Coming Clean: A Memoir (25 page)

Two weeks and nearly thirty apartments later, I got a text message from Lee. A coworker of hers lived in Chelsea, one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods, and there was an apartment for rent in his building that was, surprisingly, in our range.

The real estate agent ushered us in, apologizing for the state of the apartment, which was in the middle of renovation. “The guy who lived here was a hoarder,” he said matter-of-factly, assuring us that the dead roach carcasses on the walls would be scraped off, a new bathroom sink would be installed, and a fresh coat of paint would wash away all signs of the previous tenant.

I knew what Roy was thinking. The place was perfect. It would be newly renovated, it was relatively spacious, and it was exactly the right location and exactly the right price. I wanted to see what he saw in the apartment, but all I saw were the roaches on the walls.

I shelved those thoughts. I told him that we should take it, to go ahead and put down a deposit, because it’s perfect for us. And by
us
, I meant
him
. Nothing in our price range would be perfect for me. I really wanted to make him happy.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay awake in Roy’s bed, crying. I knew he didn’t fully understand what home meant to me, the kind of weight it carried. He’d moved practically every year since he came to New York seven years ago. An apartment was a place to put his stuff, but to me home was something to be defined by. I grew up ashamed of who I was, because my home was something to be ashamed of. I had never been more proud of anything in my life than I’d been of the tiny Brooklyn apartment I was leaving to start a life with Roy—it was small and clean and
mine
, and for so much of my life that was all I ever wanted. I didn’t know what kind of apartment would define us, but I was pretty sure the apartment in Chelsea, with its dead roach carcasses, wasn’t it.

Around 3 a.m. I snuck out and took a cab home to Brooklyn. I
needed to be with myself, with my stuff. Understandably, he was angry when he woke up and I wasn’t there.

“You can’t just sneak off in the middle of the night. What are you going to do when we live together?”

“Sneak off to the living room,” I said, crying.

“It was the hoarding thing, wasn’t it?” he said. “I could see it in your face when he said it. I should have known.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Losing a deposit isn’t the worst thing. But I do expect you to pay for it.”

“Okay.” My crying had slowed down to snivels.

“I’ll email the real estate agent about the uptown apartment; I’ll tell her we’ll take it.”

It was an apartment I actually really liked and Roy really didn’t. It was large and beautiful and had a full modern kitchen, but it was also expensive and much farther uptown than we’d planned. The agent told us she could get the paperwork started early the next day, but first she had one last apartment to show us—it had just become available and was only slightly over budget and just a few blocks from Roy’s current apartment.

We went to look at it on the way to signing for the other one, just in case. Even as we walked down the block, Roy shot me an impressed look. The street was picturesque, classic New York: turn-of-the-last-century four-story brownstones, with arched entryways and bow windows and Romanesque flourishes. The street was quiet and canopied by two rows of trees, ending at a small park.

We were greeted by the landlord, who lived on the first floor. Various members of his extended family occupied most of the
other apartments in the building. It being the Upper West Side, he was, unsurprisingly, a nice old Jewish man, and he seemed to be taken by us, especially Roy, the young man from the homeland. He seemed to be less interested in showing us around than testing his Hebrew out on Roy.

As a large prewar brownstone, the apartment was not the brand-spanking-new luxury building one I thought I wanted, but it was a very far cry from the roach carcass–covered apartment in Chelsea. It was elegant. It had 12-foot ceilings, a built-in fireplace with a carved mantel, and giant bow windows with old-fashioned wood shutters. The cabinets and appliances were a wee bit dated, but I let Roy do the negotiating. They chatted in Hebrew for a while, eventually agreeing on a new refrigerator, bathroom sink, and significant reduction in rent.

“The bedroom is big enough for a queen-size bed,” I yelled out. Roy came in to check.

“We could have a crib here too,” he said.

“We could,” I replied, about our hypothetical offspring. “But when the kid needs a bed we’re going back to Brooklyn.”

“Deal.”

I woke up from a nightmare shortly after 3 a.m. I thought about waking Roy, but he’d already been subjected to too many nightmare-induced sleepless nights.

We had spent the day buying up the entire contents of IKEA (or as Roy insisted, “European imports”) for our new apartment. It was an exhausting day of shopping and carrying heavy things, so I let him sleep and stared at the ceiling until it was time for me to tiptoe out to meet my aunt. We’d scheduled an early-morning wine tasting on Long Island.

When Roy heard the bedroom door squeak open, he called out for me. I knew he was thinking that I was running away in the middle of the night again.

“I’m not leaving you; I’m leaving to meet Lee.”

“You were tossing and turning again last night.”

“Nightmare,” I said.

“What was this one about?”

“Same thing, different night. We were in the house I grew up in, but my parents weren’t there,” I told him. “It was our house now, but it was just as bad. I was looking out the window of my childhood bedroom into the neighbor’s yard, admiring how nicely it was kept. In the dream they had two swimming pools: fresh water and chlorinated. Apparently we were engaged, and a newspaper was coming to do a wedding announcement, and we had to clean. I didn’t know where to start. You told me you had hired people, and I said ‘I don’t have to do it myself?’ You said no, I didn’t have to do it at all, and then I said, ‘This is who I am, this is what made me.’ Then I woke up.”

He sat up, still groggy. “That’s not who you are. I will never let that happen. You will always live somewhere you’re proud of.”

W
HEN
I
DECIDED
to write my story, I thought I would make it a research-heavy book and throw in intermittent personal anecdotes as support. All of this was a plan to both understand and accept my parents. Secretly, though, I hoped that I might figure out a way to fix them. I fantasized that I would soon be calling home with a little nugget of information that would click for them, and all of a sudden they would hate owning things.

