Coming Clean: A Memoir (10 page)

I
T WOULD BE YEARS
before I heard the theory that hoarders tend to be perfectionists, that each item they collect is one crucial part of an ideal world they are ever creating for themselves. If that’s the case, it’s possible I inherited this, too, from my father. The older I got, the more obsessed I became with maintaining the illusion that everything in my life was perfect—and as the years passed, I depended upon it to fly me under the radar of friends and faculty long enough to get to college.

No one questions the home life of quiet girls with good grades and kickline practice after school. My need to be seen as perfect was as compulsive as my father’s need to surround himself with paper.

By the time I got to high school, my act had become second nature. I wasn’t the shy, barely audible girl I’d been when I was younger. I had people to wave to in the hallways and to pass notes to in class, and parties to go to on the weekend. I was nicknamed “Kimbie” by my new social circle and took on a persona to match my peppy nickname. I rarely left school before 7 p.m. because I had become so immersed in the social world of extracurricular activities, each one chosen as a notch for my college
applications and intended to illustrate just how well-rounded I was.

I didn’t rebel like other kids my age did. I didn’t long to be kissed by boys or wear brand-name jeans. My wildest fantasy—the focus of all my efforts—was college. College would rescue me. On paper, I was the all-American girl. At home, things had reached an unfathomable level of squalor.

Between my father’s love of paper (and just about everything else he could get his hands on) and my mother’s depression-fueled shopping, our house had started to resemble the remnants at the bottom of a garbage can. Soggy junk filled our living space. When I was fourteen, the boiler broke in the middle of winter, but we could never allow a repairman into our mess, and so we lived without heat, without showers. Instead we joined a local gym (I lied and said I was sixteen), and each Sunday we would go through the motions of a workout so that we would feel justified in using the locker room for our weekly shower.

I was lucky: Instead of acne, puberty had brought with it dry skin and dry hair. I could go a week without washing my hair and still look presentable. Rubbing alcohol and cotton balls sufficed for spot hygiene maintenance to keep body odor under control.

Later—I don’t remember precisely when—the pipes in our house started to decay, causing flooding throughout the house. We shut the water off at regular intervals, turning it on to flush the toilet a few times a day, knowing that each time we allowed the water to flow, moisture would escape and drip through the downstairs ceiling that had started to rot. The house smelled musty and moldy, and my trips to the ER for asthma attacks had become so frequent that the hospital eventually sent me home
with a ventilator of my own. Two out of our three bathrooms had stopped working because of various levels of disrepair, so we all used one bathroom on the second floor. The door no longer closed all the way because there was too much junk in the hallway, and no matter how many times we pushed it away, the junk would eventually fall back into its rightful place. We settled for pushing the door closed as far as we could for maximum privacy. Unused, the tub had been converted to yet another place to hold things.

Fleas were as much a part of our summers as swimming and ice cream. The dogs would bring them in from the backyard, but we couldn’t set off a bug bomb and get rid of them like our neighbors did—there were too many places amid the trash for them to hide. We spent the summers being eaten alive by them. I would capture them between my thumb and forefinger and cut their slim little bodies in half with my fingernail, watching my own blood seep from their severed bodies.

I could pass the fleabites off as mosquito bites most of the time, but there was a constant fear that one would jump from my hair or clothes in school and people would see them. That people would know that I was flea-infested.

The dogs fared worse than we did, though; there weren’t enough flea collars in the world to keep them safe. I hated seeing my little cocker spaniel Jewel’s coat turn from light blond to a rusty red color from the fleas’ blood-drenched dander.

The downstairs had become a relative swamp ground. It never seemed to dry out from the flooding, so when we did walk through it, the inches of trash would squish beneath our feet, creating an unsteady terrain. The living room, dining room,
and den—spaces I thought my father would never find enough things to fill—had floor-to-ceiling piles of boxes and bags of paper and knickknacks, things that had been purchased and put down and long forgotten. We gave up the kitchen and survived solely on fast food and hermetically sealed snacks we could keep in our bedrooms.

I often felt like I had two different families. There was the family we were at home, where we lived every man for himself. There wasn’t room anywhere anymore, in the four-bedroom house with the two-car garage and attic big enough to convert to an apartment, for us all to fit somewhere together, so we each found our own station. My mother spent most of her time on the small corner of mattress that was left for her to sleep. Over the years, her mattress had started to slide off the box spring, pushed aside by the spoils of her constant shopping. The side of the bed she slept on teetered at a 45-degree angle, while the half of her mattress still firmly planted on a flat surface had been taken over by stuff. The rest of her time was spent in front of the computer. As the house deteriorated, so had my parents’ friendships, and so my mother spent most of her time talking with people she had met in AOL chat rooms, people who couldn’t see her twisted body or garbage-filled house.

My father either sat on his mattress in the sea of paper that was his bedroom or in the driver’s side of the car, and I had my room.

My bedroom was no better than the rest of the house. My parents, especially my mother, were generous in their shopping. Lacking for anything was never my problem, but I didn’t value anything I owned. Everything that came into my house
was garbage. It was easier to throw out my dirty clothes than to get the width of a laundry basket through the front door to a Laundromat. Every few months I would purge my room of the dirty clothes, unused spoils of late night shopping binges, and hallway debris that made its way into my haven into big black plastic bags until the floor was visible, but it would only be a matter of weeks before I had new things and new clothes to take their place.

The family we were outside the house was completely different. My father arranged his work schedule around shuttling me to my seemingly endless array of afterschool activities. I would go to kickline, voice lessons, and youth ambulance corp meetings, while he and my mother would wait in the car. Over the years, they’d gone from fighting all the time to barely talking at all while in the confines of the house, but in the car they were still the same. When I would come out from dance class or acting class or my voice lessons or from a brunch shift at the restaurant I waitressed at, they were there, laughing.

