The Tangled Web

The Tangled Web

 

The spider rested near the center of his web, a thick sort-of second layer of web over-tracing the basic web design radiated out from the center to near it’s long and outstretched legs like a reinforcement.  There were several black specs of what had surely been flying insects caught here and there.  They were lifeless and still and the spider, too, was similarly still, but it was anything but lifeless.  Patience was his only virtue and with Godlike patience he sat near the center of his web waiting for a meal worth his efforts.  His legs, four up and four down on the vertical plane of his web, were easily two inches long; the body, black with symmetrical rounded shapes along both sides and accenting the bulbous a*s-end was almost as long as the legs. He rested, still and deceptively lifeless, in the tall weeds along the fence in the backyard.  Jarrod swore it was some kind of mutant.  Great outdoorsmen that he was (the closest he had ever come to “camping out” was an overnight stay at a Motel 6 when the car died on Highway 8 on our way to our Florida vacation), he had never seen a spider so big and claimed nature would never create so conspicuous a predator on purpose.

That sunny June afternoon, he took digital pictures and horrified the kids.  They hadn’t bothered with the backyard since the onset of Nintendo 64.  Hadn’t thought about the backyard since the new X-Box and PlayStation 2 last Christmas.

But I kind of liked the idea of the spider.  He was neat.  I went out every morning with my cup of coffee and what ever I happened to be reading at the moment, inspected the Morning Glories (and trained their vines:  up the stairs to the back porch, along the downspout at the apex of the stairs and the porch beams, never a stray crawling over the porch floor or over the hand rail), checked the level on the bird feeders and said hello to the spider in the flowering weeds along the fence.  The weeds, in the spring and summer, birthed such cute blue flowers I hadn’t the heart to cut them down, though mid-summer through to winter the naked stalks were as ugly as anything.  The spider never seemed to move from his spot just off-center of the web, just to the left of it in fact, though the web was filled with the specs of flying creatures abundant in a wooded area such as ours.  None had been wrapped in that special spider silk.  None seemed to be on the menu.  I wondered just what the hell he was waiting for?  There seemed a feast in the making but the spider, morning after morning, showed his disdain for the tiny stuck bodies of gnats and flies and sweat bees by remaining still, lying there in his place to the left of center, and waiting.

I suppose I was waiting too, though I didn’t know for what.  Not then.  I sat on the back porch every morning after the completion of my morning ritual (Morning Glories, bird feeders, spider) sipping coffee and reading, listening to the world move around me:  the wind in the trees and the rustle of green summer leaves, birds singing and then taking wing from gutter box to bird feeder to neighboring bush, the occasional car on an adjacent street.  Nothing seemed to move very fast.  Like the spider, like me, the world seemed to wait.  For what?

But it must be understood; I sat on the back porch with my book and my coffee around 9:00 a.m. or so.  The busy little beavers had already set out in their busy little cars to build their dams against the monthly bills and braces for the kids and retirement.  Jarrod was gone before the sun, and the kids snatched up their lunches and were off to the school bus.  There was housework enough, to be sure, but it could wait.  The downstairs (living room, dining room, sitting room, office) were vacuumed and dusted every Tuesday and Thursday, the upstairs (Mike’s room, Joy’s room, Jarrod’s room, and the hall) every Monday and Friday.  The day was Wednesday, and the primary chores were the kitchen and bathroom floors and laundry.  Laundry was twice a week so there wasn’t very much.  The entire operation would only take me a few hours and so why not?  Why not sit on the back porch with my book and my coffee and wait.

Did I say Jarrod’s room?  Our room, of course.  Our marriage bed, our walk-in closet and adjoining door to the bathroom.  Ours.  That’s what I meant.

I found myself thinking of the spider.  I decided to name it Jarrod, though I would never tell anyone. 

That was early June.

