Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.
Last winter, on Christmas Eve, I found a frog in my lettuce. The lettuce was not even organic, and I was sure it came from Mexico. I had purchased it at the Pathmark grocery store under the Manhattan Bridge, and it had been in the fridge for days. The frog hopped out of the bag and perched on a plate, looking uncannily like a food-related item.
I wasn’t prepared to discover wildlife in my kitchen. Luckily, I have a husband, who caught the frog with a piece of cheesecloth. We punched holes through the top of a plastic Tupperware container and put him inside with some water and a piece of the lettuce he rode in on. Don’t you think he’s sick of that lettuce? we wondered. We took the lettuce out.
Upon inspection, the frog was no larger than a quarter — a baby frog. Its skin was pale translucent green; its feet tipped with yellow. Googling led us to believe it was an American green tree frog, a species common in the South that had migrated as far north as New Jersey because of warming climates.
What were we supposed to do with it? It’s not like you can just set a frog free outside in New York City in December.
If we take it to animal control they will feed it to a snake, my husband said.
They can’t do that. This frog is from Mexico.
There’s an animal hierarchy in those places. Dogs, cats, birds, then amphibians. That’s how it works.
I went outside looking for a stick — the closest thing we could get to a tree. Turns out, it’s not easy to find a stick in Chinatown. Nature eluded or deceived us. Was that a stick or a dirty shoelace? A nest of brown leaves clotted in a storm drain resembled nature; I added this to the Tupperware, for ambiance.
Because it was Christmas Eve, we soon realized that we would have to take the frog with us to Boston, to visit our family. We put the frog in a backpack and walked to the Fung Wah bus’s pickup spot at the mouth of the Manhattan Bridge. A bus employee, deftly wielding several walkie-talkies, herded us into an anaconda of a line. “Quickly!” he shouted. The bus was already roaring down Bowery. Run! Go!
Laden with luggage, we ran, knocking into vegetable delivery men and waylaid shoppers. I imagined our frog getting tossed around in the backpack, tumbling like pants in a washing machine.
Every now and then along the ride, we would unzip the backpack and look inside. Hello? How are you doing in there? The frog clung to the side of the container, looking tiny and unhappy. Don’t worry, we said. We will find food.
The last time I had a pet, I was a kid, and my pet was a goldfish. This goldfish came from the carnival. Even then I understood — to give a kid a goldfish is to say: “You can be entrusted with this life, because its loss will mean very little.” I took the fish home, thinking it would live in a clear round bowl like goldfish do in cartoon strips. I poured water into a bowl and watched my fish swim around. It died very soon after from lack of oxygen.
Now that I was an adult, I began to feel the same anxiety. Would I be able to keep this frog alive?
In Boston, my husband’s parents picked us up from the bus depot. It was late on Christmas Eve, and no pet stores were open. Tomorrow we would find him breakfast, we assured the frog. We put him on the table in our hotel room and left to enjoy the night with our family.
The next morning, we found an open store and bought crickets. But our frog’s condition had worsened. His stomach was bloated and he was having a hard time clinging. The crickets began crawling all over our frog. Something is wrong, we thought. Crickets are not supposed to be crawling all over our frog.
Googling led me to believe that we had poisoned our frog with New York City water. Otherwise, he had dropsy. By now his belly was so distended I avoided looking at him because I believed he would explode.
Look, we discussed in low voices, as if we did not want to disturb the ailing. Our frog is obviously in pain. We need to help him, or at least put an end to his suffering. Could he, or we, wait another day? Could we wait until he exploded?
We could just leave him in the snow … I began. Or stomp on him. That would be fastest.
I think I began to cry. My husband told me to leave the hotel and take a long walk. He would flush the frog down the toilet.
During my walk, I told myself to keep it together. No adult should be this upset by a frog, when human beings were dying everywhere. Get in touch! Joggers in festive hats jogged past me, sidestepping patches of snow.
I’ve heard that goldfish have only three-second memory spans. Were frogs this way too? Perhaps he would remember his three seconds of pain, and then he would forget. Death would be the ultimate reprieve.
When I returned to the hotel, my husband was sitting on the bed, looking forlorn. He threw up his hands. I couldn’t do it, he said. The frog, he struggled. He kicked like a living thing.
We owe him a chance, my husband said.
Three seconds. Then a week, then another. The frog didn’t die. Or he did, but not for many more months. He very nearly made it to another Christmas. I won’t forget how the frog liked to splash around in his dish of water while we slept. And how when he sang, he sounded like a small dog barking. And whenever I feel so insignificant it is like I can be carried away in a Tupperware container or trapped in a bag of lettuce far away from home, I think: in a city so stingy with chances, it’s good to know that they exist.