Lisa Mae DeMasi
It was a dismal August afternoon in coastal Alabama during a solo month-long rural writer’s
retreat. The deafening chirp of the cicadas sounded from a moss-covered oak and the humidity
could be cut with a knife. The clouds turned black, and thunder rumbled overhead, a daily event
in Bay Shores this time of year.
I sat at the kitchen table, barefoot. Between the stove and sink, stood Archy, his elaborate
antennae flicking in my direction.
I’d named the cockroach Archy after Don Marquis’s character from The Lives and Times
of Archy and Mehitabel. Both Archy and the story had made big impressions on me when I’d
pulled the book from a library shelf back home and read it in one sitting six months before.
Now, I was here in Bay Shores to write my first short story, and I conjured that Archy
could get me started in the same way he allegedly contributed his wit and wisdom to Marquis, by
leaping onto his typewriter during the night, striking one key with each jump. That I’d sit down
at the desk after a restless night of sleep with coffee in hand and wondrously discover a
provocative line he’d tapped in the dark, all lowercase letters and symbols that did not require
the “Shift” key.
Archy, engineered for extreme adaptability and speed, a tenacity for survival, spoke to
me. His antennae probing, I heard echoes of Franz Kafka, the opening lines of Metamorphosis:
as gregor samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into a gigantic insect.
I was three weeks deep into the 30-day sabbatical—stripped from chaos, far away from
my husband, dog, and the comforts of home in the Boston suburbs. It was the sort of isolation a
writer longs for, getting down to bare bone so-to-speak, without distraction, to create and craft
with no time limits or familial responsibilities.
But, alas, I had yet to be transformed like Archy, inside of whom resided the soul of a
free-verse poet, claimed Marquis. Archy hadn’t worked his poetic magic on my computer screen
yet and I waited for his words with wonder and anticipation.
The evening before, the cottage was crammed with local book-loving junkies, forty or so,
organized by the writing residency chairman Ned Abernathy. They’d come to hear me read a few
pages from my memoir in progress. I was skittery with nerves and began:
I’m standing on a flatbed and tossing flakes of hay into a paddock not far from
Yellowstone on a hot and sticky July afternoon. It’s 1995 and the longhorns are
meandering over. They’re magnificent beasts, donning horns that extend to seven
feet from tip to tip and hides that are ruddy and white and dirty-speckled. Their
surroundings are too much to take in all at once. The big sky and foothills and
mountains and clouds and sage and brush. I reach for a steer’s horn and playfully
give it a tug. He doesn’t like it and tries to jab me in the ribs. These steers, and
the horses too, teach me to live in the moment, take only what I need to nourish
myself, keep me sane, hold me here far from home or where I was heading.
I know in my heart I’ll never want to leave...
Everyone clapped when I finished. I folded my notes in two and watched the crowd
disperse towards a table of food, their chatter indecipherable except for a word here and there.
Charles, a tall, stocky, white-haired man, stood at the threshold of the dining room. I had
had dinner with him and his wife, Cat, at Ned and his wife Victoria’s house my second night in
Bay Shores. Charles and Cat lived across the street and had appeared at Ned and Victoria’s door,
holding highballs of bourbon. Victoria, a former ballerina, had cooked a dinner of fried catfish
and okra for us that second night of my stay. She had picked at her food and delicately sipped on
white wine while telling me about a horse riding accident that had left her debilitated for years.
Charles had gazed at me longingly, despite Cat sitting next to him. I wondered what he’d
think about my looking to the cockroach in residence for creative inspiration. “I grew up on a
cattle ranch in Louisiana,” he said then, and I responded by telling him that I had worked a
summer on a guest ranch in Wyoming, watering and feeding horses and longhorns. He had
gawked at me in pleasant surprise and Cat turned away, muttering “good grief” under her breath.
Now, people milling about, catching crumbs from green tomato fritters and shrimp and
grits piled into mini-pastry shells, he grabbed me suddenly, taking me in his arms, then holding
me back at a slight distance. My chest pressed against his through my sleeveless top. “You’re so
purdy.” His lips parted into a smile, and he looked as if in a trance.
I stood there mute, trapped. Small. Please let me go, I thought.
People laughed and sipped wine, my body frozen, my heart pounding. If you snap out of
your reverie and really look into my eyes, you’ll see this isn’t cool with me at all.
Victoria broke away from a conversation with three middle-aged women in the hallway
and took hold of Charles’s arms and drew them back to his sides. “You are such a liar,” she
drawled. Her movement was graceful and subtle. She swept back a strand of hair from her right
cheek.
I excused myself to the restroom. A liar?
After the last of the book-loving junkies had filed out of the cottage, I drew the blinds and
fled in my high heel sandals to a lively French bistro in the nearby quaint town center. Vibrant
blooms and galleries and shops lined the street. At the bar, I drowned the last traces of nerves in
a martini and then another, eavesdropped on a few conversations, the dialect full of long vowels,
an intoxicating tempo though behind the alcohol I knew I longed for home. I washed down a
Salade Niçoise with a couple glasses of white wine. Then I stumbled my way back to the
cottage.
I had managed to survive the scrutiny, presenting to all those people, their eyes upon me
as I read, the encounter with Charles, Cat’s jealousy. Archy, meanwhile, sat in the kitchen sink,
in the drain. And in an instant, the vertiginous feeling of toiling in a mad iterative circle washed
away. In my mind, I think I thanked him.
