Coming Clean: A Memoir (15 page)

When I got home, I shared my news and asked my mom to come with me to every audition. She politely declined.

The first rehearsal was in late January, and I immediately recognized one of my cast members: The girl ahead of me at the audition was playing the other female lead, Gwendolyn. Just as I’d done in middle school, I studied her for clues as how to behave during a table reading.

I started to ease up a bit when people around the table chuckled
as I delivered Cecily’s lines. Maybe winning the role hadn’t been a fluke.

Over the course of our rehearsals, Cecily rubbed off on me more and more. Gwendolyn and I giggled through rehearsals, daring each other to interject Oscar Wilde’s carefully drafted dialogue with modern vernacular to test our director’s attention level. Perhaps it was the flirtatious nature of the play—or perhaps, for the first time in my life, I had nothing better to occupy my mind—but I even found myself with a crush: a certain butler who caught my eye.

The only problem was that staring was the only way we seemed to connect. I had nicknamed him Creepy Guy to Rachel and Tim when I recounted how he spent our hours in rehearsal staring at me, only to sit next to me and not say anything at all.

It was creepy, but also kind of cute. I’d never rendered anyone speechless before. I would listen in when he spoke to other members of the cast—he was usually talking incessantly about his time spent in Cuba and would break into Spanish whenever he could. I thought he was Jewish, but what did I know? Maybe Cubans looked Jewish.

I didn’t really know how to flirt, but I knew how to read, and in an effort to actually get him to speak to me, I hit the bookstore. The small, musty bookstore in town was lacking in works by Cuban authors, but I could at least demonstrate a love of Latin culture with a copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I brought it to every rehearsal and I never missed an opportunity between scenes to read it quietly in hopes of catching his eye. My plan finally paid off when he struck up a conversation about the book.

Turns out Paul
was
Jewish and not Cuban in the slightest. He grew up among Washington, D.C.’s elite; his father owned a law firm, and Paul had gone to high school with Chelsea Clinton and played on the football team with Al Gore Jr. Paul had about as opposite of an upbringing from me as you could get.

I started spending more and more time with him in Brooklyn. Paul’s apartment wasn’t far from the theater. I realized on our strolls back to his place after rehearsal that Park Slope wasn’t exactly dangerous territory, but every bit the yuppie stomping ground that Beacon Hill was to me in Boston. Two avenues from the theater, there were designer boutiques, French cafés, and dog parks.

When the run of
Earnest
came to an end, the Reverend Chasuble, whose offstage name was Seamus, told me his roommate was moving out in June. He lived six blocks from the theater. The rent of the two-bedroom apartment with a backyard in Park Slope was $600 per person per month. I’d been scouring Craigslist looking for housing, but everything was out of my price range. I could maybe afford $600 a month—if I got a better paying part-time job. I had four months to save up the $1,200 needed to move in.

I already had my next role lined up. The director of
Earnest
had asked me to step into the role of Titania in his production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
after the woman he’d originally cast had quit unexpectedly. Since I’d been spending most of my time in the city anyway, I started sending my headshots to restaurants instead of theaters. I was slowly learning that restaurants in New York were even pickier than some casting directors, requiring extensive serving résumés and a look to match the décor of the dining room. It was finally an upscale bistro in Tribeca that liked
my look. They didn’t have any waitressing positions, but a hostess position was open. I would have to wear tight black clothing, make sure my hair and makeup were perfect, and treat the posh clientele like old and better-than-me friends.

I could do that. I made better money hostessing in Tribeca than I ever had as a waitress and squirreled all of my earnings away for my upcoming move.

My life wasn’t glamorous, but it was working out perfectly.

I
WAS FULLY UNPACKED
and decorated in less than an hour. The girlishness of my bedroom, with its white rod-iron bedframe and a pastel purple-and-green quilt, was a stark contrast to the rest of the apartment, which was decidedly more masculine.

