The Migration of Snakes

You have to get out of the house. That’s what he always says, on those rare occasions he’s home and not on the road. Or he’s on the road, on the phone, from his hotel. You have to get out of the house. Spoken truly like someone who has no idea how difficult it is to go somewhere, with two kids, three and eight months, and no babysitter, no nanny. And no one around. We’ve moved so much, luckily just within the U.S., because there are families that move internationally in his company. But we stay in the U.S., moving from one town to another. And where we are now, in this godforsaken suburb, there’s no one here during the day. All these people, their kids are older, they’re at school all day, and the dads work, and the moms are gone, doing what I don’t know. I don’t know them. Because they’re never home. And nights and weekends, they’re going to soccer, to softball, to basketball, hockey, whatever, whatever’s in season, to barbecues, to one another’s houses. It all takes so much energy. We’re home alone, Nicole and Freddy and I, going nowhere.
But though I often think Sam is wrong—this job will be better, wrong; this town will be better, wrong; we’ll be able to save more money, spend more money, have more, wrong—there are so many times when the walls feel like they’re closing in on me. Maybe I do need to get out. So when I got a brochure in the mail from the Parent and Child Center, I thought maybe Sam was right, and this would be a lifesaver. “A place for families,” the brochure said. So I signed up for a class for parents and three-year-olds, during which I leave Nicole in the nursery with the smiling mommy-aged women. Half the time she cries and they have to come get me because she won’t stop crying. I’m the only one who has a baby who can’t make it through class. The other women nod at me, superior in their own children’s ability to adjust. But even when I’m there, listening to them talk is almost worse. They know everything about parenting. And they all know one another; they’ve been taking these classes together since their three-year-olds were barely out of the womb. They have scheduled playdates and lunches and shopping excursions and visits to the park in nice weather and the mall’s soft play area in bad weather. And they invite one another’s kids to birthday parties. “So invite them over,” Sam says, as if it was that easy. You can’t just break into a tight little women’s group. It doesn’t work that way. Especially not for me; moving gracefully into a group of such self-assured and self-satisfied women strikes me as impossible. “Picture them in their underwear,” says Sam.
“That’d work better for you,” I say. They’re all thin, thin and trim, they work out, dropping their well-adjusted children at the fitness center nursery. They probably have beautiful underwear, gorgeous lingerie on gorgeous bodies. Not saggy underwear on a flabby belly.
But we’ll move again. I just don’t know where and when. Trying to fit in, that’s too much work. It’s hard enough to get out of bed in the morning as it is.
Freddy loves the Parent and Child Center. Good for him. At least someone is getting something out of it. Today, as usual, we’re late, and I’m trying to hustle him out to the car when he finds another snake in the yard. A snake in the grass! He sees them all the time, little black-and-yellow striped garden snakes. He hunkers down, fascinated, staring. “Get away from it, Freddy,” I tell him. “Snakes bite, you know.”
He shakes his head, solemn with his knowledge. “They don’t bite,” he says.
“They do,” I say. “They have little sharp teeth that really, really hurt.” I have no idea if this is true, but I’ll say whatever it takes to get him to back away. Me, I won’t go in the backyard. In the trees by the swamp—no, the wetlands, they’re wetlands, not swamps—the snakes breed, they’re always slithering back there, behind our little house.
“But no poison, Mom,” he tells me. “Daddy said.” What faith he has in what Daddy says. I remember when I was secure in the knowledge of what his father told me.
“You won’t care about poison when they sink their teeth into you,” I tell him. “Come on, Freddy, we’re going to be late. Come on.” We live in continuous echo chamber: come on, hurry up, let’s go, we’re going to be late. When we’re going anywhere, that is.
Then something slides across my foot, and I look down to see a snake using my sandal as a speed bump. For just a second I freeze, thinking maybe it’s only one of Freddy’s many toys that’s been left outside. But those, of course, don’t move. I stifle a scream and kick, jerking my foot as hard as I can, sending the thin black snake writhing helplessly through the air. Freddy watches, his face alight with joy. Then I rub the top of my foot against the back of my jeans.
