Why Are Women Afraid of Mice?

I am not afraid of much. I have hiked through the Andes and the Himalayas, zip-lined through a Mexican jungle, driven on motorcycles far too fast. I have given birth to three children and beaten off two separate muggers intent on grabbing my purse. I have jumped out of a moving car to avoid a man.

Why, then, am I afraid of mice?

Recently, I came up here to Prince Edward Island to open up our summer home. Not surprisingly, I had a special greeter on the front stairs: a tiny gray mouse, a little bitty guy who was just as surprised to see me as I was to see him. I tried to stay calm and rational. But, since my husband wasn't here, I had to deal with the intruder myself.

“Get me a pan with a lid and a broom!” I yelled to my friend Emily, a poet who had accompanied me on this trip and who, despite being nearly six feet tall and having sailed the seas in Newfoundland and conquered sweaty Buddhist meditations, is even more panicked at the sight of a mouse than I am.

She fetched me my weapons while I stood guard, looming over the rodent. Being just a child mouse, he didn't know whether he should go up or down to escape this giantess who, in his little mouse mind, would most likely swoop down and eat him if he didn't seek cover. He scrambled up, but couldn't summit the stair; he then sat and washed his worried little face, awaiting his fate.

Emily handed me the broom and I got to work, trying to brush the mouse into the pan. In my mind, it was a perfect plan: brush the mouse into a tall spaghetti pan, cover it with a lid, and take him outside (where the mouse would no doubt turn around and come back inside for more yummy toast crumbs.)

Sweeping up a mouse isn't nearly as easy as you think it will be, though. The mouse zipped back and forth on the stair to avoid the broom, with me going, “Oh no, don't you run up my pant leg!” in both English and, for good measure, and who knows why, in Spanish. Finally the mouse decided to take his chances and tried climbing up the wall beside the staircase.

Now, mice are good climbers, but this wall had no wallpaper, so down he went, plummeting to the floor. If it were one of us, it would be like falling from the Empire State Building. But the mouse just scurried down the hall as if he'd meant to do that, with Emily doing a little Mexican hat dance in the hallway to keep her feet out of his path. The mouse then found his bolthole beside the front door and made for the safety of the wall, if only to drown out the shrieking of his tormentors.

All that first night, I had to keep the light on, imagining the mouse scurrying up the bed frame and burrowing into my pillow. All the next day, I kept slippers on, for fear of stepping on this mouse or one of his many, many litter mates who are no doubt just waiting for the cover of darkness before they raid our cupboards.

I told myself this was ridiculous. Irrational. I should be ashamed of myself, I thought, especially since my dad raised gerbils for a living, and I routinely lifted them out of their cages to change the shavings and even fed those little buggers treats from my fingers. Yet, after I accidentally dropped one of the chocolate covered almonds I was eating at my desk and it rolled into a place beneath the heavy bureau that I can't possibly reach, I panicked all over again, imagining a whole army of mice running out to carry that huge treasure home, and oh yeah, me along with it, like some giant Gulliver.

I'm not the only woman in the world afraid of mice; in fact, I don't know a single woman who isn't. “I would have died if that had happened to me,” my friend Andrea agreed. Then she told me a story of her own: something about finding a mouse in the trunk of her car, and her driving to a neighbor's house at sixty miles per hour with the music blaring, hoping to scare the mouse out of its wits and keep it in the trunk. They set a trap in the trunk of the car but never caught it; to this day, Andrea checks the seats every time she gets into her car.

I finally went down to the hardware store and had a long discussion about pest control with the clerk. I couldn't bring myself to buy traps, because I knew I'd never be able to empty them. The “have a heart” traps wouldn't work, either, since they're basically just fun rides for mice who can easily figure out how to hike back home. In the end I bought poison. Or rather, “mouse treats,” which I suppose are the same kind of euphemism we use when buying “roach motels.”

“I nail mine into place,” the woman explained. “That way, the mice can't carry the bait off with them and you'll know how much you have left.”

I haven't put the treats out yet. I keep remembering the look on that mouse's face, and his courageous, foolhardy attempts to scale a staircase that was his personal Mt. Everest. He was, by far, braver than I'll ever be.

