Coming Clean: A Memoir (3 page)

“I’m Kimberly Miller.” I said quietly, and looked back at my class to see if anyone was looking at me. They weren’t.

In the hallway, the woman with the bangs told me that her name was Ms. Russo and that she worked for the school, and just wanted to ask me some questions, “If that’s okay?”

Not what I had been planning, but still better than coloring by myself. I immediately started going through my repertoire of crowd-pleasers in preparation to wow her and make her my friend; my dad had just taught me to spell “antidisestablishmentarianism,” which never failed to impress, so I could do that, and I was taking karate so I could perform my
kata
for her. And if there was room enough, I could show her what I was learning in dance school. She could then tell me how smart and pretty I was. This was going to be fun.

Ms. Russo and I walked through a part of the school I had never seen before. This was big-kid territory, and intimidating. The paintings that lined the walls here were neater; these were kids who had mastered the art of coloring within the confines of the lines or, even more awe-inspiring, without any lines at all. The unfamiliar setting and the fact that our conversation seemed to have hit a standstill started to make me antsy.

Our walk ended when we arrived at a small brick room with gray painted walls. Ms. Russo ushered me inside and sat across from me at the tyke-sized table, opened a manila folder, and as if on cue, smiled again.

With her knees bent high into her torso, Ms. Russo started
to ask me questions about life as a five-year-old. Did I know my address? Did I have a bedtime? Did I have any pets?

I answered, but with each question I elaborated a bit more, trying to get a conversation going:
Someone had been murdered on my block. I got to hold a newborn puppy once. In Alaska, nighttime can last for twenty-four hours, and Eskimos eat a lot of fat to stay warm in the winter, but my mom cut the fat off of my meat because we aren’t Eskimos.
But each time Ms. Russo would just smile and then curtly ask me another pointed question.

My efforts to impress her appeared to be failing miserably. And then the topic of siblings came up. “Yes, I have a sister. Her name is Sheryl.”

The more questions she asked about Sheryl, the more I told her.

I wasn’t sure how old Sheryl was. She was a baby, I guessed. She was often naked, I explained, because there was only one dress that fit her, and sometimes it had to be sacrificed to the greater good of my stuffed panda named Male Panda or one of my cocker spaniels.

Ms. Russo’s initial indifference toward me was transforming into undivided attention.

“Tell me more about Sheryl.”

“Dad puts her in the trunk when we go shopping,” I vented. This had been a point of contention in our family for some time now, or at least the last few weeks. I wanted Sheryl to go with me everywhere, but my parents wanted to stop going on Sheryl scavenger hunts when I would inevitably lose her somewhere.

It was obvious by her disapproving looks and spirited scribbling that Ms. Russo agreed with me. My parents were being completely unreasonable.

The more intently my new friend listened to my stories, the more I continued to divulge my exasperation toward my parents’ handling of my little sister.

“Faith urinated on her.”

“Who is Faith, Kimberly?”

“Our dog.” Ms. Russo was not keeping up with the conversation.

I told her about the long night Sheryl had spent soaking in a suds-bath in the bathroom sink and continued from there to air my most recent grievance: Sheryl had been taken away from me as punishment for stealing those toys from the nursery school.

My enthusiasm eventually waned. This wasn’t quite as fun as I’d imagined, and I didn’t want to be late for the milk lady, lest all the chocolate milk be taken. Ms. Russo walked me back to my classroom. She took my kindergarten teacher aside while I joined the rest of the class in playtime. I was sure she was explaining how gifted I was.

That day, when my babysitter came to pick me up from school, her infant daughter Kaitlynn on her hip, my teacher came running out and demanded to know if the little girl was Sheryl.

Within days of my meeting with Ms. Russo, the mood at home changed. My parents started fighting more, taking days at a time off from work, and cleaning well past the time that I went to bed. My father was messy. So messy I didn’t know the color of our carpets. Paper covered the dining room table, the couch, the bathroom floor. Old newspapers lined the floor of my bedroom. And now, according to my mother, someone was coming to the house to check on me and Sheryl, someone who would see how messy he was.

Our home was of the ticky-tacky Levitt variety. Every house
on our block looked the same—except we never opened our shades, our plants were a little more unkempt, and the neighbors never came over for a cup of coffee.

Our house was two stories tall, but the second floor was like a forbidden wonderland to me. We didn’t use it. In fact, I often forgot it was there. One room was dubbed the Bird Room because it was filled with birds: cockatiels, parakeets, and English budgies, all housed with another of their kind in arranged marriages, with the hope that nature would prevail and tiny featherless offspring would be produced. My parents would then sell the baby birds at local pet stores and flea markets. The brown carpets of the Bird Room were covered in bird seed, discarded feathers, and puffs of down that had come loose when the birds squawked and jumped around to protest the intrusion of their living space by the pesky humans who lived downstairs. I rarely went into the Bird Room—I hated the smell and the noise and the unaffectionate nature of the birds—and instead focused my upstairs adventures on the room next door: an abandoned bathroom where spiders had long woven their webs from the faucet and around the nozzles of the sink and bathtub. It was by far the most interesting of these forsaken spaces. The tub was lined with long-dried bars of soap and rusty razors. I liked to sneak up there with a fork and steak knife and practice my cutting skills on old bars of Ivory soap. I hated the indignity of my mother cutting all my food for me. I figured I’d watch what my parents did at dinner, practice, and then surprise them one night when I could premiere my newfangled ability to cut my own food.

