Housebroken

by Laurie Notaro

  Then I posted a picture of my office on Facebook, and people freaked out. Yeah, it was a little messy, mainly because one of my stacks had fallen over onto the floor the week before last and made it look way worse than it was. People called me a hoarder and told me to “get your shit together.”

  “My shit IS all together,” I commented back. “ON that table. That is exactly what I am showing you!”

  And hoarders, by the way, make paths. If you don’t have a path to get to your hoarder table, you are legally not a hoarder. You’re a collector. And it was plain as day that I could walk up to the table and touch anything on it as long as I didn’t mind stepping on a couple of books and some dishes, which was awesome, because I had been looking for them.

  I have to say that I was surprised at most of the reactions and comments about the picture; I have written about the archeology of cleaning my room in one of the books, surprised at what I was finding, layer by layer; that I once discovered the remains of a dead woman in my scary room; and that I hands down beat the DEA when they attempted to search my house for drugs and actually gave up halfway through my closet. I wasn’t making any of that stuff up. So how could people be so shocked when they saw a picture of the actual thing? Even my editor, who has gone over a majority of my writing with a fine-tooth comb, wrote back “Yikes!” when she saw the picture.

  Did no one believe me besides my mom?

  Maybe I am messier than the average messy person, I thought. Maybe my messiness is so awful that people tend to think I am exaggerating. Even my husband thought I was blowing the situation out of proportion when we began dating until, as he tells the story: “I went to put beer in your fridge and there weren’t any shelves. Everything was in a big pile on the bottom, accented with bits of broken glass. You said to just put the beer on top. I had to talk myself out of fleeing immediately.”

  The good news is that while quite overstuffed, my fridge now has all of its shelves still intact, but the bad news is that if I was in my twenties again, making seventy bucks a week, and all of my refrigerator shelves broke one by one, I still wouldn’t replace them.

  Anyway, I got the Tidy book, the book that can make anyone Tidy and promises to be foolproof. Everyone who knows me has been telling me to get that book, so I stuck through it after the author professed that she started reading home and lifestyle magazines when she was five, though I did roll my eyes. When she asked the question, “Have you ever been unable to study for an exam the night before and found yourself tidying instead?” I shook my head, and a crumb from the chocolate muffin I was eating tumbled out of my mouth onto the floor when I answered, “No, I usually found myself drunk instead.”

  I pushed through the part where she claimed, “A messy room equals a messy mind,” and sighed slightly. And when she stated, on page thirty-one, that “when it comes to being tidy, the majority of people are lazy,” I laughed a little.

  Further on, when she suggested that you ask each and every object if it sparks joy, I thought that I might finally have a good reason to dump my elliptical machine, but I did walk over to my craft table and clear my throat.

  “Dress pattern from 1939 with the Peter Pan collar, inverted-V bodice, and poufy little sleeves, do you bring me joy?” I asked, holding it up, and then I giggled. “Of course you do! Especially when I make you up in that gray-plaid seersucker in the fabric closet right there, or the pale-pink silk on the silk shelf, or that wonderful floral voile that I got in New York. Of course you bring me joy! That was a silly question!”

  It was such a waste of time that I didn’t bother asking the other fifty-three patterns on the table the same thing.

  “Empty Altoids box,” I queried. “Do you bring me joy? Of course you will, once I make a little circus diorama in you with paper cutouts of flying girls and prancing horses! And then I’ll make a little theater out of this empty Altoids box, and out of this one I’ll make a little travel-sized sewing kit.”

  I moved on. “Random Styrofoam egg-shaped thing, do you bring me joy?” I asked, then paused. I was not sure.

  “I’m going to bring you a shitload of joy when you realize you need me to make a spur-of-the-moment doll head and you’re happy that you didn’t purge me because you also purged the forty-percent-off coupon you got from Michaels yesterday. Idiot,” the egg-shaped thing shrieked at me.

  “By god, you’re right!” I exclaimed. “You get to stay!”

