Coming Clean: A Memoir (23 page)

No worries
, I replied.
I highlight my hair
—
it’s not naturally striped.

The glass eye didn’t bother me; it was the fact that David number two had lied by omission. He was paralyzed on one half of his body, including his vocal cords. I smiled and tried to guess when to laugh throughout our date, but I couldn’t understand anything he’d said.

My last date, the final date I had to go through with before I could officially tell my mother that I was through with online dating, was with Roy.

Roy. I said the name over and over again, trying to make sense of it. Simple, but not exactly popular in my generation. I expected men named Roy to more closely resemble my father’s potbellied coworkers than this guy. In his online profile pictures, Roy had a square jaw, dimples, dark hair, and a seemingly ever-present tan. Roy looked more like he should be walking a runway than driving a bus. And Roy was kind of funny.

I had assumed that his profile was fake, a plant set up by the company to entice members to renew their plans when they were running out, but Roy didn’t send me a form email. He responded to my profile as if he had actually read it.

I wanted to be honest on my JDate profile, so I wrote, “They say you’ll know what a woman will look like in thirty years by looking at her mother. Unfortunately for you, I look like my father,
which means in thirty years I’ll bear a striking resemblance to Santa Claus.”

Roy’s pickup email said, “The original Santa Claus was Turkish, you know.”

I wrote back that I was far too fair-skinned to pass as Mediterranean and would have to resolve to spend my latter years in a crushed red velvet pantsuit.

We continued our JDate banter for a few more days before he asked if he could see me in person. At this point, I’d already had my fill of the dating scene. But I had made a promise to my mother and was admittedly curious about this Roy character. As far as looks went, he was out of my league, and to verify that fact I forwarded his pictures to everyone I knew, including my parents, to ask if he was too attractive to date.

“Your dad says he looks Photoshopped,” my mom emailed back.

Roy walked right past me, and when I called out for him he looked back at me with what I assumed to be disappointment. “Kim?”

He assured me that he overlooked me because I was blonder in real life than I looked in my photographs. I didn’t believe him, but followed him to the Thai restaurant he’d picked out for our midday date anyway. I’d already written him off.

Over vegetarian duck, Roy filled me in on his life: grad student, native Israeli, personal trainer. “I have a green card,” he volunteered, probably noting my uncontrollably furrowed brow. “I’m not using you for citizenship.” Roy was a writer, too. When he was finished with grad school, he told me, he wanted to write children’s books.

I gave my first-date spiel: I lived in Brooklyn, freelanced as an
actress and also as a writer, and had two kooky parents whom I adored that lived two hours east of the city.

“What do you write?” he asked.

“Well, I write gossip and fitness stuff mostly, but I’ve been writing a bunch of personal essays. Not to publish, necessarily, more for myself.”

“About…”

“About my past,” I said, unsure of how to proceed. I wasn’t sure why I was being so honest with this guy—maybe because I’d already made up my mind that there would be no second date.

“What about your past?”

“Well, I’m writing about my family—my dad has an obsessive compulsive disorder.” That was only partially true, but I didn’t feel like launching into the newest theories that hoarding is not really an OCD but its own compulsive behavioral disorder.

“Does he wash his hands a lot?”

“No.”
Here goes nothing.
“He’s a hoarder.”

He looked at me for a minute, considering what he’d just heard, and promptly asked for the check.

I expected an awkward hug in the front of the restaurant and then a ritualistic turning to walk separate directions… regardless of where we were each headed next. But Roy just held his elbow out for me to hold and walked me to the Strand.

We spent about an hour picking through the aisles of the iconic bookstore. In the graphic novel section, I learned that Roy was a comic book geek. A really sexy comic book geek.

In trade, I admitted my soft spot for urban fantasy novels, confessing that more than a respectable share of my reading
consists of vampires, werewolves, and faeries of various dispositions. I wasn’t sure if I was more embarrassed by my father or my reading habits, but I was being completely and utterly honest about who I was with this Israeli Comic-Con aficionado.

