Dirty Secret (4 page)

When Joe shows up, I put him in charge of emptying out my mother's car, which is the second front for the hoarding. It looks the same as yesterday: the backseat piled high with books, bags of trash, the ubiquitous Savers bags, loose papers, stuffed animals, shoes, jackets, and hats. Within her hearing, I ask Joe to put everything on the grassy boulevard next to the curb and to try to group things into piles of similar items that my mother and I will sort later—then secretly I tell him to throw out anything perishable or trashed. He can use his own judgment. I don't have time to ask my mom before tossing everything. Besides, I fear she'd find some reason for needing each precious object.

In one corner of the living room, near the sewing machines, I come upon a nest of paper bags, each filled with yarn of various thicknesses and colors. The bags sit on top of empty plastic bins.

“What's going on over here?” I ask. It looks a little more organized than the rest of the room. I pull a spool of midnight blue yarn from one of the bags.

“This is my art corner,” she says. “Ooh! Pick out your three favorite colors of yarn!”

“Why?” I'm already suspicious. One of the reasons she has so many possessions is that she fancies herself an artist or inventor of sorts. Many hoarders do. As the authors of
Buried in Treasures,
the doctors Tolin, Frost, and Steketee, write: “. . . people who hoard often come up with idea after idea, saving things for all kinds of creative reasons but never following through with those plans. They have become victims of their own creativity.” My mother spent close to a year trying to crochet a bikini for me even though I told her a hundred times that I would never wear a bikini at all, and especially not a crocheted one. But she ignored me and continued working on it, pulling it apart and starting over each time she discovered a flaw. That's what she does: obsess over a project, trying to get it absolutely perfect, and when she can't get it just right, she falls into a depression and finally stops. Even after she's abandoned the project, though, she can't get rid of the supplies for it, “just in case.”

“Wait until you see these, Jessie—they're going to be incredible!”

“What are they? What's going to be incredible?”

“GATORS!”

“What's a gator?”

“You don't know what a gator is?” she says, stroking a spool of yarn as if it's a kitten. “That's hysterical!”

“So what is it, then?”

“It's a neck scarf . . . it's like a tube that goes around your neck—like a turtleneck, but without the shirt.”

“Okay . . .” I say and start piling the yarn into the plastic bins. At least that way I can stack them, which will clear a little floor space.

Later, after I've returned to New York, she'll call me with
a new plan: “Oh, Jessie, I've come up with a great idea for my gators! African women!”

“Why would African women need gators?”

“They don't
need
gators. They're going to help me make the gators. You know how there are so many starving African tribes? I'm going to recruit them to work on my gators.”

“Mom. You cannot be serious.”

“I'm completely serious. They need work and I need workers.”

“So basically you want to start a sweatshop of African women to make gators for you.”

“Well . . .” she pauses for a long time. “Yes.”

“Good luck with that,” I say, and though it's months before she stops talking about them, she eventually downgrades her plan to making the gators herself and selling them from her front porch.

Hoarders' creativity can be a curse in another way as well: It makes categorization—a key part of organizing—a serious challenge. They'll spot something unique about each item and end up with many different categories containing just one object. For example, instead of forty toothbrushes, the hoarder will see one category for the blue toothbrush, one category for the red toothbrush, one category for the sparkly silver toothbrush, and so on. Since each item is one of a kind, it automatically has more value, and it can't be grouped with anything, which makes it arduous to say the least, when I find a stack of newspapers that my mom claims she “must have kept for a reason,” because each one has to be scrutinized individually.

Not that creativity is the only reason she hoards. When I come upon an entire dresser drawer filled with eyeglasses, I ask my mother why she has so many pairs. Some are mangled, missing parts, or have cracked lenses.

I half expect her to tell me she's going to become an optometrist or that she's going to start a mail-order business specifically for used glasses. But, instead, her answer is simple.

“I might need them someday.”

“This many pairs?”

“You never know.”

“You couldn't possibly have gotten these from an eye doctor—are they even your prescription?”

“Give me those,” she says, snatching the pair I'm holding in my hand. She swaps them with the ones she was already wearing. “They're fine. It's a waste of money to go to the eye doctor. If they work, they work.”

“Yeah, okay, but why would you need
all
of these?”

“I told you. I might need them someday.”

“How about if I get rid of half of them?”

“No,” she says, her voice firm.

Okay. She's not going to budge on those, and at least they're put away. I move on to the next thing.

Much of my mother's clutter is comprised of gifts for people, gifts that she never got around to sending or simply lost track of in the mess. Still, she manages to keep track of enough of them to waste a ton of time and money sending me things: special egg-cooking devices, digital watches, and every kind of book light known to man. And since she doesn't trust the regular mail, she spends excessive amounts on UPS or, if she's slumming it, priority mail. I've begged her to stop, but she won't. No matter how many times I've told her how small my apartment is and that I don't need or want anything, she continues to send things—things that I almost always end up donating to the Housing Works store down the street.

Some hoarders have a hypersentimental attachment to their possessions; for example not wanting to get rid of a box a gift
came in because that would be erasing, or at least tarnishing, the memory of the day the person received the gift. Some hoarders anthropomorphize items and take the item's feelings into account—
This empty plastic bag would be hurt if it knew it was so worthless that it was in the trash.
While my mother doesn't do either of these, she does have most of the other traits that contribute to the disorder: compulsive shopping (in her case thrift-store shopping), organization problems, indecisiveness, and perfectionism. My mother is so afraid of throwing something away now that she might need later—in other words, making the wrong decision—that she'd rather make no decision at all. Also, like many hoarders, my mother reports feeling safer when she's surrounded by her possessions, as if she can insulate herself from the dangers of the world with
things.

