Coming Clean: A Memoir (24 page)

“Hey, Mama, what’s up?”

I heard my mother start laughing, even before she spoke.

“Your dad says you’ll probably hit me, but I have an idea.”

“What’s the idea?”

“After the ceremony, maybe you and Roy could come over and help us move.”

I was genuinely stunned. “Mom…”

“I thought it would be a good idea.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, trying to cool myself down. “You want me to leave my best friends’ wedding reception, skip their afterparty, and put my boyfriend, whom you have never met, to work cleaning and packing your house.”

“Your dad said you’d react like this.” She’d stopped laughing. “I’m sorry I’m not being supportive of you, but I need your help.”

I didn’t see how letting me enjoy my best friends’ wedding in peace was being so magnanimously supportive. But I wasn’t angry, just sorry. Sorry I wasn’t being supportive of her. More than that, I was exhausted by the expectation that my family’s functioning was my responsibility alone.

“Fine. I’ll ride back into the city with Roy after the wedding, drop off my dress, and come back out the following day. I’ll give you a week, but if you don’t do anything, I don’t do anything.” I told her. “I’m not doing this alone. Rachel and Tim will be on their honeymoon, and frankly I’m sick of asking her and Anna to clean your apartment. You have no idea how humiliating that is for me.”

“You don’t think I’m humiliated?”

Apparently not humiliated enough to hire someone to help as opposed to taking advantage of my friends. But I knew that to her, my friends were like family—they already knew what they were getting into. Hiring someone was just inviting judgment.

It had always been easier for me to be mad at my mother than
my father. She was a fighter and she could take it, and she’d love me anyway. I wasn’t sure my dad could take the brunt of my anger. And beyond that, he had never asked for my help. He didn’t know the right buttons to push to make me feel like a terrible daughter. He didn’t start crying on the phone about how helpless he was, so that I’d do what needed to be done.

Although my father had no plans to change his behavior, he would not throw a hissy fit if his belongings were thrown out. He had even requested—on his own, amazingly enough—that they hire a cleaning person to come in regularly.

My mother, on the other hand, was forever ruled by embarrassment. Any progress we made when she helped me paint my apartment had long been forgotten. She once again insisted that the entire mass of mess was still all my father’s fault, and that she never bought anything.

I took the week after Rachel’s wedding off from work, assuming that I wouldn’t have time to wake up in the morning and write about celebrity gossip or the best beer gardens in New York while moving my parents. But my first three days home were a waste. I tried sticking to my guns and not doing anything because no one else was, but by the time Wednesday arrived, I realized that it just wasn’t going to happen. The apartment was worse than I had ever seen it; there were piles reaching all the way to the ceiling now, like columns, and not only did I have to sort through those piles, I had to pack their contents and move them. So I swallowed my pride and called Abby again.

“Hey, lady, it’s Kim.”

“Hey, hon. How’s the move going?” Abby asked.

“That’s why I’m calling. Do you think I could hire Reina to help me again?”

“Let me call my mom. I’ll get back to you.”

“Thanks. And sorry.”

“No worries. I’m sure she could use the extra money for Christmas shopping.”

I hung up and called Anna. At the wedding, she had offered to help. I told her “absolutely not,” but I needed all the help I could get.

“I can do Saturday, but I have plans on Sunday,” she told me.

“I’m trying to hire someone to help for Sunday, so that should work. Thanks for doing this again. I’m sorry.”

“I had a feeling you might call. I’ll see you Saturday.”

It was four days before they needed to be out, and my mom was just getting around to hiring movers. I had asked that she make those calls while I was arranging for help. When I was done begging my friends, I went into her room to check on the status of that chore, only to have her tell me that it was far too expensive. “Maybe we’ll just rent one of those trucks from Home Depot and do it ourselves.”

