The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

CHRISTINA HOPKINSON

NEW YORK   BOSTON

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Table of Contents

Copyright Page

To Alex—you constantly inspire me but you are
not
the inspiration for the story of a grumpy woman married to an untidy man.

1

The Pile of Stuff

The solitary jigsaw piece sits in the corner of the living room, daring me to ignore it. It is a battle of wills between me and it. I try to stare it out, but the corner section of a 32-piece puzzle of a dog flying an airplane wins, of course.

“What are you doing?” asks Joel, who is setting up our latest DVD box set, a classy American import with impenetrable dialogue.

I’m rifling through the shelves to find the puzzle that it belongs to. “I can’t watch TV knowing there’s a stray jigsaw piece. Think how annoying it will be next time we do the jigsaw and the last bit is missing.”

“Chillax, Mary.”

“Chillax? What are you? Twelve? Don’t you think that vampires are, like, the coolest things?”

He laughs and gets on with his episode selection.

The world divides between those who can watch television knowing there’s an isolated jigsaw fragment lying on the floor and those who can’t. While I’m down there I look under the sofa to see if there are any of its colleagues and I see something else: a cup. I look inside it and realize that it’s been buried there for weeks, but the tide has finally washed it ashore. I think it once had coffee in it, but it’s hard to tell now that a mold lathers up
its sides like a green-tinged cappuccino froth. Since I drink only expensive soy lattes, I know it belongs to my husband.

“Look at this,” I say as I thrust it in his face.

He doesn’t recoil, but peers at it with interest. “Don’t you think it looks like one of those foams that they put around food in fashionable restaurants? I don’t know, hand-stacked quail confit with spume of snail extract.” He looks closer. “We should show it to Rufus. He’d be really interested to see how spores form.”

“Are you going to take it to the kitchen?”

“How do you know it’s mine?”

“Because this is the mug you always use because it’s so big, which is great because it means you can always leave some at the bottom for someone to spill.” He shrugs and presses play on the DVD. “Well, aren’t you?” One, two, three, I count slowly, just as I learned in an article I read recently about anger management.

“Laters.”

“When later?”

He turns the sound up on the TV. I increase the volume of my sigh and stare at him hard. I crack first, I always do, and take the mug to the kitchen. I tip its contents down the sink and manually squish the bits of mold through the sieve that guards the plughole. My husband’s cup overflows with fungi. Mine with fury and irritation.

“Joel,” I shout on my return, having dispensed with both the mug and any attempts to avoid being angry. “I’m fed up with living in this squalor.” No response. “If you just tidied up as you went along…”

He’s entered that trance that our sons do when placed in front of a TV. I half expect him to go and sit with his face six inches from the screen. I try again, this time actually stamping my feet like Rumpelstiltskin. “You never do a thing around here, you’re worse than a child; my life would be so much easier if I had only
two boys to contend with. You, you,” I splutter, groping for the best example to illustrate his total blindness to the quantities of detritus that I sweep away for him, “you don’t see how much I do. And how little you do.”

“Like what?” he says, finally.

“I don’t know, it’s not like I keep a list,” I said.

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe I will.”

A list, I think the next day, maybe I should keep a list. One with all the things he does or doesn’t do around the house. I can’t see any other way of making him understand the state we’re in. What would I do with this list? Is making a list yet another thing that falls onto my plate, while the only thing on his is large hunks of meat?

I’m distracted by Gabe, who has retreated to the corner of the kitchen with the look of a mathematician thinking about the world’s largest prime number.

“Gabe, what are you doing? Wait, don’t do it, wait, wait, wait, let me get the potty. Here it is.” His trousers are whipped off and his bottom planted just in time to catch the daily event around which my life seems to revolve. “Well done,” I exclaim brightly, though in reality it’s more my triumph than his. “You are such a clever boy.” I hug him, which is ill-advised as I haven’t yet done a thorough wipe. “And clever boys get stickers.”

I go to the chart on the fridge door that proclaims to the world all of my second born’s successful encounters with the potty. There are not very many of them. “Here we are, football or dinosaur?”

We’ve had four months of more poo than a pig farm but we finally seem to be getting somewhere. I’ve always been skeptical about star charts, but our newly instituted one appears to
be effective. He gets a sticker or a star for every potty success, every painless exit from the house to get Rufus to school and every prompt bedtime. There are no black marks for misdemeanors, not because Gabe is the sort of child who is free from sin, far from it, but because we’re the sort of craven parents who can’t bear to tell our children off. (And when we do dare to give them the meat of criticism, we have to douse it in the ketchup of endearments. “I’m not sure everyone else in the restaurant wants to hear you make farty noises,
darling,
” “
Sweetheart
, Mommy doesn’t like it when you hit her.”)

“Superstar Gabe, you are well on your way to getting that Thomas the Tank Engine Aquadraw Deluxe set.” If only Joel were so easy to train.

And that’s when it hits me. Of course: that’s what I can do with the list of everything he does to annoy me. I will make the spousal equivalent of a star chart. Except because he’s 38, not two and a half, he won’t get a star for every good thing that he does, but a black mark for every bad one.

