Magical Thinking

by Augusten Burroughs

  I wasn’t even halfway finished reading her list and already I wanted to fire her. “Natural-fiber broom (no nylon bristles), Handi-Wipe brand reusable wipes (no paper towels . . . think of the waste!!!!), save all your newspapers (I use them to clean the windows), lemon juice, salt, white chalk, plain steel-wool pads (no S.O.S.), olive oil (for the care of your fine wood furniture).”

  I’m willing to cut people a lot of slack, but I draw the line at a greasy coffee table. It was bad enough that she was going to be cleaning my apartment with condiments. I did not want my furniture slathered in salad dressing.

  Still. With my jaw clenched, I bought almost everything on the list, including the cheapest white wine I could find. I even took the subway uptown and bought her a pair of cotton gloves for twelve dollars.

  When I got home, I checked the paper to see what movies were playing the next day. Unlike Brad, I didn’t want to hang out in my apartment while my cleaning lady prepared lunch on my floor.

  On Sunday at eleven, Debby arrived red-faced, and whether this was from climbing the stairs or from a morning Bloody Mary, it gave her a healthy glow. “You’re so on time,” I said with a fake smile, irritated that she had insisted on getting to my place before noon. On Sunday.

  “Time is money,” she said.

  Never would a cliché prove to be more prophetic.

  “Well, I’m just gonna take off for the day. I figure I’ll see a movie and then go to the office and do some stuff there.”

  She smiled. “Did you get the items on my list?” But her eyes were narrow, not the eyes that belonged with a smile.

  I smiled back at her, but in a way that suggested I might be withholding something. “I sure did.”

  “Everything?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding my head.

  She looked surprised. Apparently, she was accustomed to experiencing a certain percentage of rejection.

  “Well, except the olive oil,” I said. “I just can’t, you know, have everything all sticky.”

  She looked horrified. “Oh, no! But that’s the most important thing on the list! It’s wonderful. It’s not greasy or sticky or anything. You’ll love the way everything comes out, I promise.”

  “Well,” I said, now with a little shrug and apologetic smile. “It sounds nice. But I didn’t pick it up.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I saw a little food store downstairs. I’ll just get some in there.”

  I smiled. “That sounds fine.”

  “But I’ll have to charge you for the time.”

  “But it’s just downstairs,” I said, my smile frozen, now just the memory of a smile.

  “I know that,” she said in the weary tone one might use with a telemarketer. “But it takes away from the cleaning. I have to stop everything I’m doing, then go downstairs, then select a brand of oil, then pay for it, then put my money away and come back upstairs. It’s not like Bewitched, where I can just wrinkle my nose.”

  She wrinkled her nose, and it made her look like one of the singing Lollypop Guild munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.

  I didn’t want to argue with her over fifty cents’ worth of her time. “Whatever you need is fine.”

  “Great,” she said, suddenly, incredibly happy. It was unnerving the way she could go from cool efficiency to sarcastic to sweet within the space of thirty seconds. I found it very manipulative and controlling. It put the other person constantly on-guard. And it was extremely intimidating, because you never knew when she was going to snap.

  I made a mental note to refine these skills within myself.

  Six hours later, when I returned, I was greeted at the door—and this before it was even opened—by the overpowering smell of vinegar. What were my neighbors thinking? That a douche-obsessed woman with a gigantic, three-foot vagina lived next door?

  I unlocked my apartment and stepped inside and was nearly knocked over by the stink. But when I turned on the light, I was pleasantly stunned. There was an actual luminosity to the room. I could tell, even from the distance of the doorway, that everything was utterly spotless. The floor, which was a standard-issue Manhattan-apartment parquet wood, glowed exotically. It was so generic, I’d never even noticed it before. And suddenly the grain of the wood seemed somehow illuminated.

  It must have been her olive oil.