Mothers, Teach Your Daughters about the Herman Cains of the World

As Herman Cain strives to rise above the sexual harassment allegations dogging his run for the presidency (and I do mean “dogging”), almost every woman out there is uncomfortably recalling some former teacher, boss or neighbor who did the same things to her.
I have no idea if Cain is innocent or not. I suspect not, since more than one woman has come forward. The important thing about these stories is that here's one of those golden teachable moments: every mother should educate her daughters about the Herman Cains of the world.
I have been in similar situations as Cain's accusers. Most of the men who touched me or said inappropriate things did not frighten me. But these events did make me feel sour and wretched afterward, as if I had somehow caused them to happen.
For starters, there was the neighbor I babysat for who offered me a raise if I “just touched him a little in the car.” I was fourteen at the time.
One college professor—Sociology of Religions, of all things—took me to lunch and promised me an A if I went to Bermuda with him. There was another, less playful chemistry professor who showed up at my apartment when I was home with the flu, under the pretense of bringing me a lab report I could revise. He then proceeded to try and rape me. Lucky for me, he was crying about his divorce at the time, so I was able to fight him off despite having a fever of 102.
Shall I go on? Sure. While putting myself through college, I worked as a waitress in a restaurant. The owner of that place was a notorious groper—not just me, but any waitress was in danger if she made the mistake of being alone in the kitchen with him. His wife was a hostess in the dining room, but none of us ever spoke up because we needed the tuition money.
In one of my first jobs after college, the vice president of the publishing company I worked for promised to make me an editor if I gave him a blow job. “I won't even come in your mouth,” he wheedled. “It'll only take a minute.”
Years later, I worked as a PR consultant in a school district. There, my boss loved to take me to lunch. He never tried to touch me, but constantly referred admiringly to my “shelf,” as he so delicately put it.
Shall I go on? Nah. You get the idea. In fact, if you're a woman reading this, you probably got the idea long ago. Like me, you were probably neither stunningly beautiful nor desperate for attention, yet various men in power seemed to think that it was perfectly legit to make sexually explicit suggestions or advances.
These incidents did not damage me, but that's only because I am one of those fortunate women who had a strong, independent mother as a role model. My mom was a Navy wife accustomed to fending for herself; she taught me early on that there was nothing a man can do for me on the job that I can't do for myself. I managed to sidestep these men and keep moving forward in my life without them.
I hope that I have successfully taught our two blonde, gorgeous daughters—one a newly minted college graduate, the other about to complete her degree--about the Herman Cains of the world. I want our girls to be confident enough about their own intelligence and abilities to know that, when certain men make advances or inappropriate remarks, they don't have to put up with it.
I didn't speak out when these things happened to me, but I wish that I had. I hope that my girls, and generations after them, will know that our voices give us power.