Clean. Pack. And now move. I had my work cut out for me. I started with the guest room, which I’d designated as my room. For some reason, because it was my room, my parents insisted that the mess that resided there was my mess. But the only thing I kept in there was a Yaffa block full of underwear and pajamas. The room was a catchall for junk, reminding me of my grandparents’ unused room. There were infomercial exercise devices; boxes of towels and sheets that were never unpacked from their last move; the mini-fridge I bought when I went to college, now
full of the food that my parents couldn’t fit in the kitchen fridge; a cabinet reserved solely for porcelain dolls my mother bought from television shopping channels but would never display and never sell even though she insisted they were an investment; a rotisserie; scrapbooking kits; pots, pans, cookie cutters, and extra blenders; and the boxes and bags of papers that my father had strategically placed throughout it all. I knew that if I started here I’d have very little interruption. No one would peek out and tell me that whatever it was I was holding was incredibly important for some far-reaching reason, that they had been looking for those towels for the past five years or that there’s a check lost in one of those bags of papers they’d like me to find.

Abby called back. Reina was sick, but Abby’s mother and two aunts were going to come help on Sunday.

“Thank you. I’m so sorry to be doing this again.” I told her. “How much should we set aside?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

I shook my head, as if she could hear me do it. “Abby, I’m not letting them come here and clean this mess for nothing!”

“Don’t worry, they just got a big bonus from one of the rich-people clients. They’re just sharing the wealth.”

I paid my cleaning lady $100 for my apartment, so I resolved to tell my mother that that was what we were paying each woman who helped us—perhaps not as a fee, but Abby didn’t say anything about tipping.

We threw out at least seventy bags of trash—an entire roll of heavy-duty garbage bags—on Saturday alone. But there was still so much work to be done that Anna cancelled her Sunday plans and returned Sunday morning. Reina apparently felt better
and showed up with the rest of Abby’s mother’s crew.

“We’ve been cleaning for days,” I told Abby’s mom in the parking lot when she pulled in. “It just doesn’t look like it.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Anna and I are going to spend today loading the truck and bringing things to the new place. Maybe you can stay here with my parents and help with what’s left.”

I felt yet again like I was taking the easy way out. I hated leaving other people to do the cleaning. But before Abby came, I reached a breaking point. Upon moving the still-unpacked boxes from their last move, I found that hundreds of pill bugs had made their home in the guest room,
my room.
Living and dead, the bugs were clustered together under a plastic shelving unit that held towels no one had used in years. I was drained, physically and emotionally, and I couldn’t take this new find. I marched over to my parents, who were huddled over the bags of stuff I’d already bundled up for a trip to their complex dumpster.

“If you ever put me in this situation again, I am done with you.”

I’d been mad before, but never this livid. I refused to have to ask my friends for help again. I wanted them to take responsibility for themselves, for their own home, but it was too much to ask. Their brains didn’t work that way. Embarrassment wasn’t enough of a motivator. Nothing was enough of a motivator, except maybe losing me. It took a bottle of painkillers to get them out of their last dump. This time, I would be leaving them by my own choice. No more monthly requests that I come home to help.

My dad’s head sunk into his shoulders, and he started to twiddle his thumbs nervously, but he didn’t say anything. My words
rolled off of my mom like Teflon. “I know you’re mad now, but in two weeks you’ll love me again,” she said.

I loved her then; that wasn’t the point. I wouldn’t put myself through all of that if I didn’t love her. But I was done cleaning up after her and my father, done with being done and then returning. So now, I informed her, I was passing the buck to my friend’s mother, who was nice or crazy enough to come to my rescue.

Anna, my dad, and I loaded up the truck from noon to midnight, taking trip after trip to the new apartment. I mopped and scrubbed the new place so that it’d be a clean start for my parents, and I tried to unpack as many boxes as I could before they arrived so that those things wouldn’t stay in boxes and become hideouts for bugs.

Abby’s mother’s van pulled up to the house with the last of the stuff shortly after midnight.

“Thank you. You really didn’t have to stay this late.”

“We didn’t want to leave you. You have your hands full.”

“I really can’t thank you enough.”

