Coming Clean: A Memoir (22 page)

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from therapy: You can blame everything in your life on your parents,” I told him. “I just wanted to give you a little fodder.”

“Oh well, then, thank you.”

In my reading I found that many hoarders have similar stories to my dad. Maybe they weren’t the children of abusive alcoholics, but they were emotionally neglected at some point in their development. One of the more popular theories behind the triggers for hoarding indicates that people who were neglected emotionally as children learn to form attachments to objects instead of people. When they do connect with others, they then keep any object that reminds them of that person as a way of holding on to those attachments.

Every visit home comes with a stack of newspaper clippings my father has saved for me, fitness magazines he thinks I will be interested in, or notes on software he thinks I would find helpful. I usually just throw them out.

“I
WOULDN
’
T MIND A PLACE
like this,” my dad said, putting his arm around my shoulder.

My extended family invited my parents and me to seders and Thanksgivings every five years or so out of obligation, but an invitation to just come by and visit was a rarity that I couldn’t remember ever happening. But when my mother was in the hospital, her cousin Sue started calling regularly, and when my mother healed enough to get around again without her walker, Sue invited the lot of us to Pennsylvania for a visit.

Sue’s house was practically made of windows, without blinds drawn or dark impermeable curtains. My parents had never opened a single curtain to let in natural light, always afraid of who might see in.

“You can have something like this, Dad,” I replied.

He nodded and tightened his grip around my shoulder.

“So,” Sue said to my aunt Lee and my mother, “which one of you is a hoarder like your parents?”

My mother made eye contact with me and then pointed a
sheepish finger in my father’s general direction. I had no idea what was going on.

“My parents never threw anything out,” my mother later confessed on the train ride back. “They had someone in regularly to clean, but there was always stuff everywhere. I remember thinking how great it was that they had a room reserved for junk.”

“Your parents were hoarders?” I was trying to wrap my head around the fact that my family tree was messy down to the roots.

“I grew up with it,” she said. “I guess that’s why I didn’t see it in your father until it was so out of hand.”

“Was Daddy always like this?”

“Oh, no. When we first moved in together, long before you were born, he was the complete opposite. We had this light green carpet that he obsessed over keeping clean. If anyone stepped on it with shoes on, he was there with a sponge, washing up their footsteps.”

“When did he start collecting things?” I wondered how different my life would have been if my father was still obsessed with keeping things clean.

“When we left the Bronx,” she told me. “It was like he had too much space.”

“You know, I read that hoarding could be genetic,” I said. A marker on chromosome 14 had been found in families where hoarding was common. “They say that all it takes is a trauma to set people off.”

My mother knew where I was going with this. “Kim, I think you’ve been traumatized enough for one lifetime,” she told me. “If you haven’t started hoarding by now, you probably won’t.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you about my new dentist,” she said, deciding to change the topic. “He’s very good-looking; he looks like the redhead from
The Partridge Family
.”

“Danny Bonaduce?”

“I’m going to bring your picture with me to my next appointment.”

“You want to set me up with a guy that looks like Danny Bonaduce?”

Since she had recovered from her surgery, my mother had become obsessed with my dating life, or lack thereof.

I had dated plenty of guys since breaking up with Paul, but had kept each relationship casual, ending things before
I love you
s could be whispered or family dinners expected. I figured there was a certain amount of emotional honesty and vulnerability that was required for relationships to be successful, and I was aware that there were things about myself, the things that made me most vulnerable, that shouldn’t be shared over sushi or during pillow talk.

The only family I could imagine having was the one I already had, and while I loved them, I couldn’t even fathom the kind of person who would willfully join it.

“I think you should call Dr. Philipps’ office and make an appointment,” my mom said

“For what?”

“A date. I think he liked you,” she giggled. My mother had dedicated much of her surgical recovery stay in the hospital to setting me up with her surgeon, much to Dr. Philipps and my mutual embarrassment. “He offered to come to Brooklyn for a checkup. I’m sure he wouldn’t do that for all of his patients.”

“I try to make it a practice not to date men who have seen my mother naked.”

“Think about how good you would look in comparison,” she teased. “What about JDate? I’ll pay for it. Jews make the best husbands.”

“How would you know? You married two Catholics!”

“That’s how I know. Don’t make the same mistakes I have.”

I promised my mother that I would sign up for a dating site. And when my parents dropped me off at home I followed through, signing up for the religiously unspecific—and more important, free—OKCupid.

After what seemed like hours of taking addictive tests about my vacation preferences, political leanings, and socializing inclinations, the first profile that came up in my matches was Dr. Philipps—we were, according to some sort of algorithm, a 98 percent match. From his profile, I learned that he was a recent transplant to New York, which I knew from researching him on the hospital website, that he liked cooking and reading, and had a dog.

If life were a movie, this would have been the moment when the music started and I hopped on a train, ran to his office, and professed my love for the doctor who saved my mother’s life. But life was not a movie. I immediately disabled my account so that he couldn’t see that I was looking at his page.

A few minutes passed, and then I joined JDate.

W
HEN BECKY AND ABBY ASKED
me how my parents were doing, I lied, telling them they were doing great, that they had really made the effort to keep the place clean. But in reality, by the time summer had rolled around, Anna, Rachel, and I had already purged their apartment of hundreds of bags of paper.

The cleaning had become harder. The nightmares, the memories, the fact that so many people had volunteered their time and money to help them have a better life, only to have them squander it with the remnants of newsstands and clearance aisles, was all harder to bear. I didn’t have the energy to make their home spotless again, so I settled on clean enough not to get evicted.

