Chipmunk
I remember the house, can see it even now, though it was over a decade ago when I lived there. I see the Berber carpet, beige, nothing I would’ve picked out but it was there when I moved in, it was my husband’s house before we met, and I see the sun streaming through the windows, into the white kitchen, the oddly-angled staircase at the front, the open floor plan filled with that early September sun, and me crossing through those beams with my new baby in my arms. He was just a few days old then and I was tired, so tired, swaying to try to put him to sleep, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something small and fast dart across the floor.
I thought rat, sharp teeth, diseases, but then I saw the two brown lines down its back and the fluffy tail that chipmunks have and I breathed out, relieved, until it darted out from beneath the sofa, and all I could think was I had this small baby and we were alone, my husband taking every opportunity to get away.
I froze at first, the chipmunk zipping everywhere as if I were the intruder in his house, and finally I lunged for the stairs, ran up with the baby against my chest, more awake now from my panic, and when I got to the second floor and I called my husband’s cell phone, I said something like, Come home now, I am recovering from childbirth and holding our infant and do not have a spare limb or extra energy to chase a chipmunk out of the house, and I was always saying dramatic things like, I am recovering from childbirth because he could not see the simplest, most basic facts about my existence, and so he sighed, said he was coming, hung up. I sat down then, in the nursery rocker, but before I could really even take a deep breath, a relaxed breath, the chipmunk was in the room with us and I thought, It can climb stairs? Why would it want to climb stairs?
Afraid to put the baby down (maybe there were more, a whole family of them, and maybe they would bite my brand new child), I held onto my infant as I jumped up and tried to corner the animal back toward the stairs. I didn’t even have shoes on, which disturbed me, but all the pairs I might slide on with the baby in my arms were in the mudroom, past the chipmunk, on the first floor, and there was nothing I could do about it then. Next, the chipmunk flew back down the stairs and I noticed tiny dark pellets all over the hallway rug and my heart sank because I couldn’t have my perfect new baby living with chipmunk shit, how was it that the house was ruined just when the baby came to live in it?
I heard the garage door open and then close again, and my husband walked in and I yelled out locations, watching the rodent move so swiftly through our house, apparently shitting everywhere it went. My husband gave me a disgusted look, an exasperated look, everything I asked of him was such a problem, and he went back into the garage and came into the house with a broom and he started to slap the floor with it, narrowly missing the chipmunk every time, and I said, Well, don’t kill it, and I don’t even know why I would say such a thing because I wanted it gone, but still, I followed my husband around begging him not to kill the chipmunk, and even as he chased it into a corner of the garage, I stood there in the doorway holding my baby against my shoulder so he couldn’t take in the violence in his world, and I said Stop as my husband continued to hit it long after it was dead, as if everything he never liked about his life could be beaten out of it. That moment of helplessness, of being powerless to control him, replayed again and again long after the divorce and through multiple courtroom appearances and even now, just this week, the helplessness bloomed in my chest again when my sixteen-year-old son got into my ex-husband’s car in our driveway, and the man I saw driving my son away is the same stranger I watched that day, hunched over the still and silent animal dying on the cement floor.
Cindy House (@cindyhouse.bsky.social) is the author of Mother Noise, a memoir in essays, and a regular opener for David Sedaris on his tours across the country. She teaches in the MFA program at Lesley University and lives in New Haven, CT.