As we explored, I barraged Jon with questions. I wondered if his mother’s hoarding emerged from her immigrant experience (she had come from Africa to London) and if attaching to objects was easier than to foreign English people . . . “Your mother is so petite. Is she afraid of losing her husband and being alone in this big space? Is she filling up her house prophylactically?” Jon chuckled at my blunt overanalysis. He didn’t know why his mother was a hoarder, but what ultimately stood out to me was that he was OK with it, with exposing his family’s craziness, aware and confident that his mother’s mess wasn’t him. Not even ashamed.
I’m not my mother’s house, I remembered. I was here, thirty years old, someone’s girlfriend in London. My mother’s mess isn’t me.
As we walked up the final flight of stairs, I felt amazed at the extraordinary coincidence that two children of hoarders had found each other and could no longer hold myself back. “My mother has stuff too!” I was panting. “Reams of it. Thumbtacks, onesies, laundry baskets bought on sale. Tupperware, Play-Doh sets, wall calendars from the late 1970s. My childhood bed is currently a warehouse for fax machines. My friends complain that their inheritances are being spent on cruises; mine is being spent on hole punchers. My mother’s house,” I confessed, pointing all around me, “is even worse.”
“Worse?” Jon stopped.
“Worse.” Now I worried I’d gone too far, that in coming clean I’d made a mess.
“Wow,” he replied after a pause. “I can’t wait to see it!”
As he opened an attic freezer filled with ten-year-old kosher turkeys, I suddenly understood. Like me, he had grown up in small pockets of affection surrounded by record players and hotel-shampoo collections. Our forthright rapport countered our worlds of hidden secrets. Being open about our past messes, even joking about them, helped clean them up. His successful detachment from his mother’s mishegas could help guide my own. My attraction to Jon was propelled by his ability to face the ugly and the odd, to accept it without judgment or fear.
But most of all, I understood that after three decades, I had finally found someone I could bring home.
• FOURTEEN •
BUILT-INS
Montreal, 2007
Jon once told me that his parents had never picked him up at an airport. I was going to do everything imaginable to make him feel at home here, in Montreal. He’s actually coming to meet my family. My brain froze over. What would he think? And they? Thank God he’d booked a room in a hotel.
I paced in the arrivals lounge, surrounded by layers of winter fabrics, all of us waiters playing bumper cars with our fluffed-out bodies. It was a particularly harsh day, gray and blizzardy, the snow rolling across the city so that two-lane streets had shrunk to one, vehicles nestling up to one another as they pushed in their own directions.
When Jon emerged, I gulped and waved.
“No fanfare?” he asked and kissed me. “Let’s go meet your family,” he said. “And let’s see how you drive.”
“Driving in snow is its own story,” I said, as I turned the key. “Get ready, bitch.”
As a warm-up, I took him first to Carlton, where Dad had convinced Eli to live with Uncle Moishe and keep an eye on him—and maybe to justify never selling this parental hideaway. Though Dad advertised it on par with the Mandarin Oriental, the building was infused with whiffs of urine, the pipes were rotting and the infrastructure was collapsing. Having said that, he had redone the flooring, and Eli had created a funky, retro-designed interior, which is why I felt more at ease showing it.
I parked in the snow heap outside. The temperature had reached minus twenty-five. I braced myself as I opened the door to the windchill factor, feeling the fragility of my small physique. The cold made it impossible to dawdle, so I ran up the snow-filled stairs. Jon was elated: the extreme frost, the unusual mounds of white, all an adventure. “I can’t wait to do some ice driving!” His mouth emitted streaks of steam.
“Hello?” I called as I opened the door to the upstairs flat.
“Hello!” Jon called up, giddy.
“Hi,” my mother’s and brother’s voices made their way down.
My mother?
I hadn’t prepared. There was so much to say, to warn Jon about, still. I’d planned to assure him: she was not the future me. I’m not her. Not her.
But Jon pushed in behind me and shut the door. I held my breath as I walked up the stairs. This was it. Well, I consoled myself, Mom is easier to meet than her house.
“Jon, so nice to meet you.”
“It’s brilliant to meet you too.”
They hugged. Full-blown, all-physical, total-contact embracing. I turned away, moved and scared by this breaching of boundaries.
“Let’s see this place.” Jon excitedly noted Eli’s guitar collection. I’d warned him that some rooms were disaster zones, but he happily pranced around the shining new parquet, leaving traces of dark slush, as if tracking his journey into my family.
“Ay, Jon,” I called, both annoyed and relieved that here, the mess was his. “Shoes off in Canada!”
“Oops, sorry,” he said, looking down. He slipped them off and went to chat music with Eli while I wiped up his marks. Jon had always been socially comfortable, the kind of person you could take anywhere. Even here.
“He’s friendly,” I whispered to my mother.
“Certainly!” She was smiling widely. Could they be getting along? Could he have simply taken my mother for who she was, despite everything? Was there no problem?
Thank you, Mom, I ESPed to her. Thank you for being so normal today.
