When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,70
Tegenaria can live for up to two years, and that this was an adult female. At that moment, though, standing at the window with my mouth hanging open, all I recognized was a profound sense of wonder.
How had I spent so much time in that house and never realized what was going on around me? If the Tegenaria barked or went after my food, I might have picked up on them earlier, but as it was, they were as quiet and unobtrusive as Amish farmers. Outside of mating season, they pretty much stayed put, a far cry from the Carolina wolf spiders I grew up with. Those had been hunters rather than trappers. Big shaggy things the size of a baby’s hand, they roamed the basement of my parents’ house and evoked from my sisters the prolonged, spine-tingling screams called for in movies when the mummy invades the delicate lady’s dressing room. “Kill it!” they’d yell, and then I’d hear a half-dozen shoes hitting the linoleum, followed by a world atlas or maybe a piano stool — whatever was heavy and close at hand.
I was put off by the wolf spiders as well but never thought that they were purposefully out to get me. For starters, they didn’t seem that organized. Then too, I figured they had their own lives to lead. This was an attitude I picked up from my father, who squashed nothing that was not directly related to him. “You girls are afraid of your own shadows,” he’d say, and no matter how big the thing was, he’d scoot it onto a newspaper and release it outside. Come bedtime I’d knock on my sisters’ door and predict that the spider was now crawling to the top of the house, where he’d take a short breather before heading down the chimney. “I read in the encyclopedia that this particular breed is known for its tracking ability, and that once it’s pegged its victims, almost nothing will stop it. Anyway, good night.”
They’d have been horrified by the house in Normandy, as would most people, probably. Even before I joined the American Arachnological Society, the place looked haunted, cobwebs sagging like campaign bunting from the rafters and curtain rods. If one was in my way, I’d knock it down. But that all changed after I discovered that first Tegenaria — April, I called her. After writing her name on an index card and taping it to the wall, my interest spread to her neighbors. The window they lived in was like a tenement building, one household atop another, on either side of the frame. Above April was Marty, and then Curtis and Paula. Across the way were Linda, Russell, Big Chief Tommy, and a sexless little speck of a thing I decided to call Leslie. And this was just one window.
Seeing as I’d already broken the number one rule of a good nature documentary — not to give names to your subjects — I went ahead and broke the next one, which was not to get involved in their lives. “Manipulating,” Hugh would call it, but, to my mind, that was a bit too mad-scientist. Manipulating is crossbreeding, or setting up death matches with centipedes. What I was doing was simply called feeding.
No spider, or at least none that I’ve observed, wants anything to do with a dead insect, even a freshly dead one. Its food needs to be alive and struggling, and because our house was overrun, and I had some time on my hands, I decided to help out. In my opinion, the best place to catch flies is against a windowpane. Something about the glass seems to confuse them, and they get even dopier when you come at them with an open jar. Once one was in, I’d screw on the lid and act as though I were shaking a cocktail. The little body would slam against the sides, and as Hugh went progressively Gandhi on me, I’d remind him that these were pests, disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance on our silverware. “I mean, come on,” I said. “You can’t feel sorry for everything.”
The Tegenaria build what I soon learned to call “horizontal sheet webs,” dense trampoline-like structures that are most often triangular and range in size from that of a folded handkerchief to that of a place mat. Once my prey was good and woozy, I’d unscrew the lid and tip the jar toward the waiting spider. The