Coming Clean: A Memoir (11 page)

W
HILE DOING HOMEWORK
in my room my senior year of high school, I saw a report on the evening news about a local family “living in filth.” My heart stopped when the reporter standing outside the worn brown ranch house commented on the “disgusting” living conditions inside. It wasn’t
my
house the perfectly coifed reporter was standing in front of, but it may as well have been. I scanned the image onscreen and saw so many similarities in the deteriorating building: random pieces of furniture sitting on the side of the house along with the trash, shrubbery allowed to run wild to shield the prying eyes of passersby, curtains drawn in every window. I wanted to know everything about that house—where it was, who lived in it, if there were kids there. And I wanted throw up, because it wasn’t my house but it was my secret, and it was out there in the open.

The reporter said that the owner suffered from a rare obsessive-compulsive disorder called “hoarding.” Before the report was over, I was running into my mother’s room.

“Turn on channel four!” I yelled as I burst through the door, but the segment had already ended.

“There are other people who live like us! It was on the news.”

“No one lives like us, Kim. No one else would ever live like this.”

“They do! There’s a condition called
hoarding
. I think that’s what Dad has.”

“Your father doesn’t have anything other than a severe case of not caring about anyone but himself and his papers.”

I didn’t let my mother’s disbelief dampen my bitter excitement. There was now a word for my father, and having a word meant that we weren’t alone in this.

I
PURPOSEFULLY REDIRECTED MY
route between classes to take me past the guidance office. In the front window, there were paper stars with the names of graduating seniors and the colleges they’d been accepted to.

“Another one?” the secretary asked as I handed her my latest acceptance letter, my twelfth. I’d been a bit overzealous during application season, getting lost in the fantasy world of college brochures: pictures of young men and women, a little older than I was, smiling while on line in pristine dining halls or in neatly decorated dorm rooms, and pictures of well-dressed professors in front of projector screens. Each school had its own personality and potential for a new life.

Of my twelve schools, there were two I was seriously debating between. Syracuse University had offered me a full scholarship, and it was certainly my parents’ pick for me. My father started wearing an Orangemen baseball cap with his uniform to work each morning, and my mother touted the importance of starting my adult life debt-free. I wasn’t quite as sure. I had visited Syracuse in January when there was two feet of snow on the ground. My nose hairs froze on the walk from the hotel to the
acting school auditions, and my long-deliberated, perfect college audition outfit was drenched up to my midthighs thanks to the unshoveled sidewalks.

Syracuse was practical, but my dream school was in Boston.

One year earlier, I hadn’t even heard of Emerson College, but a school trip to Boston my junior year had changed all that. In an offhand comment, our tour guide had introduced the small liberal arts school as Boston’s playground for artistic freaks and geeks. While on the outside, I may have strongly resembled a Gap ad, on the inside I was all freak. It didn’t hurt that it was a balmy spring day and the Boston Commons were in full bloom. Our tour guide didn’t mention that Boston could be every bit the arctic tundra that upstate New York was during the winter.

Unlike my runner-up, Emerson was known for being incredibly stingy when it came to financial aid, and in my searches I found it on “worst of” lists when it came to financial services.

When my aid packages started rolling in from the schools around the Northeast, it became clear that Emerson could take or leave me. The tiny school in Boston gave me a small amount of need-based aid and nothing for my academic achievements and pages of carefully planned extracurricular activities.

Still, Emerson was the biggest crush I’d ever had, and I was determined to make it work for me. I couldn’t picture myself anywhere else. I started crunching numbers: After my scholarship, I would need $19,000 a year just for tuition, plus money for room, board, and expenses. If I worked full-time in addition to my school load, I might be able to cover it.

I quit the kickline in December of my senior year so that I could pick up more waitressing shifts, and I spent my downtime
scoping out restaurants in Boston travel guides and calling to see if they’d be hiring come September. I took out books about scholarships and financial aid from the library and put calls in to the financial aid department to ask if I qualified for work-study. If I worked the maximum allotment of student labor hours, I could take another $2,000 off my bill.

While my parents favored Syracuse for their own reasons, they told me that it was ultimately my choice. They weren’t paying for college, so it was my decision and mine alone. And so on Labor Day weekend of 2000, in typical Miller fashion, my parents and I loaded up a U-Haul with more stuff than I could possibly ever need and hit the I-90.

Unlike the sprawling quads my friends were moving to, Emerson’s campus was the Boston Commons. My dorm was beautiful, an office building converted into student apartments. From my window, I could watch Boston’s businesspeople rushing to meetings, students rushing to class, derelicts napping in the sun, and the weathered tombstones of Revolutionary War–era icons holding their historical ground in the cemetery amidst the park. Most important, it was new and it was clean. My college home was picture perfect, as were my roommates. My freshman suite came complete with three bedrooms and three roommates, all of whom were smart, friendly, strikingly attractive—and who, strangely enough, seemed to like me. It was like I’d finally managed to be the girl I’d been pretending to be for so long. Once we’d finished lugging my suitcases and Yaffa blocks upstairs, I immediately kicked my parents out.

“I’m going down to the dining hall with my roommates,” I said, a not-too-subtle hint that my parents should make their
way back to Long Island. While this should have been a milestone moment for us as a family, I really just wanted them to leave before anyone started to see the cracks in my façade.

“Don’t you want to go out to eat? Say good-bye?” my mom asked me, while smiling at the snub. Years before, she had put me in acting lessons—not to fuel my creative fire but to get me to speak to other kids. Now I was majoring in acting and talking to people all by myself.

