Dirty Secret (8 page)

She did tell me. The police broke down her back door because no one had seen her for so long and she wouldn't answer her doorbell. Afterward, she seriously considered suing the police. When I asked her why she hadn't just answered the door, she said it was because she didn't know who it was; I suspected it was really a combination of her reclusive nature and not wanting anyone to get a glimpse inside her house.

“You have her phone number, right?” I said, fighting to hide my annoyance. “If you're worried about her, you could call.”

“Yeah, but she don't answer her phone.”

True. She'll call me either every day or not for months. Often I have to ask my dad or Sandy to tape a note to my mother's front door asking her to call me—she has voice mail but claims not
to know how to check her messages. Sometimes I picture her body inside that house, dead and decaying, being snacked on by rodents, and that's when I ask my dad or Sandy to leave another note. Finally she'll call me and say she's either been too depressed to pick up the phone or too busy making some kind of political T-shirts she intends to sell for millions on eBay.

“Well . . . thanks,” I said to Mean Lesbian Neighbor, and she shook her head, scowling, clearly repulsed by what a horrible daughter I am.

Now my dad pulls up in front of my mother's house and she unbuckles her seat belt.

“Thank you, Rick,” she says.

“Sure, Helen. See you later.”

I'm jealous that my dad gets to drive away. When he was twenty-one he had to have his mother committed to a mental institution, and though it's been a while since I've feared having to do the same thing, sometimes I can't help but resent that my father gave me a mother I'd have to take care of forever, just like he had to do with his.

“Call me if you want me to bring lunch, or if you feel like taking a break,” my dad says as I get out of the car, and I feel guilty and selfish for thinking anything bad about him at all. Especially because he's the one who married Sandy and gave me a semblance of a normal family, even if by then it was too late.

“Let's not clean today,” my mother says. She opens her front door and we walk inside. “Let's go to Como Park Zoo. The house already looks marvelous. You've done a beautiful job, honey.”

The house looks horrible. I know the nice thing to do, the
kind
thing to do, would be to spend the next few days I'm in town talking with my mom, letting her tell me stories and pontificate on the meaning of life as she has been, but I don't want
to. There is so much more cleaning and clearing out to do, and I can't stop.

“I want this house to be clean when you're recovering. I want it to be nice for you.”

It breaks my heart to think of my mother, injured, alone in this house. She has no friends, not one. Sandy's offered to come by, but she's busy and their relationship, while cordial, isn't close.

“But it
is
nice,” she insists.

“It isn't, Mom.” I walk toward the stove. It's caked in grease and dirt, piled high with dirty pans. I'll have to clean it off before we try to trade it in. “And what's this?” I ask about the dishwasher squatting in the middle of the kitchen floor. “Why do you even have this?”

The dishwasher, it turns out, is from Savers. I can't believe she paid someone to bring it in here, that she let someone inside, and that she thought she needed it in the first place. It takes up 90 percent of the kitchen's floor space. And it doesn't even work. She needs some part for it, some part that I know without a doubt she'll never locate, and if she does, she'll never buy, and even if she does buy it, she'll never actually spend the money to hire someone to install it. So, this dishwasher will never work. But she won't let me get rid of it because when it does work “it will save so much time.”

“So much time?” I say. “You live alone—you do the dishes for one person. How much time can that take?”

“You have no idea.” She shakes her head as if it's the saddest thing in the world.

And considering how slow she is, maybe she's right. Often my mother seems to be moving in slow motion, or underwater. I've never seen someone take as long to write out a check, to walk one block, to get in and out of a car. And excessive slowness, it turns out, is not uncommon among hoarders. They're often
slow in completing tasks and late for appointments. At least in my mother's case, the slowness is partly due to indecisiveness—each and every movement has to be considered and carefully weighed—and partly due to perfectionism and anxiety (worry about somehow making the wrong move).

