Curtis Sittenfeld - Eligible

Liz’s phone pinged as she was standing outside the front of Doodles, waiting for her mother to use the restroom. Call me, read the text from Shane.

When she did so, he did not mince words. “Your parents have a spider infestation,” he said. “We need to get pest control to the house as soon as possible.”

Liz winced. “An infestation meaning, like…?” She trailed off. “Like, how is that quantified?”

“That’s what pest control will determine, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Are the buyers still interested?” Liz asked.

“No,” Shane said. “But that’s not our biggest problem now.”

OFTEN, ON THE last day or two before an issue of Mascara shipped to the printer, Liz found herself in extremely frequent contact with her editor: A sentence needed to be added to reflect that the actress Liz had profiled had just entered rehab, or that the member of the women’s national soccer team was now pregnant; the additional sentence meant that an equivalent number of words elsewhere in the article needed to be cut. Either in person in the offices of Mascara or by text, email, or phone, Liz and her editor would communicate constantly, in an increasingly exhausted and loopy shorthand. And though by the time the article closed, Liz felt utterly sick of whatever it was about — few readers, she believed, had any idea of the amount of work that went into the casual reading experience they enjoyed while riding the subway or taking a bath — when it was all finished, Liz rather missed her editor and their urgent and knowing exchanges.

Later, when Liz looked back on what she thought of as the Week of Fumigation, she felt a similar and perhaps even more surprising nostalgia for her frequent conversations with Ken Weinrich, the proprietor of Weinrich Pest Control & Extermination and the man who steadfastly guided her on a tour into the unsavory and bewildering world of spider infestation. They first spoke when she was still standing outside Doodles in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was the next morning when he parked his truck in the Bennets’ driveway. A sturdy, middle-aged white man, Ken Weinrich entered the house wearing a short-sleeved button-down tan shirt, jeans, and work boots and carrying a flashlight and a clipboard.

The intervening hours had represented, without question, the worst night’s sleep of Liz’s entire life, even counting elementary school slumber parties, college hookups, and overseas plane flights. For legal reasons pertaining to the former buyers’ retraction of their offer on the house, Liz hadn’t spoken directly to the person who’d conducted the Tudor’s inspection. However, the inspector had told Shane, and Shane had told Liz, that he’d found spiders on every floor, including inside fireplaces, ceiling light fixtures, and showerheads, and that they were most concentrated in the basement and attic. For this reason, Liz slept, or tried to sleep, in Lydia’s bed, but every few minutes she awakened convinced that she could feel the tickle of arachnid legs crawling across her skin. The inspector also had told Shane that the violin-shaped spots on the back of dead specimens indicated that the spiders were the brown recluse kind, whose bites were known to cause swelling, nausea, and flesh-eating ulcers. When Ken Weinrich confirmed the species, Liz’s first reaction was relief that Jane was gone from the Tudor.

There were probably, Ken Weinrich estimated, thousands of the spiders hiding in the Tudor, though true to their name, they were mostly reclusive. Not that reclusive, Liz thought as she recalled her various encounters with them during the past three months. In retrospect, the evidence was plentiful that calling an exterminator was something she ought to have done during her first week at home.

Assuming no rain, the fumigation was scheduled for two days hence and would require tarps to cover the house from the outside; once they were in place, sulfuryl fluoride gas would be released within them, and special fans would circulate the gas. The Bennets would need to be absent from the property for three days. Repeatedly, Ken Weinrich assured Liz that sulfuryl fluoride didn’t leave residue, and that not only the Bennets’ furniture but even their food would all be safe for future use. The cost of the fumigation was $10,000.

Mr. Bennet seemed resigned, while Mrs. Bennet met news of the infestation with indignance. Much the way they might have had Liz reported the sighting of a single mouse, neither of her parents appeared all that troubled. “I’m sure it’s not thousands of spiders,” Mrs. Bennet said. During the fumigation, they would stay at the country club.

Liz’s sisters, by contrast, were horrified, though in Lydia’s case the horror contained a rather gleeful undertone only partially compensated for by Ham’s immediate offer to let any Bennets bunk at his house in Mount Adams. However, that very day, Mary and Kitty found a two-bedroom apartment — just, as it happened, a few blocks from Darcy’s — and Liz was the one to pay the first month’s rent and cosign their lease. Not wishing to risk the transport of spiders into this new living space, Mary, Kitty, and Liz drove to the Ikea thirty minutes north of Cincinnati, where Liz bought each sister a bed and, to share, a couch, a kitchen table, and chairs.

She wasn’t ignorant of the advantages to her of underwriting their acquisitions: Now beholden, they’d have no choice but to obey the directives she laid out for after her departure from Cincinnati, among them instructions about monitoring their father’s diet; keeping the Tudor in a state appropriate to be visited by Shane, other real estate agents, and their clients; and making themselves available to their mother for miscellaneous errands in the forty-eight hours prior to the Women’s League luncheon. Though the luncheon itself was little more than two weeks away, Liz had decided not to remain in town for it. She just couldn’t stand Cincinnati anymore. She didn’t want to spend another night in the now-spidery, soon-to-be-chemical-laden Tudor. She didn’t want to sleep for two weeks on Mary and Kitty’s couch. And although she appreciated the offer, she didn’t want to move in with Ham and Lydia and watch them kiss and coo and drink kale smoothies. With an abrupt urgency, she wanted to be home, in her home, which was Brooklyn. She wanted to get saag paneer and samosas delivered from her favorite Indian restaurant and eat them alone on her living room couch while reading a magazine, blasting her air conditioner, and not defending her lack of a husband.

“Do you think it’s awful if I go straight back to New York after I interview Kathy de Bourgh in Houston?” she asked Jane over the phone, and Jane said, “I’m not exactly in a position to tell you not to.”

Lying on Mary and Kitty’s new $500 couch, Liz couldn’t decide whether her behavior as a daughter and sister was exemplary or indefensible. On the one hand, she had in recent days exerted herself to an unprecedented degree to ensure the welfare of her family members. On the other, she would not be waiting even until the aeration stage of the fumigation was complete to leave. She’d be in New York in time for Labor Day weekend, and indeed, the main impetus for her flurry of activity was the knowledge of her departure.

THE WAY LIZ packed her suitcase and purse was to drive them empty in the trunk of her father’s Cadillac from the Tudor to the small lawn in front of her sisters’ new apartment; also in the trunk were full trash bags containing her clothes, toiletries, digital recorders, and laptop computer. She knelt in the grass and examined each article of clothing, each item from her Dopp kit, to ensure that no spider was clinging to it. She wondered if another resident of the building would complain — it probably looked like she was setting up for a garage sale — but no one did, and she found no spiders. When she’d finished, she carried her full bags into her sisters’ apartment, relieved that she would never be anyone’s mother and thus would never need to pick through the scalp of a child, searching in just this way for lice eggs.