Coming Clean: A Memoir (6 page)

My mom and I stayed up all night. I cried, she didn’t. She had nothing to feel guilty about.

My dad showed up in the early hours of the morning. As soon as I heard his keys in the door, I ran and waited for it to open, and he immediately picked me up.

“Hey, kiddo, shouldn’t you be sleeping?” My dad seemed almost normal again, and I thought that maybe his migraines burned up in the house, too.

“Can’t. I’m sad.”

“Well at least rest a bit then.” With that, he carried me back to my temporary bedroom and tucked me back into bed, where I promptly fell asleep.

When I woke up, Ebony, our black cocker spaniel puppy, was in bed with me. She had been in the bedroom with my dad when the fire started—she was the only one he could save. When she was an even smaller puppy and we still lived at home, I used to come home every day from school and read
Bingo
to her; it was the only book I had about a dog.

Not only had the fire killed my pets, but I would miss my last day of school because of it. Instead of the field trip I was supposed to go on to celebrate the year’s end, my parents and I packed up our puppy and headed back to what was left of the house to meet with someone from the insurance company. The two-plus-hour trip back to the suburbs was mostly silent. There was nothing to say, except the obvious.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked.

Mom said she didn’t believe in God because there were children dying in Africa. “There are a lot of terrible things in this world, and I can’t believe in a god that would allow innocent children to starve to death,” she told me.

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for, so I waited for my father’s response. He knew pretty much everything, so I was positive he would know whether God was real or not. “I haven’t seen any convincing empirical evidence that would either confirm or deny the existence of God,” he told me, his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

I wanted to tell them that I knew the truth, that there was a God and I had proof. God had answered my prayer. But if I told them, they would think I was bad. I had wished for our house to burn down, and it did. I just wanted a new house, a clean house, a house that wasn’t full of paper, and then we could be normal and I could have sleepovers.

All of this talk about spirituality set my father off on a rant about transcendentalism. This wasn’t the first time in my life that I’d been roped into a discussion pertaining to Walden Pond, so I let him talk,
uh-huh
-ing periodically, while my mind wandered.

Up until this point, I had considered God to be some sort of benevolent genie. If you prayed the right way, your wish would be granted. I had wished for something bad to happen, and it had. But I couldn’t help but think my mom was right: There were kids in this world that had it a lot worse off than I did, and I was sure they prayed, too. So why hadn’t God listened to them, but had instead listened to me?

When my father’s rant on the innate goodness of man ended,
the car again became silent, which was good because I still had questions I wanted answers to.

“Daddy, did you cry?”

“No, kiddo, I didn’t cry. But that doesn’t mean I’m not sad.”

“Mommy, did you cry?”

My mom didn’t answer. My father’s monologue had given her the perfect opportunity to pretend to be sleeping. I could tell she wasn’t really napping, since I could see her reflection in the mirror and her mouth was closed. When my mother was really asleep her head flopped to the side and her mouth hung open.

I didn’t want to be responsible for my parents crying. This was my fault. I had burned down the house. I had killed all our animals. I should have been more specific when I prayed, I should have told God not to let our pets die.

T
HE HOUSE LOOKED DIFFERENT
than I expected it to. In my mind, I had imagined a conelike pile of ashes, the way it happened in cartoons. It had “burned down,” after all, so I expected it to be down, but the house I had prayed so hard to destroy was still standing. The fire had started in the walls of the kitchen, toward the back of the house, and there was nothing left there but the charred remains of appliances.

My bedroom had completely imploded, taking a good portion of the upstairs we never used with it. “It was a good thing you were at Grandma’s,” my mom said. The kitchen was gone, as was the garage, but there were still parts of my parents’ room that were left unscathed.

I was ordered to sit in the car while my parents spoke with the insurance adjuster, Bruno. Mom said she didn’t want me breathing in the soot, but I could smell the sour smoky twinge to the air from inside the car. I stayed with Ebony and decided to search for whatever treasures I could find in the backseat. My dad always kept bags of papers in the car, lots of them. Every time we went to the car, there was a fight about it, and in order to keep
the arguing to a minimum, I would often tell him to clean the car out before we left to go somewhere, or I would go out and clean it up myself when he seemed particularly distracted. The trunk was always full to the brim with paper, too, so it was better to let him do it—Dad had a way of making it all fit somehow.