WAITING FOR THE BIG C

I hate waiting. Yet, somehow I managed to book my mammogram for the week before Christmas, and found myself waiting for something I didn't want during the busiest week of the year.
I had a lump removed from my breast seven years ago, so getting a mammogram for me is always a cause for heart-pounding, knuckle-biting anxiety. What's more, since that first lousy mammogram, every mole, hive, aching joint, and stomach pain makes me wonder: Do I have cancer? Am I dying?
How stupid. Of course I'm dying. We all know how life's movie ends. Still, it didn't help matters that my pre-Christmas technician was one of those perky young ones. She wore a squintingly bright orange t-shirt to set off her sprayed-on tan and chatted like a parakeet as she maneuvered me in and out of the chilly breast sandwich plates. Her sharp nails were scratchy on my bare skin. I shivered like a wet dog at the groomer’s.
When she was through, the technician told me to “sit tight, Hon,” while she brought my films to the radiologist. She left me in a “For Women Only” waiting room with soothing prints of chubby women in garden hats, picnicking in a forest. Who picked out those particular prints, I wondered. Someone who thought we'd be calmed by them? Someone who thought, Oh, good, the fat women in these pictures will make everyone feel thin?
There's one other woman in the waiting room. She studiously avoids my eyes and flips through her magazine. I wonder which particular circle of hell she's in.
I consider the waiting room magazines, artfully arranged on the table in front of me like a colorful fan by some zealous volunteer. I can't bring myself to take one. It would be like pulling a feather out of a peacock's tail.
Seven years ago, I had the lump removed from my breast because my mammogram showed microcalcifications gathered in a “suspicious cluster.” Such a garble of a word, “microcalcifications.” Not cancer, just tiny calcium deposits. Lots of women have them. Normally, they show up on mammograms as big and round and scattered, like benign flower petals. But, for some women, microcalcifications appear in patterns associated with malignancy. These are smaller calcium deposits. They’re more numerous, and they come in an array of shapes: Rods, branches, even teardrops. A good radiologist will feel his hackles rise when he sees them arranged just so.
The last time I had an interesting pattern of microcalcifications, I had a “needle loc” biopsy, as the booking receptionist so breezily referred to it. Her good cheer suggested that there was nothing to fear about the procedure. My boyishly enthusiastic, tactless surgeon’s description of it was “just a little slice and dice.”
Now I know better. A needle location biopsy is a two-step procedure that takes several hours to complete. It’s a type of surgical biopsy that involves more breast sandwiches, but with the added discomfort of a hollow needle inserted into the breast. The hollow needle conveys a long thin wire into your breast in a way that makes you feel like a remote-controlled car. The amount of tissue removed ranges “from the size of a grape to that of an apricot,” as my surgeon had explained.
“What am I, a fruit basket?” I joked.
Oh yes. I joked around during that first biopsy. Then I got home and fell apart, plagued by unanswerable questions: Can you go barefoot in heaven? What would my children do without a mother? If I have chemo, will I look as good when I'm bald as Sigourney Weaver did in Alien II?
I waited weeks for those results. Because the local radiologist deemed my biopsied bit of flesh to be “in the gray zone,” the tissue had to be sent to a Boston cancer hospital, to a man so famous for his breast biopsy readings that my surgeon actually referred to him as “Dr. Breast.” And Dr. Breast, it turned out, was on vacation for two weeks.
“How dare he take a vacation when I need him?” I joked, and hung up, feeling sorry for that abandoned little piece of me sitting alone in a Boston lab, cooling its tiny heels.
As I waited, I tried to look on the bright side of cancer. If I lost my hair, I could be a shaggy brunette on Tuesdays, a smoky redhead on Thursdays, and hey, why not go blonde all weekend? Breast cancer could have other benefits, too. I could finally say no to the PTO! I’d book that vacation to Spain!
When the biopsy results arrived, they weren’t the best, but they weren’t the worst, either: I had DCIS, which means “ductal carcinoma in situ,” or “Damn Cancer In Sight.” The treatment was a lumpectomy, which the insurance company insisted on calling a “partial mastectomy.” I cried, because it suddenly seemed as if a piece of me had gone renegade: The breast that had once nursed my three children was acting up. Naughty, naughty breast, after all of that money I’d spent on expensive lingerie and bathing suits! If that was the thanks I got, maybe I’d just ask the surgeon to lop the whole thing off. Breast be gone! Ha! That would show ol’ Lefty who’s boss!
On the day of the surgery, the only truly bad moment came in the operating prep room, where I made the mistake of asking a nurse how much she thought the surgeon would remove. She patted my hand with a smile. “Oh, he’ll probably take out a chunk the size of a plum. You’ll be just fine.”
A plum! Can’t these people think about anything beside fruit? I fumed, and then the mask was over my face. The next thing I knew, my husband was leading me out to the car with a bandaged boob, a woozy head, and strict instructions to avoid my favorite underwire bras.
As I recovered from the lumpectomy, I had one more visit with my surgeon, who said, “Well, there’s no such thing as a 100 percent cure for cancer, but I’d say you’re in the 99 percent range.” He’d gotten clean margins all around the affected tissue, which meant I wouldn’t need radiation or chemo. “Go home,” he said. “Be happy.”
And so I have. For the last seven years, I’ve managed to do just that – except when I worry about having the Big C.
“What I hate about cancer is this feeling that I'm disappearing one piece at a time,” complained a friend as she headed into her second skin cancer surgery recently.
“Me, too,” I agreed. “Only with me, it’s probably going to be one melon ball at a time.”
We laugh about our battle scars, my friends and I. What else is there to do? We're all learning to wait with grace, and trying to remember that waiting is really just another part of living.
So take your next piece, I silently admonished the radiologist and the surgeon as I sat in the waiting room the week before Christmas, still not touching the magazines on the table. I know I'm not alone. I can deal.
The technician finally came back, all smiles. The other woman in the waiting room and I looked at each other. It was my name the technician was calling. I stepped out into the hallway, supposedly out of earshot, though I knew the other woman must be listening avidly, trying to see which one of us was going to make up the next count of breast cancer patients in this hospital, this country. We know we're in this together.
“Everything looks fine,” the technician said. “Go ahead and get dressed. Merry Christmas.”
Indeed. Happy New Year, too. And may every woman know that she is never alone in the waiting room.