“Snake germs,” I mutter, trying to make light of it.
“Snakes don’t have germs,” Freddy says. “Daddy said.”
What answer can I have for that? Daddy said. Daddy, the glamorous visitor, calling from Detroit. Chicago. Dallas. Charlotte. I stay home, keeping the doors closed, keeping the snakes out.
But now I’ve gotten out of the house, and I’ve kicked a poison-free, germ-free snake across the yard. And my reward is waiting for me at the Parent and Child Center, where Nicole whimpers and cries in the nursery while Freddy and I sit in a circle of moms and kids on the floor, and we sing songs that the other moms seem to know, but I don’t, songs about liking to eat bananas and apples. I missed this somewhere, didn’t read that chapter in the mommy manual.
Then we have our “breakout” session, where the kids stay and play with Teacher Debbie, who’s just a few years younger than grandmotherly, and the moms go off for our mom lessons. Today I’m treated to a lengthy discussion of validating emotions. This is for three-year-olds, for heaven’s sake; whoever said a three-year-old has emotions worth validating? I distract myself by wondering what’s worse, having a snake slide across my foot at home or being here, listening to this.
Maybe it’s because I’m tired, because I don’t sleep, or Nicole doesn’t sleep, which means even less sleep, but I can’t hold my tongue anymore. “Don’t you think,” I say toward the end of class, clearing my throat, “that maybe there’s too much validation going on?” The other mothers turn toward me, polite, frozen smiles on their faces. I’m not going to be a hit today. “I mean, if you think about it, how about all those kids who go around shooting other kids, or shooting their parents?”
The smiles fade. “What do you mean?” says Liz, the parent educator. Now there’s a great job title.
“We go around telling these kids their emotions are all OK,” I say. “So doesn’t that lead them to think any feeling they have about anything is a valid reason for shooting someone?”
“Oh, no,” says a women whose name I don’t remember and whose nametag I can’t read from here. “I think those kids who kill have been told to suppress their emotions all their lives. They’re really miserable. It’s just like—” she laughs, a pseudo-self-deprecating laugh, “when my husband tells me, ‘You’re making too big a deal about that. It’s not important.’ That just makes me go ballistic!” And the other women laugh and nod.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I think we’re giving kids too much room to feel.”
“I don’t think you can give them too much room,” says another woman. I can see her nametag: Patty. She has a baby younger than Nicole; she’s my height and at least two sizes smaller in clothing. “We have to teach them how to handle their emotions, not suppress them.”
“I didn’t say ‘suppress them,’ ” I say. “I said ‘validate.’ Isn’t that what we’re talking about here? Validation? If my kid says, ‘Hey mom, I feel like blowing some people away today,’ I should say, ‘why sure, honey, I validate that’?”
Oh, I’ve got their attention now.
There’s a silence before the others collectively turn to Liz, as if to say, help us with this twit. Liz clears her throat and fingers the pendant hanging from her neck. “Well, that would be taking validation to an extreme,” she says. “What I think we’re”—notice the collective we’re—“saying is that we have to let our kids know we hear what they’re saying, that we understand they are really feeling that particular emotion. Not that they should go ahead and act on it.”
“But if we’ve told them their emotions are valid, how are we going to stop them from acting on them?” I don’t even care, but I can’t seem to stop.
“By giving them acceptable outlets for their emotions,” says Liz. The other mothers nod, validated. Liz goes on, encouraged: “In fact, let’s talk about healthy outlets. That’s a challenge for three-year-olds.” There’s laughter. I don’t join in.
When class ends, no one talks to me. I tuck Freddy into his jacket, make the usual parent-educator-approved comments about how hard he worked on this painting and how nice that he used so many colors. Around me, other kids are being tucked into Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren jackets, shinier and more impressive than the blue fleece jacket from JCPenney that Freddy wears. Someday, there will be money for better clothes. Daddy said.
I tell myself I don’t mind when I see the other mothers lingering in the hallway, chattering brightly. When I stop by the office to withdraw from the class I tell myself that it’s just something that didn’t work. It’s part of life. But it feels like giving up. I’m a mother and I’m a woman; I’m supposed to belong here.