  I walked through my small apartment and was impressed over and over by how immaculate everything was. Up to a certain point. Because as my eye traveled up from the lustrous floor and past the height of the doorknobs, I noticed that things didn’t seem quite so spotless. For example, the window ledges were clean even inside the corners, where nobody can ever get at the grime. And the window glass itself was as clear as air. But not the top window. It had been swiped but not polished clear, like below. There were streaks. And the mirror, too, that hung above the sofa. Here it was more obvious, a line dividing the top half from the bottom. Spotless on the bottom, filthy with fingerprints above.

  I checked the bathroom. Toilet? Yes, you could proudly offer it to your guest’s dog to drink from. But not the shower head.

  And when I looked very close—in between the tiles, packed into the edge between the medicine cabinet mirror and frame—there was white powder. Which could only be baking soda.

  And then there was that smell. While the apartment—at least from the waist down—was clean, the vinegar was making my eyes water.

  Still, I decided, it was probably worth it. Surely by tomorrow when I got home from work, the fumes would be gone. And what did it matter that the apartment wasn’t so clean up top? Most of the dirt was down low, anyway. Dirt fell, it didn’t rise.

  So, I decided, Debby had done a pretty good job considering. Considering, of course, meaning considering she only cleaned as high as she could reach. Maybe I’d bring this up to her next time I saw her.

  Then I saw her bill, handwritten and placed in the center of my kitchen counter. “Hello Augusten. I hope you find the apartment to your liking. The floors were very dry and absorbed two bottles of extra-, extra-virgin olive oil. Because of the added time applying the oil to the floor and the damage to my already bad knees, I’ve had to charge you an additional forty dollars, in addition to the twenty-three dollars for the oil and shopping time. See you next Sunday! Debby.”

  Two hundred and fifty-three dollars for an apartment that was exactly half clean?

  Was she insane? Grandmother or not, she was a thief.

  All week long, I found myself trapped in a paradox. While I was tempted to be extra-sloppy and leave globs of toothpaste in the sink, clothes hanging everywhere, and empty food cartons all over, I knew that I would be punished for this. Debby would charge me extra. On the other hand, if I didn’t do anything, she wouldn’t know how upset I was over her bill.

  I was distracted at work, obsessing over it. And in the end, I decided that at least I would bring up the issue of the half-clean mirror.

  So the next Sunday, I made sure I was there, waiting for her.

  Debby arrived at ten and was startled to see me standing in the doorway. She had obviously expected to find me gone for the day, so she was munching comfortably on red licorice twists. “Oh!” she said. “Hi there.”

  “Hi Debby,” I said, cheerful. “I just have one little thing to ask.” I figured “ask” was the right way to put it. Make her a part of the process. Make her feel involved. I walked over to the mirror and pointed at the glass. “I noticed?” Again, raising my voice in a question, my smile firm on my face. “I noticed that the mirror looks really beautiful.”

  She smiled, but then as I continued it reversed into a frown.

  “But only from the center down. The top of the mirror is dirty, Debby. And it’s the same with the windows. It’s like you only cleaned half of everything. The lower half.”

  She looked at me and asked, “Are you criticizing me for being a short person?”

  Instantly, a vision of myself on Court TV flashed in my mind. “No, of course not,” I said. �
��I’m just saying that I’d prefer it if you could clean the entire mirror, and not only the lower portion. If you have to use a chair to stand on, that would be fine.”

  “Use a chair? To stand on? What exactly are you saying?” She shoved the package of Twizzlers into her jacket pocket. She clenched her teeth, and I saw the muscles in her jaw work, like she was chewing cud.

  “I just mean that if you’re not tall enough to reach the tops of things, please use a chair.”

  Suddenly, she smiled. “You know what? That’s a great solution. Thanks. I’ll do that.” She removed her jacket and hung it over the arm of the sofa. “Thanks for the tip,” she said, but without any trace of sarcasm.

  Two could play at her devious little game. “You’re welcome. I’m glad I could help.”