Two Women Bare It All

Our first morning at Berkshire Vista Resort, my friend Mandy sleeps late while I muster the courage to leave our room. The question isn’t so much what to wear, here, as what not to wear.
We arrived late and identified ourselves calmly enough at the security intercom, but our cool evaporated at the sight of a sign that said, “Caution, Nudists Crossing Ahead.”
“I can’t get out of the car,” Mandy laughed, clutching the steering wheel like a life preserver. “What if naked people suddenly jump out of the woods to greet us?”
I left her doubled up over the steering wheel and marched toward the inn, a restored 1770s farmhouse, expecting to find the office. Instead, when I climbed the steps and peered through the window, I spotted a couple of men in easy chairs. Naked.
I turned heel and fled. “Whose idea was this?” I gasped, crawling back into the car.
Mine, of course. Surfing the Net to find a nature camp for my kids, I typed in “naturist” and stumbled onto a list of nudist camps. Hundreds of them. I couldn’t believe it. I thought everyone put their clothes back on after free love and Woodstock.
Giggling, I telephoned Mandy to announce that I’d found the perfect present for her 40th birthday: A weekend at Berkshire Vista, the northeast’s only luxury nudist resort. “We’ll celebrate your birthday in our birthday suits,” I coaxed, “and laugh about our nudist days when we’re 80.”
I proposed the idea as a joke to cheer Mandy on through the last difficult days of her thirties. Although she is a successful professional in business for herself, her personal life has been rocky; she recently ended her wedding engagement and feels bereft and uncertain about her future. I fully expected her to call my buff, I mean bluff, as the Day of Our Unveiling approached. When it became clear that she was going to do no such thing, I panicked.
I couldn’t possibly go to a nudist camp with Mandy, of all people! She works out at the gym four times a week and maintains a perfect tan. When I treated Mandy to her birthday dinner, she ordered a lobster and ate it without butter, observing my plate of fried scallops with astonishment: “That’s more fat than I eat in a month!”
I’m a junk food maven whose favorite snack du jour is a handful of cookie dough. I have three kids and the body to prove it. Mandy wears bikinis to the beach, while I’ve graduated to bathing suits bigger than my mother’s. I’m so self-conscious about my body, in fact, that I sometimes feel awkward getting undressed in front of my husband.
Most of my friends sympathized. “A nudist camp? OH MY GOD!” one exclaimed. “Listen, you may be hesitant about being naked in front of your husband, but I don’t even like being naked in front of myself!”
My husband, however, tried to reassure me. “You’re a beautiful woman,” Dan said, then grinned. “If you want to practice ahead of time, I’m always available.”
I stared at him. “Don’t you even mind that I’m going to be naked in front of complete strangers? Or that, by the way, those strangers will also be buck naked in front of me?”
Dan, who once wore a ponytail and a long beard that made him look like an Amish farmer, shrugged off my concerns. After all, he still reminisces fondly about his glory days as a member of a hot tub club in San Francisco. “Social nudity is about acceptance, not sex,” he lectured.
Oh, sure. I lie in my bed and will the skies to open up. At least if it rains, I can twirl a strategically placed umbrella.
Along with the umbrella, my suitcase bulges with enough gear to survive a winter in the Himalaya. Facing all-new fashion dilemmas caused me to overpack. I knew I needed bug spray and a few gallons of sunscreen, but then I noticed a garden party on the resort’s agenda. How did one accessorize for such a thing? A big sun bonnet and open-toed shoes? And where would I keep my lipstick and keys? I couldn’t carry a purse.
In the end, I solved the purse dilemma with a fanny pack, trying not to visualize what I’d look like wearing that and nothing else. I also poured all of my necklaces out of the jewelry box and into the suitcase. With enough weight around my neck, surely I’d look thinner.
I can hear voices now, men and women chatting in the kitchen outside our bedroom door. Naked voices, I remind myself.
