Rats

Rats are a recurring presence in the narrator’s account: first as a problem Will reports in his New York apartment, then as a possibility in her own Toronto home, and finally as the subject of a distressing dream. Their movement between ordinary household concern and private nightmare gives them a small but distinct role in the narration, which connects them to the narrator’s worry and longing for Elfrieda.

Reports and Household Speculation

In a phone call, Will tells the narrator that he has rats in his apartment and asks how Elfrieda is; he misses her too. The conversation prompts the narrator to consider the pests in her own home. There are ants, she says, and she thinks there may also be mice. A Toronto saying offers a neat distinction—where there are mice, there are supposedly no rats, and vice versa, because rats eat mice—but it does not settle what is in the house.

The narrator extends that uncertain household speculation to Mourning dove, wondering whether rats eat them. The question links an imagined predator-prey relation to the domestic setting without establishing that rats have harmed any bird.

The Recurring Dream

The rats also enter the narrator’s dreams. In a recurring dream, one becomes trapped beneath her shirt, and she cannot get it out. She struggles until the animal falls away, and the dream leaves her exhausted. The account makes the rat a source of anxious confinement rather than a confirmed threat in waking life: the dream repeats, while the cause of the household’s possible mice remains uncertain.

Narrative Significance

The rat motif shifts between other people’s reported circumstances, local folklore, and the narrator’s private fear. The call about Will’s apartment also carries news of his concern for Elfrieda; the narrator’s own thoughts turn from possible pests to a dream of being unable to dislodge one. Rats therefore gather mundane unease and emotional strain in one image, while the narration keeps the literal question—whether rats are actually in the Toronto home—open.