DECEMBER 7, 1970
MONDAY NIGHT, DRUNK, MAUREEN STARTED HYSTERICALLY accusing Bo of going with someone else, and if it wasn’t the one with the withered arm in the next apartment, it was someone. She knew he was out catting around. She called him all the big betrayers in the book, every heartbreaker, every whore-hopper, and once she started, she didn’t stop. Bo hauled her out of bed, pulled her hair out, blackened her eyes. He wouldn’t even let her sleep on the couch; he wouldn’t let her sleep. He just kept dragging her around by her hair and kicking her and spitting at her and yelling.
She couldn’t remember much else because they’d both been really, really drunk. Tuesday morning, she got up, hungover, bruised, miserable, without a thought in her head. Then her eyes lit on the big industrial-sized brown glass bottle of chlordane, a chemical exterminator used 1:50 to kill cockroaches and all other manner of insect life, which the ditzy buddy from Orkin had forgotten after he’d sprayed their apartment for earwigs. Next to the bottle was the Flit gun that he’d also forgotten, filled with the 1:50 chlordane-water cockroach and earwig killing mix. Not really present to herself, dazed and stupefied, she picked up the Flit gun, went directly to the fridge and Flit-sprayed on everything that wasn’t covered—on the half tomato on the plate, on the deli turkey in the gaping plastic, on the cheese, on the sad piece of leftover pizza; she Flit-sprayed them all. Then she spotted the orange juice. She could see in her mind’s eye Bo hungover, padding out from the bedroom on his big, thick, hairy hobbit feet, pulling the fake crystal fancy stopper out of the bottle and drinking straight from the decanter, probably downing the entire contents. Maureen went over, picked up the huge bottle of straight chlordane and poured the poison right into the orange juice, put the fancy stopper back in the bottle, put it back in the fridge, put on her clothes and, quiet as a mouse, left the apartment.