Beware the toaster

Jump to Comments

Millie and I were just minding our own business. It was Thursday night, 11pm, a little over a week ago.

In the mood for some toast, Millie inquired about a half-loaf of bread that appeared to be a permanent resident in the fridge. I assured her that if there were no mold spores it would probably do just fine in the toaster. I was preparing to dive into a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt.

Millie had just finished dishing on a Match.com prospect she’d been chatting with on the phone. I was offering my review on the denouement of our latest book club selection, Paint It Black (the dark and disappointing second novel of author Janet Fitch, who became a literary rock star when her White Oleander was an Oprah’s Book Club selection).

I am furnishing all of this detail in an effort to represent how we remember exactly what we were doing in the moments leading up to disaster and how normal everything seemed (in the same way we reframe a natural disaster or act of terrorism or an assasination). This is how Millie and I recall our last moments of innocence.

There we were, standing shoulder to shoulder, when Millie’s toast popped. A mere second later, something else popped out of the toaster and into my bowl, but my brain did not immediately register the identity of the object. That one second seemed to occur in slow motion, as I attempted to make sense of the dark shape, assuming it was a piece of charred toast.  Then Millie shrieked and the thing started moving. Oh the horror. The horror. A mouse had jumped out of our toaster.

I haven’t done the calculations, but I believe the chances of witnessing a mouse jump out of your toaster and into your bowl of frozen yogurt while standing next to your roommate who is making toast at 11pm, are about as slim as winning the lottery without purchasing a ticket.

Millie bolted into the living room and jumped on the coffee table while I sought higher ground on the ledge of the bathtub. We traded shrill screams and cried out helplessly, “what should we do?!” The mouse, also in a state of panic having nearly been toasted to death and now in the midst of two wild banshees, leapt from my bowl to the kitchen sink where it scrambled aimlessly until finally making its way onto the floor, disappearing behind the oven.

I left my post in the bathroom and joined Millie on the coffee table. We held each other and made whimpering noises. We were in a state of shock. We felt violated.

Eventually we returned to the floor and I found some mousetraps I had been given as a joke when I moved here a year ago. At least I thought they were a joke at the time. Hoped.

While I search on the Internet for clues about setting and baiting the traps, Millie unwrapped them, attempting to decipher the instructions. Still badly shaken, I summoned the courage to venture into the kitchen for the peanut butter.

“I think he had been living in there for a few days,” I told her. “I heard some metal, springy sounds coming from the kitchen the other night.” My voice was hoarse from screaming.

“Oh,” she sighed, dejected. “I really think this is an isolated incident, I mean I remember having mice in my old apartment. They leave droppings and I haven’t seen any.”

“Well, I do vacuum a lot,” I countered, but I wanted to believe her.

“That mouse was an a–hole,” Millie said irately. “He is the biggest a–hole I’ve met since I moved to New York.”

Once we had laid out the traps and removed the tainted toaster from our apartment, Millie and I synchronized our alarms for the morning so that no one would have to confront any deceased mice on their own. We got out the yellow rubber dishgloves and some plastic bags, both praying we would not have to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. As I lay down to sleep, I tried to imagine what the snapping of the trap would sound like. Thinking about what we might find when we rose in tandem at 7am, it was like Christmas eve gone very, very wrong.

We did not find a dead mouse in the morning or on any of the days that followed. We had either frightened him so badly that he would never return, or he had a peanut allergy. Millie and I regaled our friends with the story. One of my friends even tore an article from Real Simple about how to rodent-proof your home, with an illustration of a woman discovering a mouse in her cupboard. Next to the woman she wrote my name and next to the mouse she wrote “Toasty.”

One of Millie’s friends volleyed back an even better story.

The mother of one of her friends had found a small dog on the street in Yonkers. She couldn’t figure out who the owner was, so she put a leash on it, took it home and fed it, before eventually bringing it to the humane society. “Ma’am, that’s not a dog,” they informed her. “It’s a Mexican rat.”

At this, one of the girls chimed in, “I’m all for immigration. But I believe in tightening the borders against rats.”

While I’m glad that Toasty has not reappeared, I haven’t stopped expecting him to creep out at any moment and the tiniest sound alerts me to the possibility of his presence. Millie continues to relive the event, recounting exactly what we were doing and saying and thinking, on the night a mouse jumped out of our toaster. This is perhaps an overlooked form of PTSD.

Millie bought a new toaster, but we refuse to put it in the kitchen until we devise a sophisticated security system. We are considering purchasing a “toaster caddy” made by Laotian women, available online.

1 Comment

Filed under Humor Me, Only in NYC