I feel anxiety myself when I look at her refrigerator: It's coated with orange and yellow and brown food smears, especially near the handle; I wonder how many hours of scrubbing it will need. The freezer is one solid chunk of ice with microwavable dinners, tinfoil packets of leftovers, and bags of frozen corn, peas, and lima beans buried inside like insects in amber. The refrigerator shelves hold long-expired cartons of milk, half-eaten loaves of bread, and Tupperware containers of every shape and size imaginable. Splotches of mold in bruisey green and black hues bloom on every surface. But most disturbing are the tiny black fruit fly–looking bugs. My God. What kind of insect can stay alive inside a refrigerator?

My mom parks herself on one of the chairs at the kitchen table.

“So what are you reading, Jessie?” she says, her favorite question.

It's something I'm grateful to my mother for—she's a voracious reader, at times averaging a book a day, and I'm sure I inherited my love and respect for literature from her.

“A collection of short stories,” I say, as I begin tossing every single thing from the refrigerator into the trash can I've lined with a garbage bag.

I don't feel like talking about books right now. I'm busy trying to picture a time I saw my mother clean something, and can't. Ever. Not sweeping, not mopping, not dusting. Not once. When she and my dad were married he did all the cleaning, then it fell to me, then her boyfriend Sam, and then Roger. Had the
people my mother lived with always done the cleaning? Could it be possible that all of this is simply a result of never learning how to clean?

“Can I ask you something?” I say. “When you were growing up, who did the cleaning in your house?”

“No one. There was nothing to clean. We didn't have anything.”

“No one?” I say, aiming a greenish bag of carrots for the trash. I'm surprised she bought them in the first place. They're much too nutritious for her normal tastes. “What about sweeping the floors? Doing the dishes? Vacuuming? Dusting? Those things still had to be done even if you didn't have much stuff. Someone had to clean.”

“I guess my mother must have done it.” She shakes her head angrily. “Those people. You know my father wouldn't even let me eat at the table with them. He'd say, ‘I can't look at her. Get her outta here!' And I'd have to go eat in the living room, all alone.”

“Why?” I've never understood the way her father's cruelty seemed, most of the time, directed singularly at her.

She shrugs. “When he'd try to beat my mother, I'd stand up for her. I'd get right between them and then he'd end up beating me instead.” She's gritting her teeth and I feel bad for bringing up her childhood—it almost always leads to a downward spiral of anger and despair. But I had to ask. I'm still grasping for a reason for her behavior.

My mother continues. “I told you what my father said about the Boston Strangler, right? He said, ‘Hey,'” my mother lowers her voice in an impression of a typical meathead-type guy, “‘I used to drink in the same bar as the Boston Strangler, and he was a nice guy. Those girls must've been asking for it.'”

“Good Lord,” I say as my mother and I laugh and shake our heads in disbelief.

I manage to pry a bag of frozen corn from the freezer's icicle tentacles and toss it into the trash.

My mom really has had a crap life—appalling parents, a bellicose marriage and divorce, then the death of her boyfriend. Since she doesn't speak to either of her siblings, she has no family other than me. And my brother, sort of. He hasn't spoken to our mom in six years, not since they had an argument shortly after Roger died. Three years ago my brother and our dad had a disagreement while my brother was doing some work on one of Sandy's listings. My brother stormed off and hasn't spoken to our dad, Sandy, or me since. It seems so odd that our mother has cancer and he has no idea. As kids, my brother and I were allies against our parents' dysfunction, but once we moved into the yellow house we drifted apart. As we grew older I'd see him at holiday gatherings, but we had no real contact other than that. I wouldn't even know how to reach him now, though I could probably figure it out. I've considered trying, so I could tell him about our mom, but she's still too wounded that my brother stopped talking to her—abandoned her—especially so soon after Roger's death.

She really has no one.

No wonder she's the way she is.

