I live across the street from Mrs. Perfect, a cute blonde with an eleven-year-old son. Mrs. Perfect used to be one half of the quintessential Perfects, a family that deviated so little from the ideal that I was convinced they had struck a deal with the Devil. Mr. Perfect had a good job with the airlines, drove the black Volvo, cut the emerald, weed-free grass on weekends, and helped raise the blond, baseball-loving son. Mrs. Perfect was a stay-at-home mom, drove the matching white Volvo, and kept Mr. Perfect busy with home improvement projects and social events. She ventured out of the house on the pretext of watching her husband and Matthew play catch but was really evaluating whose front lawn was starting to compete in beauty with her own or, more often, whose front lawn was in need of fertilizer, water, insecticide, better landscaping, and the like. [I can picture Mrs. Perfect in the bathroom asking, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose yard is better than mine?" only to be told that none in the neighborhood could compare.]
Mr. Perfect has since left for the arms of another woman, and Matthew seems to prefer his father's company because I hardly ever see him, and when I do observe him with his mother, he has the sullen attitude of a seventeen-year-old on drugs. Despite the divorce, Mrs. Perfect still maintains her perfect yard where she tolerates no ugliness.
Now, opossums are fucking ugly creatures. They have oily, wiry fur and a mouth full of dangerous teeth. They hiss like angry alligators, resemble giant rats, and get into the trash. Of course, Mrs. Perfect would never allow opossums to live under her house, although several have tried, especially after so many of their natural homes—the big, half-rotten oak trees that lined the streets—came crashing down after Charley, and then Francis, and then Jeanne. When Mrs. Perfect discovered the first unwanted squatter, she enlisted the help of the Ex, who brought a cage trap to catch the poor animal. After the trap was sprung, the Ex came to retrieve the "horror" and release it somewhere else. Unfortunately, Mrs. Perfect must have been passing notes to the cute guy in biology the day her teacher explained that "Nature abhors a vacuum," so as soon as the critter kingdom realized that primo real estate was on the market, another opossum moved underneath her home. The Ex took care of that one, and then the next, and then the next.From what I have observed, Mrs. Perfect is a great manipulator. I can hear her argument: "Your son plays in the yard. Opossums carry rabies. Do you want Matthew to have to get all of those painful shots because you allowed vermin to live under the house?" Unfortunately, the food that baited the trap must have attracted the hungry mother who lived under my house, and after her "relocation," the babies, too young to care for themselves, crawled out to die.
What Mrs. Perfect will never realize is that her perfect yard which no weed mars, where no grass runner dares to creep out of its place onto the sidewalk, is a cage trap itself. It limits her options as if she were the caught animal. In her attempt to create a static ideal and hold back change, everyone who knows her finally gets so frustrated with her impossible standards that they "relocate." And she pays as dire consequences as those that my baby opossums faced.