Even though she's more amenable than the last time I cleaned, over the next few hours my mother edges toward a breakdown as she watches me piling her belongings into garbage bags, with the salvageable items going out to the porch for donation back to Savers. She practically cries when I find another stash of inflatable furniture and put it in the donate pile.

“I need those!” she says. “I'm going to use them, once I get everything set up.”

“These are for kids,” I say. “They aren't even big enough for you.”

“I don't care. I'll make it work.
Please
don't make me throw them away.”

“You can keep one piece. Not a whole set.”

“But I need at least two pieces! A chair and one of the little couches.”

“Fine,” I say. “Two pieces. But that's it.”

As the afternoon gets later and later, I realize that I can't put off the basement any longer. The last time we cleaned, my husband
took a look around and said it wasn't that bad. This time I have no choice but to see for myself.

I take a tentative step down the stairs; they're so weak that I'm sure if I stomped hard enough I could break right through the wood. I hear my mother's voice all those times saying, “Don't go down to the basement,” as she formed her fingers in a circle the size of a basketball, “There are snakes down there this wide that will eat you.”

Thinking about it brings a perfect picture to my mind: a snake's giant, triangular head aimed directly at me. It was what I saw the day my mother brought me inside one of the buildings at Como Park Zoo, covered my eyes, and walked me over to a “surprise.” She pulled her hand away right as a giant snake flicked its tongue at me, just on the other side of the glass.

She laughed and I screamed. The following year she left a rubber snake in my Christmas stocking. After she stopped doing Christmas stockings, she'd just randomly present toy snakes to me or leave them lying around for me to find. Begging her to stop the snake-teasing seems to simply encourage the behavior. The only explanation I can come up with is that it's another form of hoarding—letting go of the “joke” is as difficult for her as letting go of her unnecessary belongings.

But regardless of why my mother does it, I'm now absolutely terrified of snakes. I don't mean just a little afraid. My fear is phobic level, without question. The one time in recent years that I encountered an actual snake was when David and I were hiking in the Czech Republic and came across a fat one sunning itself in the middle of our trail. I burst into tears, refused to take another step, and seriously considered canceling the rest of the trip. Eventually poor David had to pull me past the revolting muscular coil—which I just knew was about to strike at any second—with my eyes closed.

That's why I haven't been down to the basement in so long. I try to clear my mind of the slithering images as I take another step, descending lower and lower, until I'm at the bottom.

Dozens of pale blue nursing uniforms my mother found at Savers hang from nails in the ceiling. I half-expect the ghostly uniforms to begin swaying, but there's no air down here. The musty, moldy scent is strong enough to remind me that the rest of the house doesn't smell bad at all. I suppose that's one good thing. In the center of the cement floor sits a four-foot-high pyramid of mildewy sweaters, looking like a bonfire ready to be lit, and that's exactly what I'd like to do, because life would be so much easier if I could just burn this whole house down.

That's when I hear it.

A low, sibilant “Ssss . . .” and then again, louder, “Ssss . . .”

My mother is standing at the top of the stairs, hissing down at me.

“Funny, Mom!” I yell and she doubles over in laughter, then immediately straightens up, looks me in the eyes, and does it again: “Sssss . . .”

I'm up the stairs and out of the house in seconds. I vow to never speak to her again. Let her clean her own disgusting house. But even as I'm pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, wishing I still smoked because I could really use a cigarette right now, I know I won't keep my vow—and not just because she has cancer. I can't keep my vow because I never can. She depends on me. She always has.

WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS OLD, I'D SOMETIMES TUCK myself into one of the windowsills in the hallway of my elementary school. From there I could view my mother's house in one direction, and in the other, the yellow house, where I lived with my dad and Sandy. I was bifurcated, living two very distinct lives. I'd gaze back and forth: longingly at the yellow house, and with dread at my mother's. The weight of her house was so palpable that just looking at it made my shoulders tighten.

It hadn't always been that way. The first time I saw my mother's house, when I was seven years old, was the day my dad, mom, brother, and I moved in. The house had freshly painted walls and shiny mahogany woodwork throughout, even some stained glass windows in the living room that cast shards of burgundy, blue, and green across the newly carpeted floors and
over the walls in the late afternoons. A sweet balcony off one of the four bedrooms overlooked a fenced backyard filled with lilac and oak trees. I was about to enter second grade, and my brother was just starting kindergarten, at the elementary school across the street. We'd already moved more than half a dozen times in my short life, including one trip across the country.

My parents met in Berkeley, when my dad pulled his van over for the pretty girl with waist-length hair standing on the side of the road with her thumb sticking out. It was 1967 and my mother, Helen, was with two friends from UMass Amherst, from which she'd just graduated; the three girls were visiting Berkeley before their real lives started. My dad, Rick, was with two friends as well. He'd been living in Berkeley for about six months, painting houses, taking classes at the community college in Oakland, and driving a van on which he and his friends had used blue house paint to scrawl
SAY IT WITH FLOWERS
across the side.

One of Rick's friends slid the door open and the girls got in, smiling. Even Helen was feeling brave that day. After they settled into the back, she leaned forward and made a joke about the originality of “Say It with Flowers”—it was the slogan of a popular flower shop and Helen liked that Rick and his friends had appropriated it for their hippie purposes.

Rick laughed and decided he liked that one, the littlest one of the group, with her almond-shaped hazel eyes, wide smile, and perfect teeth.

“So where's everyone going?” he asked.

“Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore,” one of the girls said, and Rick's friend Tom laughed. That's where they'd been headed, too.

By the time they arrived, Rick and Helen had decided they'd rather stay in the van and continue talking, so everyone else went in to the concert without them.