Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs

paid two thousand dollars each year to an exterminator to insure they didn’t have so much as an ant in their kitchen.
    I called a friend who dates a plumber, and the plumber called me back (I paged him) and told me the most horrifying thing I had ever heard in my life: “Vermin sometimes climb up into theplumbing and get
trapped in the shower head
.” Which meant that I may have been showering, may still be showering, may someday be showering with piping-hot water filtered through a dead rat, without even knowing it.
    This meant, naturally, that I would be unable to take a shower again for the rest of my life. Only sponge baths with Evian.
    I now associated my entire bathroom, all cleaning products, and my eyeglasses and the distinctive smell of Raid with the rat/thing. Worse, I would think of it every time I showered for the rest of my life. I would be standing under the stream of hot water, and I would be checking my skin for hairs and whiskers. I could never take a bath again, either. Not with the very real danger of seeing a rat slip out the faucet into the tub of bubbles. These things happen to people “all the time,” the plumber said.
    Also, I would now probably become sick with hantavirus.
    I knew that one of the identifying traits of serial killers is that many of them tortured animals as children. The difference, I needed to believe, was that I was no longer a child. This had to count for something.
    After a horribly long day, I needed a mental break. I threw on my parka, with the raccoon fur around the hood, and I went to see a movie.
    But what to see? Something sweet and stupid and harmless. At the movie theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth, a title caught my eye. I thought,
That seems good. Jodie Foster and a puffy, friendly farm animal, a butterfly
.
    I unzipped my jacket and headed inside to see a movie I’d heard the name of but knew nothing about. It was called
The Silence of the Lambs
.

D EBBY’S R EQUIREMENTS
     
     
     
     
     
T
he year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush. (The dykes had been a real coup, considering the client told me, “No white, white bathing suits; no black, black people.”) I’d just been promoted from senior copywriter to associate creative director. With this promotion came a fat raise and the loss of the measly four hours a week I had to myself. Now, I would be expected to live at the office. I knew some copywriters who actually slept there several nights a week, talking full advantage of the shower in the men’s room. Now I would never have time to clean my apartment. As it was, I was reduced to taking one Sunday a month and just scooping everything into trash bags. But even this Sunday would be taken from me.
    So I decided I would treat myself to a cleaning lady.
    In Manhattan, the idea of hiring a cleaning lady is not as bourgeois as it might be in Harrisburg. New Yorkers regularly drop off their laundry to be washed and folded. So why wouldn’t they have somebody else scrub the inside of their toilet bowl?
    I approached my friend and former blind date Brad, the heir to a fortune made from Saturday morning cartoons. His grandfather had created a character that got its own show, then its own lunch box, then its own studio. So having been raised with housekeepers, Brad was very experienced in these “domestic matters.” And because he was agoraphobic and never left his apartment, he would know firsthand how good the cleaning lady really was because he’d follow her from room to room, watching her clean while he ate sunflower seeds. In the two years I’d known him, he’d already gone through eight different cleaning ladies.
    “Call Debby,” he said. “She seems pretty good so far.”
    “Pretty good, huh?” I said. “I want
really
good.”
    Brad said, “Well, she’s a grandmother, and she doesn’t stink or anything.”
    I liked the idea of a grandmother cleaning my