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.

Card Reader

At almost ninety years old, my great-grandmother doesn’t get out much. Instead, she relies on her family to do things for her. My Grandma Sharon, her only daughter and now the person with whom she lives, cooks for and takes care of her, while my father and great-uncle help out with the more technical and everyday issues that arise — things like insurance problems and TV repair. The responsibilities that fall upon my brother and me are of a simpler nature. Namely, we act as gophers, seeing as we have neither the inclination to do anything more or, in my case, the ability to understand things like Medicare documents. Rather, my brother, Matthew, and I run around to different places, picking up things like groceries or prescription medications, occasionally making the short trek up to our grandmothers’ house to bring in the mail and newspaper when no one is able to go out and get them.

My latest assignment from my great-grandmother, a smallish, white-haired woman named Inez, came back at the end of September, when her daughter’s birthday was just around the corner.

After she asked me if I could pick something up for her, she handed me a small white envelope with a folded piece of notebook paper and a small stack of cash. I didn’t open the piece of paper, remembering as how, several years ago, I’d been in a similar situation and had managed to make a complete ass of myself.

Back then, my great-grandmother had had me lean close to her so she could whisper in my ear what she had wanted me to pick up — again, for my grandmother’s birthday. All I could focus on was the particular aroma of her, that not-so-subtle smell of age mingled with liberal doses of Jovan Musk, and so I had only caught most of what she said.

When I stood back up, I thought I knew what she wanted me to buy, but in order to make sure, I repeated back to her what she had said.

In any other place this might’ve been okay, but as it were we were in my Grandma Sharon’s living room, and she was sitting right next to us. I watched my great-grandmother’s face slacken in surprise, and as she let out a slight gasp and looked at me with eyes that said, You imbecile, I felt myself grow smaller, like a turtle retreating into its shell.

This time there would be no ruined surprises, and so I left the paper folded, thinking that if I did take it out I might just read it out loud, word for word, in front of both of them.

After work the next day I drove out to the mall and picked out the various bottles of hand and body lotion I’d been tasked with procuring. I walked down to the other end of the building to try and find a greeting card. In passing shop after shop of trinket-peddling mom-an-pop stores employing teenagers who never seemed to look up from the text messages they were sending, I found myself before a Hallmark store.

This shouldn’t be too hard, I thought.

Before I stopped giving greeting cards to people, I was pretty fast at picking them out. My system was an efficient one: after finding the appropriate section for a birthday, holiday, or death, I would place myself before the selection and simply choose one at random. Sometimes things worked out and other times they didn’t, and although it was nice not having to wade through card after card, it was admittedly kind of sad losing so many friends after giving a Happy Birthday card with a picture of a girl to one of my guy friends, or, even worse, giving a grieving friend a Let’s Party! card some asshole had set down in the wrong section.

When I stepped inside the store it took no more than thirty seconds for me to feel out of place and more than a little uncomfortable. Awkward enough was the fact that I was the only man in the store, but I was carrying all my grandma’s lotions in a delicate white bag decorated with flowers and probably the most effeminate lettering one could ever imagine. Ordinarily that sort of thing wouldn’t bother me, but when the women around you look like they’ve just stopped in after their most bountiful pig slaughter or have donned some in-your-face God Loves You shirt, it doesn’t inspire the warm and welcoming feeling of inclusivity.

At least the store isn’t busy, I told myself, marching past pristine glass cases displaying overpriced chocolates and shelves holding decorative picture frames. There were maybe six or seven other customers there, plus the five workers I could see. The women shopping I was separated from by about ten to fifteen years, while the ladies stocking the floor and working at the cash registers looked to be well into their fifties and sixties. It felt odd being there. Not because they were women, but because everyone was so much older than me. They made me think of just how much time I’d wasted and all the things I’d yet to accomplish.

My English degree.

A finished novel.

Any reason to buy and wear a fine dinner jacket.

Were I to climb on top of a high-rise, perch myself on the edge of the roof, and threaten to jump, what might someone say to coax me down? I wondered as I searched the rows of cards for the birthday section. It was sad to admit, but it wasn’t like I had many proverbial irons in the fire, and so I was left feeling both small and insignificant, a failure of sorts except that I hadn’t really tried at much.

“Now hold on just a minute,” I told myself, suddenly thinking out loud. I tried to reason that there were things I was doing, tasks that I was trying to accomplish. But the best I could come up with was making it through all five seasons of The Wire, a television program about cops and drug dealers in Boston, or developing my appreciation for Joni Mitchell’s album Clouds, a collection of songs that, to this day, still makes me want to shoot myself in the head. Other than that, I was more or less drifting, and in all honesty, I thought, that was pretty pathetic.

Reading through the greeting cards didn’t really help either.

When I found the birthday section, I planted myself in the center of an aisle overflowing with bright pink signs, like I was standing before a giant rash. At first the notion crossed me that I could just do as I had before, and let luck and fate do the deciding. But then I remembered how my great-grandmother always fawned over an eloquent card, one that said exactly the right thing, and so I began leafing through them.

