Dirty Secret (35 page)

“That's what I'll do.”

These bugs have done the impossible: They've turned back time. I'm right back in that awful, awful summer. The memory of those four months remains in my muscles and I feel myself hunching my shoulders, trying to make myself disappear.

“Why did I go back in there!” I scream. Abraham Lincoln jumps down from the couch and dashes into the front room.

“It's my fault,” David says.

“How could it be your fault?”

“I took off my gloves.” He shakes his head. “I never should have taken off those fucking gloves.”

WE START THE
sulfur lotion that night and spend most of the next day cleaning and doing laundry. David's winter coat is washable, but mine is a vintage orange wool pea coat. I put on the warmest washable coat I have, a jean jacket, over a thick sweatshirt and walk to Old Navy, where I buy a cheap puffy black coat. It's so shapeless that I feel like I'm walking around in a sleeping bag, but it can go in the dryer.

I wrap my wool coat in a garbage bag and stash it in the back of the closet, knowing I won't wear it again until next winter, if then. Throughout the day I grow angrier and angrier, at myself and at my mother, especially as I see the mental toll this is taking on David. He's trying to stay positive, but his brows are permanently furrowed and he hardly says anything. He opens a beer at 5:00, which he rarely does, and drinks it in about ten minutes. After that, I open one, too.

We were both holding out hope that this was a false alarm,
but by the time we decide what to have for dinner—takeout Korean because neither of us wants to cook—it's obvious that we have the bugs again. We're both itching severely and getting bites.

After dinner I call my mom. At first she thinks I'm joking.

“I wouldn't joke about that,” I say. “Believe me.”

“But how, Jessie, how?”

“You tell me.”

“Oh my God. Let me think here . . . let me think . . . I just don't know how it could have happened . . .” She sounds so genuinely concerned that it catches me off guard. “I don't have them anymore,” she says. “I think I don't. No, I really don't think I do. Are you sure you have them?”

“I'm sure.”

“And Dave, too?”

“Yes. Thankfully, we still have some of the lotion.”

She's silent for a few seconds. Then she bursts out: “Oh, no, Jessie!”

“What?”

“I was at your dad and Sandy's on Christmas Eve. What if I gave it to the people there? Oh, and I had such a nice time, too, with that delicious meal and the Trivial Pursuit.”

She'd been cute and fun that night. I was on her team and she got every question right, answering the other team's under her breath. “You didn't give it to them. They didn't come into your house.”

“If they get it, too . . . I just don't know what I'll do if I gave these things to them. And you and Dave, when you were so nice to clean my kitchen that day . . .” She sounds choked up, as if she might cry, and I can't help but soften toward her.

“Mom, you need to do the medicine. The sulfur lotion this time,” I say gently. “Either they're still in your house or maybe
you have the bugs without having symptoms. Do you have any of the lotion left?”

“I'm not sure. I think so. Maybe. Oh, Jessie, I'm so sorry. I just . . . I just can't believe it. Please tell Dave how sorry I am.” She's actually moaning.

“It'll be all right. At least this time we know what it is and how to get rid of it. We'll be fine, Mom, don't worry.”

And just like that, I'm comforting my mother for giving us the bugs again. That makes a lot of sense.

OVER THE NEXT
week, I keep trying to reach my mom, but she's not answering her phone. I'm worried because she sounded so out of sorts when I talked to her—and sometimes when I worry I fall into an ugly downward spiral of “what ifs.” Everywhere I am: the grocery store, the library, the ATM, the Laundromat, the gym, walking with Abraham Lincoln, wherever I am, I imagine my husband coming through the door or down the street, searching for me with a scared look on his face; I imagine him approaching as if I'm very fragile and saying, “Something happened. It's your mom.”

And then he'll tell me that she's killed herself. She's never threatened suicide, but between her history of serious depression, how guilty she feels, and the fact that last time she was pretty much committing slow suicide with the bleach baths and the lindane, who's to say what she's capable of?