The only windows in the first-floor apartment were in the bedrooms, and the living room and kitchen had a cavelike quality that was only exacerbated by the dark oriental rug Seamus had placed in the living room and large wooden masks his mother, who was an art dealer, had given him after a trip to Africa. Signs with catchy slogans like “Smokin’ One” and old Guinness ads were located around the apartment, and a painting of Mao Zédōng hung in the entryway.

Paul quickly started referring to me as Mao, despite the fact that the painting wasn’t mine. “It’s perfect for you,” he said. “You both have five-year plans.” I found comfort in organization, and shortly after I’d moved home from LA had decided on a series of goals to build a life around. I had made my plan into PowerPoint slides categorized by career, family, finance, and personal life goals, which I then converted into a screensaver for my
computer—a regular reminder that there was work to be done. Each time my computer was left unattended for too long, I was reminded of my goals to pay off 10 percent of my student loans each year, get my Equity Card, visit my parents once a month, start a retirement account, and hit the gym five days a week.

While Seamus and I split the rent evenly, I had the bigger bedroom with the bigger window, and he had the door to the backyard. Since he was an avid gardener, that seemed to suit him just fine, and I reaped the benefits of his green thumb when he stocked the kitchen with more fresh herbs and vegetables than either of us could eat.

We got along, but we weren’t close friends. He worked days while I worked nights, and we were rarely home at the same time.

As a housewarming present, Rachel gave me a small watercolor painting of a neat little cottage floating in a watery green field. “This reminded me of you,” she said, and I knew what she meant. When we had talked about our dreams when we were kids, long before she and Anna had started putting the pieces of my family’s situation together, I had told her that all I wanted one day was a little home that was only mine—just a small space that I could keep neat. The apartment was Seamus’s through and through, but my bedroom was my cottage. I hung the painting next to my bedroom door so that I could look at it each time I left and remind myself that I was finally becoming who I had always wanted to be.

Shortly after I moved to Brooklyn, my parents announced that they were also moving. Their rent was facing a steep increase,
and they had found a slightly cheaper, slightly newer, slightly bigger apartment in a development a few miles away from where I grew up.

The move sounded perfect, with one catch: The new development had regular apartment inspections. Every couple of months, someone from the development’s management company would take a walk through each apartment to make sure that the tenants were taking care of the property, that the smoke and carbon dioxide detectors were working, and that tenants weren’t hiding any unapproved pets on their premises. My parents considered this to be a huge invasion of privacy, but I thought that these regular inspections might just be the pressure they needed to keep their house in order.

The one thing standing between my parents and their next clean slate was the mess they were still living in. Packing hadn’t been an issue for their last two moves, between the fire and simply abandoning their home with everything in it. They seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that they couldn’t just show up to this next apartment and fill it with clothes and furniture later. My mother asked me to come out to Long Island on the weekends to help them prepare for the move. I didn’t know how to explain to Paul why my parents seemed to need so much help—months of help—so I used my mother’s failing vision as an excuse for my constant trips home.

“She’s going blind” wasn’t an excuse that was easy to question, and Paul never did, but he hinted that he felt like I abandoned him each weekend for the comforts of home.

Once I got home, cleaning and packing seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s mind. There was always something that
needed to be picked up from a store, something on television that needed to be watched, a new restaurant that needed trying, or an article that needed reading. Weekend after weekend, I would declare that I wouldn’t clean unless they cleaned, and weekend after weekend I would go back to Brooklyn having done absolutely nothing. I had mistakenly believed that as moving day loomed closer my parents would stop procrastinating and start packing, but when I came home the weekend of the move everything was exactly where it had always been—everywhere.

My father carried on as usual, stationed on his worn couch cushion, surrounded by paper, but my mother had hidden herself in the corner of her bedroom, alternating between the one foot of space between her bed and computer desk, and pretending to sleep when I came in to check on her. She didn’t want to shop or leave the bedroom to cook. She had become catatonic in her fear.

