Coming Clean

Like a great number of stereotyped housewives and cartoon elephants, I am scared to death of mice. It’s not the kind of fear that makes a person pull away, slightly put off; rather, my fear of these particular creatures makes me want to curl up into a ball, and only after running away, screaming like a girl. I’m not sure if it’s their shifty eyes or their skimpy, flesh-toned tails, but it never fails that if I see one, my heart skips a beat and I’m left panting, my skin white as a fresh sheet of paper.

Mice, to me, have long been a symbol of filth — not just in the rodent world, but for humans, too. After all, when a person imagines a house with mice, invariably it’s one of those distressed places, something you might stumble upon if you were a wary travelers in a movie about the gruesome deaths of wary travelers. They’re the scavengers of domestic life, hiding in the walls and ceiling like vagrants scraping to get by. That’s a far cry from the cute, big-eared scamps of Jerry the Mouse and Mickey, who, at face value, were cute and seemingly free of communicable diseases. No, mice in the real world helped spread little things like, say, the plague, and thusly should never have made it onto Saturday morning cartoons.

My dislike for these creatures stretches back to when I was young. As a child, I was messy. That’s not to say that I was unclean, but when it came to keeping my room organized, the task of picking up my toys always lost to other activities. Namely, anything other than picking up my toys. One of my most vivid memories is of me, eight years old, sitting on my bed one afternoon. My bedroom floor was so bad that I could only see the blue carpet in little patches, like I was looking down through the canopy of the rainforest, and to get from my door to my desk it was necessary to train like a football player navigating a series of tires.

That day, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, playing with some toy action figures of the superhero variety — probably Spider-Man or Batman — when I glimpsed something small and sickly gray move in between a stuffed animal and a plastic toy car. I started, flinging myself backward onto the center of the bed, and I wondered if I had really just seen what, to me, might have been a monster. Only after carefully scanning the floor did I creep off my mattress and head for the kitchen, where my mother was washing last night’s dishes.

I told her what I’d seen, but she didn’t seem to share my concern.

“Do mice bite?” I asked.

My mind was infested with visions of the vague little creature suddenly appearing at my bare feet, opening its mouth to reveal impossibly oversized fangs not unlike those of a python or a tiger. It’s eyes were a harsh red. Something like that would hiss as it lowered its head.

“It’s not going to bite you,” my mother said, not looking up from the sink and the mound of dishes waiting to be scrubbed.

“Are you sure?” I asked. The possibility of attack seemed inevitable, just like in any number of low-budget creature features my dad and I found on late-night cable. Never in those movies did the mutant crocodile or the irradiated scorpion simply waltz by. For all my mother knew, what I saw might not have been any normal mouse.

Ignoring the immediacy in my voice, my mother sloshed around for a handful of silverware. The lint-colored dishwater looked similar to the shade coloring my mouse. I imagined it having emerged from the dirty water, and now it might be back in there, waiting for the perfect moment to strike at my mother’s bare, water-wrinkled hands.

“You know, it’s not a bad idea for you to clean your room. Maybe there wouldn’t be any mice if you kept your stuff picked up,” she said, draining the sink and refilling it with fresh suds. This was how she operated; never a direct assault, but rather a sly pincer attack of guilt that made everything seem, clearly, like it was your fault.

I returned to my end of the house after an extended stay in the safer, cleaner living room, and with my mother’s suggestion stuck firmly in the back of my head, it only took me another five years to start keeping my room in order.

Now, in my twenties, I’ve developed a healthy, recurring obsession with cleaning. It surfaces randomly — most often at night — and I’ll find myself shaking open a trash bag or two and going through my room, hunting down random things to throw away or give to the local Salvation Army drop box or Goodwill. Sometimes I’ll get a pressing desire to clean the soap scum from the shower walls and doors, while other times it might be the little mud stains on the dining room floor that set my mind to cleaning.

It might be just another specific aspect of my personality, like how my television volume or car’s air conditioner must be set upon an even number, or how my shoes must be matched up and sitting side by side, but I sometimes have to wonder if it might be something more. Maybe it’s a subconscious attempt to keep the mice out, and by extension push the old me away.

In any case, a few weeks ago I started hearing the unsettling scratching sounds in the ceiling above my bedroom, and it reminded me of that moment when I was eight. And as I sat in my desk chair and looked around my room, I noticed little pieces of evidence showcasing my failure, once again, to keep things tidy. There were the piles of dusty books stacked between my bed and desk; wedged beneath my keyboard was a hoard of plastic bags I’d been saving for an event that I couldn’t anticipate or even specify. And to look beyond my bedroom door to the kitchen, the living room, and (oh god) the bathroom was to invite the same feeling of insurmountable dread that people must feel when all hope seems lost.

This never would have happened ten years ago, I thought. Back when my mother was alive, our home was near spotless. As it is now, the cleanest part of our house, thanks to rainfall, has to be the siding. Inside, it’s just my father, brother, and me, and the place is like a dormitory at a particularly third-rate institution. Our living room looks like we’ve either just moved in or are in the process of moving out, and in either case it would appear that we’ve decided to do so without the aid of boxes. Our dining room table sags under weeks’ worth of junk mail and spare change, and the kitchen has enough used dishes spilling out of the sink that, just in case anyone comes over, I’ve already forged a lie about having thrown a dinner party the night before.

Listening to the unsettling sounds above me, my first instinct was to go for a trash bag. Instead, I stayed sitting, dwelling on the scrape of tiny feet, for what might have been twenty minutes. All that time I wanted to blame my brother and father for letting things slip into chaos, but still I couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty about my own faltering attempts to keep things tidy. I glanced toward the hallway leading into the kitchen. A flash of something small and gray darted from my bedroom door into my open closet. Without thinking, I jerked my feet up off the floor. I had to wonder what frightened me more: the fact that mice were in my house, or the idea that, somehow, I’d allowed them back in? At heart was I still some slovenly child?

Looking at the pile of old magazines spilling from beneath my bed, I had to admit it was true.

I swore to myself then that I’d do better. My head felt heavy with the thoughts of daily rituals involving not just the occasional emptying of the trash can but of befriending the mop bucket and bottles of Pledge. I would strap on kneepads and scrape away every bit of dirt and grime in the crevasses of our kitchen and dining room linoleum. Reasoning that a clean house equaled a rodent-free house, I let my fear and hatred of the mice carry my ambitions. I uncurled myself from my chair and forced my feet to touch the floor. Trash bags wouldn’t cut it, I thought; besides, it seemed crazy to go rifling through piles of plastic bags and old clothes, perfect hiding places for a little pack of mice ready to attack me. I’d stick to safer things, like vacuuming.

Considering that they live in the walls, I’m not entirely certain what I expected a shiny kitchen floor to do. Really, I guess a mouse couldn’t care less about the condition of the carpet he’s slinking around on. Still, the cleaning made me feel better. In the end, though, it was my brother, Matt, who took the swiftest action against the mice. While I brought to the fight brooms and scouring pads, he had a thirst for blood. And so, armed with package after package of mousetraps, our kitchen slowly transformed into what could only be described as a minefield.

As the rooms of the house steadily, slowly, transformed back into some semblance of their old selves, I allowed myself a small sense of accomplishment. The mice weren’t gone, and things weren’t perfect, but they were getting there. Until then, I would sit there at my desk, rocking gently back and forth, or simply lie in bed, waiting for the harsh snaps of the metal bars springing down, each one a reassurance that everything would soon be back to the way it once was. Soon we would have a slate just as clean as the gleaming promise of our better future.