But I don’t. As I’m leaving the office, on my way to pick up Nicole from the nursery, I have to walk by a cluster of women from my class, all of whom stop talking when they see me, more of those polite smiles, no one meeting my eye. As far as I know, anyway, since I don’t try to make any eye contact Freddy seems to know what I’m doing. “I don’t wanna go,” he says, pulling my hand to keep me from exiting the building. “Stay.”
“Can’t,” I say. “Class is over.” I pull him harder than I mean to, and he collapses on the floor, howling. Nicole watches him, her eyes bright. “Freddy,” I say, trying hard to sound loving in front of the attentive receptionist and the silent women behind me, “come on, honey, it’s time to go.” He just cries harder. Now Nicole is whimpering. I lean down to whisper into Freddy’s ear. “We … have … to … go,” I hiss. “Now. Come on. I’ll take you to Burger King if you stop this right now.” Bribery, I know, is not highly thought of at the Parent and Child Center. That was a topic for two whole classes.
Freddy whimpers, but at least he looks at me. “Burger King?” he says loudly.
“Yes,” I whisper. “But you have to come now.” And so we go.

I don’t want to go home, but I can only tolerate Burger King so long, and Nicole needs a nap. Some babies sleep in their mother’s laps, but not Nicole, she has to have her crib. Besides, the stink of French fries, the screaming of kids, the too-bright lights, all make me feel like my skin is being stretched too tight. So home we go. I tuck Nicole in, and she waves her little hands in front of her face, a ritual she performs to put herself to sleep. I can hear the TV; Freddy learned how to turn it on, and I keep it set to Animal Planet. He slumps down in front of it, waiting patiently for crocodiles, for snakes, for dogs and cats being rescued.
Suddenly I’m so tired that I’m trembling. The afternoon stretches before me, full of things I should do, empty of anything I want to do. I go sit in the living room, that useless room-for-show in the front of the house. But, I realize, the useless room isn’t so useless, if it gives me this time alone. Leaning my head back on the couch, I close my eyes and sit with my hands on my thighs, palms up. It’s not sleeping, but it’s not exactly conscious either. It’s about the closest thing to sleep I can do. I feel my lungs breathing, slow and slower, each breath feeling like it might be the last. Then Freddy calls, “Mom? Mom!” I sigh and open my eyes. Across from the couch is a display cabinet, full of the useless knickknacks, crystal bowls, Chinese tea sets from Chinatowns we used to visit before kids, things we’ve collected in seven years of marriage. It has a mirror for a back wall. I see myself, a puffy figure in loose, rumpled clothes, hair not really clean and pulled back into a tight ponytail. Something flickers in the upper range of my eyesight, and I look up. There’s a thin something poking out from the top of the cabinet, and I sigh. How did Freddy get a toy snake all the way up there? But then it moves, and I realize that the snake looking down on me is not a toy.

The Yellow Pages has dozens of ads for pest control companies, but most work only with mice and squirrels, bugs, moles, voles, rats and bats. No one wants to do snakes. I finally find one that does and call them. I want to hide somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t know how the snake got there, but if it made it to the top of the cabinet, it could get up the stairs. So I sit in the chair that’s outside Nicole’s room for decoration, all poofy and white, where I can watch her crib while still peering downstairs to the TV room. Freddy is transfixed in front of some show about koala bears. And I’m standing guard, as if that will help.
The snake man is big and burly, with a grizzled, graying beard that covers his face. I show him where the snake was. He brings in a ladder and peers over the top of the cabinet. “Yup,” he says. “Here he is.” Then, with his bare hands, he brings the snake off the cabinet.
“Oh my God,” I say, peering around the corner to the TV room, hoping Freddy isn’t coming our way. He thinks the big man is here to clean the china cabinet.
He chuckles. “You’re not afraid, are ya?” he says. “Of a little old garter snake?”
“I thought they were ‘garden snakes.’”