As a little girl, I used to lie in bed, thinking
Maybe if I endure all my pain now, I could be happy when I am older
. Emerson felt like my reward for the years of shame I’d logged. No one there knew about the hate-fueled letters our neighbors left in our mailbox. They didn’t know how much I appreciated cafeteria food after having spent most of my teenage years eating hermetically sealed, chemically laden foods, because our kitchen had been left to rot under cobwebs and maggots. I no longer had to plan meetings with friends so they wouldn’t know where I lived. There would be no more walks down the block to stand in front of a stranger’s home when someone announced they were on their way. I loved being able to shower without fear that rotten pipes would create a flood. For the first time in my life, I felt normal.

My freshman year was like a movie montage. I’d never been so happy. I spent my days learning with people who were creative and talented and who thought that I was, too. When I wasn’t working, my nights were spent hopping from dorm room to dorm room visiting friends and doing
Abs of Steel
videos with my roommates, followed by trips to the c-store for some Ben & Jerry’s, or playing tourist in my beautiful new hometown.
My roommates and I made plans to study abroad together in the Netherlands our sophomore year and set about comparing backpacks and making lists of the countries we’d visit together on weekends. But as May approached, the reality that the school year was coming to a close started to set in. While my new friends and I made promises to visit one another in the coming months, I found myself preparing lies about family vacations and remodeling work—lies to break out if any of these plans came to fruition. The old Kim enveloped me like a dank, moth-holed blanket just waiting to welcome me home.

When I returned to New York, the things that had been so normal to me before—the rats, the sludge, the ubiquitous smell of mildew, the feeling that this was my home—were glaringly wrong. I couldn’t get used to them again.

And I could hardly speak to the parents I had once been so afraid of hurting. At school, I could pretend that I was like everyone else, but I couldn’t pretend at home. At home, I was dirty. I spent my summer doing what I had always done: being too busy to be home. I worked days as a waitress and nights as security guard. I slept at Rachel’s house during my free nights; she even had an extra mattress on her floor that was designated for me. But I couldn’t sleep there forever—my seemingly endless presence had already been the source of fighting between Rachel and her sister.

One night, after a waitressing shift of her own, Rachel’s sister came into Rachel’s room asking to sleep on the mattress on the floor.

“Doesn’t she have her own home?” she asked Rachel, not looking at me.

When she left, I asked why Rachel’s sister wanted to sleep in her room. “She started redecorating her room this morning and it’s a mess, so she wants to sleep here,” Rachel said.

I was already self-conscious about the amount of time I spent at my friend’s house, but now I was completely mortified. I made a mental note to avoid Rachel. It was time to go back home.

At home, the nights were sleepless. It was the rats. In high school when the rats had kept me up, my mother and I would get in the car and drive to a twenty-four-hour grocery store, but my mother had started working again when I went to college, taking an overnight job as a security dispatcher. With no one with whom to escape, I would try to suck up my fear alone, but as soon as I started to doze off, I’d hear a squeak or the shuffle of papers, and I would know the rats were in my room. One even made it up to my bed once, scurrying across my leg like a hurdler. After that, I started sleeping in my car. I would take my blanket and pillow and curl up in the backseat of my 1988 Pontiac Grand Am. All I wanted was for school to start again.

In mid-July, a letter came from the Emerson financial aid department. I had a small trust in my name from an accident I’d had as a child that was set up so that I wouldn’t be able to access the funds until I was twenty-one. But because that trust existed, the school decided that I no longer qualified for financial aid.

Without financial aid, I couldn’t go back to Emerson. I couldn’t take out the kinds of loans necessary to pay for the pricey private school. I was majoring in theater, and even at eighteen, I knew that I would never be able to pay back that kind of debt on a waitress’s salary. I called the school and tried to explain, but the financial aid officer professed that until those
funds were utilized they wouldn’t be required to give me any need-based aid. But I wouldn’t be able to touch that money until halfway through my senior year of college.

The room started spinning. There was only a month left of summer, and I was already working full-time in addition to school. I started to break down on the phone, and the man on the other end of the line became annoyed. I had never been very good at fighting my own battles. As she had done so many times before, my mother took over. She tried to explain that she and my father weren’t financially able to help me with tuition, that she had been disabled for years, and that my father drove a school bus. “She’s already working two jobs to pay for school,” she pleaded. Then she started yelling. Eventually she hung up.

“What did he say?”

“You don’t want to go there, anyway.” She responded in an indignant huff, but we both knew that it wasn’t true. All I wanted was to go back to Emerson.

I waited a moment, then ventured the question again. “What did he say?”

“He said that if you can’t afford it, then you don’t belong there.” She was livid that anyone could say something like that, but I wasn’t.

It was true. My freshman year I was assigned to a group project with a girl whose father was a famous musician, a guy whose family owned the largest chain of electronics stores in the Northeast, and another guy whose father ran a record label. I didn’t belong at Emerson with all the perfect, beautiful kids with their trust funds and summer homes. I belonged here, among the sludge and rot.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was too late in the
summer to apply to be a transfer student at a good school, and there was no way I’d be able to get housing anywhere at this point. I had to move back home.

I spent the next week pretending that nothing in my life had changed, putting off making a decision about my future, and hoping that some rich Hamptonian would roll into my small town and leave me a $40,000 tip. After an overnight of security-guard duty and a morning of serving brunch, I came home that Saturday to find my parents on the front lawn, arms flailing and voices raised, having an argument with our neighbors. The neighbors and their three young children stood on their side of the lawn, the markedly greener and more evenly cut side. What I could garner from the back-and-forth was that our rottweiler, Gretchen, had gotten loose, dug into their backyard, and barked at their daughters. They had called animal control. They wanted her put down.

One of the best parts of my childhood had been that my mother was a dog breeder. I didn’t have siblings, but I always had puppies around to play with. The dogs weren’t always kept in the best of conditions, but despite their matted coats and cramped cage-living arrangement, they loved us unconditionally, and they made me feel safe in an environment that often felt scary.