“Hi, honey, how was class?” was my mother’s standard greeting, followed by “Okay, kiddo, where to next?” from my dad. And there always was a next place to be. We ate out almost every night, a byproduct of having abandoned the kitchen. In these moments, at restaurants, we were at our best, because unlike in the car, which was almost always filled with bags of my father’s papers, in a restaurant we were completely free. We laughed—loud, and often at the kind of humor that only seems to make sense in families. My father could laugh so loud and for so long that the people seated around us would start laughing, too.

Life lessons were dished out over appetizers. Over a basket
of buffalo wings, my parents set the ground rules for drugs and alcohol.

“I don’t need to know what you do; I just want you to call me to pick you up after you’ve done it,” my father said.

“What if it’s late?”

“I don’t care how late it is,” he said. “I just don’t want you getting into a car with someone who’s been drinking.”

“I’d rather you didn’t drink, either. It’s in your blood, honey. Your grandparents were alcoholics,” my mother chimed in. “If you have to choose, I’d rather you smoked pot—it’s not addictive.”

“If alcoholism bypassed Dad, I think it will bypass me.”

“When I first met your father, he drank quite heavily,” she told me, looking over at my father. “I told him if he wanted to keep seeing me, he’d have to give up drinking, and he did.”

My dad went to go “vote,” which was his euphemism for using the bathroom, and I started in on my mom. I was always trying to get to the bottom of who my dad was before I knew him.

“You’ve seen dad drunk?”

“Oh yeah, he was quite amorous. There wasn’t a girl in a bar that was safe once your father had a few beers in him.”

I could picture him as a silly drunk, but affectionate seemed wholly out of character. I could count on one hand the number of times my parents had kissed on the lips.

When my father came back to the table, we caught him up on our conversation, and his grin broadened as he told the story of the night my parents met—at an orgy, in 1973.

My father loved telling this story. I couldn’t remember the first time I had heard it, but I remembered being immediately embarrassed by it. My parents couldn’t even meet like normal
parents. After sharing it with Rachel and Anna to shocked giggles, I started milking it for all the entertainment value it was worth at parties and sleepovers. But the truth was—as far as orgies go—this one was relatively G-rated, at least for my parents.

My parents referred to it as “the party,” because my mother apparently didn’t notice the part of the invitation that mentioned that group sex would be on the itinerary and showed up thinking she was going to a run-of-the-mill house party.

My father, newly back from the army, knew exactly what he was getting into, and unfortunately for him, this was the one and only orgy he had ever been invited to—unfortunate because the little redhead he was flirting with when the party transitioned from chitchat in the living room to naked bonding in the bedroom grabbed ahold of his arm and asked him if he would mind staying with her in the living room, just to talk.

“I couldn’t leave her there. Plus, that finger thing she was doing was nice, running her index finger up and down my forearm…” my father said.

My mom just giggled nervously. “I thought it was a party!”

My parents spent the evening flirting in the living room while their friends got it on in the bedroom.

When I’ve told that story to friends over the years, I’m often asked if I was conceived that night—I wasn’t. My parents didn’t become a couple right away. What started that night was an indelible friendship. My parents didn’t curl up at night and talk about feelings, but they enrolled in college together, spending their downtime at movies or hustling pool at local bars.

It was while playing pool one night, about a year into their
friendship, that they made the transition from friends to something more.

“The guy I was playing opposite was being very attentive,” my mother says. “All of a sudden, your father was all over me, in a way he’d never been before. So that was that.”

Shortly afterward, they moved in together, and a few years after that, they decided to leave the cramped spaces and paper-thin walls of apartment living behind them and move to a house on Long Island. Two years after that, they decided to have a child. Two years after
that
, my mother found out she was pregnant, and finally, on the seventh anniversary of their pool-table kindling, they got married.

My parents used to have adventures—leave for a drive around the neighborhood only to embark on a days-long road trip, or dress in drag for a night out—just to make each other laugh.

I could sit in restaurants or parking lots with my parents forever, because I knew as soon as we pulled into our driveway, my family would disband and we’d all go back into hiding.

A
N INSTRUMENTAL PART OF MY
façade was my decoy house. The more friends I made, the more likely it was that their parents would offer me a ride home. But I was too embarrassed to let anyone see me walk into my own house. The garage door no longer shut completely—something had been long broken in the mechanism that allowed it to lock, and so every so often it would inch up to reveal the massive piles of long-forgotten treasures that had taken over the garage. The panels opposite the front door were rotting, the wood gradually chipping away, with a plastic bag taped to the outside as its only source of insulation. My biggest fear would be that a friend would be in the neighborhood and want to drop by, knocking on the door, only to see the spiderwebs and dead moths and flies that made their home in our curtains, or see through our window shades to the teetering piles behind them.

The house I chose was completely unremarkable. Small and neatly kept, it was the kind of house you forgot was there, and it was exactly what I wished I had. My decoy was five houses away, around the corner from my real house. It was easy for people to drop me off and continue on down the road. Not too far a walk
from my real house, but far enough to ensure that they’d be back on the road by the time I arrived at my door. I didn’t know the people who lived there, and if someone were ever to knock on their door looking for me, I would have to come up with some sort of excuse, but at least my secret would still be safe.

Mr. Griffith died in a car accident during my junior year of high school. I hadn’t seen him since seventh grade English class. I was a totally different girl because of him. His death devastated me as it was relayed as gossip between classes. When I told my mother, we both cried. “That man changed your life,” she said.

I didn’t want to seem overly dramatic, so I kept my mourning to myself during school hours, but at home I cried for weeks over my fallen hero. I wondered how many other kids would go unchampioned now that he was gone.