  Then I looked at all of the other things on my table. Vintage velvet ribbon. A thimble my friend Louise brought back from England when she went to the Alexander McQueen show. A dupioni purse I was halfway finished with. A scattering of antique jet buttons. An assortment of sculpted doll heads I hadn’t painted yet. Scraps of the softest leather that waited patiently to be made into purses someday.

  “AAAAA­AAAAA­AAAAA­!” I screamed, unable to keep it in. “I am bursting with joy! I love all of my things!”

  Nevertheless, I continued on in the book, and got to the part where she undresses each night and thanks her clothes for making her productive and helping her accomplish a lot.

  Um.

  But I tried it. If it would help me hang up my dirty clothes, so be it. The first night I said to my shirt, “I’m sorry I got so fat I ripped your arm seam out. I’m sure that hurt.”

  The second day I said to my dress, “I’m sorry I peed a little in you today. But I’m at that age when we need to expect that from time to time.”

  And on the third day, I told my vintage green sweater, “I’m sorry the saag paneer didn’t make it all the way to my mouth and dropped right on the boob portion of you. It will probably be a while before I try to get the stain out, but with a boldly placed brooch or if my hair grows six more inches, I’ll probably wear you again.”

  Then the Tidy lady wrote how she was shocked when one client had an unbelievable eighty rolls of toilet paper in his house. I glanced sideways and said to myself, I am looking at that right now. No way I’m letting the apocalypse go down without at least eighty rolls of Charmin blue in my direct line of vision.

  But when I got to the part where she talked about throwing away books that hadn’t been read, I had had enough and closed the book. Those words are nothing short of the rantings of a lunatic. Madness. Enough, I thought, enough. Tossing books you’ve never read is not just a sin, it’s a crime, one worthy of capital punishment. Frankly, if I walk into your house and you don’t have two hundred books somewhere that you haven’t read yet, I don’t trust you. I don’t want to know you as a person. I barely believe you are human. But if you don’t have the capacity to want, if you lack the urge to find out, if you’re not curious enough to explore the stories you don’t know yet, or what is in the book that you brought home for whatever reason, I have to say this is the point where I believe civilization stops, curls up in a ball, and dies a dull, boring, very tidy death.

  And I want no part of it. Or your magically tidy house, which, by the way, I find lifeless, a shell, a corpse of something probably once vibrant and bursting with things to make, read, touch, feel, smell, and explore. She’s a kook, I finally determined, and I suspected it all along. I had already read about her texting goodbye to an old phone when she got a newer model, and supposedly, the old phone got the text and subsequently died. She is a madwoman. If anyone told you that story while waiting in the checkout line at Safeway, would you change lanes? I would. You can kill someone with a Hershey bar or a copy of The Star, you know.

  If someone told you at Thanksgiving dinner that they thanked their clothes before hanging them back up again at night (and I’m not even going to address the part about hanging up dirty clothes), would you trust them with the knife to cut the pumpkin pie? I don’t even want to sit next to someone like that on the subway. I don’t want to even sit in the stall next to them, a thin piece of tin barely separating me from a woman who thinks magic consists of sucking the soul out of a house.

  I know why I am not tidy. It took reading that compact, perfect little book to find
out. It’s because I HATE it. To me, tidying every day is the equivalent of sitting down after dinner and figuring how much money you owe the IRS from the money you earned that day.

  I clean my house the way I do my taxes: in crisis mode. I wait until there is no alternative, and then I do it in one grand sweeping motion. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. This is the way I’m wired; this is the way I work. After reading the Tidy book, I am actually a little proud of how I operate. I don’t care that the author calls messy people lazy; I’ve written thirteen books under towers of bills, IRS notices, old catalogues, sales statements, and receipts and binders full of research. And I hope to write thirteen more.

  When I really boil it down, when I really think about it, I have to wonder, when I’m dead and gone, what do I hope someone puts on my headstone—Laurie Notaro, Messy, but Literally Laughed Herself to Death and Wrote Some Funny Books, or Laurie Notaro, Kept a Really Clean House and Paid Her Bills on Time?