I call and call but she doesn't answer and I can't leave a message because her voice mail is full. Not that she ever checks it anyway. So typical. So maddening, especially because I have another pressing reason I need to reach her: We're running out of the sulfur lotion and I need her to get more from her doctor. It's not working as quickly as it did last time. And this time
David's even getting bites on his face. He's puffy and uncomfortable and he's really pissed off. I feel like crying whenever I look at him. The only good news is that my friend Julia assures me she has no itchiness whatsoever.

I begin calling my mother every hour. Then I remember a signal we used years ago and decide to try it. I call and let the phone ring once, hang up, wait a minute, and call back. She picks up.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“Oh, hi, honey!” She doesn't sound depressed. She doesn't sound distraught.

“I've been worried about you,” I say.

“About me? I'm fine. How're you?”

“Not well,” I say. “Pretty terrible, actually. We're running out of the sulfur lotion and I need you to get us some more.”

My mother says nothing.

“Mom? Are you there?”

“So what's the weather like in New York?”

“What?”

“I'm asking you what the weather is like there.”

“What's going on? Aren't you going to say anything about getting us more lotion?”

“I've thought about it since we talked and I'm convinced you must have gotten it another way. I just don't see how you could have gotten them from my house when I don't have them.”

The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. “Maybe when we were there we touched something you haven't touched in a while—like your broom or your mop.”

“Ha, ha,” she says. “Look, I'm sorry you two are going through this.”

“You're sorry we're
going through this
? It's your fault we're going through this.”

“I don't know what to tell you, Jessie.” Her voice is cold. Distant. Controlled.

“What you're going to tell me is that tomorrow morning you're going to see Dr. Paulsen to get a prescription for more sulfur lotion. I can't get it here—I tried last time, remember?”

“Dr. Paulsen hates me now. I asked for too many prescriptions and now whenever I go there the nurses tell me he's busy and to make an appointment.”

“Then call and make an appointment,” I say. “Look, I don't care how you do it, but you need to get us some of that lotion. David has bites all over his face.”

“Really?” I hear laughter in her voice. I'm sure it's nervousness, but even that's unacceptable. All week I was worried about her and this is how she treats me. How she treats David.

“Don't you fucking dare laugh about this, Mom.”

“Jessie, I'm sorry, but I can't go back to Dr. Paulsen. I can't help you.”

I can't help you.

As if she ever could.

My chest goes tight. I'm hot, light-headed—not as if I might faint, but as if I might lift off, blasting out the window and into the sky. I don't think I've ever been this angry.

“Listen, Mom. If you don't do this for me, this one thing I'm asking—”

“But I can't!”

“If you don't do this for me,” I say and now I've moved beyond anger, beyond rage. “If you don't do this for me, Mom, then we're done.”

As I say the words, I know it's already happened. We
are
done with the way things were. Even after I told myself I'd walked away, I still clung to a shred of hope that I could change her, that I could unclutter her mind so she could be a normal mother. I
did. That's why I had that most recent cleaning frenzy. Somewhere inside me, hope remained. Now that hope is gone. I'm done for real this time. I'm done cleaning her house, I'm done feeling responsible for her, I'm done feeling guilty that I can't fix her.

There's a line I read somewhere about the climax scene in a story: Something must die, so something else might live. I must kill my obsession with cleaning my mother's house.

It's dying.

There.

Now it's dead.

And what will live? My sanity, my marriage, my skin. Me.

“Okay, fine,” my mother says. “Fine. I'll go see Dr. Paulsen.”

THREE DAYS LATER
a box arrives from my mother and I ask David to open it in case of snakes. Other than five big bottles of the lotion, the box is empty.

I call my mom to thank her, but she doesn't pick up the phone, and I don't try again.

Instead, I find the online Children of Hoarders group again. This time I introduce myself to the group and post some of my story, mostly about the last year and a half. I write that at this point I can't even muster anger at my mother; I'm just profoundly disappointed and sad. I feel heartbroken, like I'm grieving. In a way, I guess I am.