Since my father had been on his own for months, no one had forced him to clean out the car, and so I rummaged through the ample bags looking for entertainment. Sometimes there was candy mixed in with the newspapers, old lottery tickets, receipts, weathered paperbacks, and store flyers. If I was lucky, I’d find a Kit Kat.

Periodically, I would stop my search and see what the grown-ups were doing. Bruno was the biggest man I’d ever seen. He was far taller than my father and also much heavier. He had a round nose and loose hairs that he combed over his bald head. He reminded me of Wimpy from Popeye, only if Wimpy were the size of Andre the Giant.

I watched the grown-ups talk and shake hands while consoling Ebony. I was sure she was sad; her mother, Merry, had died in the fire. If I found a candy bar, I would give her half.

When Bruno left, my mom came back to the car to sit with me while my dad poked around the wreckage that was once their bedroom. A while later he emerged, reeking of smoke and covered in ash but holding two mostly intact picture frames that had been in my parents’ bedroom. They were baby pictures of me, the only pictures that had survived. That’s when my mother’s tears came. Silently. She didn’t sniffle and wail the way I did when I cried, but I could see the reflection of her wiping away tears in the visor mirror.

I watched her reflection the entire ride back to Grandma’s house. I didn’t ask any more questions.

When we returned to the Bronx, our belongings were in boxes in the hallway and the locks had been changed. My mother banged on the door, but all she heard from her mother was that she didn’t want us leeching off of her.

That was the last time I saw my grandmother. But I didn’t know that yet. All I knew then was that we were all together again, and that we were homeless.

We slept in the car that night. The next day, my mother arranged for the insurance company to put us up at a hotel. We drove back to Long Island and moved into the Comfort Inn. The only other time I had slept in a hotel was when we went to Disney World when I was four.

I loved everything about our hotel home. We were strategically located next to a 7-Eleven and had an inground swimming pool at our disposal. On the days that my mom had to work, I would usurp the pool as my own personal playground and bestow the honor of babysitting me to whichever lifeguard was on duty. When I got tired and pruny, I would pester my dad to walk the thirty feet to the 7-Eleven with me. Slurpees and chlorine became the staples of my diet that summer.

Normally I wasn’t allowed to have big sugary drinks, but I had overheard my mom tell people that I was traumatized—which somehow meant I was allowed to eat candy and swim all day. I didn’t feel traumatized, but if it meant a daily bout of brain freeze I was all for playing up my sadness.

I overheard a lot that summer, making it my business to listen in on as many grown-up conversations as I could, trying to piece together what life meant for our family now.

I took a lot of bathroom breaks when we visited my friend Jacob and his parents. Their bathroom was next to the kitchen, where the parents would sit and talk while we played. With my ear to the door, I heard Jacob’s dad, Mike, say, “It was an electrical fire. It could have happened to anyone.”

“If it was your house, it wouldn’t have happened,” my dad responded. I only heard three voices after that: June’s, Jacob’s mother; Mike’s; and my mom’s.

A hand-washing later, I left my eavesdropping station to go find my dad. It didn’t take much looking on my part; he was where he always was: in the car, driver’s side door open, one foot in and one out, drinking tea and listening to the radio. I took over the passenger seat.

“How’re you holding up?” he asked me.

“I’m okay. How are you holding up?”

“I’m okay, too.”

And with that established, we sat in the car together listening to NPR.

T
HE SUMMER WAS A WHIRLWIND
of house hunting and yard sale-ing. Shopping for real estate became my new favorite hobby. It was like playing the biggest game of pretend ever; within ten minutes of stepping into a potential house, I lived a thousand lives. I could imagine myself sitting on the floor playing board games on soft carpets—something I’d never been able to do in our last house. I thought about bubble baths in tubs with Jacuzzi jets and rooms just for my toys. I spent hours studying the JC Penney catalog, picking out canopy beds with pink accessories or wicker daybeds with burgundy shams. I carried the catalog with me wherever we went, comparing my fantasy life with available real estate. In these houses, I had the most perfect, most tidy, most normal of lives.

