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  • Village Bakery
  • Ben Miller (bio)

We lurched down the steep alley to Jersey Ridge Roadten-year-old Nanette crying and me squeezing her hot birdlike hand. It was no tantrum. It was a breakdown. We children each experienced breakdowns, then picked up the pieces—the largest ones—and went on.

“I found three roaches in my flute case!”

A normal morning in the sense that escape was necessary, first thing. You fled to another yard, the mall or library, or a friend’s house. Or, too tired to run, you shuffled onto the back stoop, staring out over terraced blocks as if they were the shingled sea that could carry you to Ireland. We did not occupy our home in urban Iowa. We immigrated from room to room constantly, never settling in one place. What stability existed came of those actual or imaginary acts of immigration. To linger was to live on the nerve-edge of a humiliation that could creep from any cluttered corner. Insects were the least of it—though I dared not say this to the sister I was herding toward the Village Bakery, a café located a few blocks away, near the Lindsay Park basketball courts, on the corner where Happy Joe’s pizza parlor stood before it migrated north, out where mansions were being built—pillars stuck here and there on shiny 1980s edifices.

“I’ve got a concert next week!”

As she twisted toward me, her long black hair whipped around her neck.

“A solo in front of everyone! What if …” It was too terrible to detail.

Roaches had also invaded the tepid refrigerator freezer, exploring the half-melted block of Neapolitan ice cream. They lived in the toaster, in the royal blue couch given us by the charitable Priester family, and in the basement wall’s paint bubbles. Bugs traipsed between the pages of any New Yorker magazine retrieved from the carpet and climbed through vents to reach the upstairs room Nan shared with her older sisters Elizabeth and Marianna—although Marianna was often gone all night. She had started sleeping around with older boys—maybe men—no one knew.

“I found roaches in the sheet music!”

But it’s not personal, honey. No no no no, I wanted to say. Roaches don’t know our names. Not mine, not yours. They know only to nest, reproduce, and crawl indoors. To roaches grass is a waste of space. Roaches are like Davenport real estate ladies in that way. They are like kettles in their attraction to stove burners. They are like box turtles in that once a roach flips over on its back it is helpless—legs kicking, antennae agog. (And why did one never see the flip happen? The sight seemed proof of secret circuses roaches put on for each other [End Page 39] after midnight.) They are shunned by wiser cats. They are in cahoots with lice, bed bugs, and tape worms. They are carriers of filth—but no one ever dies of roaches. They are not plague-carrying rats. They can’t harm you like you can harm yourself or do the damage of despairing parents, lazy teachers, sadistic meter maids, unsympathetic relatives, or the ambitious neighbors trying to turn a gray city stretch near the Mississippi River into a gay boutique abyss named “The Old East Village of Davenport.” Quite terrible though are the numbers of roaches.

The roaches multiply and multiply again—almond slivers on legs. They are a math lesson charging at your Cheez-It cracker. The dolorous lock-step columns of World War I. You spray and spray and still they keep coming. The poison mist stings your nostrils, and you smell their death—metallic and astringent and numbing. Husks of casualties drift like cereal flakes across warped counters. Stepped on, roaches flattened and quivered but bled not. They clung like lint (or faith) to window screens, book bindings, dirty laundry heaped on stairs. Surprised at night by a blast of light the roach quilt spreads swiftly over sticky linoleum. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em? The thought had entered my mind via Kafka. Being a roach would be...

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