A stream of excuses and apologies erupted from my mother when she and my father returned from being out of the way:
I’m too weak to keep up with the cleaning. You know how Dad is. I’m so sorry you girls needed to do this again.
My father just stood behind her, smiling but miserable. After my friends left he immediately made the rounds, assessing the damage. Eventually he settled
on the couch and started to riffle through the documents I had deemed important enough to keep.

I sat down next to him on the newly cleared couch, but he didn’t look at me, too preoccupied with calculating what he was missing. “Would you rather I didn’t clean your house out, Daddy?”

“No, it’s good that you punish me.”

I knew that was how he felt, like I was punishing him for being a bad boy. Punishing him for something he didn’t quite understand was wrong.

“I’m not trying to punish you,” I told him. “I’m just trying to prevent you from burying yourself alive.”

“In an ideal world, there’d be a happy medium,” he said, finally turning his attention toward me. “But, for now I’d rather you kept me from ending up like one of the Collyer brothers. Which one of them died buried in the house?”

“They both did.”

My parents were in their mid-sixties, but time had been hard on them. As angry as I was, I still worried all the time about what would happen if one of them died. If my father died first, I was petrified that my mother would be too embarrassed by whatever mess he left behind to let anyone in the house to get him. If she were to go first, I was relatively sure he would end up exactly like the Collyer brothers, swallowed whole in a sea of paper.

“Dad, did you know how bad the old house was?”

“You know, I couldn’t see it when we were in it,” he said. “But when I look back on it… how do I put this… it was suffocating.”

I had been able to staple my box spring back together successfully but I had put the rest of my furniture out on the curb during my bedbug paranoia. The upside to being underfurnished was that I could redecorate. The mismatched furniture that my parents picked up for me over the years had served me well, but it was time to move on to mostly matching and slightly more fancy knock-down furniture.

My parents offered their help building my new IKEA furniture and painting my walls. I wasn’t entirely sold on putting them to work, but it would be nice to have company while I painted my cream-colored walls blue.

By the time my parents arrived, I had dutifully studied the art of painting on YouTube, watching every video about proper painting protocol I could find. I removed what remained of my furniture, cleaned, cleaned again, laid out old sheets, and taped all of the corners of the room in accordance with the instructions bestowed to me by various Internet gurus.

I had a plan for how I wanted the day’s work to go. First, we would paint the perimeters of the walls, since that’s what the Internet had told me to do, and then we would fill in the gaps. I tried to explain my strategy, but my parents were excited and rolled their rollers in all sorts of non–strategically approved places—happy to be helping. I bit my tongue and reminded myself that they had driven to Brooklyn to help me. When the sponge from my father’s roller flew off the handle and rolled across my wood floors, I kicked them out of the bedroom, turned on a movie in my living room, made them a snack, and banished them from reentering the bedroom.

I wanted to paint my room, and I wanted it to be beautiful
and perfect and structured and not like everything else we did as a family.

After about an hour, my back was starting to hurt, and I could have used the extra help. I was far too stubborn to let them back in, though. Luckily, when my father’s snoring had gotten so loud that it drowned out the television, my mother knocked on my door.

“Honey, can I come in? I’ll listen to your directions.”

“Sorry. I’m…”

“A control freak.” She finished my sentence for me, but that wasn’t what I was going to say. “I know. I made you, remember?”

She was silent for a moment. “Kim, what’s going on with you? The bedbug calls in the middle of the night, the hives, the fact that you appear to no longer own furniture?”

“I’ve been having nightmares.”

No matter how angry I would get at my mother, I still told her everything, but I hadn’t yet told her about my cleaning nightmares. I didn’t want her to feel any guiltier than she already did.

I told her about my dreams, about how no matter how much research I did or therapy I went to I couldn’t make them stop. I told her about the sludge and the bugs I saw every time I closed my eyes. I told her I remembered all of these things that I hadn’t thought about in years.

She listened to it all while slowly painting. “We shouldn’t have had you. That was no way for a child to live,” she said quietly.

I was surprised by that response—before her surgery, my mom would have given me a pep talk about putting my childhood behind me. “I’m glad you did. I like me,” I backpedalled.

“You wouldn’t have known the difference,” she said. “I remember
the moment that I started hoarding, too. I wanted space for myself in my own house, so I started acting like him. I was a terrible mother.”

“You were not a terrible mother. It was a terrible situation, but it’s over now.” If she didn’t want to be her optimistic self, I would.

“It will never be over.”

I had always wondered what had changed my mom. My mother wasn’t like my father—she bought stuff, but she saw the squalor around them. But old habits die hard, even habits carefully chosen out of spite.

I
PROMISED MY MOTHER
that I would use the three-strike rule in regard to Internet dating. I would date three guys, the first three on JDate I deemed worthy of real life communication, and after that I would be allowed to give up and wither and die alone.

The first, David number one, was promising. He accidentally told me that he loved me on our fourth date, and I let it slide, playing it off as if I hadn’t heard the premature declaration. Sweet, Canadian, and a doctor—he was the kind of guy I wanted to want to end up with; he loved his family and wanted one of his own. He talked about “people like us” as if I fit into the same social hierarchy he came from. I could tell he had grown up with money by the way he spoke and dressed and the fact that he had finished medical school without student loans, but I didn’t realize how much money until he took me to a hockey game and casually mentioned that his family were partial owners of the team we were watching.

I broke up with him that night. I didn’t want to date this great guy for the wrong reasons. I told him he was practically perfect, but I wasn’t feeling what I should. He told me I
was
perfect. And
that was the problem—I wasn’t, and I didn’t want to pretend I was anymore.

David number two only got one date. Ivy League–educated and with excellent email banter skills, he texted me thirty minutes before our date:
BTW, I have a glass eye. I hope that won’t be an issue.