“We’re never going to get this done,” she said, before breaking down into tears. “I don’t know where to start.”

“One box at a time,” I told her. “If you pack what you want, I’ll clean up what’s left.”

Overwhelmed and uninterested, my parents had two days left on their lease, and I realized that they weren’t just procrastinating—they
couldn’t
face their mess. It had been so easy for me to slip right back into tiptoeing around boxes, bags, and broken things when I’d moved home, and this was their everyday. If they couldn’t differentiate between trash and treasure, at least I could, so I grabbed a garbage bag.

That was enough to get their attention. Every plastic bag of
papers that went into the garbage was immediately retrieved by my father.

“Do you know what’s in that?”

“Paper,” I told him. It was only paper.

“You can’t just throw things out without looking at them,” he scolded.

“Fine, leave it all here and let the management company throw it out,” I said, before storming into my bedroom and giving up on my parents.

My resolve only lasted until morning, when I kicked my parents out of their own apartment.

“
Go
—go shopping, go to a movie, go anywhere, but leave me alone!” I yelled.

“We need to pack,” my mother said, as if she’d been waiting all along for this exact moment.

“That’s what I’m doing.”

My father fiddled with his coat, waiting for my mother to make a definitive decision for the both of them.

“Okay, we’ll be back in a couple of hours and then we’ll get started,” my mom said. “Call us when you want us to bring you lunch.”

My parents left before I could change my mind, and I was left to figure out how to clean and pack their piles before the movers came the next day.

When my parents had first moved into the apartment, they had been so excited for me to finally invite Rachel and Anna over. At eighteen years old, I could finally have a sleepover. But in the years since, they had returned to greeting them from behind a
crack in the door. Rachel hadn’t been inside the apartment for years, but I needed the help, and for the first time I could remember, I didn’t care about embarrassing my parents.

She and Anna knew about what went on in my house. I didn’t have to tell them—they’d figured it out over the years of corner drop-offs, requests to shower at their houses after school, and walks to my parents’ junk-filled car—but this was the first time I was letting either of them see what it was really like. When Rachel knocked, I was already covered in cobwebs and bird dander. I opened the door wide, giving her a good look at what she was getting into, in case she wanted to back out.

“Hey, hon,” she said, taking a look around. “Are your parents here?”

“No, I sent them out, but they’ll probably come home and start hovering soon.”

“What should I do?”

We started by throwing out all of the bags of papers my father had out in the open, then we started hunting for the strategically hidden bags. I was sure there was some sort of method behind my father’s filing system, but I didn’t have the time to go through each bag to find out. I knew I was throwing away important documents. Unpaid bills, uncashed checks, medical records, and work documents were all hidden amid the store circulars, yellowed newspapers, and half-filled notebooks. But as far as I was concerned they were all just paper, and there was always more paper.

Under the coffee table, my father kept a graveyard of broken radios and sole-flapping sneakers. The wires and shoelaces tangled together, creating one solid mass of things my father would
fix one day. I threw it all out. I threw out boxes from Home Shopping Club, QVC, and Amazon, even with their contents still safely guarded in plastic.

My parents called midway through the day to see if they could bring me food, but I told them to stay out, that I would order pizza. I couldn’t afford the time delay that managing their feelings would create.

My mother paused when I told her Rachel was helping. “Okay, then—tell her I say hi.”

Stiff, stained clothing was found under tables and chairs, on the bottom of closets, and under the bed. There was no point in washing them, so they went, too.

Unmarked VHS tapes—many with my old dance recitals, school plays, and the bit parts I had done while I was in Los Angeles recorded on them—went in the trash. I had no use for nostalgia if it took up space.

We boxed their towels and linens, cooking supplies and shoes; vacuumed carpets that hadn’t been visible in two years; mopped stained linoleum; and scrubbed the bathtub until it looked like it had been clean all along.