Mucking About

The mid-April snow had turned into a chilling, intermittent rain. I made my way toward the quay from the rue Agar, my face bent out of shape against the cold.

“Take your winter coat,” he had said that morning, “it’s going to be freezing out today.”
“No way,” I grumbled back, “I’m sick of wearing that damned thing!”

I sat down on the bench under the cover of the #70 bus stop on the Pont de Grenelle, wondering why I hadn’t taken his advice. Next time I’ll listen to him, I thought, no matter how much he sounds like a nagging grandmother.

There were four of us huddled under the shelter, silently cursing the wait. Up in the distance, just off to the left of the Eiffel Tower, the faint shadow of a rainbow managed to pierce its way out of a dense, dark cloud, and brought a warming smile to my face. I sat there grinning and wishing it could be contagious. I had the urge to say to the others, “Look, did you see the rainbow?” with my big dorky, naive smile. But I didn’t, either by my own self-consciousness or the disbelief that they would have appreciated it as anything other than mundane.

So I sat there ginning and feeling a little warmer. The bus still didn’t come. A few more people gathered around. Then, instead of the bus that we were all expecting and hoping for, from around the corner came a woman, on foot, wearing a rain slicker with a bright yellow hood, leading three saddled ponies. The rain continued to fall. My grin widened. She stopped in front of us for a minute to adjust the bridals in preparation of crossing the bridge. I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Now there’s something you don’t see everyday!” She smiled, but didn’t say anything. We all watched with curiosity, my smile now a permanent fixture, the woman’s next to me had faded like the rainbow.

Finally, the bus arrived. I was the only one smiling.

When we last saw our hero, she was standing begrudgingly in a corner, protecting her face and praying that the winged creature of the night would find the wide-open door across the room from her. But alas, it flew into a dark back room to find, she assumed, a corner of its own, and she sighed with relief and relaxed her tensed muscles a bit thinking her worries were over, at least for the night…

I stayed still for a good five minutes before becoming convinced that batty wasn’t gonna budge. I closed the patio door and put on the security bar. I brushed my teeth in the downstairs bathroom (the upstairs bathroom was still under construction). I grabbed the sheets that were in the dryer from my last visit. I turned off the lights and went upstairs. All was quiet. I made the bed. I started unpacking. I went to set a bottle of water and the book I was reading (White Teeth by Zadie Smith) on the bedside table, and then I heard it again. That weird squeaky noise. Damn!

I turned around and there it was, right there in the bedroom with me. It must have been attracted by the light or by the noise – maybe it wanted company. I thought bats liked dark places and quiet, but it obviously wasn’t content downstairs in the darkness of that back room. So now what do I do? Here in the bedroom it had much less swooping space. Its new circuit became: one swoop around the room clockwise, then a brief landing on the ceiling in that classic upside-down bat posture, then off again for a swoop.

I had to do something. I didn’t want to kill the poor thing; I decided to catch it. But all I had at hand was a pillow case. I didn’t very well want to use my nice clean sheets, and after all I needed the sheet to hide under. Yes, there I was, even more ridiculous than before, a grown woman hiding under a sheet with a pillowcase in her hands making lame attempts to scoop this bat out of the air as it circled the room. The bat’s wingspan was of course a problem. It wasn’t that big was it wasn’t moving, but in flight its wings stretched at least a foot or so – much too wide for the reach of my measly pillowcase.

After a while I think it started getting tired of being chased and went to hiding behind the curtain. Well that was no good. I couldn’t possibly go to sleep knowing there was a bat in the room – that just wasn’t going to happen. So, making sure my hair and face were well protected under the sheet, I used the pillowcase to slap at the curtain, thus wrangling the bat out of its hiding spot. Did you know that bats can actually fly along the ground? I didn’t! It’s the weirdest thing to see and the freakiest if you’re not expecting it. I was protecting my head, not my feet, and here is this bat somehow coming out of the curtain while skimming along the carpet before once again taking flight and starting the whole thing all over again.

I was exasperated. I was never going to catch it, but it just wouldn’t leave. This all went on for a good half hour. Maybe more. I started talking to it. I yelled and cursed it. I called it names, then tried to be coy, tried to persuade it with reason. I tried both English and French. It was clueless. I was clueless. Finally, I had a new idea. I went out into the hall and turned on a light. I called to it. When it didn’t come I went back into the bedroom and slapped at it again with the pillowcase and then went back into the hallway. When it ultimately came out many minutes later, I rushed back into the bedroom and closed the door. Ha! Or rather, whew! Unbelievable.

The next morning I put on a pot of coffee and opened the patio door again. Within no time batty was out running track but this time, it found the door in seconds flat. Closing the screen door to keep the creatures out but let the morning air in, I stood there with my coffee cup watching as batty familiarized itself once again with its freedom, did a couple of laps around the yard, and fluttered out of sight.

Renegade chickens, bully cockroaches and now this. It wasn’t enough that I arrived on-time a day early, thinking it was Friday as it would have been had I been traveling West to East and not the opposite. But no, it was Thursday, silly me. Otherwise the trip went fine me being somewhat of a veteran of turbulence and airport security. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a ride after my time zone screw-up, and decided instead to follow the trip through like a true scout, winding up in a taxi with a tattooed comrade of a driver with whom I could be chatty, feeling less alone and once again a part of the club.

I was feeling pretty good when Mark-the-tattooed-taxi-driver dropped me off at the front door of the lake house for a few nickels shy of the cost of the taxi ride from my Paris abode to the Charles de Gaulle airport. Silliness subsided it was time to take stock, starting with a key to the house lying visibly in the window next to the font door. Not starting well. That first door was, at least, locked, and I continued in through the garage to the second door which, to my dismay, wasn’t. What else is waiting for me? The ceiling light had been left on and the security bar on the patio door was on the floor not serving its purpose. Real estate agents, humpf. Ultimately no damage done…hey, what was that?

I heard it first and knew somehow instinctively though not from experience what it was. When unexpectedly confronted with a member of the animal kingdom, more especially those unfamiliar and unwelcome creatures of the night, most of us go through several phases of assimilation: Surprise, questions, and sometimes panic.
Surprise: Oh my God! There’s a fill-in-the-blank!
Questions: Will it attack? Is it contagious? Will it jump on my face or get in my hair? How do I get rid of it?
Panic: Oh my God! There’s a fill-in-the-blank!

It wasn’t a particularly big bat, nor did I really think that it would attack, bite or try to use my hair to build some kind of bat nest. I’m sure, actually, that it was just as unhappy as I was that it was in the house. But there it was. It was in the house. Shit. As it swooped around the open space I made my way to the patio door and opened it wide. Then I stood there feeling silly again. No matter how convinced you are that the damn thing isn’t going to attack, you’re still really protective of your face, aren’t you? Come on, I know I’m not alone on this one. At each wide, graceful swoop, I couldn’t help but think it was headed right for me. It swooped and it swooped, making grand circles around the living room, at first high up, then down low, then continuing through and under the balcony within inches of the open patio door, but just not somehow leaving through it. It swooped back into the back room and within seconds would be back starting its circuit all over again. Bats have an amazing mechanism for evaluating and navigating space and volume. Not once did it even vaguely come close to crashing into me or anything else, but no matter how convinced I am that it was not happy in the house, it just didn’t register that open door. I stood in the corner watching it running track for a good 15 minutes until finally, poof – it disappeared into the darkness of the back office and stayed. Or so I thought.

To be continued…