  And I left.

  That evening, I decided to call Brad. I told him about the list and then about the bill and how she added on all this money we didn’t agree to. I told him about the weird thing with the chair. He was silent for a moment, and then he made this little spitting sound.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Nothing, I was just eating a grape while you were talking, and I spit the seed into an ashtray.”

  “Watch out, Debby’s going to charge you twenty bucks for that.”

  “You know,” Brad began, “I believe she’s eating things.”

  I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t say anything else so I prodded him. “What do you mean? What’s she eating?”

  He exhaled into the phone, like it was extremely difficult for him to hold the receiver to his ear and operate his mouth at the same time. Brad was very handsome, with dark hair and strong features. He even looked privileged. “What I mean is that I think she’s stealing food. Last night, I had some leftover Chinese food in a box in the refrigerator that I was going to eat tonight. And when I opened the container, there was only a tiny bit left.”

  “Maybe you ate more than you thought,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Impossible. I portion control very carefully. I had precisely half a container left and then tonight just a smear across the bottom: a noodle or two and a tiny shrimp.”

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked, curious to know if he was going to fire her over this. He was accustomed to firing the help. He might even be at a stage where he enjoyed it.

  “I’m going to try an experiment,” he said. “To see for sure.”

  A week later he called me back with the results. “Well, I got confirmation. Debby’s stealing food. I know for sure now.”

  “What do you mean? How?”

  “I ordered a container of shrimp chow fun because at least I know she likes shrimp. Then I left it unrefrigerated for two days, I hid it in the closet. Then I put it back in the refrigerator, full, and that night when I checked, it was almost empty. She called in sick the next day.”

  What a brilliant idea. If I did the same thing, would she become suspicious? And would it be wrong to do it just for fun?

  “So are you going to fire her?” I asked him.

  “Oh, no. I’m enjoying her too much. She’s become my hobby.”

  As the weeks passed, I became consumed with work. They handed me an additional account, on top of the three I already had. Now, I truly had no time for myself. I couldn’t even pick up my dry cleaning because they were always closed when I came home at ten. And I was working every weekend, too.

  I became more and more dependent on Debby. An extra day here. A new errand there. Gradually, cunningly, she had wormed her way from “housecleaner” to “personal assistant” all the way to “psychological crutch.”

  It started with the closet. One Sunday when I came home from work expecting her to be gone, she was still there. “If you gave me some money, I could really transform this closet. I could super-organize it, and you’d have so much more room. I could install a storage system where you could keep your shoes, your socks, your bills, and paperwork.” She outlined a dazzling wire shelving plan that was sure to simplify my life.

  “How much?” I asked. I was quite familiar with her ways by now. We’d worked out a very specific cleaning routine, and if it deviated by so much as one extra glass, I would pay. With Debby, everything came at a price. Tighten up those annoying doorknobs? Thirty dollars. Have that slip-covered sofa repaired? Two hundred twenty. You know, freezers need to be defrosted: fifty dollars, please. And I was buying enough salt each month (“Works wonders on mold!”) to seize the heart of every retired snowbird in Florida.

  Debby looked at the closet, then back at me. “I checked. The system I have in mind is four hundred and change. I figure it’ll take me two days to install it and then get all your belongings put away. Let’s call it an even six hundred.”

  “Fine.”

  “Done.”

  And she was gone.

  A week later, I was out six hundred dollars, but I knew where my shoes were.

  By this time, I was using Debby to take care of all the day-today tasks that a person normally takes care of himself, with the exception of wiping my ass. But how long before I was paying her for that, too? And what would she charge?

  All the extra money from my raise was going to her and then some. And what did I have to show for it? A very small, half-clean apartment, minus one chair, which Debby said broke when she tried to stand on it. And which I suspect she smashed intentionally.

  “I could help you find a larger apartment,” Debby told me one Sunday. “You’ve outgrown this space. Face it: you’re gonna need more suits, and with all the travel you do, you’re gonna need more luggage.”