By late July the kids were sleeping in (school was over for yet another school year) and Jarrod was hustling out at the same pre-dawn hour only to stay gone later and later (“more daylight hours to burn, sweetie…now’s the time to wow’em if I ever hope to make partner, you know that!”).  The routine had changed.  I had my early morning peep at the Morning Glories and the bird feeders, my quick glance at our pet spider, and then there was breakfast to prepare and dishes and wiping up the toast crumbs and spattered egg yoke the kids had left behind on the table.  They were old enough to clean up after (not to mention cook for) themselves but the only response my words afforded me was a look of sarcasm from Mike and a tongue clicking against the roof of Joy’s mouth.  I may as well have been lecturing the spider out back.  And then, of course, came the shuttle service.  First Joy to her friend Gena’s and then Gena and Joy and a gaggle of teenage friends to the Cinema 6 off Harrison Pike.  Then, Mike, tossing a nerf-soft football against the headrest of my driver’s seat the whole way, off to meet his friends at the park to play a pick-up game (or so he told me.  I never failed to notice that he and his friends were never dressed for football but instead in their jeans half-down to their knees like gangsters and polo style shirts with FUBU or Hilfiger stenciled across them, and that when I picked him up he never had so much as a grass stain on his hands or knees).  Then, when the shuttle service was done, it was back home to vacuum, mop, iron, launder, or whatever else needed doing.  My time of contemplation was over—my latest book hid unfinished in the drawer of my bedside table. 

But I got out to visit Jarrod in the mornings, still unmoved from his position of excellence just left of center in his tremendous web.  Had the web grown larger?  I couldn’t be sure.  It seemed to extend over the heads of the flowering weeds from the front of the bush—a good 4 feet—to the fence, and then down in the stalks of the weeds and ending just were the wild grass bullied up around the weed’s roots.  There were also a great many more trapped prey:  a few bees, a couple wasps, a grasshopper, a cricket—in addition to the quickly decaying corpses of gnats and flies.  None bore the spider’s silk.  None was being prepared for supper.

I remember lying in bed with my book face down on my lap and my eyes fixed on some point just above the ocean landscape hung on the far wall nearest the bathroom door.  I could still hear the kids in their respective rooms, not asleep—oh no, that would be too much to ask an hour after bedtime—I could hear the front door open and close with the same force as if it were the middle of the afternoon and I could hear the clang of a briefcase being dropped in the foyer and the clack of a light switch going up.  I remember I thought a great many things but, as quickly as the thoughts arose I drowned them in a sea of denial where their corpses might be washed quickly away into the unknown black, and the only thought that stuck was that I hated that stupid landscape (seascape, oceanscape) painting on the wall.  It made the bedroom feel like a hotel room.  It made the most intimate aspects of my life seem transitive and insignificant.  The book remained face down on my lap and I started thinking about Jarrod—not downstairs Jarrod, but spider Jarrod, and his Job-like patience.  What was he waiting for?  What made him so content to just sit and wait?

I don’t know how long I sat there like that, staring at a point just above the ocean landscape hung on the far wall nearest the bathroom but I do know that when Jarrod finally came to bed I could no longer hear the kids moving about or watching T.V. or talking on the phone.  He came in, kicked off his shoes and his pants (he had already dropped his shirt, probably in the living room for me to see to in the morning) shut off the light and climbed into bed.  I sat there awhile, blown away that he had not even looked at me, had not even noticed that I was still awake (so to speak) and eyes open, a book on my lap when he flicked off the overhead light.

Eventually, I let my anger drift off into the stupid hotel-room-quality oceanscape on the wall…where its corpse might be washed quickly into the unknown black, and I hid my book away in the bedside table.  When I closed my eyes to sleep, I dreamed I was a spider and Jarrod had been caught—wriggling and screaming—in the far left corner of my web.  Just close enough for my long back legs to caress his screaming lips as the finality of his situation became clearer.  His terrified eyes took me in and saw me.  Maybe for the first time in years.

