Coming Clean: A Memoir (20 page)

“Dad, can you take a few days off work to stay with Mom while I clean?”

“I can do that.”

“You can’t screw it up this time. I need you to really try to keep it clean.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

“I don’t want this to come out the wrong way,” Anna said. “I love your parents, but every time we do this, I get so mad at them. I just can’t believe this is how you grew up.”

But this was nothing compared to how I grew up. Anna never saw the inside of our old house, and it is probably best that she imagined it looking more like the new apartment than what it did when we fled from it eight years ago: like the damp and mucky remnant that collects at the bottom of Dumpsters. At least this place was dry dirty.

“Me too,” I replied.

I had hoped we’d be farther along by now. Despite my confession to Abby, I thought that Anna and I could do the bulk of the
work before she and the rest of the designated cleaning crew got here. I underestimated my own exhaustion level, and my parents’ ability to fit large quantities into small spaces.

Anna held up a fifty-state commemorative quarter holder. It was empty. My dad had Ziploc bags of quarters hidden all around the apartment—many more collected than that cardboard memento could hold.

“Toss it,” I said.

One of the few things my father had inherited from his own father was a collection of rare old coins. They, along with everything else we owned, burned up in our house, but for each holiday or birthday after the fire my mother would buy my father a new old coin, neatly preserved between layers of cardboard and plastic, to help rebuild his lost collection. I knew his coins were special, but that didn’t stop me from stealing them anyway, to buy an orange New Kids on the Block lunch box when I was nine.

When he noticed he’d been robbed, he didn’t yell at me. This happened shortly after he returned from the mental hospital, and I think he realized how close he was to losing his family. He never yelled at me again after the radio incident—instead, when I admitted that I had stolen his old coins to buy a four-dollar lunch box, he just shook his head.

At this point, he had come to expect the things he loved to be gone each time I come to visit. He still gives me bear hugs when he picks me up from the train and says “my baby girl” with his big growly laugh as his arms engulf me.

Cleaning has never been easy for me, and I have always been self-conscious about it, convinced that no matter how much
dusting, mopping, and sweeping I do, I will never really be clean enough.

My junior year of college, I moved off-campus to a beautiful three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Boston with two friends. Unlike the lavish dorms I’d been living in, there was no cleaning staff to maintain our space; I had learned to be tidy, but I hadn’t learned to clean, and I was petrified of being outed as hygienically impaired.

When no one was home, I studied the labels on cleaning bottles, made notes on how to use them, and did Internet searches on the regularity with which each chore should be performed. I cleaned in private, hoping no one would know that it was me who mopped the floor or scrubbed the toilet, afraid I would be accused of doing it wrong. Afterward I would blow-dry the mop so there was no evidence of its use.

I’ve gotten better over the years. I let my mops dry naturally now, and I’ve been able to keep my tiny Brooklyn apartment clean and orderly and normal. Seamus moved out shortly after I started hosting the show, and with my improved income, I opted to skip the Craigslist roommate search and keep the two-bedroom for myself. Despite my years of studying the labels of various cleaning products and learning proper scrubbing protocol via instructional YouTube videos, I still found comfort in hiring someone to deep-clean my apartment twice a month. Of course, I would sweep and Swiffer before she showed up, lest she judge me as slovenly.

My parents’ home is something else entirely. The papers are the easy part, but once they’re bagged and off to the dump, next comes the stuff. They have so much stuff. My father loves electronics,
the more broken and useless the better. And office supplies. Bundles of Post-it notes, pens, pencils, scientific calculators, hole punchers, and staplers can be found in every room. While my mother’s postsurgical depression has certainly lessened over the years, her compulsive shopping for things they do not need with money they do not have did not. She will never admit that she is part of the problem now, insisting that she will return most of what she buys. But things don’t get sent back; they have a habit of being engulfed by the stuff surrounding them. Each new box added to the house becomes a new surface to put things on.