I get up and, still in my cotton nightie, peek outside the window. My first nudist of the day is a woman on the deck of her RV. She’s wearing a sweatshirt and bends over, bare-bottomed, to water a planter of pink flowers. My second nudist is a man walking his dog. He’s in a t-shirt and flip-flops, swinging bravely along the open road as he and the dog trot down the path towards the brook.
It’s not raining, but I’m in luck: It’s chilly enough for a few people to wear sweat pants and tops. I’m one of them. I vowed to shed one article of clothing at a time, though, so that means no bra to breakfast. Mandy is still asleep, her blankets pulled up to her chin, as I let myself fall prey to gravity and slip out of the bedroom.
Headed into the restaurant, I rely on peripheral vision to avoid staring. A hairy man looms up on the other side of the pool fence like a grizzly bear on hind legs, drying himself on a towel the size of a handkerchief. A topless woman pushes her naked toddler on a playground swing, and a man wearing only a baseball cap squats next to a motorcycle. I don’t relax until I’m on the clubhouse deck, where I focus on the rolling hills that form a bright green basin around the resort.
When the sun comes out, the place has the giddy atmosphere of a summer camp. Campers bounce about the tennis courts, wearing only sneakers, and two elderly men toss a Frisbee with the glee of undiapered toddlers. I remind myself that the athletes of ancient Greece were naked, as I make the stunning observation that I’m among the most petite women here. I’m also one of the youngest. I had expected Aphrodite and Adonis, but this place is crawling with Ozzies and Harriets with broad smiles, fantastic tans and big bottoms. So this is where all of the flower children have gone!
As the temperature rises, the only people still dressed are the clubhouse bartender and waitress. “Well, at least you’re down to shorts,” one friendly fellow teases, striding past us with his wife. This couple is our age, and they have identical blonde manes of shoulder-length hair brushing their bare shoulders. Both wear shorts.
“So are you,” I observe.
“I hate carrying a towel.” He lifts the front flap of his dungarees to show us that he’s really not wearing shorts, but a skirt. And, as with all men in kilts, the mystery ends when the breezes blow.
Mandy and I decide to hike. If we’re hot, we’ll be more inspired to bare it all. “Are you going to wear earrings?” Mandy asks me anxiously. “Earrings and lipstick do seem sort of superfluous here, don’t they?”
“I’ll wear my most slimming earrings,” I declare, “and just one article of clothing.” I pull a sundress out of my suitcase and go into the bathroom to put it on. “Why am I closing the door, when in just a few hours I’ll be frolicking naked in the freesias at the garden party?”
“I don’t know,” Mandy answers, as I emerge from the bathroom and find her pulling on a t-shirt that reaches to her knees. “But I’m leaving my underpants on.”
Within an hour we’re sweaty and changing into our, uh, into nothing but towels for a swim. The brochure strictly states that this is a clothing-optional resort, but “Nudity is required in the pool, hot tubs and sauna. No bathing suits,” they add, in case anyone misunderstands.
We pause by the pool fence, still safely cocooned in our enormous towels, to watch a man wearing only sneakers erect a trellis for the garden party. “I understand why I’m reluctant to get undressed,” I tell Mandy. “I’m overweight and pasty white. But you’ve got the body of a goddess!”
“My breasts are too small,” Mandy argues. “Besides, your body is the way it is because you’ve had kids. I’m 40 years old and my body hasn’t done the work I think it’s supposed to do. Sure, I’m thin, but what’s the worth in that, at the end of a life? Nothing.”
I’m sad that she feels this way, and tell her so. Still, the fact that Mandy feels self-conscious, too, lets me take the final step. I drop my towel onto a pool chair and scuttle over to the outdoor showers, where a shriveled gnome of a man chats up an attractive blonde woman. Like many women here, the blonde has gone in for some decorative shaving. The result is a fuzzy caterpillar creeping downward from her navel. Another woman by the showers has two enormous nipple rings, leading me to think, Ow! Then I wonder whether, in fact, most people are more ornamental without clothing than I’d realized. How would I know? I’ve never even seen my own mother naked.
