Sipsworth

By late afternoon, Helen thinks that “God is everywhere” (53) because the radio and television are broadcasting Sunday church services. She watches one and prays along with the people on TV. After this, she makes a home for the mouse out of a clean pie box and puts some tissue into it. Then, she puts the old, dirty box and the new box next to the hedge. After sprinkling some oats around the new box, she goes to bed. The scream of a cat wakes her up, and she wishes she had never taken the fish tank into the house.

Helen goes out in the dark and searches for evidence of a struggle between the cat and the mouse. Seeing nothing, she picks up the two boxes and puts them in the kitchen sink.

In the morning, the mouse is sitting in Helen’s sink, eating a piece of oatmeal she put in the box. Helen is surprised by the mouse’s soft coat and large, delicate ears. It retreats to its new home in the pie box, and Helen throws the old one out. She fills a bottle cap with water and places it in the sink. She then makes a shopping list, proud that she doesn’t need any medication despite being old. She can’t buy tinned vegetables because she’d need to take a taxi, and she wants to avoid making small talk with the driver.

At the grocery store, Helen is excited at the sight of two Bakewell tarts, which are pastries with a jam and almond cream filling. On impulse, she buys nuts for the mouse, thinking it must be an old animal since it is so trusting and grateful. She hesitates before also adding strawberries to her cart to give to the mouse.

Back at home, the mouse is lying on its box. Helen studies its body and decides it is a boy before giving him a piece of strawberry. He turns it around in his paws, and she thinks that he must have tasted strawberries before.

Helen watches a film and decides she’ll have to move the mouse, as she needs her kitchen sink. She decides to call a wildlife center to come and get him. As she is preparing her dinner, she puts some bits of food together for the mouse but is upset when her “old, unreliable” hands drop the food. She muses that nobody alive would have believed the “miraculous things” they could once do. Unable to eat, she gathers the mouse’s food again and looks in the box. The mouse is peeking out at her, its eyes bright with “something she has seen before, in the faces of those who now haunt her” (72).

Helen goes to bed and wonders when she will die. Then, she realizes that if she dies, the mouse will be alone. She feels uncomfortable by the idea that she “is no longer able to die” (74). She complains to herself that this new responsibility is like having a baby at 83. She realizes that the toys sitting out on her patio were all part of a set she saw once in a pet shop, and that they look familiar because David originally wanted a mouse, not fish.

She wonders why all this is happening to her now and if what people call coincidence might have “a meaning purposely hidden” (74). That would imply the existence of God, however, and she can’t picture a God who would take both her husband and her grown son. If there is some loving force, she thinks, it must be “very small and at times powerless” (74), much like the mouse in her sink. She thinks that perhaps the mouse was a pet that outlived its use and was abandoned. Thanks to her, he isn’t dying.

The next day, Helen wakes with a feeling of lightness and sees that the mouse is asleep in his box. She finds the number for a pet rescue service in the phone book and calls it. The person who answers has many questions about the mouse and tells her he thinks it is a wild mouse that found its way into an abandoned hamster tank. Helen calls him an idiot.

Helen’s favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz, comes on. When it is almost time for Judy Garland to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Helen lures the mouse into a slipper with a nut. Then, she carries the slipper to the couch so the mouse can watch with her. She tells him that she sang the song when she fell into the well, and she wants to mouse to have the memory of it in case he ends up somewhere like that. Near the end of the movie, the mouse walks to the slipper’s heel and stands on his back legs.

Helen puts the toys from the tank in the sink, and the mouse begins to run on the spinning wheel, which is in fact a pet rodent’s exercise wheel. She introduces herself to him and after watching him delicately sip water from the bottle cap, she names him Sipsworth because it’s an old-fashioned name, like Helen herself.