I must have been a sight: me, twenty-three years old, eyes sunken and tired after a day’s work, leafing through cards that read For Sister, From Sister and To My Goddaughter.

I started looking for and avoiding anything referring to mothers or sisters, and if I noticed my hand drifting toward something with the word “cousin” or “niece” I drew back like it might hold the plague. Instead, I tried to look for something flowery. Grandma Sharon could give my great-grandmother a card that simply read, You’re the Best! and she’d gaze at it, smiling distantly, as if remembering delicate moments, but if the card was one that gushed about moments together and lessons learned, she might break down and start crying. That was the kind of card she would want to give.

The verses inside the cards were all printed in delicate, elegant writing, as if pixies had calligraphed each and every one. Some of them were really quite beautiful to look at, but while the cards differed in content the meanings, more or less, stayed the same. “What would I have done without all the special, beautiful things you’ve done for me?” one card asked. Another read, “How can I thank you for all the magical moments we’ve shared?”

After ten minutes of looking I was skimming every other line. Each card was so sugary I felt worried I’d end up leaving the store with diabetes. Besides, I was tired and the fluorescent lights were starting to give me a headache. These cards were supposed to convey so much — all the heft and magnitude of how much the recipient meant to the giver — but all i could focus on was one question: Who are these cards based on?

What kinds of lives did the people who wrote these cards lead? True, I wasn’t a girl, but, being gay, I was the next best thing, and I didn’t think any daughter had those kinds of moments with her mother.

Looking at the cards, I was reminded of the feelings the women around me stirred up. If someone were to write a little blurb about me and all the special things I’ve done, I thought, they’d have to reach pretty far. I’ve never really done anything heartwarming, much less heroic or commendable.

“Great job playing that video game twice that one summer,” mine might say.

Or, “Thanks for all those times I thought you were going to do something special.”

I started moving through the cards, grabbing randomly and hoping that one would have something close to sensible. Feeling out of place here was bad enough, but to be confronted head-on about my obvious lack of value was too much.

Finally, I picked up a card with a little ribbon adornment. he background was a pine green color, and inside I read from a mother’s wistful point-of-view about the moments they had experienced together, the profundity and the power of them. After reading it once and then rereading it again to make sure it didn’t say anything completely stupid, I decided it would work. Grabbing its matching envelope, I made my way to the cash register feeling like someone on the run.

The woman who looked up at me from the cash register was short, at least a full foot and half below me, and from above her I could see the still-dark roots of her otherwise gray hair. She wore large glasses that made her smallish face seem exaggerated like a cartoon character’s, and as she went about ringing up the card I wondered if all of her possibilities were summed up somewhere in the rows and columns of heavyish single-folded paper.

“Ooh,” she said, picking up the card and setting it back down. She tapped it with her finger. “This one’s a good one. Pretty.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was in a hurry, but I meant it. It was nice, the feeling of accomplishment and recognition for having picked out a graceful, tasteful card. I felt as though I had succeeded at some difficult task.

But, in stepping away from the counter after the lady slipped my receipt into the little peach-colored bag, I caught a glimpse of the other customers, the ladies dressed in their God-fearing sweatshirts or their harshly-worn jeans. How foolish it was to think myself different from them, better even, I suppose, when I truly had nothing to show that might put me on a higher plane. On the way out, I noticed a small rack of cards with a sign above it. Blank, it read, and as I passed by the cards, empty like something someone had intended to start and finish, I realized that the cards right there, waiting, declaring nothing and able to boast even less, seemed to have been made just for me.

Big Spender

It’s not a recent occurrence, but money, much like boyfriends or good hair, never has a way of sticking with me. I’ve never been able to hold onto a bill of currency for more than a week — and that’s if my internet’s out or I’m in a coma — because once I have my hands on it, I start thinking about all the things that I’d like to have.

The list of offenses is a long one. If these things were necessities, then, sure, I’d say, why not? But as it turns out, each time I get a craving it’s for something that I neither need nor have any real use for: the new leather laptop bag for when I take my trips to nowhere; the full-sized digital piano awaiting the day it plays an entire song. Some of the lesser examples include armies of barely-used computer mice, each one just a little more stylish or feature-laden than the one before.

Ever since I was small, I’ve been prone to this kind of thing. I’ve always liked the rush of buying, the feeling of trading in those raggedy dollars for something new and shiny. And still, even now that the pocket-wrinkled bills of my youth have been replaced by little plastic cards, the desire remains the same. At the age of seven, I remember, I pleaded with my mother for the go-ahead to buy a Spider-Man action figure. “But I really want it,” I said, tugging at her hand as she tried to pull me out of the store.

“Don’t you already have one like that?” she asked.

I did. Wanting another didn’t make sense, but the six dollar bills in my pocket were screaming at me, a far cry from the earlier whispers that had first given me the idea. I’d gotten the bills from little chores done around my great-grandparents’ house, and though not inherently sentimental, the money, my mother thought, should have been kept and used for something like, I don’t know, feeding starving children or starting my own college fund.

