A Rat is Forever               1,164 words

Her eye to the peephole, Alice groans as she watches Ramon lurching towards her across the shadowy hall. He’s drunk, and he’s got something in a box.

‘It’s Ramon,’ she whispers. ‘Drunk again.’

‘Poor guy,’ mutters Leon, fiddling with his tie. They’re in their party clothes, seconds away from leaving.

Alice sighs and fumbles with their locks to open the door.  Ramon is comically surprised, takes a few drunken steps backwards, mouth gaping. ‘Me rat-eyed,’ he garbles. ‘What?’ says Alice, automatically taking a step back. ‘Me rat-eyed,’ he repeats, proffering the box. Alice looks inside, screams, jumps back. There’s a dead rat in there. Little rat teeth bared, tiny pink paws curled up.

‘Que Pasa?’ Leon wants to know, and a quick explanation follows, in Spanish. Leon sometimes has trouble understanding Ramon, who tends to mush his words, but not this time. ‘It’s his pet,’ he explains. ‘It died this morning. He wants me to bury it.’

Ramon lives just opposite them. He’s young: hardly over 30, but his joints are all twisted from arthritis. Sometimes you come back to the apartment and find him on his long, long way upstairs, clutching the banister, grimacing in pain. You go to the toilet, change your clothes, brush your teeth, run back out again and there’s Ramon going hand over hand along the banister, finally huffing and puffing his way up to the fifth floor landing. There’s no elevator and it’s his bad luck that no ground floor apartments ever become vacant.

Leon’s a softie. He’ll carry Ramon’s groceries for him, run to the pharmacy and get him aspirin. Alice can’t be bothered. When she sees Ramon coming up the stairs gripping the banister like grim death, she makes sure she’s as far away from his as she can get.

Alice looks at her watch ostentatiously. ‘Omigod, look at that, we’re going to be late.’

Leon gives her a look. Ramon, still clutching his box, is close to tears. He’s a drunkard. His family’s washed their hands of him. Their Puerto Ricans. Nicely dressed, decent-looking people, respectable: you can tell they’re ashamed. Leon says they ought to be ashamed, anybody’d be a drunk with the kind of pain Ramon’s got 24-7. Alice thinks to herself:  a drunk’s a drunk.

Leon pats Ramon on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay,’ he says, ‘I’ll borrow a shovel, take him down to the back lot and bury him tomorrow, okay?’  Ramon’s face crumples. Alice is so disgusted she has to look away.

On the way to the party, Leon’s quiet. ‘What’s wrong?’ Alice wants to know. He won’t talk at first, makes her drag it out of him. ‘The guy’s alone, all by himself in his apartment all the time. Can’t you even spare him five minutes?  Or pretend to be concerned?’ Alice can’t believe this. ‘For God’s sake, Leon, he had a dead rat. What was I supposed to do?’

He’s quiet again, angry at her. Over nothing. A dead rat, for God’s sake.

Alice is struggling along in her high heels. Leon’s half a block ahead of her now. Lexington Avenue is a zoo, people everywhere as Alice doggedly follows in Leon’s wake. Christmas disco music blasts tinnily from shops, booms out of cars. Glitz galore. It’s Christmas and she’s limping along, fighting with her husband over a drunkard and his dead rat.

‘For God’s sake, Leon,’ she pants, catching up, ‘it’s Christmas!’ He just keeps up the pace, half turns, almost looking at her. ‘Well yeah,’ he mutters. ‘That’s just my point, Alice. It’s Christmas.’

On the way back from the party, the streets are less crowded, but people are drunker. Leon is still quiet, moody. It has begun to snow, too, but it’s wet snow: tiny, sleety, stinging flakes. Through the falling snow, Alice sees a woman walking towards them. Old, but tall, well dressed. She’s clutching something in her arms, one of those awful little dogs, maybe a Pekingese, all dressed up in tartans and bows. The woman’s holding it up close to her face and she’s talking to it, chiding it, crooning to it. As the woman walks past them, Alice finds their eyes meeting and she has to look away. In the woman’s face there is a certain dignity, a certain pride. Defensiveness too. And almost unfathomable loneliness.

That night Alice can’t sleep. The woman’s handsome, bony face fills her mind, that look of pride mingled with defiant embarrassment – Okay, she seemed to be saying, so it’s Christmas and I’m out here talking to my dog, what of it? The dog’s little coat, the woman’s decent shoes, her carefully done hairdo, for some reason these details strike Alice as so pathetic she can barely stand to think of them. What might happen to a person to make her become like that woman? Imagine the slow alienation from friends, the growing away from those you loved, from those you called your acquaintances, all culminating in a solitary lifestyle with a dog.

 

In the morning she gets up first. The pet shop is only five blocks away and already doing a brisk business what with it being Christmas Eve. Inside it is too warm and it smells, as pet shops do, of fear and birdseed and dung. ‘I want a rat,’ Alice says to the big-bellied fellow behind the counter. ‘The younger and healthier the better.’  The man looks her up and down and goes and gets one out of a cage in the back, putting it in one of those little cartons they put Chinese take-out in. ‘You got a snake?’ he asks. She shakes her head, mystified at first, then, as she understands, says quickly, ‘No, no – it’s a gift. For a friend.’  The man thinks this is hilarious. Handing her the change he chides her, ‘You take care and remember – a rat is forever, not just for Christmas.’

At home, they put the rat in a shoe box with some shredded newspaper. Alice gives it wheat germ, a piece of cheese, some water. It takes Leon ages to find anyone who has a shovel he can borrow, but at last he succeeds and he goes out to bury the rat. Ramon watches from his window, a Kleenex balled up in his ruined fingers. Rattus domesticus benedictus, pronounces Leon, who is totally ignorant of Latin. Ramon, however, is visibly touched.

Later they take over a bottle of eggnog and the new rat. Ramon’s flat is predictably filthy; the empty rat cage is the cleanest thing in the room. The new rat looks right at home in it.  

‘Merry Christmas!’ slobbers Ramon, hugging Leon first, then Alice. ‘Merry Christmas!’ they echo. Alice is horrified, but she hugs him back.