  So, know this. I never want to be Tidy. Tidy is most likely an alcoholic, but not an awesome one. She’s the lady who you see in Rite Aid buying the five-dollar bottles of Chardonnay in a six-pack so that it doesn’t stain her teeth, and the one that never laughs when she’s drunk—only cries.

  That’s sad. And that is not the way I want to live my life, even if I can’t find the corkscrew in one of the five drawers I try first before eventually locating it under a couch cushion. And have to pull all of the dog hair off of it and let that float to the floor before I use it.

  And to the lady who wrote the book about Tidy, I know that you cried when you found slime on the bottom of your shampoo bottle one day in the shower instead of exclaiming, “Science is awesome!” and rinsing it off, but what makes me cry is that you will never know the joy of losing grapes in your office and making raisins, even by accident, and that the raisins you made taste really good.

  But understand, if you’ll excuse me, I have found one thing in my house that does not bring me joy—a perfect, neat little book that can never tell me how to be happy. With a big wave goodbye, I release you into the recycling bin.

  There. That was magic.

  Seriously. Who doesn’t want almost free food?

  And not only was it almost free, it was delivered to me, the meals of my choosing.

  I didn’t have to stand in line at a food bank, I didn’t have to plead my case to the local Department of Economic Security, and things on the menu included steak, fried chicken, and korma!

  All I had to do was buy a Groupon, and I’d get a week of HelloFresh meals for thirty-nine dollars, and if that meant that I didn’t have to go to Safeway for a week, count me in.

  Any excuse not to enter that vortex of mayhem otherwise known as Safeway is one that I will adopt, so I bought the Groupon and immediately signed up. The next week, on Wednesday, UPS would deliver an enormous package with each meal brilliantly organized in its own box with hipster ingredients (the tiniest jars of Sir Kensington’s mustard and ketchup, organic herbs in their own miniature clamshells, and spice mixes in adorable paper bags with cute labels) and instructions.

  As I unpacked the contents, my husband picked up the recipes and started looking them over.

  “Do you know what I think would be awesome?” he said after a moment.

  I looked up and shrugged.

  “If we cooked together,” he said. “I think it might be fun, and we could increase our couple coordination that way.”

  “You want to be a team?” I asked reluctantly. “You want us to be more coordinated?”

  “Yes,” my husband answered. “Don’t you think that would be fun?”

  “No,” I said blankly. “I do not. I already know how to cook, and you are a six-foot, two-inch man, and this is a very small kitchen. We have like three square feet here. And you take up four.”

  Aside from his André the Giant stature, my husband is a master at Man Cooking, which is just basically throwing together two or three ingredients within his field of vision and ingesting it before his brain can identify that he is swallowing things people won’t even eat in Africa. For example, he lays claim to the fact that he invented “Salsa Spaghetti,” which entails boiling some pasta and christening it with Taco Bell sauce. Another favorite is a sleeve of saltine crackers smashed in a glass of milk and stirred, otherwise known in the civilized world as “spackle,” and once, for a special treat on his birthday, he asked me to make him toast with canned vegetable soup poured over it.

  “We have very different cooking styles,” I replied. “I like to make things I enjoy eating, and you make things like you’re living by the river and cooking in a can heated by a Bic lighter.”

  “Well, maybe if we could work on our partnership skills, we wouldn’t have been such a—” he started, then suddenly stopped.

  “Oooooooooh,” I said, shaking my pointer finger. “I get it. I get it. This is all about the Kiss Kam, isn’t it?”

  My husband waited for a moment.

  “I’m just saying that if we had better timing together, we would have been more in sync and maybe that wouldn’t have happened,” he finally said.

  “I know you want to blame me for the Kiss Kam, but it was not my fault,” I stated without question. “That was not my fault.”

  My husband opened his mouth.

