There is always a scene, in the cheesier horror movies, where the the hero or heroine looks under the bed, or the porch, or the couch, or the overturned boat, and finds—well, it being a horror movie and all it kind of goes without saying, but here goes—they find something horrible. As an audience member you always want to shout out a warning to them just before they lift the bedskirt, and, in fact, in certain theaters, your fellow movie goers do. (I always wished I had a best friend as honest and obnoxious as those women who feel compelled to talk to the characters on the screen. “Uh-uh, girl, don’t even think about going in there,” is just the kind of advice I need to hear sometimes.)
Then again, it’s easy to have that kind of wisdom when it comes to somebody else: we’re all the wise one when it comes to solving somebody else’s problems. Which probably explains why, even though I’ve seen what happens in a million and one cheesy horror movies, when it comes to my own house I still make the mistake of looking to see what lies beneath.
And it is always horrible.
My husband is smarter about this, which is probably why the kids pick him when they are looking for someone to check and see if their rooms are “clean.” (I’m still not sure why it is we have to go and do this in the first place—asking someone else to see if something is “clean” is kind of like asking someone else to check if something is “dry”—the answer should be fairly obvious to the original questioner.) Anyway, when my husband is the one asked to check on the cleanliness status of their newly “cleaned” rooms, he looks around the room the way one of those loud women at the front of the theater would advise him to do: a cursory glance, and then, muttering, “Uh-uh, don’t go in there,” under his breath, he is gone.
And he is safe.
No face huggers jumping out from beneath the bed, no axe murderers lunging out of the closet. And, more importantly, no bowls of two week old cereal being discovered tangled up at the bottom of the bedsheets, for all the world like a horror movie. A 3-D one. 4-D, actually, if you count smell as a dimension. (And believe me, if you’ve ever smelled a partially decomposed bowl of cereal that has festered in the sheets for a month or so, you would agree that smell deserves its own dimension.)
In the Middle Ages they had such a terrible rat problem that they started breeding dogs to be smaller and smaller so that they could follow the rats down their rat holes and kill the whole nest. I think that we should do something similar to solve the problem of what lies beneath in our children’s rooms. Not dogs, of course, but an animal that is much more suited to rooting out filth: the pig.
It’s true that we already have pot-bellied pigs, but I’m talking about something even smaller: a miniature pig. You know, like a purse dog—but a pig. I know what you’re thinking: bringing a pig into the house won’t make it any cleaner; in fact, it’s liable to make it worse. But the truth is, pigs are very clean—much cleaner than children—and anyway, it’s not like you’d have to have a pig living in your house. Just like people in the Middle Ages only sent for the dogs once or twice a year, you would only have to call the pig man every month or so.
Or the day before your mother-in-law came to visit. Unless you were smart, and listened to the obnoxious women. “Uh-uh, girl. Don’t let her go in there!”