He shakes his head while he puts the snake in a canvas bag. “Common mistake. They’re really known as ‘garter snakes.’ Know why? Probably not, if you didn’t know they was called ‘garters.’ ” He twists the end of the bag, knotting it. “Since they’re mostly black with stripes, they look like men’s garters, back from the old times.” A picture suddenly appears in my head of snakes dangling from my underwear, striped snakes twisting around my legs, little snake teeth holding up silk stockings. “Although since people often see them in gardens and lawns, calling them a ‘garden snake’ is not too far off base.” He descends from his ladder. “Tell you what. I’d guess this thing got in through an open window or door, but let me have a look in the basement, just to be safe.”
“I didn’t know they could climb.”
“Oh, they’re good little climbers,” he says. “I seen ’em in places you wouldn’t believe. You ever heard of those tree snakes in Guam? They got those brown snakes—now those are deadly!—and they just drop right out of the trees.” He guffaws. “Law of gravity—what goes up, must come down!”
“There’s the basement door,” I say, pointing at it. Freddy calls for juice, and I hurry to help him, my eyes flickering up and down, looking for slithering tails on the floor and scanning the cabinets for dropping snakes.
Minutes go by. Freddy drinks his juice and wanders upstairs, where I hear the sound of his Lego bin being dumped on the floor. Normally a sound that nearly makes me cry, since it means I will be picking up thousands of Legos later, but for now it’s good.
Then there’s a shout from the basement. My stomach lurches. “Ma’am?” calls the snake man. “You better come down here.”
I pause at the top of the stairs. “What is it?”
“You got a whole nest of snakes down here,” he says.
I close my eyes. “I can’t,” I say.
“Sure you can. They get into houses easily enough.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t come downstairs.”
There’s a thumping on the steps, then he reappears. The bag in his hand is clearly fuller now, and wriggling. “I think I got ’em all,” he says. “But I want to look around outside, see where they came from.”
I wait by the doorway as he disappears around the side to the backyard. Eventually, he calls me out. I pull my winter boots out of the coat closet, even though it’s sixty degrees and sunny, unusually warm this late in the fall. The snake man is staring at the house foundation in the side yard. He bends over, and in spite of myself, I smile to see the beginning of his butt crack appear at the top of his work pants. “I think this is your problem,” he says, pointing to a minuscule gap between the concrete block foundation and the siding. “This is where they’re getting in.”
“That’s so small,” I say, squinting at it. “How can they fit in there?”
“Snakes can worm their way through almost any size crack,” he says. I have to choke back a scream of laughter at a sudden vision of a snake slipping into his crack. “And this time of year, they’re migrating.”
“‘Migrating’?” I say. “I thought geese migrated.” Now I see crazy V-shaped formations of flying striped snakes.
“Snakes too,” he says. “Spring and fall. In the spring, they’re leaving their hibernation to find places just like that”—he points to the trees and swamp, wetlands, behind our house—“to spend the summer. Then fall comes, like now, and they need a dark, kinda warm place to wait out the winter. A basement is ideal, if they can get into one. Of course, it’s not ideal for you, because come next spring, there’s babies.”
“Oh my God,” I say. There’s a hard, choking ball of panic rising in my throat. My stomach is squirming like the tied-up bag he’s tossed on the ground.
“I can do up an estimate for you to fix that gap,” he says. “And we should probably do another sweep of the basement. Once they’re in, it’s a tough job to keep ahead of them.” I try to say something, but all that comes out is a strangled sound. He looks at me.
“Where in the basement did you—” I say, unable to finish the sentence, just pointing at the bag on the ground.
“Sump pump,” he says. “That’s a common one. But I’d like to do more looking, maybe behind some of the walls. They could be anywhere. Hell, I’ve seen ’em nesting under water heaters. I went to a house where they was coming up through the pipes into the washing machine.”
“No,” I say, and what I mean is: stop talking. “Can you just fix it?”
He looks at his watch. “Not today,” he says. “You’ll have to call scheduling. I’m booked solid all week. I only got here because I was doing an estimate for mice the next block over.”
“No,” I say. “You have to help me.”