I’m content in the pool, where I have the illusion of being less exposed while my breasts bob along with me like a pair of happy white ducks. It’s not so bad being naked when I lie down in the sun, either. For one thing, my stomach looks flat. For another, the woman beside me is nearly twice my size. She’s sprawled across the chair the way my kids lounge in front of the television, leaving no place where the sun can’t shine. This is the first time in my life that I can contemplate the entire visual spectrum of the human condition, and that spectrum seems infinite. I am lying in a sea of flesh, and all around me are the old and the young, the thin and the fat, the hairy and the bald, the pierced and the unadorned.
That afternoon, Mandy and I don sunhats, bangles and beads. Clanking and tinkling, we follow the parade of people to the garden party in the Snob Hill area of the campground and discover an amazing fact: What nudists do for fun is dress up. The men are in top hats and spats, bow ties and cummerbunds. One woman wears white lace gloves and carries a parasol, another has chosen a black nightgown clasped at the neck with an elaborate brooch. There are a lot of sarongs and fanciful clothing created from scarves tied in fancy ways. These chatty couples all seem to have been nudists for decades and married even longer. Most of their grown children have no idea; they think Mom and Dad are just off camping again.
There are overflowing window boxes and elegant gardens, tasty snacks and, at one trailer, a tiny toad orchestra tooting away on a table. Someone sets up a croquet game and there’s a sale table to benefit a legal fund for nudists. It all feels like a PTA carnival at our elementary school, as I talk to two lawyers and an engineer, a construction worker and a teacher, a speech therapist and a banker. The key difference is that, without clothes, you can’t tell a ditch digger from a doctor. Nudists, I realize, are part of a subculture, like golfers or birders. And my husband was right: Nudism has nothing to do with sexuality, but with finding an activity you enjoy and seeking out places where you can practice it and feel accepted.
The party blooms into the night, when we all gather at the clubhouse dance. Mandy and I borrow dresses from our new nudist friends, since scanty evening wear is the one thing neither of us packed. Mandy’s is black and fits her like an ace bandage; mine is a filmy, copper-colored gown.
“This will bring out the highlights in your hair!” promised the owner of the dress.
The highlights in my hair? This dress is invisible! But it’s perfect for the dance, where a disco light swirls over people who leap, amble, hop, and sway to every wedding reception favorite from The Macarena to The Electric Slide.
Afterward, Mandy and I go back to our room and reverse our normal routines, going naked by day and then dressing in our comfy pajamas at night. “So what do you think of all this?” I ask her.
“Well,” she mumbles around her toothbrush -- by now we can do almost anything in front of each other -- “I’ll be glad to get back to the safe comfort of my clothes. But it’s certainly interesting to get a new perspective on aging and on the self-created shame most of us feel about our bodies.”
I think about this the next morning, when it really is raining and I find that I’m slightly disappointed. I’m not as anxious to zip, tuck and button myself back into clothing as Mandy. In fact, even my nightgown feels like too much right now.
I undress and shower, then wander into the kitchen to make tea, a towel draped over my shoulder. It’s a little odd, since I wouldn’t even walk around this way in my own house, and I almost wrap the towel around me. But then, through the kitchen window, I see several of the couples I met the night before. They’re soaking in the hot tub on the deck, never mind the rain, and laughing. One woman sees me and motions for me to join them.
I hesitate only a moment before I do it. Everyone slides over on the benches to make room, and the warm water rising to my rain-cooled shoulders feels like a blanket. I glance at the gray sky and have a sudden memory of the time I hired a small plane at the local airport to fly me over our town, of how astonishing it was to see our home as just another rooftop. Our house would have been nearly indistinguishable from the others, if I didn’t know the life within its walls. Just as now, from up above, my body would look like all of these other bodies next to mine, our heads tipped back to enjoy the rain on our faces.