Coming Clean: A Memoir (16 page)

There were hundreds of unused toiletries: enough shampoo, conditioner, body wash, toothpaste, and deodorant to keep the South Shore of Long Island shower-fresh for the rest of the decade.

Cans of expired beans, sauces, and soups took over the kitchen cupboards—my mother was convinced that expiration dates were just a ploy to make you throw out perfectly good food. They went in the garbage. I refused to touch the refrigerator. Full to the brim, only the front had food still edible. The
rest had been pushed to the back and forgotten, creating a familiar soupy mess in the vegetable and deli bins that brought back memories I was trying incredibly hard to keep at bay.

The walls and couch cushions were stained and the flooring spotty, but the apartment was clean and packed by the time my parents came home around midnight.

“Wow, you girls did a great job,” my mother said.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I was so angry with them for living this way again.

Rachel, socially adept as always, took over, talking to my mother about her plans for grad school and her summer job working as a dockmaster on Fire Island.

I watched my father look for some sign of his papers, under couch cushions or in coat pockets. Something to find comfort in.

After Rachel left, the questions started coming.

“Where did you put my box of old Day-Timers?”

“I hope you didn’t throw out my ice-cream maker, it only needed one part to work again.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Oh, you’re not talking to us,” my mom said as if I were seven years old again and being adorably rebellious.

“I’m not not talking,” I said. “The refrigerator still needs cleaning.”

T
HE FRESHLY LAID CARPET
and recently painted walls of the new apartment were enough to make me forget why I was so angry—again.

My parents didn’t have all that much furniture. They trashed their full-length sofa because it had become worn and misshapen from years of my father’s bags weighing down on it. The loveseat fared better, and my father immediately took up shop there, creating for himself a new space to inspect whatever documentation the world sent his way.

With their bedroom furniture, loveseat, and dining room table in place, the rest of their life was deemed unworthy of unpacking, or was just left boxed up “for the next move.” They hadn’t even slept a night in their new home, but they were already deciding whether it was worth settling in.

The walls of the guest room—my room—were lined with those boxes, filled with bedroom and bathroom linens, decorative candles and knickknacks given as gifts and therefore deemed nonpurgeable, and family photos. My mother didn’t like making holes in the walls, she said, so pictures were framed but never hung,
and usually ended up buried or stepped on. They were better off in boxes.

“Do you think Paul would like to come out for a weekend?” my mother asked before I left for the city. My parents had met Paul briefly after they’d come to see us in
Earnest.
Bringing a boyfriend home for the weekend seemed way too normal, the kind of thing that regular, run-of-the-mill clean people did without a second thought. I knew I could blame whatever mess was around on the recent move, and figured the sooner the better in regard to getting a family visit over with.

Paul was immediately enamored with my father.

“Your dad is brilliant,” he said, as he curled up next to me on the futon in the guest room. The two had sat together for hours on the small loveseat in the living room, my father simultaneously listening to NPR and reciting the contents of any related reports he had listened to earlier in the day, week, month, or his lifetime.

“I know.” It was so easy to take my father’s incessant babbling about forty years’ worth of news and social commentary for granted, and often when he spoke on end about the British rule of Rhodesia, or comparisons of medical care in social democracies, I zoned out. In Paul, he had an eager audience. Paul himself was no dummy; he often bragged that his brain was worth a half-million dollars, the sum of tuition for the elite private school education he’d had since childhood. Despite his pricey brain, he had decided to become the disciple of an eccentric old Russian acting teacher, and with a few exceptions like the show we
met doing, he spent his time developing performance art pieces with her.

“He’s just like your father,” my mom said. “Brilliant and completely devoid of ambition.”

The idea of finding a man like my father didn’t scare me. Paul wasn’t a collector of anything—he could be messy, but was mostly just a normal guy when it came to housekeeping. His brilliance and determination to be exactly who he was, despite social expectation, were things I admired in him, and in my father.