  “NOTMYFAULT,” I said loudly, and pointed my finger at him.

  We had been married twenty years, happily, enjoyably, and satisfactorily. We were proud of our accomplishment, we were pretty much good with our life and the choices we had made. We drank wine in the evenings, we made each other laugh on a daily basis, and sometimes to the point of urination, which I found particularly impressive until that same thing started happening when I was simply trying to get out of bed in the morning. In any case, things were good. We were married. We felt that we had married the right people. There were no regrets, there were no shadows of doubt.

  Until the Kiss Kam.

  We recently got season tickets to Eugene’s farm league baseball team, mainly because my husband discovered he likes baseball and I have always liked the dollar hot dogs and the twelve-dollar nachos. He bought us both baseball caps with the team logo on them. It’s a great reason to get out in the beautiful Oregon summer weather, the mascot is Bigfoot, and there’s always a chance an asshole is going to get hit in the head with a baseball. So far, that has come very close to happening, and the asshole was me.

  But apparently, there’s a lot of downtime in baseball and, thus, the reason for audience participation during those recesses. The corporations need their time (there is a Taco Race sponsored by Taco Bell, and a cheeseburger building race by Carl’s Jr.); then there’s the ring toss, in which little kids get a chance to win a free ice cream, and a tug-of-war that is usually hilarious, with a fat kid and a skinny kid on each end of the rope.

  And then there’s the Kiss Kam, which scans the stands for unsuspecting victims, looking for people who look like couples—which is a very dangerous proposition if you ask me, rife with the potential for a lawsuit. The camera then stays on the couple until they kiss.

  Usually, this is the cue for either one of us to get nachos, but before I could even reach down and grab my wallet, my husband gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Kiss Kam,” he hissed between closed teeth.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going to get nachos now.”

  “Tooooooo late,” he hissed again, and motioned his eyes toward the baseball field screen to see my largest nightmare come to life. There I was, reaching down in between my legs for my purse, my eyes wide as saucers and my husband frozen as if he had just had a stroke or Darth Vader had turned him into carbonite.

  “Holy shit,” I saw my mouth say.

  “You’re going to have to kiss me,” my husband struggled to emit.

  “Act like brother and sister,” I hissed back, the camera still on us.

  Apparently, patting someone’s leg i
ndicated a sibling relationship in my husband’s family, because that’s exactly what he did. The cameraperson who steadied his camera on us, however, saw that as a symbol of commitment and kept the lens exactly where it was.

  “It’s not working,” my husband slurred. “You’re going to have to kiss me.”

  “Oh god,” I said.

  “Kissssssss me,” my husband insisted.

  I was mortified. Despite my past, I am a bit of a Victorian who would really prefer to abstain from public displays of affection if at all possible. I felt my face get super hot, and I tried to figure out what to do.

  “Kissssssss me,” my husband hissed again.

  The pressure was enormous. I felt like I was getting sucked into a black hole and as the seconds ticked away endlessly, my husband finally turned toward me and I had no choice.

  In hindsight, I remember the incident frame by frame. The slow approach of my husband’s face coming toward me, the furrowing of my brow, the implication of reluctance, his lips reaching out toward mine, my lips puckering up toward his, coming together, closer, closer, closer until—

  BAM!

  The brim of his baseball hat hit me in the forehead, and the brim of mine hit his, and thus, reaching for one another but solidly stuck four inches apart, our puckery lips tried to reach the other side but only moved like little fishes in a bowl.

  And we stayed like that for moments, trapped in an accident of physics or something of that order that simple minds fueled by one-dollar hot dogs and twelve-dollar nachos cannot easily comprehend. Governments have fallen and people have died dramatic, notable deaths in less time. When my husband realized our blockage and finally took off his hat and we successfully made contact, two thousand spectators and several baseball players from Costa Rica had witnessed the gold standard in Kiss Kam failure, so horrible that people didn’t even laugh and simply grew silent, probably believing that they had, indeed, just watched a brother and sister kiss.