Dirty Secret (7 page)

When the yellow house was completed, with a brand new
spiral staircase linking the two previously unconnected floors, the five of us moved in, claiming spaces and bedrooms. My brother knew which room he wanted right away, so Beth and I let him have it. She and I flipped a coin over the remaining two kids' bedrooms (though over the next six years I'd often beg Beth to switch with me—back and forth she and I would move all our furniture every year or so. I was easily bored and still must be, because even now, at close to forty, the longest I've ever lived in one place is the six-year span in that house). The “yellow house” as everyone came to call it, was spacious, sparkling new, and clean. Every week my dad and Sandy gave us a new chore chart. One week I'd be in charge of cleaning the bathroom, the next week the kitchen, the next week the living room or the TV room. All three of us kids were responsible for doing our own laundry from the time we each turned ten. Most evenings we ate dinner together as a family. At the end of the night I'd go upstairs to my room and listen to the faint murmurings from the kitchen—my dad and Sandy always sat up talking at the table after we kids went to bed. Little did I know that the main topic of their conversation was the financial problems that beset them shortly after their marriage, that they were desperately trying to find a way to pay for the renovation of the yellow house, as well as feed and clothe five people. Within a year, my dad would lose his record stores and he and Sandy would be on the verge of bankruptcy.

I STILL HAD
to go to my mom's house every other week. One night my mother took my brother and me to a drive-in movie. We were late and missed most of the first feature. When the second movie,
Saturday Night Fever,
came on, my mother decided it was too sexist. She started backing her boatlike car out of the lot.

“Let's not leave,” I said. “Let's watch it.”

“I'm not watching this crap and I'm not letting you kids watch it either.”

I continued protesting as we drove along the highway toward home. Suddenly my mother flashed her gritted teeth at me and reached for my hair.

She yanked. I screamed at her to stop. My brother, in the backseat, begged us to calm down.

My mother was having a hard time driving and pulling my hair at the same time, so she did the logical thing: headed over to the shoulder of the highway and ordered me out of the car.

“It's pitch black out here,” I said.

“Out!”

I got out, and—as was required in a situation like that—slammed the door behind me. She screeched off into the distance.

I started walking. It was a highway. It was night. Dark. I kept walking as cars sped past. No one stopped; I didn't want anyone to stop.

But after a while, someone did.

Her. She'd managed to circle around.

I got into the car and we drove home in silence. My mother dropped my brother and me off at the yellow house. But I'd made a decision as I walked along that dark highway: I was going to take charge of my own life now. The next day, after talking it over with my dad and Sandy, I called my mother and told her that I didn't want to live with her anymore. I wanted to live full-time at my dad and Sandy's.

She put up no resistance. She deemed it the best thing for everyone. Which was good, but not exactly what I wanted to hear. At least a “Why don't you think about it?” or “Let's see how things go,” would have been nice. But she was relieved, I could
tell. My brother continued with the one week on, one week off thing longer than I did, but not by much—maybe six months.

About once a week I'd go to my mother's house and have dinner with her, always doing a little cleaning and straightening up while I was there, or I'd go on weekends and try to fix up her yard. After Sam moved in, he tried his best to stay out of the way when I was over, climbing the creaking stairs to smoke cigarettes and watch the television set in their bedroom. He wasn't exactly what you'd call warm and cuddly, but he wasn't a bad guy either.

I'm sure he was the one doing the small amount of cleaning that was happening there, but it wasn't enough. Her house wasn't in a full-fledged hoarding state yet, but it was a mess and becoming junkier and junkier on the inside and the outside. And unfortunately the house hadn't magically lifted up and moved itself into a different neighborhood across town either. No, regardless of how often I wished it weren't the case, my mother's house was still directly across the street from my elementary school. Because my dad and Sandy's house was across the street in the other direction, I made a point to tell my fellow students as often as possible that I lived in that nicely painted yellow house. “See that one, right there,” I'd say, pointing at the house with the adorable porch swing, gardens bursting with tulips and hydrangeas and roses, and the fence my dad had built—as straight as a set of perfect teeth—around the backyard.

Though he'd already traded it in for a Volkswagen, I'd brag about my dad's baby blue Cadillac. I thought of it as an insurance policy in case anyone found out that the weird lady who bundled up in knee-length sweaters year-round and wore a full-face motorcycle helmet while bicycling down the middle of the street—riding so slowly that a slight breeze could have tipped her over—was my mother, and those rusted, junky cars (Sam's
contribution) parked outside the house, hers. Every time my class went out for recess I'd stay toward the back of the group so that if by chance my mother was outside she wouldn't see me, or worse, come over to say hello.

Sometimes I'd look around my dad and Sandy's house and marvel at how nice it was, how clean it was, how normal we all appeared. But I couldn't let myself trust it. I couldn't completely acclimate. I didn't belong there. During that time my brother and I lived with my mom through the week and my dad on the weekends, I'd turned feral. By the time I came to live with my dad and Sandy full-time, I'd been wild too long. I felt like one of those kids raised by wolves; I'd never fit in, never be able to mask my animal nature.

I tried, though. That was why I'd stand outside the school with my classmates, keeping my back to my mother's house and pointing toward the immaculate yellow house, saying, “That's me, that's where I live,” even though I barely believed it myself.

Officially I lived in the yellow house, yes, but part of me had been left behind at my mother's. It was the part of me that felt responsible for her, the part that was constantly searching for a solution for her cluttered house and her cluttered mind. There was no one else to keep her from running completely amok, no one besides me who could stop her from packing the porch with “antiques,” from allowing the closets to overflow with moth-eaten sweaters and the backyard to go wild. By the time I was ten years old, sitting in the windowsill of my elementary school gazing back and forth between the two houses, the weight of my mother's burgeoning problem was bearing down on me. And I had become the one in charge, in my mind anyway, of fixing it.

