By Any Other Name
It was a lovely community, nestled under tall pine trees, large old maple trees, and a pond visible just beyond the tree line. The dwellings were mostly two story and patio apartments, townhouses, and a few cottages that faced large patches of grassy landscapes. Maddie particularly liked that it was diverse, not just by age and occupation, but also by ethnicity and gender. She had rented a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor with a large screened-in porch. Downsizing was so difficult to do, having to sell her home and give up so much stuff, she still had a lot of stuff, stuff she felt defined her life.
On her very first evening, the weather was mild, so she left the porch door open while she was unpacking. Then she saw it, crawling into the apartment. Her dog, Susan, saw it too. They both stood still watching it stride in, owning the place. Susan was a no nonsense dog and slowly walked up to the cockroach. It then made a dash under a packing box. Maddie quickly took off a shoe and went in pursuit of the intruder. She hated, hated cockroaches, had zero tolerance for them, and knew she wouldn’t sleep until she smashed it dead. This was just the beginning, she would see them at night crawling onto the concrete porch floor, crawling up the brick building facade, once even flying past her face just as she was getting into bed.
Maddie talked to her neighbors, “There are cockroaches here!!” She would get blinking eyes and, “Oh, the water bugs?” “No,” Maddie would reply, “cockroaches!” After a few days of that, she went to the front office to complain that her apartment was being invaded by cockroaches. “Oh, water bugs?” the assistant manager said. “No, cockroaches!, Maddie would say. An order was placed to send an exterminator to spray the perimeter of the building, as well as Maddie’s apartment. “I call these creatures cockroaches,” she complained to the exterminator, “So what are they!” It turns out like her, he was from Wisconsin, and like Maddie, he knew them as cockroaches, in fact they were the brown cockroach variety. He said they lived under the pine mulch on the shrubs and trees next to the building. He too was confounded that people in the area called them water bugs. She was disgusted, but felt vindicated that by any other name, they were still cockroaches.
A week passed, no bugs to her relief until another lovely evening, she and Susan were lounging on the porch enjoying a late spring breeze when she spied a cockroach crawling onto the porch under the metal balustrade. Maddie sprung into action, shoe in hand and violently smashed the bug as flat as a piece of paper. “Ugh,” she moaned with furrowed brows and lips formed downward. She cleaned it up, but when she sat down, she had an unwanted memory—
It happened in West Africa, a suburb just outside of the capital where she would work as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher. She had rented a small house in a compound with a main big house and two smaller houses. Maddie was cleaning her small house before moving in her few sticks of furniture. She started in the kitchen, then the bathroom, poured cleaning solution in the tub and the drainage, but before she could run the water, a few cockroaches ran out of the drainage. Maddie ran to get her African sweeping broom, a hand broom usually made of palm dried fronds that force you to bend over while sweeping floors. By the time she had returned, the tub was filled with cockroaches. The battle began. She was beating them with the broom, they kept coming, more of them, then hundreds of them. She continued to beat them. Maddie found herself backing out of the bathroom as the swarm of cockroaches spilled over the edge of the tub dropping to the floor rushing towards her. Still, she beat them, and beat them with the broom while backing up into the hall, then the living room, beating them, and beating them until she simply ran out of the house, screaming.
“This place is infested! It’s infested! It’s infested!” Big mama, as Maddie referred to her, and two of the sons all came running out of the main house, wearing expressions of just another “toubab” freaking out about something. The eldest son, in broken English shaking his head said, “No understand, ‘fested?” Maddie shouted slowly, “That house is infested with cockroaches.” He shook his head, “No!” She shook her head, “Yes!” He went into the house, but hurried out within seconds, eyes wide open in shock and disbelief.
That afternoon, Maddie reported the incident to the Peace Corps nurse who immediately sent an exterminator to the resident. He sprayed the entire house. But while spraying the outside perimeter, he discovered that the septic tank was located just a few feet from the bathroom. He had never seen anything like it, he told the nurse and Maddie. All she felt was vindication.
As Maddie sat on the porch, cringing with horror from just the memory of what had happened so many many years ago, she sneered and mused that cockroaches were ancient creatures, even the modern varieties have survived over 125 million years. She whispered to herself, “It’s still a cockroach.”