But sharing an intellect and sense of self wasn’t enough to win my father over. Like my mother, my father wasn’t a big fan of Paul, which was odd, because for the most part my father was a fan of everyone.

“I think you’re too young to be dating someone so seriously,” he told me over tea and the politics section while Paul was in the shower. I couldn’t imagine another father encouraging his twenty-one-year-old daughter to play the field, and I had a feeling his comment wasn’t so much about my age, but about Paul himself. There was something about my boyfriend that my parents didn’t like. I wasn’t sure if it was parental instinct or perhaps a sense that they were losing me kicking in, but I wasn’t planning to give up the only normal thing in my life.

A few weeks after visiting my parents, Paul and I took a bus to Washington, D.C., so that I could meet his. The first stop on the family bonding tour was the FDR Memorial. Paul and his father immediately broke off to catch up, leaving me with Paul’s
mother. While I tried to make conversation about the Great Depression, she was more to the point.

“What does your father do, Kimberly?”

I remembered being utterly confused the first time someone queried my father’s profession as a means of getting to know me. That was back at Emerson, as my social sphere broadened from my hometown friends who grew up in working-class homes like I did to wealthy children of the entertainment industry elite and captains of industry. There was no confusion now. I knew Paul’s mother was judging my social worth.

“He drives a bus.”

I didn’t pass my first test, and Paul’s mother had nothing left to say, so she turned and walked away to find her husband and son, leaving me with President Roosevelt and his copper dog.

Paul’s family’s home was immense. I’d never been in a house as large as his, and in the center of it all was a sports room that included a full-size football goalpost on one end and a full-size basketball net on the other. A mural of a crowd scene with the family etched into it covered one wall, and hundreds of years’ worth of sports paraphernalia lined all the others. Bright-red, purple, and gray walls decorated the rest of the house, and gaudy sculptures in equally bright colors seemed to pop up from out of nowhere. I tried not to leave Paul’s side when I visited, afraid I would break something and have to replace it.

Over the next three-and-half years, our relationships with each other’s parents only seemed to worsen. My parents started referring to him as “the Little Prince,” a nickname he was given
when we stopped at a rest stop to use the restrooms on a road trip to a family wedding with my parents. After his trip to the bathroom, Paul ordered a meal at one of the fast-food counters and sat down to eat it, leaving the rest of us in the car thinking he’d had serious business to take care of in the public restroom.

“That boy has entitlement oozing out of his pores,” my mother said.

Paul’s family didn’t even pretend to like me. When I didn’t go home with him for Rosh Hashanah one year because I needed to work, his father invited a young, pretty paralegal from his firm to accompany his son to synagogue and family dinners.

Paul started visiting D.C. more often after that. He was trying his hand at regional theater in hopes of qualifying for his Equity Card, he told me. I didn’t think much of the trips. I was also balancing an acting career and, at this point, a full-time job in events marketing for a national nonprofit. That was, until I opened up my email inbox one day and found an email from the young, pretty, Rosh Hashanah–going paralegal.

She wrote
I thought you should know
in the subject line and pasted various instant messages and email exchanges she’d had with Paul, most alluding to their sexual relationship.

I had thought I was one of those people who would marry their first love. Paul knew everything about me, including that my father was “a bit messier than most.” He knew that I went home every couple of months to clean my parents’ apartment before inspection. He knew about the weeklong crying spells that followed, how consuming my need to take care of my parents had become, and how guilty I felt about my anger and disappointment.

I wanted to forgive Paul—not because of my love for him, but because I didn’t think anyone else would ever love me enough to accept all the things that were wrong with me.

I sat on the couch watching Paul cry on the carpet. He told me he needed to sleep with her, needed to have a relationship with her, in order to know whether he really wanted to be with me. I knew I was done. Done with Paul, done with romance, done with letting anyone new into my carefully guarded life.