After the bookstore we ate ice cream in the park, and then when it started to rain, we sat in a café.

I told him I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I’d had a boss once who had a plaque over her desk that said
MANAGE EXPECTATIONS,
and I wanted to make sure neither Roy nor I expected anything to come of this five-hour date.

“I’d like to change your mind,” he said, not being managed in the slightest.

I gave him a kiss on the cheek and left one café to immediately take up residence in another and call my mother.

“Don’t gloat, but I had a good date.”

“David?”

“No, Roy.”

“Roy,” she said. “That’s funny, on your first birthday cake, the bakery misspelled your name—they wrote an
o
instead of an
l.
We called you Kimberoy for the entire year.”

It took exactly four dates for the topic of hoarding to come up again. All of our dates had been epically long, and this one was no different. A lunch date had turned into a 3 a.m. diner run, and Roy wanted to know more about my childhood.

“What does your father hoard?”

“Paper, but more than paper. I don’t know how to describe it,” I said. “He loves information so much, but it gets so out of hand.”

“Just paper doesn’t seem that bad.”

“No, it doesn’t. Like I said, I don’t know how to describe it.
I’ll send you some of the essays I’ve been writing. Somehow it’s easier for me to put it all down on paper than to say it all so that it makes sense.”

A few days later I got a text from Roy, who I was officially more than comfortably giddy about.

Roy’s Droid: Just finished reading.

Kim’s iPhone: Still like me?

Roy’s Droid: Yes. Respect you even more.

Kim’s iPhone: Thank you.

Roy’s Droid: Heavy stuff. Some cringeworthy.

Kim’s iPhone: Hence me being nervous about you reading it.

Roy’s Droid: Well I’m damaged goods too so you ain’t so special.

Roy’s Droid: You’re obviously very strong. I admire that.

Kim’s iPhone: Thanks for your observations.

Roy’s Droid: My observation is that you’re all kinds of awesome & I’m excited to be with you.

On our next date Roy bought me a toothbrush and asked me if I would be his girlfriend, officially.

A
FEW MONTHS AFTER
our first date, Roy and I celebrated our first Halloween as a couple by throwing a party. I was busy putting coats in the bedroom while Roy chatted with our friends in the living room. I had a hanger between my teeth when Meghan, a relatively new friend I’d met while traveling earlier that year, came looking for me. “So, Roy mentioned you’re writing about hoarding.”

Pain shot through my jaw as I clenched down on the hanger. I realized that by telling Roy my father is a hoarder, he assumed I was the kind of person who regularly told people that my father is a hoarder.

“My mother’s a hoarder,” Meghan said, hurriedly.

I unclenched and nodded. “My father’s a hoarder.”

We hung out in my room, comparing stories like two grizzled war veterans.

“I just don’t know why my father stays with her,” she told me.

“I’ve thought that, too, about my mom. Although my mom isn’t like your dad; she’s sort of taken up hoarding as well.” But I did know why her father stayed, and my mother stayed, and
why we, as their children, stay. Life without their stuff just wasn’t worth life without them.

My parents started looking for a new apartment almost as soon as my mother was released from the hospital. They quickly put a deposit down on a cute two-bedroom condo in a retirement community not far from where I grew up. The idea of my parents owning a home scared me; if they rented and their apartment belonged to and was maintained by other people, it meant a safeguard against squalor.

“If I own something, like this condo, I can leave it to you. And that means I won’t have completely failed as a mother,” my mom said when I talked to her about my fears about home ownership. Since her stay in the hospital, my mother had become obsessed with what would happen to me when she died. With my dating life under control, she’d set her sights on establishing some sort of inheritance for me.

I told her she was being ridiculous, as if I’d just been hanging around for the last twenty-eight years waiting for a windfall. All I wanted, all I had ever wanted, was for my family to live in a safe place, a place without shame. I hoped that this condo could be that for them.