Inevitably we’d end up at a yard sale after our days of house browsing, and all those daydreams shattered. We didn’t have a house yet, but that didn’t stop us from buying the things that other people didn’t want anymore: a waffle maker, given as a wedding gift to a couple we didn’t know; a coffee table that
might match a couch we didn’t own; and numerous other doodads we might be able to piece a life around.

I hated yard sales. To me, used stuff was junk, and we had just gotten rid of all of our junk. Our hotel room began to look more and more like our house had. Each new purchase recreated the claustrophobic conditions I’d prayed so hard to get away from. The hotel was starting to feel like home.

After a month, the insurance company stopped paying for our hotel. According to them, we needed to make a choice: rebuild, which would consist of living in a trailer on our front yard, or buy a new house. My mom couldn’t stomach the idea of living in front of the wreckage, so we downgraded to an hourly-rate motel off of the highway willing to give us a discount. Cheap and small and dingy, there was no pool or almond-scented shampoo, but for the time being it would suffice as home. Unlike the Comfort Inn, the maids at the motel would come tidy up the room whether we were in it or not, which meant I got to spend a lot more face time with the cleaning staff.

I was fascinated by the women who would come in and out of each room with carts of toilet paper, towels, and Lysol. At first I would just watch them attentively, but as I got more comfortable, I started following them around to other rooms, watching the way they made tight corners with the sheets and wiped down any visible surfaces with dingy rags.

Most didn’t speak much English, or at least pretended not to, and therefore couldn’t tell me to get lost. The exception was Rosa, who was younger than the other maids and made a habit of winking at me each time I passed her and her cart of towels on the way to the ice machine. I made up a story that she was
the daughter of the hotel’s owner, the owner decidedly being the man in the office who gave out the room keys. When she came to clean our room, I perched myself on the faux-wood-finished dresser that furnished the barebones hotel room and watched her every move.

“Hi. I like the way you make the beds,” I told her.

“I can show you how, if you want,” she responded, and waved me over to her.

I’m not sure where my father was at this point. I assumed he was sitting in the car listening to the radio, and I hoped he wouldn’t come back and ruin my opportunity to get a housekeeping tutorial from a real-life maid. Rosa taught me how to make tight corners with top sheets and creases for the pillows and how to properly fold the bedspread. The next day, I had the beds made before she got there, but she allowed me to follow her into the empty guest rooms and make them up.

If Rosa was annoyed by my overzealous companionship, she didn’t show it, and she let me help with the dusting, polishing, and vacuuming—things I had never done or seen my parents do at home. My favorite chore remained bed-making, but I made careful mental notes about each housekeeping duty we did together so that I would have a plan of action for my family’s new house. I would take over the cleaning in our new house, and I would ask my parents to give me an allowance. I had seen that on TV.

My parents’ goal was to move before the school year started in September, since I couldn’t register for school from a hotel. As August approached, my mom took more and more time off of work to dedicate to our hunt for a new home. The prospect of
finding, closing, and moving into a house in less than a month seemed increasingly unlikely. Especially given my mother’s propensity to hate every house she saw.

My dad didn’t have much of an opinion about where we ended up, but my mother found veto reasons in white carpets, narrow doorways, shower doors, lack of fencing, and floral wallpaper. There didn’t appear to be a house on Long Island that was right for our family.

And then we saw the worst of the lot: tan and brown on the outside, orange shag carpet on the inside, overgrown shrubbery, and a guest bathroom decorated with pea-green reflective wallpaper. In my eyes, there was absolutely nothing right with this place, but my mother was in love. It didn’t hurt that the owner of the two-story, four-bedroom, three-bathroom house, with a two-car garage and an attic that was so big the real estate agent said that we could convert it into an apartment, had already bought a new home in Florida and was looking to close immediately.