There was a brief moment in time, when I was eleven or twelve, when my parents had hired cleaning people to come in once a month. We never had the money or nerve to allow them the time to clean the whole place out, but my mother had moments of lucidity from her depression when she could see how bad the house was getting. A team of workers would come in with face masks and shovels to rid us of garbage. In a day, they could usually succeed in digging us out of one room. But that was all we could afford, and by the next time we were able to pay them to come back, that room would be full again, and they would need to start all over.

For what little time we had it, I loved that one clean room. If we could just keep it clean for a whole month, then the following month the cleaning people could get to a different room, then another one, and maybe in a year we could have a clean house again. Another fresh start.

We’ve continued the pattern over the years, only my parents no longer bother to have a cleaning crew come in. They know
I will clean their house, and I know I will be back to start from scratch in a matter of months.

Abby’s mom arrived with one of her most zealous employees in tow. Reina was shy and sweet, and smiled at me and at my parents’ dump of an apartment like she’d just entered the gates of Disney World. Abby’s mother, rail-thin and strong as an ox, asked me what I’d like Reina to start working on first. I looked around at the overwhelming task we all had in front of us.

Anna and I have been cleaning for two days, and the apartment still looks like hoarder central.

“Why doesn’t she start with the bathroom, okay?” Abby’s mom said. I stayed silent, wallowing in guilt—I should be able to take care of my family on my own, but I’d been too pigheaded to come home over the last few months to help my parents.

My excuses included dates, work, and shooting schedules, but the truth was I was just tired of cleaning up after my parents. I refused to accept that this was just who my parents were, and still stubbornly thought that if I let them stir in their own stuff long enough, they might change.

“Wow” was all Abby’s mom said as she walked around the apartment, surveying the damage.

“It’s just really hard for my dad; he doesn’t see how much there is, and my mom can’t clean—it’s hard for her physically.”

I was exhausted and embarrassed, and I wanted to make excuses for my parents like I always had. It was easiest to blame it all on my father. He so willingly accepted the blame, and my mother had just escaped death, which meant she got a get-out-of-blame-free card for the moment.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to throw anything out. I’m going to move it, and whether to get rid of it will be your decision or your parents’. My job is to clean around it. It’ll be okay.”

Over the course of the day, I excused myself more often than was fair to take bag after bag to the development compactor, leaving Anna, her mother, and Reina to do most of the heavy lifting for me. But I needed to be away—to remember why I was doing this. I was cleaning for my mother, because I loved her, because I wanted her to be safe. I needed to remind myself of that, because cleaning my parents’ home, more than anything else, made me angry.

I hadn’t thought about my childhood in years. Even when I went back to clean my parents’ apartment, I could avoid thinking about my childhood home. I remembered the basics, but the images were gone. The reality of my parents had never been escapable, but somewhere along the way of life I forgot how truly bad it was, and intermittently forgot to be ashamed.

When I got back from the compactor, my friend Becky was on her hands and knees, scrubbing my parents’ kitchen floor with a cleaning brush. Abby had called her, and she’d driven in from New Jersey to help with the cleaning efforts. A few minutes later, Abby arrived, bottles of soda in hand. Rachel and Tim would arrive later in the day. I was both thankful and nervous for the day to end, because when it was all over, I knew there would be questions. Abby and Becky would ask me why I never told them, or worse, they wouldn’t ask. They could just as easily forget to invite me to Rosa Mexicano’s for pomegranate margaritas after work, then to birthdays, then to their upcoming weddings, and eventually I would be someone they used to know, that girl who seemed so normal.

W
HEN THE DAY WAS OVER,
every inch of my parents’ apartment had been scoured. When things were clean enough, they were cleaned again, and once they were cleaned again they were organized. The pantry had been emptied of expired goods; the piled-up clothes in my parents’ closets had been rehung on the fancy hangers my mother had ordered at one point but never used. Cobwebs were removed and colonies of insects were vacuumed out from under and inside furniture. I had gotten new table linens and shoe holders and a variety of storage boxes to help keep things contained. It looked like clean people lived there. It looked like a place safe enough for my mom to live in.