• • •
AFTER A DAY of traipsing through piles of snow and Jon repeating that he couldn’t believe the city functioned as usual when people were skiing down the streets, we had fish at the diner with Dad. “Do you like him?” I asked when Jon went to the bathroom.
“He seems like the kind of guy I could hang out with,” Dad replied. “That’s all I can say,” which I took as my father’s closest admission of love.
But all this was only part.
Jon drove this time as we headed across town for the moment I’d feared my whole life. Bringing him home. We parked in the driveway.
I reminded myself of his mother’s Volvos.
“Jon!” My mother immediately greeted us at the door. “Come in.”
I shut my eyes as we entered, afraid of what I’d find, but was relieved and grateful to see she’d made attempts to tidy up. The boots and rubbers had been lined up on each side of the vestibule; the hallway leading to the kitchen was clear of the usual plastic bags stuffed with two liter Diet Coke bottles. The floor looked, at least, dirt free.
“Do you want a hot drink? Coffee? Tea? Juice? I have cheese Danish, cinnamon Danish, prune Danish–”
Prune Danish? “Mom.”
“I never met a Danish I didn’t like,” Jon said, heading straight for the kitchen, not even looking around. “It would be rude not to.”
My mother heaped pastries on the table (which had otherwise been cleared of crumbs—thank you). “How about pickles? Should I order Chinese? Wait! I have a cold pizza in the fridge.”
“Mom.” I glanced at Jon, who seemed content being fed. “I’m going to show Jon around,” I said, as soon as I saw him finish a pastry and before my mother could get another one in. I had to get it over with.
Jon followed me into room after room as I introduced him to the piles of laundry baskets, the commercial-grade stash of Manischewitz and newspapers dating back to the 1980s, when people still read newspapers. I tried to joke like he did, but the lines weren’t coming out. “Here’s the Chinese laundry factory,” I said, my tour de maison nowhere near as funny as his. Instead, I became earnest, trying desperately to prove that we had class. “Check out these Rosenthal dishes that my mom bought on sale in the seventies.” I opened a credenza door to reveal a mou
ntain of never-used factory-second plates.
“This is worse than my mother’s,” he agreed. “The great thing about you is that you make me feel like the family I come from is normal.”
My tour eventually landed in the basement, where my father had recently carved out a section for a single bed. His undershirts and pants were draped on every surface, like graying flags of surrender. I tried not to notice that the old pullout couch I used to crawl into at night was completely covered.
“Check this out,” Jon called. He was not examining my father’s frightening nest, but instead, excavating something from under a landslide of vinyl records. “This is worth keeping.”
He’d not run, but gone digging, and found my parents’ 1970s Danish modern teak dining room table. “We should refurbish this,” he said, as he fondled joints and felt surfaces, checked for inscriptions. He had not only accepted the junk, but had found a side of my parents that I had long forgotten about, a side that was stylish, worldly.
“Wow. Amazing how a sense of fashion can turn into this,” I said, gesturing around. “Scary.” But my own fear was diminishing, hearing his “we,” his commitment and acceptance. Like Evan, he had a domestic streak, but Jon found it charming—and not lacking—that I was not, as I called it, a domestic eater. A chance to try more restaurants! he’d happily conceded.
In any case, Jon was excited, blowing dust, pulling wooden legs out of the jumble, seeing value in the junk. Thirty years, and I can finally show myself, share myself. “A twentieth-century classic.”
That night, we slept at a chic boutique hotel that had a screenlike fireplace emanating two-dimensional flames. It was the first time I’d stayed at a hotel in my own city, never mind such a luxury room (Jon’s ability to self-soothe was extremely not Batalion). I was a part of here, and not a part of here. An inhabitant and a visitor. When I’d told my parents, they were fine with it. Maybe it was too much for them to host Jon too. Maybe they saw me, noted what I needed.
I breathed in the crisp white linen sheets. For five nights I’d been buried under my mom’s junk, and then Jon came and whisked me off. My Prince Churlish.
Before dozing off, I thought of his green travel toothbrush, perched in my bathroom. I knew, it fit.
• • •
“MY LEASE EXPIRES at the end of April,” I said to Jon over the phone two months later as I leaned on the pillars of the staircase at the Art Institute—the same staircase that had been the subject of an e-mail a few weeks earlier instructing everyone not to use it on a particular Tuesday due to a royal visit. “Who knows what will happen? The new landlords may want to evict me.”
“That sounds like a good time for you to move in here,” Jon replied, as I expected. For a while, he’d been hinting that he wanted me to (it would mean so much less time driving; so financially convenient; hey, move in here already) but I’d stayed quiet. Spending my life with someone, sure. Getting married, even, that I could now begin to vaguely see, a reality in the hazy distance whose contours were beginning to emerge as solid lines. But living together? And in his space with the golden calf? Still a mirage. He’d said he loved me, but I was scared. How could I—who had worked so hard, over decades, to painstakingly cultivate my own place, build my own walls—share them? I felt ready to merge my life, but my home?
“Let me think about it.”
And I did, for three hours, until on my way home I noted that my favorite local hole-in-the-wall bar, a dimly lit secret, overflowed with trendy twenty-two-year-olds.