And then I glance down, into a basket of junk in the middle of her kitchen table—rather than a junk drawer, my mom has junk baskets, out in the open so she can see everything—and I notice something long and rubbery. Green. I look closer. It's a rubber snake.

My mom bursts out laughing, clapping her hands. “I was wondering when you'd notice!”

And the pity I'd felt seconds before drains away like water from a tub.

IT'S TAKING FOREVER
to sort through everything with my mother watching over me, so I come up with a task to get her out of my way: I ask her to transfer a huge pile of books taking up the entire couch—where the hell has she been sitting before this?—to the empty bookshelves. Take at least half of them and put them into a box to give back to Savers, I tell her.

“But, Jessie, some of these are collectibles! Some of these books are worth a fortune! I'm going to sell them.”

“Really? How much do you think this book on using Microsoft Word from 1996 is worth?” I ask, tossing it into the box.

She sighs, blinks her eyes at me. “Fine. I'll donate some of them. But only half.”

A bit later, I glance into the living room to check on her progress. She's sitting on a newly cleared patch of the couch, with a cardboard box on her lap—it's one of the many boxes I've come across that contain maybe an inch of papers, or a couple small pillows, or one cowboy boot.

As I approach, I see that she's holding a photograph of Roger and her with their dog, a tiny sheltie. My mom is staring at the photo. Roger was the one person with whom my mother never fought; he was the one person who seemed to love her unconditionally, despite her many quirks. Already sick with diabetes when they started dating, Roger's condition deteriorated over the decade they were together, and eventually my mother quit her job and devoted herself to him full-time.

I met Roger only once. It was the summer of 1998, and it was the first time my mother and I saw each other after an almost seven-year silence. Looking back, it seems absurd that we didn't
speak for so long—especially because our estrangement began so capriciously, almost by accident. My mother had asked me to go see her therapist with her, and even though this was the same therapist she'd been seeing for at least fifteen years and as far as I could tell hadn't helped my mother in the slightest, I agreed to go. This was also the same therapist who advised my mother to force my brother and me to walk around the block when we fought, regardless of time or weather. But I was curious about what my mother wanted to say to me that she didn't think she could say on her own.

We'd been getting along fairly well at that point, so when my boyfriend at the time and I decided to take an impromptu road trip to Canada and it happened to coincide with the planned meeting, I didn't think delaying our talk would be a big deal. Apparently, though, it was a very big deal.

“I am so sick of you letting me down,” my mother said.

“Excuse me? I just want to postpone it. I'll go with you the next week.”

“Just like everyone else,” she said. “Always letting me down.”

What was she talking about? “Mom, I don't know who you're confusing me with, but I do not let you down.”

“Well . . .” she said, pausing. “You're just . . . you're just evil!”

I was so surprised that I laughed. “Really? I'm evil because I can't go to your shrink appointment with you?”

“I need a break from you!” she said. “Let's not talk for a while.”

I felt stung. But not surprised. Actually, I felt stupid that I hadn't seen it coming. When she'd met Roger a few years earlier, the one wrinkle was that my mother was still living with Sam, her first boyfriend after my dad. But the wrinkle was easily smoothed out: Instead of Sam moving out of the house, he just moved into another bedroom. He was still living there. And my
brother was temporarily living there, too. She'd always been unable to have more than one person close to her at a time. And at that moment she had three.

“Okay,” I said. “How about if you just call me when you're ready?”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” I echoed, and that was that.

I figured that she'd call in a week or two. A month at most. But weeks passed. Then months.

Then years.

During that time I moved to New York; I'd see my brother at my dad and Sandy's when I visited Minneapolis and he'd report that our mom was doing well and was happy with Roger. I missed her but at the same time I was relieved not to have to deal with her. I wondered if she ever thought of me.

Five years passed like that. My brother asked me one day, when we were both visiting my dad and Sandy, if it would be all right for him to give our mom my address. She wanted to get back in touch. He assured me that she was different, that Roger was a good influence on her and that she was “calmer” now.