When bedbugs attack

If it is, in fact, a bedbug. I am about to text a picture to my new pal, Matt, at Prodigy Pest Control, so he can diagnose the reason my partner’s been waking up with itchy welts on her back.

I’ve already done my homework, spending several unnerving hours staring at online images of insects magnified to the size of my fist. My Internet sleuthing led me to two conclusions: 1) We had bedbugs and 2) We needed an Expert.

“Ewww!!!!” my daughter screeched when we shared the bad news. “Ewww ewww ewww I am NEVER ever getting in your bed again!!!!” I didn’t mention that it was probably too late, that bedbugs are veteran hitchhikers, which is why it’s so easy to bring one home in your suitcase from that sketchy hotel in Cincinnati.

I also learned that it’s a myth to link bedbugs to uncleanliness: They are equal-opportunity pests, as likely to turn up in a four-star hotel as in a tenement. But it’s true that they’re becoming more ubiquitous — thanks, in part, to bans on the toxic DDT that used to keep them at bay.

What other juicy facts did I learn? Bedbugs feast on human blood, generally biting at night in a row of tiny nips, but they can also live for a year without a meal. Evolution has done fine work here; these bugs are built to survive.

Although my bug was not the most appealing subject — medium gray, with few distinctive markings — the photo styling was apparently successful: Matt called to say that my blurry texted picture did indeed depict a bedbug. He proposed a thermal treatment — essentially, turning our house into an Easy-Bake Oven by heating the place to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot enough to incinerate bedbugs. Hot enough to melt our CDs, too, so we’d have to remove them, he explained, along with lipsticks, soaps, and anything else we didn’t want liquefied.

The cost of this treatment? More than $3,000.

I got a second opinion. Then a third. Pest Expert #3, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Elton John, impressed me: He donned blue booties and latex gloves to probe the slats of our hand-built wooden bed frame and cast the searing beam of his flashlight at the mattress seams. He found one bug, popped it into a plastic bag, and said he’d be in touch.

We are not alone

At the neighborhood café, my best friend leaned forward in sympathy. “Sorry to hear about your…bedbugs,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper, the way my relatives used to say “cancer.” As I shared the news, though, I learned that a lot of people had had bedbugs — close friends a few blocks away, my daughter’s bat mitzvah tutor, even a pal in New York whose tony apartment has a view of the Hudson River.

While bedbug research was making havoc of my work schedule, I actually relished the challenge of learning about the best way to eradicate our tiny critters. I wasn’t always this sanguine, though. I remember, at 21, sobbing inconsolably because I had to move from apartment 603 to apartment 704 of the same building — an identical studio, mirror-image of the first. “But I’m used to the bathroom being on the left!” I wailed to my mother.

“Oh, honey,” she sighed. “You’ll adjust.”

A couple of decades later, when you’ve weathered your best friends’ divorce, mourned a father-in-law, and survived that near-miss on the Jersey Turnpike when the minivan swerved into your lane, the prospect of bedbugs just isn’t a red-zone crisis. Even if your whole body itches at the mere thought of them. And if you take the really long view, the ancestral view, the whole situation shrinks right down to size.

Remember the red-brown cucaracha in Mexico, the one you chased around the bungalow and finally slaughtered with a sneaker? The phalanx of ants marching from the front door of your house in Portland straight to the kitchen garbage can, where you’d casually tossed the remains of a cherry soufflé?

The fact that you can recall these entomological encounters just underscores the point: For the most part, we’ve banished bugs from our lives. It wasn’t always that way. Why do you think people sent their loved ones off to bed with, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”? Even “hit the hay” once had a literal meaning — before curling to sleep on your straw-stuffed mattress, you’d give it a good thwop to scatter the vermin. Now we go ballistic and haul out the poisons if a mouse darts through the kitchen or a silverfish squiggles from the baseboards.

Once, I would have been one of those hysterical customers, signing the contract to have Pest Expert #1 roast my whole house. Maybe it’s the blessing of middle age: What formerly seemed catastrophic is now merely a blip on the readout of daily life. Even bedbugs. Which, in the end, turned out not to be bedbugs at all. Pest Expert #3 examined our bug in the lab and identified it as a carpet beetle. The solution? Vacuum. Often.

Mixed emotions

I felt a little let down. All those friends who’d shared their alarm and concern? I’d have to call them back: “Hey, guess what, it wasn’t bedbugs after all.” It would be a little like reporting, “Whoops — I got that MRI, and it’s not a brain tumor, just a headache from klonking myself on the freezer door.” There’s a frisson of regret in skirting a crisis, right there alongside the deep and abiding relief.

At 51, I’m content to live the undramatic life. I hear about my daughter’s italicized days — “Oh. My. God. Ms. Amit gave us a SURPRISE TEST in literacy…that kid is going to get in SO MUCH TROUBLE!!!...I CAN’T STAND that song; how can you even LISTEN to it?” — and feel grateful to have reached a stage where I can stare down a bedbug with equanimity.

Sasha’s returned to cuddling with us — the Bedbug Scare old news now — but the other night at dinner, she went on and on about a movie they’d watched in science class. “It was about these little teeny tiny bugs that are everywhere, you can’t even see them. Dust mites and stuff. They’re in our skin and in our hair and on our clothes…ewwwww!!! That movie was The Most Disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. It was even more disgusting than the movie they showed last year, the one about birth!!”

Her other mother and I leaned forward, not missing a beat as we spooned up butternut squash soup. Oh, honey, just get ready: bugs, kisses, sweat, birth, all the itch and blood and shout of life. “Really?” we said. “Those little bugs are everywhere? That is so interesting.”