I meant it, but I was also simply going through the motions. I had said it all before. It was a never-ending cycle: each time feeling helpless, then angry, then guilty, then frustrated, then resigned, ad infinitum, ad absurdum.

Abby’s family and Anna left, and then it was just me and my parents.

“Your father and I have talked about it, and we really want to surprise you. We’re going to keep this place nice. When you come to visit next time, you’ll be proud.”

“I believe in you,” I said, telling them what I had always told them, but this time it was lip service. I didn’t believe in them. They would mess up the next place, then the next, and the one
after that. One day they would die and I would do one final cleaning and it would finally be over. If I made peace with anything, it was that my parents were never going to change.

“If you believed in us, it wouldn’t be a surprise. It’s okay. We wouldn’t believe in us either.”

W
HEN I GOT BACK
to Brooklyn from a solid week of cleaning, packing, and moving, I was depleted. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in the fetal position and cry for three to four months. But I had to get back to work. I had deadlines to meet and pitches to send out.

Roy came over; for once, I was unwilling to head to Manhattan to see him. I needed to be in my own meticulously maintained space. Over the course of our six-month relationship, his place had become our place, and my place remained mine. That was how I preferred it.

Craving vegetables, anything that was not typical moving food—pizza, soda, Taco Bell—I headed to the kitchen to make dinner.

When I turned around, butcher knife in hand, Roy was on one knee.

No.

“Kimberly Rae Miller,” he began, “from our first date, I knew I never wanted to be with anyone else. I plan on spending my life with you…”

I’m holding a knife. I’m holding a knife. I’m holding a knife.

“… so I was thinking we could start by moving in together.”

Eventually I started breathing again, although it took longer than expected. I was so glad he didn’t ask me to marry him. I think I would have said yes, but I would have been really pissed off about it—I wanted to be with this guy forever, but I was not romantic enough to feel comfortable with committing to someone after only six months of dating.

I didn’t tell him this. I didn’t tell him anything. I just stared at him like he was a lunatic. He stared back, grinning from ear to ear. He knew me, knew how I’d react, and he was very pleased with himself for nearly giving me a stroke.

“What if we have too much stuff?” was my response.

“You can throw out all of my stuff… except for my comic books.” The smart, beautiful, accepting man who I was in love with just happened to collect paper. There was an irony there that didn’t escape me. It also petrified me.

“What are you going to do with the comic books?”

“We’ll find storage. I promise you that they will never take over. You never have to worry about that, Kim.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay. I’ll move in with you—but not yet. In six months. I think a year is a good amount of time to be together before moving in.”

“Ha, okay. In six months,” he said, content. “You should have seen the look on your face when you thought I was going to propose.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t stab you.”

Before I knew it, six months had passed, and soon enough Roy and I were looking at real estate. We each had our nonnegotiable
must-haves: I wanted a real kitchen, since cooking is the thing that relaxes me the most, and I didn’t want a stove in the middle of my living room. He was adamant about living in Manhattan. His argument: “I did not travel 6,000 miles from the other side of planet Earth to
not
live in New York City.”

I tried explaining that Manhattan was one of the five boroughs that make up New York City. Brooklyn was another one. But Roy would have none of it.

We compromised—I agreed to move to Manhattan for the next few years, but once kids were in the picture, we were hightailing it back to Brooklyn. Roy agreed to agree, for now.

Our first day of hunting made it very, very clear that New York City was chock-full of overpriced slumlike apartments. Well-maintained high-rises were out of our price range, even with each of us willing to pay what we already did in rent. I paid the same amount for my two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope that Roy did for his posh Upper West Side shoebox studio. I had assumed that the combined force of both our rents would allow us to upgrade, but the apartments in our price range were musty, ill-kempt walkups with narrow hallways and smoke-stained walls.

I was starting to feel anxious about the whole moving in together thing. We could have a successful bi-borough relationship forever, maybe. When we had kids we could trade off days. It worked for divorced people. It’s amazing the things you convince yourself of when you’re apartment hunting in New York.