Reviews: December 1999

When my best friend, Maggie, separated from her husband and moved into the apartment above mine, her friends agreed that she needed a pet. She was skeptical. She'd spent too many years, she felt, taking care of others instead of herself. So she turned down offers of puppies, kittens, a blue budgie, and a fighting fish. Then one evening, I heard excited footsteps on my ceiling. The phone rang: "Come upstairs and meet Charlotte." In a pickle jar handsomely furnished with twigs, a gleaming black beauty the size of my thumbnail was spinning a cottony web. On her abdomen, round as a raindrop, Charlotte wore a scarlet hourglass - the mark of the black widow. "Don't worry," said Maggie. "The man who gave her to me says her bite won't kill a healthy adult, it'll only hurt. A lot."Charlotte was hatched in Queens, and to Queens she eventually returned, after ...