In early August the web had extended out over the entire bush of flowering weeds making up a six-foot length along the fence and out four-feet toward the yard.  The spider had not moved (and if he did, he had an uncanny sense of the exact point in which to return) from just left of center of his mighty web. He’d grown larger, though.  His legs spread out a good four inches according to the yardstick I kept in the shed with my gardening tools. 

There was an unpleasant odor in the yard the morning of August 9^th as I made my infrequent check of Morning Glories and bird feeders.  The feeders were empty—I hadn’t seen to them in weeks—and the Morning Glory vines stretched over empty space along the handrail and snaked across the floor trying to grab hold of the lawn chairs.  They had already smothered the few plants I kept in pots on the porch.  I noticed it the last time I was out but I didn’t have to time to do anything about it.  Those days I was lucky if I could see to the garden once a week.  Cursing quietly under my breath I began to rip apart the vines that had grown across the porch floor when I noticed the stench.

I searched for it but couldn’t find it.  It wasn’t under the porch or in the garbage cans lined along the far fence by the driveway. I heard Mike slam the door on the refrigerator and gave it up as a bad habit.  I’d try to get up earlier and see to it tomorrow.

August 10^th I overslept.

When I awoke Joy had already gone leaving no note as usual.  Mike stretched out on the couch with his shoes on the armrest watching MTV.  I headed into the kitchen and began to clean up the mess they had made: cereal and milk slung over the table, a piece of toast slimed in grape jelly face down on the floor under a kitchen chair, a pile of sugar carelessly spilled on the counter by the coffee maker, a pile of dishes in the sink.  I tried to think back to the last time I had seen my husband and realized, feeling more foolish than ever, that it had been just last night.  I awoke from one of my increasingly disturbing spider dreams to find Jarrod lying right beside me, deeply asleep, stinking of cigarette smoke and old beer.  The memory did not warm me.  When had I seen him last…prior to that?  I couldn’t remember.  Unless it had been a month ago when he shut the lights out on me as though I weren’t even there.  Maybe he was so tired he just wasn’t cognizant of my presence?  Especially since I am usually asleep by the time he gets home.  He works so hard, after all, so I can stay home and look after the kids.

The kids.  They were a horror.  I realized suddenly, down on my knees wiping grape jelly from the floor and scooping up stray cheerios that had rolled away to the baseboards, I hated my kids.  I hated them.  I couldn’t stand the sight of them.  I couldn’t stand the ugly, senseless, self-involved, disrespectful f*****g sight of them!

I hunkered down under the table pretending to scrub at that grape stain long after it was gone, trying to reign in my thoughts, hoping Mike wouldn’t choose that moment to come in to the kitchen after a coke from the fridge.  How could I think such a thing?  No body hates their own children.  Whatever mistakes they made, whatever was…was wrong with them…nobody hates their kids.  And besides, if they’re screwed up, it’s only because you made them that way.

“Bullshit.”  I whispered, scrubbing the long-gone stain.

The wax was starting to come up from the spot.

Mike had turned to look at me from over the back of the couch and when I looked up I caught his staring eye.  He had a look on his face I thought I could happily slap off of him.

I gave the housework up as a bad habit and went out to sit on the back porch.

 By the end September the web encompassed the better part of the back yard.  The pretty flowers on the bush of weeds were long dead and the web held the stalks together like a net full of dead fish.  The fence along which the weeds grew shimmered in the sunlight and the web grew up off the fence to the edge of the porch and caught in suspended animation a good fourth of the wild Morning Glories I had long given up trying to train.  The door leading into the basement was covered over and so was most of the back wall of the house as high as the elevated back porch.  The stench I had noticed in August had grown in direct proportion to the number of corpses trapped in the ever-growing web (weeks ago I discovered the dead squirrel beneath the bush of weeds, a host of maggots worming over his decaying skin as the bottom portion of the spider’s web enclosed his hind legs).  If you’d tried to tell me a spider could spin a web strong enough to trap a squirrel I’d have called you a liar.  Now I know.  The first was a squirrel. In September I found a raccoon, a field mouse and a small cat.  The spider never seemed to move, though.  He had made a meal of none of these things so far as I could tell.  But he did grow bigger.  Just as the web had grown, so had the long legs gotten longer (now an unmistakable six inches in length, the body just over four inches).  It was hard to wrap my mind around, looking at him as he waited, calmly, stuck to the vertical plane of his web.  He was huge.  And I started to wonder if he was really a he.

