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.