Right away I get responses:
Welcome, Jess,
and
We're happy to have you here,
and
I hear you,
and over the next few hours, as I read their stories and respond to some posts, I begin to feel something I rarely have: a sense of belonging. It's intoxicating to feel understood. The empathy among members works like an antidote, neutralizing the poison of my secret, of all of our secrets.

Someone's posted a link to a site about adult children of alcoholics, because there are so many shared characteristics between them and children of hoarders. It makes sense: Both are shame-soaked atmospheres, in which the child is almost always parentified, or made to feel like the adult in the situation. Both circumstances can rob children of their childhoods. Because my parents went through rehab and got sober when I was a kid, as a teenager I was given a few books about codependency and about being the adult child of an alcoholic. I even attended some Alateen meetings back when my mom was hanging out at The Club. I still remember the advice I heard there: You can't change anyone else. You can only change yourself. It was something I'd known once, but had forgotten.

IT'S A FEW
more weeks before David and I really feel like the bugs are gone. During that time, one of my best friends has a baby. She wants David and me to visit her in the hospital after the baby's born, and we would love to, but we can't. We can't risk giving the bugs to a newborn, or to a new mother. No way. When I talk to my friend on the phone I plan to lie and say I have a cold, but I'm sick of lying,
so
sick of lying.

I say, “My mom is a pack rat, and when David and I were in Minneapolis at Christmas we cleaned her house and now we both have a skin condition that's contagious.”

“Poor thing, that sounds terrible,” she says. “It's okay. You'll meet the baby another time.”

My friend seems not at all concerned by my admission about the “skin condition” and more important, that my mother is a pack rat (that label doesn't give a full picture of the disorder, but sounds so much better than “hoarder,” such an ugly word).

I'm surprised by how good it feels to tell my friend the truth.
It's not unlike the thrill I get when I throw things out. Afterward I feel lighter. And in the coming weeks I begin to think about picking up that article idea I'd abandoned—the one about compulsive hoarding that I'd been too much of a coward to pitch. Maybe I'll end up doing it after all.

SHORTLY AFTER DAVID
and I are cured, my mother calls me in a panic. “Oh, Jessie,” she says. “I really screwed up. I think I have the bugs, too. Maybe I had them all along and I didn't know!”

Anger rushes hotly through me, then drains away. I'm so tired of being angry at my mother. I don't have the energy for it anymore. I don't have the desire.

“Do the sulfur lotion, Mom. That's all I'm going to tell you. The lotion. That's it.”

“Yes, honey. I'll do it.”

She does the lotion for weeks, and finally that's the true end of the bugs. Later she assures me that she's thrown out anything that could possibly be contaminated (I'm not sure I believe her but I'm not about to go and check). Did she really have them the whole time and not know? Highly unlikely. It's equally absurd that something in her house was still infested. We'll probably never have a conclusive answer.

Regardless, knowing she's free of them, that her house is free of them, doesn't change a thing.

I'm still done.

SIX MONTHS AFTER OUR SECOND BUG ENCOUNTER, MY husband and I are spending Fourth of July weekend in Minneapolis. We're meeting my mom at an Indian restaurant she's been wanting to try that has an all-you-can-eat buffet. This will be the first time we've seen her since the day we cleaned her kitchen. Things have changed since then. A lot. As crazy as it sounds, I'm glad we got the bugs a second time: They snapped me back to reality.

And the reality is that I cannot stop my mother's hoarding. Only she can do that. The reality is that I am not responsible for her house. She is.

David and I get to the restaurant before she does. I'm not feeling great; I've got a cold and am congested and tired. I lean against the brick of the building as we wait for her to arrive.
Finally we see her rusty boat drive past us on its way into the parking lot.

A minute later she walks up. She's her typical rumpled-looking self, with a moth-eaten sweater jacket and her keys jangling on a plastic neon-orange coil around her neck. She's also wearing a tiny backpack over her shoulders and carrying her giant travel mug.