“Well, call scheduling and see if they got anyone on call,” he says. “They might be able to get someone out in the next couple days.”
I grab hold of his arm. “No,” I say. “Please. Can’t you help me? I can’t be here with these snakes.”
He glances down at his arm, where my fingers are digging in as tightly as I can.
“Hey,” he says. “It’s not that bad.”
“It is,” I say. “It’s exactly that bad. This is impossible. I can’t live with snakes in my house. Everything is wrong. I hate this house, I hate this town, I hate this—”
“Ah, hell, lady,” he says, gently removing his elbow from my hand and patting my shoulder awkwardly. “We can kill the snakes. You don’t have to feel bad about that.” He pulls a small spiral notebook out of his shirt pocket, flipping through it and frowning at it. “Well, I can move a couple of things around, come out tomorrow afternoon. I need another guy with me, but I can grab him from his lunch hour.”
“I’ll buy you both lunch,” I say. “Please.”
He peers at me, brow furrowed. “You got anywhere you can go?” he asks. “Any family? Your mom around here?”
“No,” I say. What I don’t say is that even if she lived next door, she’d be no help. All my life, she’s never been there. The shadow woman. Silent and miserable. Until my sister and I grew up and moved away. Then she was free. She’d want nothing to do with this. And I want nothing to do with her. I’ll be different, I’ve always thought, always said, I won’t be like my mother, I’ll be there for my kids.
“You gonna be OK until tomorrow?” the snake man asks.
I nod. “What choice do I have?” I say, trying to laugh.
“You could go to a hotel,” he says. “You might sleep better.”
“Yes,” I say, nodding again. “A hotel.” It sounds beautiful, dreamlike, a quiet hotel, but already it sounds like too much work—packing, planning, preparing. What if Nicole cried all night? What if someone complained?
I’ll think about it later. For now, snakes are all I can consider.

The snakes don’t bother my husband. “You don’t need to go to a hotel,” he says, from his own hotel room in Cleveland.
“I can’t sleep here,” I say. “Snakes climb.”
“They’re harmless,” he says. “Garden snakes aren’t poisonous.”
“Garter snakes,” I correct him. I can almost feel them slithering around my ankles. “But they do bite.”
“They’re not coming up to the bedrooms,” he says, patience clearly wearing thin. “So the guy found some in the basement. And by the way, what did this snakebuster cost?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He didn’t leave a bill. He’s coming back tomorrow to look for more and to seal off the siding.”
“No, no, no. Christ. Look,” he says. “All he’s going to do is spray foam insulation in those cracks and charge hundreds of dollars for something I can do myself for twenty bucks.”
“When you come home at the end of the week,” I say. “The snakes are migrating. They’re moving into the house. You’ll just lock them in with your insulation. Then next spring there’ll be babies everywhere.”
“I don’t care if the snakes are migrating, we’re not spending that kind of money,” he says. “I’ll deal with it when I’m home on Friday. I’ll go to the hardware store on the way home from the airport.”
“I already told him to come,” I say. “He rearranged his schedule just to help me. I can’t cancel him now.”
“Sure you can,” he says. “Just call them up. If you call now, you can probably just leave a message and not even talk to a live person.”
“You don’t know how awful it was to see that snake on top of that cabinet. I can’t make it until Friday. You don’t understand—the snakes climb! They climb!”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he says. “It’s not that big of a deal. The snakes aren’t going to hurt anything. You don’t need to be so dramatic about everything.”
“What else have I been dramatic about?” I demand. “I always put up with everything—”
“Give me a break,” he says. “Everything is a complaint with you. Everything is always wrong. You could show some appreciation.”
“Appreciation for what? A house full of snakes?”
“Like that’s my fault,” he says. “Listen to yourself. I should have known. All the time we dated, you bitched about your mother, how she was never around, how she worked and was so tired, and you wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t allow you to be home with the kids.”