I had cleaned out my savings account to pay for the deep clean, but no one accepted my money. Not my friends, not Abby’s mother, not even Reina, the woman they hired to come help us.

“This is how life works,” Abby’s mom said. “When we need help, you can come clean for us.”

I should have felt like a charity case, another shame to add to those caused by my filthy house and crazy family and especially
regarding Reina, who was paid by Abby and her mother. But I was just too utterly exhausted to feel anything but gratitude.

My father would do what he was told, methodically and faithfully, but I knew he wouldn’t intuit what my mother needed. Especially if she was too proud to ask, which would often be the case. She needed help standing, she needed to be forced to eat, and her bedsores and surgical wounds needed tending. I had waking nightmares of my mom taking her anger and frustration out on my dad and him doing what he had always done when under attack—walking away and leaving her there. Their house was clean, but I still couldn’t let her go home. After her release from the hospital, she came home with me.

Like my parents and grandparents, I had a room in my apartment that I didn’t use—Seamus’ old room. Unlike my parents and grandparents, it was completely empty, except for a desk. I fancied this room my office, but mostly just used it for exercise and as a guest room when friends visited. I set my mother up there after unsuccessfully trying to give her my bedroom.

“It’s the air mattress, or I go home with your father,” she said. “I’d rather sleep on the plastic; it’s easier to clean up.” She was petrified that the plastic grenade–shaped ball filled with the brown fluid that drained from her abdomen would leak and ruin my mattress.

Allowing my mother to sleep on an air mattress seemed cruel, but it turned out she was right. When I woke up the next morning, my dad was standing over my bathroom sink hand-washing my sheets.

“Hey, kiddo, Mom and I had an adventure. Those grenade thingies should really have a screw top.”

I found my mother in the guest room, sitting on the naked air mattress, sobbing.

“It’s okay, Mamala. It’s really no big deal.”

“It is a big deal. What have I become?”

After almost a month in a hospital bed, she had wasted away. Her waist-length red hair started to come out by the fistful. She was afraid to brush it, afraid of pulling out more, so her loose hair had tangled itself into a knob at the base of her head. Her underwear fell off her when she stood, and she needed help getting off the couch and toilet.

My mom, who, once upon a time, never cried, now cried all the time. She cried on the couch watching television. She cried when I needed to lift her off the toilet. And she cried in the shower, because I had to hold on to her so she wouldn’t fall.

“I’m so sorry, Kimmy. You shouldn’t have to do this.”

“Mama, there’s really no one else in the world I’d like to hang out in the shower with.” I tried at levity.

“Oh boy, do you need a boyfriend.”

After two weeks of recuperating at my house, my mother was getting stronger, crying less, and becoming more independent with the help of her walker. She wanted to go home and return to some semblance of her own life. And as worried as I was, I was also excited by the prospect of some solitude.

I called my dad to arrange her homecoming, but also to check on the status of their apartment; it’d been two weeks since my friends came and purged it of all signs of my parents’ true nature, and I was afraid that he had filled the whole place up again.

“Hey, kiddo, how’s Mom?” He sounded like he was having far too much fun living alone.

“Good. She wants to come home. I think she’s officially sick of me. How’s the apartment holding up?”

“It’s good.”

“How good?”

“Good good.”

“Does it look like it looked when I left it?”

“Pretty much.”

“‘Pretty much’ does not instill confidence.”

“Kim, it’s good, really. There are some newspapers on the table, but not a lot. I haven’t screwed it up.”

“Sorry, Daddy.”

“It’s okay. How did I raise such a neat freak?”

He really did see it that way—that he just had some stuff laying around and I was a pedantic minimalist. When I would explain to him that he was, in fact, a hoarder, he would accept it, but he’d also accept being a Smurf if I insisted he was one.

“Just lucky I guess,” I responded. “So, wanna come collect your wife on Saturday?”

“Do I have to?” he said, laughing.