Jon and I set a date: the week of my thirty-first birthday. We used the Volvos to move me, and were done six trips later—six trips during which I traversed the same streets as always, but this time, from a novel perspective. I’d been the young art history student on the bus, the aspiring comedian in the tube, and now I was a thirtysomething Jewish girlfriend in a car. On these new urban treks, I saw not cool pubs, but interesting ethnic restaurants; not single smokers congregated around inside jokes, but midcentury architecture. I no longer experienced the winding streets as dark and mysterious, full of potential and loneliness, intense with my raw inner life. Instead I saw traffic lights and alternate routes, litter and shaded benches, simple conversation.
I’d been in London for seven years—the figure of wholeness and renewal. Seven days of the week, days of mourning, years of sabbatical, of the fat and the skinny cows. In seven years, your body’s cells completely regenerated so you were an entirely new person.
• • •
“WHAT IS THIS?” I pointed to a drawer in Jon’s desk overflowing with old ticket stubs. Busy unpacking, with boxes of my own stuff piled like human-sized cardboard ghosts around me, I was flummoxed, caught off-guard. How had I not noticed this before? “Are these yours?” I called into the next room. Were there other things I hadn’t known? I’d never wanted to pry, to suffocate: but what else was concealed?
“Jon,” I called more loudly. Why wasn’t he coming? “Jon!”
Now he came running. I pointed in revulsion at the first drawer.
“Tickets to every gig I’ve ever been to,” Jon said quietly. “I love music.”
I pointed to another drawer. Paper bags. And another one—holy shit. Old empty boxes. Not just thousands of CDs, but cassette tapes. Pens to supply a small country. I felt nauseous. I’d thought we had no secrets. But Jon had hoarding tendencies.
He saw me go white. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t need this.” He immediately began emptying a drawer into the trash. “I can let go.”
I sighed with relief.
I’d traveled across the world to find a relationship that was familiar, like the ones I grew up in. But, I thought as I watched him dispose of designer shopping bags, one I could finally have some control over. One that had a logic to it, room for negotiation. “I want my own open shelving,” I said. “I need it.”
“I’ll call the contractor tomorrow,” Jon said. “We’ll make you some built-ins.”
Built-ins. Permanent, clean, steady. Punched right into the very foundation of the space. My childhood dream.
“And that part of the office is yours,” he continued. “I cleared those drawers.” He gestured toward a closet that I opened to find half empty. My clean, glass slipper. We both knew our baggage impacted those around us. He was giving me room to breathe.
“Thank you so much,” I said, turning up the volume on Jon’s stereo, even though I didn’t care for the song. I carefully placed my files in piles, respecting Jon’s already filled areas. Spaces create the people who live in them, but sometimes, to fit to their spaces, people have to morph too.
• • •
“BUT IT’S LIKE ninety-five degrees,” I whined to Jon. It was the one-year anniversary of our first date, that memorable evening where we fought the whole time and he ran for the train. He was taking me out to Jerusalem’s one nonkosher high-end eatery, and insisting I wear a cocktail dress that we’d picked out together a few months earlier. “I never wear dresses.”
“Please. For me,” he said, putting on what looked to me like exceptionally comfortable shoes.
After spending a good part of our relationship traveling the globe from Toronto to Montenegro, Liverpool to Chennai, Jon and I had ended up in Israel. It felt like the right time for us to spend a week here, in this whirring axis mundi, a place where it all met, the original foundation. Jon’s distant relative was having a bar mitzvah, and he’d always made staying in touch with his extended family a priority, which I liked. (I hadn’t seen my cologned relatives in years.)
We’d spent the day before wandering through the city of gilt and guilt, sightseeing in the old quarter, reminiscing about the visits we’d each made in our adolescence. I remembered the cool nights walking home from the Wall, and flirting with boys (or more like, fantasizing). He remembered arcades, and knew everything about Jerusalem’s churches—which I had never even seen.
“Can you just grab this?” Jon handed me a crumpled bag from Boots, an English drugstore. I’d seen him schlep it around before.
“I have to wear a party dress and carry your plastic bags for you?”
“For me,” he repeated.
Jon had informed the restaurant that it was our anniversary; they kept the champagne flowing. Due to migraines, he didn’t drink, so it all flowed to me. As did the more adventurous dishes, as did the bread, which I was picking at to avoid drowning in alcohol, as did the jokes that Jon was expertly cracking. Which is why I was surprised when he pulled a straight face.
“Where’s that plastic bag?” he asked.
“Oh, le plastique; très bag lady chic!” I was drunk, my shoes off under the table, my underwear digging into my bloated belly. I flung it over to him.
“Judy.” He lowered his voice.
I leaned in. “Yeeeah?”
“Remember a few months ago when I said I wanted to spend my life with you.” It was true, he’d mentioned it once on a holiday weekend when we’d been lounging in bed, passionately reminiscing about each meal we’d eaten that week.
“Yeeaah?”
From the plastic bag, he pulled out a velvet box.
I barely had the chance to sit up straight before he opened it. A ring.
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