THE MORNING OF HER SURGERY, MY MOM INSISTS ON TAKING a cab to the hospital, because she has to be there at 5:00 a.m. That same morning, my dad and I drive to St. Paul to look at stoves and refrigerators for her—yesterday she confessed that her stove didn't work and her refrigerator was barely functioning. My dad knows of a place that may let her trade in her old appliances for new ones, so we're going to see what's in stock. The plan is that my dad will help get the old ones out and the new ones in while she's in the hospital. It's a big gesture, the first my dad's made toward helping, and I'm grateful.

As we pull into the parking lot, my cell phone rings. It's my mother, from the hospital.

“Guess what,” she says. “Salman Rushdie is reading tonight—we should go see him!” She manages to get most of the words out before becoming engulfed by laughter.

“What's going on?” Jesus. Why does she always try to frame everything as a joke? It's just like the way she told me she had cancer in the first place.

“They're sending me home!”

“What are you talking about? You're not having the surgery?”

My dad has just opened his door, but pauses when he hears me, gauging my reaction.

“They did another colonoscopy and found more polyps. They want to test them, so now the surgery won't be until next week.”

“More polyps? Does that mean the cancer is more widespread?”

“They don't know. But the good news is that we can spend more time together!”

“Okay,” I say uneasily. This doesn't sound like good news, obviously. And now I won't even be here when she goes home after the surgery. Besides, I was counting on her being in the hospital for a few days so I could clean her house without interference.

“But,” she says, “now the hospital won't let me leave on my own, because I had anesthesia for the colonoscopy. Can you ask Sandy to come pick me up? Or if she's busy, maybe your dad?”

I cover the phone and explain the situation to my dad. He puts the car in reverse and backs out of the parking lot.

“You're sure you don't mind, Pop?” I say after I get off the phone.

“It's fine, honey. Really.”

After he and Sandy got together, if there were ever arrangements to make about my brother and me, Sandy dealt with my mom. (When my husband and I got married, my dad and Sandy had a party for us, and we invited my mother. As far as I knew
it was the first time my parents had been in the same room or even spoken in twenty-five years. I was nervous about how my mother would behave at the party, but she was fine, totally appropriate—even charming. And in a weird coincidence, she showed up in a dress the exact shade of blue as the one I wore.)

When I see her standing outside the hospital entrance, my first thought is one I have frequently: Thank God I didn't inherit her enormous breasts. They hang down almost to her waist. When I was little, she'd take off her bra at night and have deep, three-inch wide gouges in her shoulders from the straps. Sandy once told me that when I was ten, she and my dad began setting aside money for me to get a breast reduction. Thankfully, I didn't need one. But why am I thinking about my mother's breasts right now? Maybe because I'm trying not to think about the cancer. It may be worse than we thought. Though we didn't know anything before, somehow now we know even less.

I switch from the front seat to the back, and my mother takes five minutes to get in and settled.

“Hi, Helen,” my dad says.

“Hi, Rick,” she says shyly. “Thank you for coming to get me.”

From the backseat, I watch my parents attempting to make conversation. I try to remember a time when I was alone with just the two of them, but can't.

“So, what should we do now?” my mother asks, turning around to me.

“My dad's going to drop us off at your house and we're going to start cleaning.”

Probably because it's impossible for me to think of my parents as together—as a couple or even as co-parents—I always say “my mom” and “my dad,” rather than just “Dad,” or “Mom.” I didn't realize it was unusual until friends mentioned it.

“The house is in marvelous shape,” my mother says, waving her hand dismissively. “You don't have to worry about cleaning anymore.”

“Really? When did that happen?”

“I've been working on it,” she says.

“So since I left last night, you've cleaned it? And now it's all just
marvelous
? The kitchen's all ready for your new stove and refrigerator? There's a way for the delivery people to get through?”

“Well . . . no. I guess not.”

My dad's jaw is clenching; it must be hard for him to hear his daughter being so strict with his ex-wife. But it's the relationship I have with my mother, it's the way we're most comfortable: I'm the enforcer of rules, while she retreats into the role of the child. It's the way we've been for as long as I can remember, and I can't imagine us another way. And though I've long given up on convincing her that teasing me about snakes verges on sadistic and is not in the slightest bit funny, I haven't been able to give up the hope of someday getting her house clean. I worry about my mother in those conditions.

And I resent the looks of scorn and judgment thrown my way by her neighbors. Last year one of them cornered me outside, when my husband and I were walking my mom home after having lunch during a visit. It was winter, but we'd wanted a walk. We tucked my mother inside her gruesome castle and were about to head back to my dad and Sandy's when the neighbor came out of her house and started shoveling my mother's sidewalk. It turned out they'd struck a deal: a swap of lawn duties—at least in the front—for the use of my mother's garage. I don't know this neighbor's name because my mother always refers to her as “the mean lesbian neighbor.”

Mean Lesbian Neighbor began glaring at my husband and
me as if we were grifters in the midst of a plan to scam my mother. But then she said, in a voice dripping with accusation, “Hey. You're her daughter, aren't you?”

I stopped walking. I turned around. “Yes. Thanks for shoveling.”

“She lets me use half her garage, so I do it.”

“She definitely can use the help. And I appreciate it, too.” I turned to leave.

“There's concern about her,” she said. “In the neighborhood.”

“That's good—I mean it's nice to know that her neighbors are looking out for her.”

“And I want
you
to know there's concern here.”

What she was saying was clear: I should be taking better care of my mother.

“You know, I don't live here, I live in another state. I do the best I can.”

“Sometimes we don't see her around for days at a time.” She jabbed the shovel straight down into the snow and leaned on it. “We even called the police once—did she tell you about that?”