The community seemed a bit Stepford-esque to me, the kind of place where you have to keep your car in the garage as opposed to filling it with garbage. Everyone’s garden was perfectly kept and there were language clubs and dance classes and people went to themed formals at the clubhouse. It felt like boarding school for the over-sixty crowd. And their mortgage was far less per month than the rent they were paying at their old apartment
complex. But the perks I was particularly happy about were the front-door garbage pickup, since it meant they actually had to put out garbage, and the bus service around town, which meant my mother no longer had to be a prisoner to my father’s work schedule. She could grab the jitney to town to shop or people-watch of her own volition.

But after putting the deposit down on the new condo, my parents’ mortgage application was among the many things lost in the to-do piles of failing mortgage companies. Their closing date was put off again and again and again, while one bank was busy buying another. It gave them increasingly more time to stockpile in the apartment they were waiting to move out of; it became just as bad if not worse than it was a year and a half earlier, when I begged my friends to help me make it safe for my mother.

Technically, they could have closed on the condo a few months before, but there was the issue of packing. They extended their lease of the apartment by a month, twice. My mom told me, “I just need more time to pack.” Which meant of course that she needed someone else to pack for her.

We had been doing this dance for years. I rolled my eyes when my mother talked about needing more time to pack. Luckily, she couldn’t see me, because all of our conversations now took place over the phone. I cut back on my visits home; the most convenient excuse I had was that I was busy trying to figure out how to survive financially. The Web show had a good run but was cancelled when the magazine industry was hit hard by the recession. I had been picking up lots of little jobs to stay afloat, with the workload and overdue invoices to prove it. There were
also other, less understandable excuses: that I was in love and wanted to spend my weekends cuddling at home or cavorting about town with my man.

But the truth was that I just couldn’t stand being around my parents anymore. That year marked the angriest in my existence. The mass cleanout that we did before my mom came home from the hospital changed something in me. I’d cleaned out my parents’ apartment so many times, but that time was different. I had been keeping my parents’ secret for so long that the shame associated with it defined me, and when they needed me to, I aired out everything I had been ashamed of my entire life for the world to see—and then my parents had screwed it all up again. I had had to do complete overhauls of my parents’ apartment twice since then, and I knew my parents needed me to do it again. But I didn’t have it in me.

When our conversation inevitably turned to the topic of how overwhelmed my mom was and how much work she’d done and how my father was no help at all, I gave her the names and numbers of companies and individuals that advertised cleaning and packing services in her area. I even offered to pay. I would pay anything not to have to go home.

She told me she’d call them when she was ready. But she was never going to be ready, so I nagged.

“Are you showing off to your friends?” she said when I called to ask if she’d called the cleaning woman I’d recommended.

“No.” The fact that my parents needed professional help to pack their apartment, the fact that they had mounds of trash and clutter everywhere, the fact that they lived like hobos in their own home, weren’t exactly the things I bragged about. But my mom certainly knew what buttons to push. Her question made
me furious. And then it made me feel guilty for being angry with her. I didn’t feel I had the right to, any more than the child of a paraplegic getting angry with their parent for not walking. I calmed myself down.

“I’m calling to see if you’ve done it. Do you want me to call? Will it be less embarrassing if I explain the situation?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Do you want to?”

“What’s your budget?” I asked.

“I’ll call when I’m ready. Good-bye, honey.” She hung up on me.

My aunt attempted to take up the slack that was usually my responsibility, coming out on the weekends to do my domestic duties. Lee had already complained to me between visits that nothing was being added to the pile of packed boxes. One night she texted me:
There’s a lot left for you to do, good luck.

My mom called a few days later, just as I was packing my suitcase to head out to the Island. It was a big weekend: Rachel and Tim were getting married and my parents were meeting Roy for the first time—without me. I’d be busy taking pictures with the bridal party during the cocktail hour and wouldn’t be there to ref the first round of
Roy v. Parents
. Roy had already offered to discuss with my parents how important it was that I focused on work—I had a gargantuan project to finish—and not spend my weekends doing horde management. I told him not to get involved. I’d rather he met my parents for the first time without putting them on the defensive.