I shall compile a list of all that he does to irritate me and then I’ll note how often he commits one of these sins. It will be an accurate account of every balled-up tissue left on the side, every empty carton of milk put back in the fridge, every pile of laundry ignored, every time I’ve had to put my hand in the kitchen sink to pull out those grotty bits of yuk he never seems to notice. It will be a spreadsheet detailing all misbehavior over a period of, let’s say, six months.

I haven’t felt such excitement in years. It reminds me of how I used to feel when in the early stages of developing a new format at work. Everything is falling into place. It is brilliant. I am brilliant.

My list will be a thing of beauty and efficiency, a work of art of Excel and observation. If it were published, it would be admired,
but I’m not going to stick it up in the kitchen like Gabe’s star chart, amid the party invitations, school dates and shopping lists. Joel’s not a potty-training toddler, but a grown man with more than a fortnight to prove himself. And he won’t be getting a Thomas the Tank Engine branded treat as a reward, no he won’t.

If my list, his star chart, proves him to be an asset in this house then he gets to stay in it. If it doesn’t, well, I suppose that means he doesn’t and we will have to rethink everything we’ve ever believed about this marriage.

So here’s the thing, Joel: all you have to do is avoid making me angry.

The problem is, I’m angry most of the time. I’m so permanently irritated that I feel that my life is narrated in CAPITAL LETTERS.

I know I’m not supposed to be angry. I am supposed to be able to “manage” that emotion, just as I manage people and budgets at work. Anger is not fashionable or righteous anymore; we are not storming barricades and taking pride in it. It is an “inappropriate” emotion.

It’s not as if I’m entirely one-dimensional; my moods are nuanced. I can range from mildly irked right through to incandescent fury, but anger is the umbrella emotion under which these gradations shelter from many things that provoke them.

Things that make me angry include: the phrases “too posh to push,” “methinks she doth protest too much,” “reader, I married him” and “it is a truth universally acknowledged”; baby girls with slutty whores’ names like Lola, Delilah, Jezebel, Lulu and Scarlett; any use of the word “mummy” unless uttered by a child to its mother (yummy mummy, mummy tummy, slummy mummy); people talking about size zero and middle youth.

I’m angry that I work; I’d be even angrier if I didn’t.

Most of all I’m angry at you, Joel. And if I could distill this anger to its purest essence, it would consist of some bracken dishwater with floating bits of lamb chop grease in it to represent your total inability to help around the house. So not very pure at all; in fact, not so much an essential oil as an oil slick of filth polluting my hearth and heart.

It’s not my fault I’m angry. I was always destined to be so. My parents used to tell me that I was born during the Winter of Discontent, which I believed and I think they did too. I grew up with tales of how my parents had battled through streets stacked high with uncollected rubbish and stench to a power-cut hospital unmanned by striking midwives. Then I read that the Winter of Discontent actually occurred some years later and I had merely been born during a freakish cold snap and it was snow rather than rubbish that was piled high. But the myth was there, that I had been born during a national strop, a collective temper tantrum. “You’re just like a union leader,” my parents used to tell me, “always whining.” They’d snap “Life isn’t” at me, whenever I uttered the phrase “It’s not fair.”

How much sunnier I would have been, went the family joke, had I been born during the Summer of Love instead.

And just to compound matters, my parents named me Mary. As in quite contrary, which my mother tells me I was from a preternaturally early age. Even in the womb, I reacted furiously to any food other than white bread and water, giving my mother violent morning sickness morning, noon and night for the full nine months of pregnancy. Once born, I refused to drink the cheapest brand of formula. I refused to be laid down on my front, as was prescribed in those medically incorrect times, but screamed and screamed until put on my back. I frowned until furrows lined my
face, but failed to smile until almost three months old. I scratched myself so much I was forced to wear tight mittens all the time. My colicky crying time was not limited to early evenings, but lasted all day and much of the night. My bottom, my mother tells me, was an angry red too—so bad was my diaper rash that it bled. (Looking back, it seems evident that I was suffering from an extreme dairy intolerance that would have been easily rectified had I been breastfed by a mother prepared not to drink cow’s milk herself, and, yes, I am a bit angry about that too.)

These facts alone were enough to ensure my choleric temperament, but then my newborn head’s colorless fuzz soon gave way to bright red hair. Not auburn, nor titian, nor merely “warm,” but proper red. Otherwise referred to by well-meaning folk as “At least it’s not ginger,” a shade of hair color also known as “Well, it’s OK on a
girl
” (this latter frequently said in the presence of my similarly flame-haired firstborn boy child). Red hair, like big boobs and poker-straight tresses, is one of those things that people strive to achieve through artifice but decry if natural. Think of all those millions spent on henna and hair dye and yet when you’ve got it naturally you just get “Well, at least it’s not ginger.” And when the child with red hair first throws the standard toddler temper tantrum that all do some time after the age of one, everybody says, “Ooh, isn’t she fiery?” instead of “Look at that toddler throwing a tantrum as toddlers are wont to do.” To this day, I’m not allowed to show the slightest ill temper without someone referring to my hair color. I’m a “feisty redhead” if liked and a “ginger whinger” if not.