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hile I was at the pet store today, buying food for wild birds
and our domestic serpent, I stopped to look at a red iguana in one of the
containers there. He (or she) seemed lively and alert, though not looking his
best, as he was about to shed and his skin looked dull in consequence.
Honestly, I would have liked to take him home with me, but I’m not up to taking
care of another pet, and anyway, the way I’m feeling I worry that any creature
that joins me may well outlive me.
It was forty-eight years ago today that my pet iguana Molly
Bloom joined me. I had wanted an iguana for years, and in honor of my
graduating from high school my father decided to give me one. I had a habitat
already set up and ready to go, and we went to select my new pet together. The
lizards were active and lively-looking, which was reassuring, in that it
suggested they had been well-treated and not “damaged in shipment” as one pet
supplier had described an episode that resulted in dead reptiles.
After looking at the bright-eyed little creatures in the
container, I selected one that looked alert and healthy, and the lady in charge
reached in to pick her up and place her in a container for me to take home with
me. As she did so another iguana seized her chance. Running up the woman’s arm
she made a wild leap into the center of the store and headed off at high speed for
points unknown. My father, the saleswoman, and I then fanned out in a sort of
circle surrounding the escapee, who was moving from point to point at blinding
speed, visible to the unaided eye only when stationary.
Finally the woman crept up behind her while I stationed myself
on the floor in front of her, my hand palm upward on the floor. The woman made
a sudden grab for her, and the lizard vanished in a flash, shooting across the
empty space and coming to a stop on my hand. I curled my palm around the small
green creature, picked her up, and announced, I’m going to take this one too. And so it was that Molly became
part of my life.
She was a surly creature, unlike my other iguana, my first
pick. She was fond of bananas, so long as they were overripe and mushy, and
when I gave her assorted fruit she would always pick the cherries out and eat
them first. When I had to move her she would do serious damage to my skin,
leaving me with scratches up my arm that refused to heal quickly, so I bought a
thick glove to wear when I had to move her. She quickly identified the glove as
her enemy, and would attack it on sight, biting it and whipping it with her
tail. In later years, when she lived in my bathroom on a perch that ran a foot
under the ceiling from one end of the room to the other, she managed to open
the cupboard where I kept the glove, pull it out, and rip it apart. When I told
my father about it he remarked, Well, at
least she knew who her enemy was.
She eventually grew to be just under five feet long. She went
through several containers as she grew, breaking out of the last one in a
memorable moment. I was out in the backyard at the time, when I heard one of
the dogs barking—I forget which one now. I came in to find that somebody—I’m not sure who, though I have
my suspicions—had overturned the garbage and spread it out over the kitchen
floor, and now my iguana was digging through it, while the dog virtuously
called my attention to her misdeeds. At my appearance Molly took fright and ran
for the bathroom, climbing up a towel rack and installing herself on top of a
cabinet. She seemed to like it there, so I let her stay, and she made it her
home for about a decade.
She lived over twenty years, a good life for an iguana I
guess. One day I walked into the bathroom to find her posed in a position as if
she were about to leap off the tall cabinet, her back feet on top of it and her
front feet on its side, her head down. I thought at first she’d just frozen
there for a moment, as she sometimes did when startled, but it didn’t take me
long to figure out that whatever it was she had been doing, she wasn’t going to
finish it. I buried her body alongside the north fence, and went on with my
life without her. She had been a part of it throughout my twenties and most of
my thirties, and I had enjoyed her presence.
Not everybody felt the same way. Visitors expressed their
pleasure that I no longer had that creature
living in my bathroom—but I missed her.
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