In the end, though, facing a teary, blubbering child and store clerks rolling their eyes at a scene they’d witnessed more times than they could remember, she relented, and the elation I felt on the way home, tearing open the packaging like a starving man might rip through a sandwich wrapper, gave way three days later to the wish that I had some money for a new toy, a better toy. Something that would kick these twin Spider-Men’s ass.

When my brother, Matt, grew to be the age where he could start wanting things, I thought that together we might be unstoppable. The combined power of our desire to buy would overwhelm our mother’s defenses and render her powerless against us. Much to my surprise and dismay, I discovered that my brother was, in fact, a saver, the equivalent of a safety deposit box guarding its money, while I was a broken automated teller machine belching out dollar bills.

Long before he was able to get a job my brother would stash away his weekly allowances and the random, generous spurts of income our grandmother would grant us. Surely my parents, my mother in particular, thought this was spectacular. Finally! she must have thought, sighing as if heaving a heavy burden from her shoulders. Gruesome fears of taking me into a toy store gave way to dreams of Matt someday becoming an investor, of playing the stock market twenty or thirty years down the road from the stashes of dollars and change he kept beneath his bed or in his closet. “That’s good,” I would hear her coo when Matt told her about wanting to save up to buy something big. “Or I’ll just keep it,” he would sometimes say, “for later.” And I would watch as my mother melted.

To this day, my brother has an uncanny ability to keep himself from splurging, whereas I will find myself willingly setting down a much-needed tube of toothpaste in favor of a set of collectible Japanese Domo-kun figurines or a rhyming dictionary for when I one day pick up writing poetry. I can say, though it shames me, that I have gone without deodorant for the sake of a DVD box set.

There would be times, growing up, when I would look at Matt and wonder why he was saving up. Was it for the latest game console? No, he’d gotten that for Christmas. Was it a new TV? No, the one he had was fine. Was it some upcoming financial disaster I knew nothing about? Maybe, though it seemed both unlikely and unsettling that no one would have told me. Not knowing drove me insane, and so I began plotting ways to beat him at his own game.

In my college years I discovered the trojan horse of credit cards. It was nice being approved with my virgin credit ratings for what seemed like an instant surplus, a savings without the pesky detail of having to deprive myself. Three years later, under a mountain of debt and with nothing much to show for it aside from a pair of stonewashed Ralph Lauren jeans and a cozy country-style bedspread, I watched as my brother used cash to buy his own computer. Then, later, his new twenty-six inch flat-screen TV arrived, a nice addition to a bedroom already accented with video game systems bearing brands like Microsoft and Sony. As month by month I chipped away at the bills coming to our house like letters from an obsessive fan, I grew to envy him and the seeming ease with which he had it all.

When he was away at work or school, I would ransack his room, overturning his mattress and rifling through his desk drawers, looking like a madman for his cache of wealth.

It has to be here, I thought. Where is he keeping all of it?

I didn’t know what I would do if I found anything, though I was fairly certain I just wanted to see his money, to find out if he really was saving or if it was through some kind of magic that he was able to get all of this stuff. But, after what felt like hours of searching, I found nothing. In my mind I saw his wallet, then, stuffed beyond its capacity, his back pocket bulging like a tumor. Of course he would keep it on him. Angry and bitter, I returned to my room to tally up how many payments I had left before my seldom-used stereo system and the notebook computer with the failing keys were paid off. The answer was months, and I wondered how many other things my brother would be able to buy before I was able to scrape up enough dough just to put my car through a much-needed oil change.

By the time I was free from my debts, my brother was swimming in money, spending sixty dollars a pop on video games and, a few towns over, singlehandedly keeping a small paintball gun shop in business, while my car stubbornly refused to start on most days and I was forced to take out a loan to get a new one.

On the way home from the dealership, the weight of my financial responsibilities just starting to sink in, I rode with my father in silence. We had exhausted talk of the new car’s details — gas mileage, style, its little features — and now we concentrated on our respective roles: my father focusing on the road, and me thinking, How the hell am I going to pay for this? I might be able to turn tricks downtown if I were just a little more in shape, I considered, watching a string of fast food restaurants pass by. My stomach rumbled, but I told myself the hunger wasn’t there. Besides, the sooner I was out of the car, any car, the better.

At home, back in my room, I sat surrounded by the things that were finally, truly mine. I listened to the sound of my brother playing his video games, and as the sound of explosions rattled my walls, I took out a piece of notebook paper and jotted down the amount of the loan. Making note of my income felt like admitting I had some terrible illness; it left me feeling hopeless and, worse, poor.

Sitting there, portioning away paychecks I’d not yet received, I had to consider my ways: the gratuitous spending, the petty need to compete, and the consuming jealousy blinding me to everything I did have. I pushed back from my desk and looked around. Could this be enough? I wondered. And I told myself it was. If my bank account was any indicator, it would have to be.