You can hardly tell with a spider, right?

Maybe, like birds, the colorful ones were the males.  Or, maybe, like so many creatures the colors were a warning to stay away, a warning that the creature in question was dangerous.

It could have been a girl spider.  The name I had given it seemed entirely inappropriate.  Jarrod was not patient.  Jarrod did not bide his time.  He took every possible opportunity, including the opportunity to see other woman while I, stupidly, sat around in the web I had spun, trying to believe the lie about long hours at work.  The stink of beer on him, the smoke in his hair, and the shirts…since when did the b*****d start washing his own shirts?  When he decided I might smell perfume on them, or see lipstick, or whatever incriminating thing.  I felt my hands tighten into fists.  I felt the nails breaking open the flesh of my palms in hard little crescent shapes.  They were only breaking open half-healed scars.

Yes, it was probably a girl spider.  I decide to rename her Constance.

The kids were back in school but I hardly noticed their absence.  There were Cheerios strewn over the kitchen table and mounds of sugar turned to cement on the counter tops.  There were muddy sneaker prints on the linoleum floor and a sink full of dishes.  I rinsed my coffee cup in hot water and poured myself a cup.  It was a Thursday in mid October but I had no plans to vacuum.

I sat out on the back porch with my coffee and my latest book.  It felt good to fall back into the old habit.  I didn’t bother with the bird feeders, the birds—the smart ones—avoided the yard like the plague; the Morning Glories had browned and their seeds were just everywhere…trapped, suspended in the all-encompassing spider web screening off the porch like a great gossamer blind.  It rose up over the porch beams and grew up the back of the house to the roof.  It blocked off the porch steps and ran over the side of the house.  It covered the windows in a criss-cross of threaded silk stronger than steel bars.  But, it allowed me my porch and the quiet and solitude I most needed to enjoy my coffee and read my book.  Constance allowed me this.

Jarrod must have been surprised to find the front entry door over woven with silk cables. 

They were spun shortly after the kids headed out to school.  They looked back over their shoulders only once at the house before hustling off to the bus.  I know because I watched them.  They sensed it but, being full only of themselves, they couldn’t conceive of it.  I wish them well.

I read my book and sipped my coffee.  Constance hovered to the left of center of her expanded web.  She was right in front of me.  She was as big as me, held suspended on her vertical plane of web enclosing the porch.  There was a sack cemented firmly to her left wrapped tightly in spider’s silk.  The sack squirmed and wiggled and occasionally a muffled voice drifted out but neither Constance nor I paid it much heed.  It was finally time, and the waiting was done.  Patience is a virtue, and there is always a grand reward.

 

 

Reviews

[cyanskye]

I think you have captured the frustration a lot of mother's feel at a particular time in their lives. The pace is perfect for the tale you have told.

[Genie]

What an amazing story! The leisurely and ... ahem ... patient development is deceiving, but it's masterfully done. Well crafted!

[yinseriv]

As well you should be featured. I remember the first time I read this story. I liked it then and it is still a pleasure to revisit. The only thing about your writing Luthien is I can't decide which work I like best because it is all good.

[luthien7]

***Ack! I'm featured!***

:-)

[Damian Alan Gray]

I am in awe of your talent. This is a great story about revenge; well-told and entertaining. Like Constance's uneaten prey, I was snared from the first sentence.