That didn’t happen, of course. I didn’t write a research-heavy book, and I didn’t figure out how to fix them. They still loved stuff. But I kept writing my story, and in doing so, something else happened: I figured out that I can be mad at my parents. Really mad. And I learned that in spite of my anger, they would still love me, and I would still love them. They can’t clean the moldy spots on my childhood, but they can serve as my cheering section, and they always have. Both of my parents have supported this process in ways that I had never expected.

I’ve talked to my mother almost every day since the inception of this book—to check dates and facts and details, but also to cry.

“Kim, you’re out. It’s over. We all survived that place,” my mother said when I called crying about some long-lost memory I hid away.

My father learned the art of text messaging, sending me virtual shoulder-rubs and “You can do this, kiddo” messages during breaks in his shift.

He started taking writing classes, because, he now says, he’s always liked writing. “You take after me like that.”

I told him that his first book should be a rebuttal. He can talk about the time I peed in the car or the time I washed his car with Brillo pads, or the time I climbed a tree but made him get a ladder to come get me, because I realized I was scared of heights once I was up there.

When my book proposal was finished and ready to be sent off to my agent, he asked if he could read it. I sat with him as he did, watching his face for any signs that he’d hate me. But when he looked up, he said, “Wow, that’s quite a story. I’m sorry that it was yours.”

I have never needed an apology from my parents. I have only ever wanted them to have a safe place to live. As I write this, my parents have been in their new home for over a year. It is clean, so far. It has not been easy, though. My mother has attempted to curtail her compulsive shopping by writing a shopping blog, which has a decent following, where she scopes out Internet sales on a daily basis and passes them on to others for the same rush of the buy. Sometimes that works. Sometimes she calls me and says, “I’ve had a rough week and I bought too much.”

My father has promised to go to therapy. I’m not sure if he ever really will, but he has been calling therapists, looking for someone who not only has experience with hoarding but also
takes insurance—a combination that is genuinely hard to find. My mom says he actually sounds excited whenever I check in on his therapist search.

As a housewarming present, I bought them a day with a professional organizer. The woman I hired was an amazon compared to my tiny mother, and for weeks afterward I received phone calls along the lines of “I can’t reach my plates! Who puts the plates on the top shelf?!”

A cleaning person comes regularly, if nothing else but to scare my parents into putting things away before she arrives.

Nothing about this is easy for my parents. My mom likes to call me a few times a week to tell me about the strange places my dad has been hiding bundles of papers that he thinks she won’t find. On recycling day she wakes up at 5 a.m. to scour their house and garage for bags of papers to put out before my father can get up and reclaim them.

“I don’t know how long I can do this,” she told me. “You’ll have to start having kids soon so that they will love me before I get too tired of cleaning up after your father and let it fall apart again.”

Roy and I have settled into our new place. The walls are decorator white and summer-shower blue and the furniture is mostly coffee brown, the colors we both agreed on. I keep my girlier, more flowery stuff contained in my office nook in our bedroom; he keeps his comic book paraphernalia on his office wall and in the library in the living room. His boxes upon boxes of comic books (thirty, at present count) have found a home in a storage unit. Our apartment is tasteful and clean and presentable. It’s very much home.

My favorite part about it is that right outside our window is a
stop for the M5, the bus my father used to drive when I was a little girl. I like to sit by the stop to call my parents a few times each week. My dad never fails to have a story about pickpockets, the bakery owner who used to trade him artisanal loaves of bread in exchange for a free ride, or the time he almost hit Aunt Lee when she walked in front of his bus. When it’s my mother’s turn, she tells me about her newest recipe, asks when I will come home to visit next, and worries that I’m not eating enough, wearing a sweater, saving enough money… the list goes on. These are the moments when I realize how very normal we are.

When I first met with Julia Cheiffetz and Carly Hoffmann at Amazon Publishing, Julia told me that writing this book would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. She was right, and I can’t imagine having done it without the constant guidance and encouragement you both provided in the process.

To my agent, Mollie Glick, thank you for believing in me and believing that I had a story to tell even before I told you what my story was.

Adrianna and Michelle, you are the two greatest blessings in my life. I can’t imagine having grown up without you and am forever grateful for your support and friendship. Eddie, you’re the best big brother this only child could ask for.

Thank you to all the friends, family, teachers, and various cohorts who have supported me in this process: MJ, Mark Goldstein, Yoselin Bugallo, Becky Gutierrez, Aziz Nekoukar, Amanda Figueroa, Michelle Slonim, Katharine Sise, Corey Binns, David Krell, Melanie Schutt, Johanna Saum, Vanessa Marmot, April Salazar Froncek, Kelly McMasters, Jill Schwartz-man, Sarah McColl, Sebastian Conley, and all the readers of
TheKimChallenge.com
.

Roy Schwartz, thank you for being my happily ever after.

Most important, to my parents: You are the toughest, funniest, most wonderful people I know. I’m not sure that I can ever do you justice in words or thank you adequately for loving me enough to support me in writing this book. I am proud and thankful to be your daughter.

KIMBERLY RAE MILLER
is a writer and actress living in New York City. Her writing on food, exercise, and positive body image has appeared in Condé Nast’s blog Elastic Waist, Yahoo’s Shine, Social Workout, and in
Figure
magazine. Additionally, Kim writes about New York living, celebrity gossip, and shopping for CBS Radio and CBS New York. In 2010, Kim was featured in Katharine Sise’s breakthrough career guide
Creative Girl: The Ultimate Guide for Turning Talent and Creativity into a Real Career
. She blogs at
TheKimChallenge.com
.