  My apartment was too small, and in the back of my mind, I’d been toying with the idea of looking for something larger. The trouble was, I didn’t even have time to check the paper for listings, so there’s no way I could actually look for an apartment. Where would I find the time?

  If nothing else, Debby had time. And for a little extra money, Debby’s time could be mine, split with Brad of course.

  So in two weeks, she was twelve hundred dollars richer, and I had the lease for a one-bedroom apartment on a tree-lined street in the West Village.

  “But Debby, I really don’t want to live in the West Village,” I told her.

  “Of course you do,” she said. “It’s a beautiful area, and it’s on your subway line. No, you should absolutely be in the West Village. Besides, it’s a done deal. There’s no backing out now. Sign the lease, Augusten.”

  I wanted to tell her to find me a place in the East Village or uptown somewhere. But I was afraid of her. I felt kidnapped. I signed the lease.

  Then there was the problem of moving and packing and unpacking. “The moving company packs everything,” I told Debby. She’d offered to pack my apartment herself for a thousand dollars to make sure nothing got broken. “Moving companies are notorious,” she warned. “They break everything, especially the Jews, who are really sloppy. You should really have me do it.” But I couldn’t afford to have her do it. As it was, I was living paycheck to paycheck.

  But she did talk me into letting her unpack the new apartment. I was going to fly to L.A. in a week to shoot a contact lens commercial, and we decided she would use this week to put my life back together. Although I wondered, how will she know how to arrange the furniture? Where to put everything?

  Ours had become a complicated relationship. I was dependent on her, and she knew it. She was a swindler, and knew that I knew.

  “How much?”

  “Nine hundred, and I’ll have everything unpacked and put away.”

  We decided that I would simply leave nine hundred dollars in cash on top of a box in the living room. When I got home, I’d be able to relax in my new apartment on a tree-lined street in the West Village, where I never wanted to live.

  By now, Debby had her own set of keys to my old apartment, so before I left for L.A., she needed a set to the new place. I was tempted to deny her and take my first step toward freedom. Only I didn’t have the chance. W
hen I handed her the set of keys I had made she said, “Oh, I already got mine. Actually, I kept the originals and gave you the copies I had made. See? I think of everything.”

  “Yes, Debby. You do.”

  “That reminds me, actually,” she said. “I need twelve dollars for the keys.”

  Actually, it turned out to be a good thing that Debby had keys. I was running late on the morning I was supposed to leave for L.A. Because all my stuff was still in boxes, I had to tear everything open to find what I needed for the trip. Checking my watch, I saw that if I didn’t leave, I was going to miss my flight. So I carefully fanned nine hundred dollars in cash on top of the largest box in the living room. I slung my bag over my shoulder and grabbed the doorknob. It came off in my hand. The knob on the other side of the door fell to the hallway floor outside my apartment.

  Surprised, I poked my finger through the hole that remained in the door and tried to pull the door toward me. It didn’t budge. I was trapped in my apartment.

  This seemed so impossible that I laughed. Surely, I could not be locked inside my apartment.

  But the door wouldn’t budge.

  And I was going to be late.

  But there was a fire escape. I’d never used one before, but it had to be easy because even drunk squatters were supposed to be able to save themselves.

  So I opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape, wondering if this was really going to work or if I was going to fall to my death.

  But actually, it did work. I was able to climb down to the bottom of the fire escape, where I then had to unhook the ladder extension to make it all the way to the ground. The iron was rusty, and I worried that I might cut myself and then get tetanus. Then I was on the sidewalk. The trouble was, I couldn’t get the ladder extension back up in place. And my window was open. Anybody could now just hop up onto the ladder and climb into my apartment. There would be nine hundred dollars fanned out on a box waiting for them.

  On the corner was a lesbian bar with a pay phone. I used the pay phone to call Debby and explain the situation.