiders

The spiders keep coming, in the real world. A calyx falls into the sink from the top of the last tomato in the garden, and I shriek seeing spiders instead of an asterisk of green leaves. Saving the marigold heads for next year, the lanky seeds are spiders spilling into my palm. A forgotten blueberry rolls across the floor in a fluttery pattern. My eyelashes respond over-well to mascara, growing long-leggy around the orb of my eye. Blink, blink…

SPIDERS.

Everything looks like spiders.

I ran out of poison and went online to buy some for immediate delivery. Every label of every de-spidering product is covered with multi-eyed, highly rendered spiders. I haven’t been back in the basement since days ago during my killing spree. There are clothes molding in the washer.

But.

I have a plan. I’ve decided to try showing my true emotions to the spiders. Maybe they will be gentler with me if I just go straight into the delirium of panting tears and beg them, sobbing, to “Please, leave my house and go outside! There are bugs everywhere out there!”

My theory is that anger isn’t a healthy cover crop for other, more vulnerable emotions.

It worked with Poppa. If showing my fear softened him and shedding my tears unlocked his hope for me and the kids, then maybe my stomping tantrums aren’t helping me deal with the spiders.

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