Maybe the Moon

is. The phone hasn’t rung at all, in fact, since Renee and I sat down—or stood up, in her case—to our respective creative endeavors.
    Renee’s painting is coming along nicely. She’s doing a waterfall now, the next step after snowy peaks. She says “Oh, poo!” out loud so often that I want to throttle her, but she shows a real knack for this technique. And I see what she means about the instructor; he does have a way about him. As I lie here on my pillow, his low, reassuring voice floods over me like warm honey, or some kindly old uncle murmuring nursery tales over a crib. I wonder if he has a cult or something, if other people tune in just for his voice.
    I’m almost to the end of this notebook. Another twenty pages or so and I’ll have to find a new one, something a little classier this time, that doesn’t have Mr. Woods’ ugly face on the cover. That was it for me today, I’ve decided, my last sayonara to the little dick-head. Every time I relent and reimmerse myself in that bankrupt mythology, I come away feeling drained and discarded, a relic before my time.
    Life is too short for looking back.
    Especially mine.

    It’s past midnight, and Jeff still hasn’t called. Renee turned in half an hour ago, after donning a new nightie and slicking her face drastically with Vaseline.
    I picture Jeff in a room by a pool, with a sleazy desert moon hanging low in the palm trees. He has just had spectacular sex (sorry, I can’t quite see the face) and is on the verge of springing the next chapter on his unsuspecting victim. In which case, he could well be planning to check his machine before he calls it a day.
    The hell with it. I need my beauty sleep.

9
    I WOKE UP THIS MORNING AND FOUND A MOUSE IN A TRAP R ENEE had laid in the kitchen. This might have been manageable had it been a regular trap, but it wasn’t; it was a rectangle of white plastic, covered in a sort of yellow goo, to which the poor thing was stuck, very much alive, twitching horrifically. Even the side of her face was caught in the nasty stuff. In her frantic struggle to escape, she was straining every muscle under her command, but so far all she’d managed to do was shit. I hate to think how long she might have been there.
    Renee is the official exterminator at our house, just as Mom once was, but she was out on a morning mall crawl and unlikely to return for hours. I opened the cabinet under the sink and made a frantic search for the mousetrap box, in the dim hope it would tell me what to do next. When I couldn’t find it there, I flung open the cupboard and spotted a likely candidate on the top shelf: a red-and-yellow box with the name E-Z Catch printed on the end. I swatted at it with a broom handle until it tumbled toward me in a pungent avalanche of cleaning rags.
    There were instructions, all right, printed in Spanish and English: Eche raton con trampa. Discard mouse with trap . There was alsoa charming illustration of a mouse caught in the sinister goo, rendered so playfully as to be almost a cartoon, complete with vivid little beads of mouse sweat (or were they tears?) popping from her head. No Springs, No Snaps, No Hurt Fingers, Disposable, Sanitary, Ready to Use .
    What to do? If I hurled this living creature, ever so conveniently, into the garbage can, as advised, it would lie there for hours in the dark, panic-stricken and exhausted, until its life ebbed away and the ants came to eat it alive. There was no way I could be a party to that, so I filled my low-level kitchen sink with several inches of lukewarm water (thinking that might make it more pleasant) and drowned the little bandit.
    It took her the longest time to stop moving; I held her down for a while after that, just to make sure. When I finally raised the tiny, dripping corpse, checking anxiously for signs of life, I flashed perversely on Glenn Close bursting out of the bathwater in Fatal Attraction . The mouse was perfectly still, though, so I took the trap outside and dumped it into the sunken garbage can by the street. Then I hurried back to the house, shuddering a little, and took a long, hot shower with a loofah.
    I am not, as they say, a born killer. I was wasted for the rest of the morning. You’d think Renee would be the prissy one in this respect, but she’s not at all; she’s held her own mousy My Lai’s before, racking up deaths by the dozen, and it doesn’t faze her one bit. She can be downright cheery about it, in fact, when she’s checking her