The following morning, I couldn’t find Archy anywhere at all. Sitting at the dining room
table in front of my computer in a T-shirt and shorts, I heard the bang of a car door and peered
through the window. Charles was there in the driveway, carrying a paperback. He rapped hard on
the door, full of intention. I squeezed my eyes closed. He wants to see how far he can get with
me. Doesn’t he realize I’m here to work?
I opened the door, his body filling the porch. His expression was that of a young boy,
hopeful, open. Much less intimidating than the night before.
“Working hard?” he asked, his thumb of one hand resting on the loop of his pants and the
paperback at his side in the other.
Without any poetic input from Archy, I had been crafting an essay about the
empowerment of sweating out alcohol during a hot yoga class. I wasn’t going to mention this to
him.
Braless, I folded my arms across my chest. I answered him quietly, wanting to be
courteous but to the point. “Hey there, Charles. I am working hard ‒ to meet a deadline.”
“I had a dream about you last night,” he continued anyway, ignoring me. “I dreamt you
were on my daddy’s ranch, and we needed help moving the herd of cows. You were sleeping in
the house, and I came to wake you. My daddy would have liked you.”
He had fallen asleep thinking about me.
He said it all sweetly, genuinely. I knew the bit about the dream was the truth. I smiled
and folded my arms tighter across my chest. Hope faded from his face.
“Here’s a book I thought you’d enjoy.” I took the book from his outstretched hand,
thumbed the table of contents, and recognized it immediately. The Alumni Grill II: Anthology of
Southern Writers. My former writing coach had an essay in it and her signature was in the
cottage’s guest book. “Thanks,” I said, and I lifted my hand in a wave goodbye.
Charles lingered there a moment in defeat, then he turned away and climbed down the
steps. “Well, guess I’ll be seeing ya...”
I watched him go and almost felt sorry for him. He had told me over dinner at Ned’s that
he’d been a marine engineer responsible for mechanical systems of oil rigs. He’d made a
comfortable life for himself, he said. My presence clearly had cast ripples into his still water of
retirement. An intrusion in the foursome’s bubble—Ned, Victoria, Cat, him. I could tell by the
couples’ interaction they’d known one another long and intimately, a comfortable easy
companionship that sometimes rested on boredom, sipping bourbon during the hot humid
evenings on Ned’s front porch, talking and not talking. I closed the door, saying nothing, sat
down on the couch and sunk my chin between my hands. I didn’t want biscuits, crawfish and
gravy or a ride on a boat in Mobile Bay. I wanted out of the cottage and its creaks and bumps in
the night and glimpses of Daphne the homeless woman who sometimes roamed the property.
Even Archy had disappeared. But changing my flight would cost two hundred and fifty dollars,
plus a two hundred dollar alteration fee. Whether I liked it or not, I had to stick out the final nine
days of thirty booked and, more importantly, get that first short story written.
Charles didn’t resurface. Archy did, the next day. I had cooked tender scallops and
savory shrimp caught straight from the bay and sold at the local market. Drank a crisp and fruity
white. Archy fed on the scraps I left for him on the kitchen floor. Hi Archy, I said, help yourself.
He reached out his antennae.
I laughed out loud, understanding that I had ‘befriended’ Archy, his company a sign of
resilience and life during my residency. But I kept the Archy-sightings to myself, cautious of my
every flip-flopped footstep in fear of crushing him. He and I were after the same thing: survival.
Two days before I was to leave for home, there came an abrupt knock on the cottage’s
door. Through the window, I glimpsed a man standing at the threshold wearing a dull gray
uniform and carrying a canister and sprayer.
“Exterminator,” he said, without making eye contact. “We have a contract to spray every
three months.”
I reluctantly let him in. He sprayed the living room as I stood there watching, my arms
folded. The pungent pesticide tinged the inside of my nose.
“Archy.” I blurted his name without thinking, an accusation intended for the
exterminator, but also a lament for Archy.
“Archy?”
“He’s a cockroach,” I answered matter-of-factly.
“Archy will be dead tomorrow for sure,” he said without any question as to the reason for
his naming.
As the hours passed, the thought of the poison working on Archy’s nervous system,
slowly killing him, haunted me. An insect can feel pain, too, surely.
I found him near the bathtub at dinnertime, belly up, his antennae swaying raggedly. Oh,
Archy. I let him be; the poor thing was suffering. I didn’t have it in me to extinguish him, and the
promise I’d found in him. The little guy had been a source of inspiration and self-reflection, and
now came his demise.
Before bed, I took one of the many thank you cards I had written for the good people of
Bay Shores who made my residency possible, and using the flat end of my toothpaste, scooped
his body onto the card to bring him outside. But I let him slip, and he flipped over and
disappeared beneath the vanity, out of reach. Thank you for your company, Archy, I said out
loud.
The night before I was due to leave the cottage, I saw him again, underneath the TV
stand, dead. I left his body there and pictured Ned discovering him – a memory of poetry, a call
for transformation.
In the end, Archy had inadvertently helped me to overcome distractions and fear of
failure of meeting my deadline, reminding me of the free-verse poet living inside my own soul
when my love of writing had taken me far away from home.
On the morning of my departure at 6:30 a.m. I guided my fifty-pound suitcase across the
threshold, but it was my first short story that I remember carrying that day.