I
SPENT MY NIGHTS GETTING
married, playing the comically naïve bride in an off-Broadway wedding show, asking the most conservative audience members I could find for sex advice, consecrating my love for the actor opposite me with a doughnut wedding ring. After that, I was a cupcake-obsessed Catholic schoolgirl, and after that, a comedienne for hire. I had a lot of fun onstage that year, but I wasn’t fulfilling the fantasy I once had of spending night after night in gut-wrenching drama, pushing my emotional capacity to the edge and inspiring people in the audience to reflect on their own lives. I had once had a dream of spending my life performing in socially reflective theater meant to inspire change, like the actors in the Group Theatre had in the 1930s. But that didn’t exist in my world, and so my life as an actor meant being really silly.

I had a small group of friends in New York, mostly friends who had started out as Paul’s but had stayed close to me after our breakup. Paul’s college roommate Aziz and Aziz’s girlfriend Becky, along with another of Paul’s Brandeis friends, Abby, were the people I got drinks with after work, where I dished about the random unsuccessful dates I would go on. When I wasn’t working,
I went to Long Island to spend my free time with my parents and with Anna, Rachel, and Tim. Professionally, I felt like I’d gotten about as far up the theatrical food chain as I ever would. When I was still in high school, my acting teacher told me that I should only be an actor if I couldn’t think of anything else that I could ever do. At the time, that was true, but I had reached a point where I was looking for something else that might keep me satisfied, at the very least. My quarter-life crisis brought with it LSATs and law school applications. I didn’t really think I would get into law school, but it was a fun fantasy.

While I didn’t aim particularly high up on the law school hierarchy, I got into all of the second-tier schools I applied to. After work, I would spread out each acceptance letter on my bed and look for some sign in the embossed stationery that the school was right for me.

A few weeks before I had to make my final decision, I got a call from a director. I had stopped auditioning by the time the acceptance letters came in an effort to turn that part of my life off and move on to the pencil-skirt-wearing woman I would be in three years. I had submitted my headshot to him months before but remembered the audition notice, because it sounded perfect for me: a talk show/skit-based daily show that revolved around our cultural obsession with weight and beauty.

Since my teen years spent showering at the gym, fitness had been a passion for me, and the gym a haven to hide out in when the world was too much to handle. But my time in LA, and the unfair expectations women were expected to live up to, had disgusted me. This was a show about all of those things.

The director told me to prepare a five-minute stand-up routine
about nude yoga, so I spent a week entertaining myself in the bathroom mirror.

At the audition, an intern greeted me and took me to an unfinished and unventilated studio, bare except for the camera and tripod set up in the middle of the room. When she told me I could start, I stated my name, agent, and phone number, and began a tirade on the possibilities for group waxing during naked yoga class, and the matchmaking opportunities. The intern didn’t give me much to go on, but I knew I was good. And when it was all done, I walked home thinking about the lifelong dream I would be giving up if I went to law school.

I got an email from the intern a few days later saying they wanted me to come in for a callback and to prepare another five-minute stand-up routine. This time I’d be auditioning for the show’s director.

“Hi, Kimberly, I’m Sebastian. We talked a few weeks ago. Listen, I loved your first tape,” the director greeted me when I walked in the door.

When I asked him if he could tell me more about the show I was auditioning for, he explained that Condé Nast was producing a new blog network made up of three sites: Daily Bedpost, about sex and relationships and tied to
Glamour;
Product Fiend, a makeup site connected to
Allure;
and Elastic Waist, which would be under the
Self
umbrella. This show was for Elastic Waist.

“We’ve already got some great bloggers on board, but we want to add a multimedia dimension and have a daily Web show reflecting current weight-loss trends and gimmicks.”

Sebastian then went on to ramble a bit about his lovely fiancée,
his history as an animator, and the new production company he’d launched. There was an Emmy in the corner that he didn’t mention and so I didn’t either, but it was clear that whoever Sebastian was, he knew what he was doing.