“I—”
“And it couldn’t be just any home. It had to be a nice one. So now you’ve got what you said you always wanted, and all you do is bitch about it. ‘I hate being home, I hate this house, I hate this town.’ Well, you’re just going to have to figure out how to live with it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He sighs, the annoyed, pointed kind of sigh. “Not that you’ll appreciate this,” he says, “but I’m being promoted. To manage the local office. So I shouldn’t have to transfer again, not for a long time.”
“Wonderful,” I say. “Then you can afford to snakeproof the house.”
The line hums between us. “At the moment,” he says slowly, “the extras come in the form of equity in the company, so—”
“So it’s not more money,” I say. “What a great deal. Equity. Will they give us equity in snakes?”
“Mommy?” Freddy appears in the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.
“What are you doing up?” I yell at him. “You’re supposed to be asleep. Why can’t you just sleep when you’re supposed to? Go to bed!”
“Is that Freddy? Let me talk to him,” Sam says.
“No,” I say. “He’s supposed to be in bed. I can’t talk anymore.” I hang up the phone and scoop Freddy up, his little legs swaying. “You have to stay in bed.”
He leans his head on my shoulder. “Scared, Mommy. Snakes.”
I stop and grab his chin, looking hard at him. “What snakes? Did you see a snake? Tell me!”
“You said snakes.” He starts to cry.
“Are there snakes in your room? Real ones? Not those goddamn toys? Tell me, Freddy!”
He cries harder. The phone begins to ring. It rings four times, then goes to voicemail. After a moment, it rings again. I haul him over my shoulder and rush upstairs, where I pull back his bed covers and look under the bed and behind the dresser, then cautiously open the closet doors. The phone stops. There are no signs of wildlife. “You see snake, Mommy?” Freddy asks, calmer.
“No,” I say, “and neither do you.” He reaches up for a hug, but I pull his arms down and plop him into bed. “Go to sleep.”
“I wanna story,” he says.
“No,” I say, and he begins to cry. “Bedtime. You have to learn that.” From downstairs I can hear the phone ringing again. I close his door and lean against the wall outside it, listening to Freddy’s wails jangling along with the phone, and I wonder how many of Freddy’s emotions I haven’t validated today.
Freddy finally hiccups to a stop, and the phone rings twice more. Then everything is quiet.
Back in my own room, the one I share with my husband when he’s here, I gingerly pull back the bed covers and look under the bed. Nothing but dust. I leave a table lamp on low, so I can see what’s happening, and I crawl into bed fully dressed. The day is ending, I think, and then I think, as I do most nights, that I don’t know if I can do this anymore. My own nighttime ritual, like Nicole’s fluttering fingers.
I remember how I saw myself in the cabinet mirrors, before I saw the snake—a puffy, unhappy woman. A shell. Useless. The skin the snake leaves behind. There’s nothing there that anyone could want. I pulled Freddy out of the class he liked because I didn’t. And because the mothers didn’t like me, and if they don’t like me, Freddy doesn’t have a chance. Better to take him out before he starts to understand that he’s being left out, and he’s being left out because of his mother.
I yell, I cry, I withhold hugs not to be mean, but because I don’t have any left. I can’t even protect my kids from snakes in the house.
All those women in that class, none of them have snakes in their basements. Or if they did, they’d cheerfully scoop them up and carry them outside, gently so the snake weren’t harmed, all the while teaching their children about nature. They don’t lie awake at night, making lists of all the day’s failures. Nicole and Freddy would be better off in any of their homes, with any of those mothers. Any mother but me.
Now I can’t sleep. Every slight sound jerks me awake, makes me wonder if a snake is moving across the comforter. I think I’m hearing noises that aren’t even there, and then I remind myself that noises don’t matter, snakes are silent. But I still hear them. Finally I get up and go out into the hallway. You’re being a baby, I tell myself, but I can’t help it.
I sit in the chair outside Nicole’s room, so tired, and watch the stairs for climbing snakes. I rest my hands on my legs, breathing slower and slower, but not slowly enough.
I won’t sleep now, even though the house is hushed and quiet. But underneath the quiet, I hear the snakes slithering in the grass on their migratory path, nosing along my foundation, searching for cracks, looking for a way in.