The third upstairs room was by all accounts the master bedroom; it was the largest in the house, but my parents had moved out of it when I was born, taking over a downstairs bedroom
closer to my room. The only things that lived there now were a bed frame, a broken mirror, some newspapers from before I was born, and cat feces. It was the cleanest room in our house.

Our entire existence revolved around the kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms downstairs. The kitchen and living room took over half of the first floor and bled into one another, with the exception of a small aimless wall in the middle of the room. Against the dividing wall in the living room were a break-front that housed porcelain Lladró figurines, dishes we never used, and an old black-and-white photograph of my mother. When I first discovered this photo, I asked why we had a picture of Aunt Lee naked and hiding behind a pillow. My mother and her sister looked so similar even I had a hard time telling them apart, the only real difference between them being that Lee was tall and my mother tiny. When my mother defensively announced that the sexy young woman in the photo was her, an obsession was born.

I couldn’t imagine that my mother was ever the glamorous and coy woman looking back at me seductively while wearing nothing but a couch cushion.
My
mother wore her hair in a braid every day, had giant round glasses that dwarfed her skinny face and drank a glass of chocolate milk for breakfast every morning.
My
mother read
Madeline
in a French accent at bedtime and played my heavily scripted game of “mermaids” during bath time. The woman in the picture didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would do those things, and I wanted to know everything about her. When no one was watching, I would climb atop the piles of yard sale finds and yellowing newspapers that took up the majority of the living room to get to that picture, so that I could inspect it tirelessly for signs of the mommy
that I knew in the naked-pillow-wearing woman she once was.

There was a television in the living room, but because the three-seater brown couch with a tropical leaf pattern usually only had room for one adult at a time, most of our time spent as a family was spent on my parents’ bed.

The kitchen was the room in the house that changed the most on a daily basis. At least, that is, the kitchen table. The table seemed to be in a constant state of flux between clean and piled high with my father’s latest finds. My mother would indignantly tell my father that she wasn’t going to clean up after him but would crack after a week or so of family meals at the foot of their bed, and the table would be cleared off for a few weeks before the stuff could take over again.

My bedroom was next to my parents’. My mother couldn’t part with my crib when I outgrew it, and there was no room in the garage to store it, so it remained next to my twin-size bed. It became my de facto toy box; I would climb from my mattress over the wall of the crib to surround myself with the stuffed animals and dolls that made up the majority of my social life. At night, Cara, our German shepherd, would sleep under the crib. She had been doing it since my parents brought me home from the hospital.

My parents’ bedroom was the center of life in our house. We ate our meals there on strategically placed folding tables when the kitchen became too messy. Their bed rested in the middle of the room, but both sides of the bed had become storage for the piles of old newspapers, worn and forgotten clothing, and must-have purchases that never needed to be had, trapping the beautiful antique armoires that once held neatly folded sweaters
and carefully hung suits behind their mass. The surrounding trove only seemed to make the bed look bigger, as if it spread from wall to wall, the piles becoming makeshift closets and nightstands.

Inevitably I would wake up in the middle of the night, roused by my father’s clamorous snoring, and stumble my way to their bedroom, where my mother would almost always already be awake to welcome me into a spot between her and my father.

My job was to wake my father up, so I would tap him on the head until his eyes opened.

“Why, hello there,” was his usual answer.

To which I would reply, “Hello, you’re snoring.”

He would then roll over and the three of us would fall back to sleep.

“Are you mad at me?” I asked my mom when she put me to bed one night. We only had one more day to learn to be clean before our visitor came, and her exhaustion had taken a serious toll on her bedtime story enthusiasm.

“I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at what you did.” This was my mother’s standard-issue response, and this time I wasn’t sure that I believed her. She was certainly mad at my father. After she turned my light off and closed my door, I heard the shouting start.

They had been fighting all week, but this was different; this time she sounded scared. “She’s going to be taken away from us, is that what you want?” I heard her say. “You’re going to lose your daughter because you can’t get rid of a fucking newspaper.”

My father didn’t sound scared, he didn’t sound like anything at all. He never answered my mother, at least not that I
could hear from my bedroom. What I did hear was a door slam.

The house was silent until I woke up the next morning.

Each morning I would wake up amazed at the transformations that had happened while I was in bed, and each morning the barricade of black garbage bags in front of our home seemed to have grown exponentially.

I was excited for the social worker’s visit. We had never had anyone to our house before, and I spent the morning of the visit anxiously dividing my time between standing in front of the door waiting to let him in and peeking out the front window for signs of incoming cars.

When the doorbell finally rang, I opened the door to a slim man with a bald head and gray moustache, wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt. I introduced myself and invited him in. The house was cleaner than I had ever seen it, which only added to my excitement.

My parents introduced themselves and excused the remaining mess, and then my mom said, “Kim, why don’t you go get Sheryl.”

The previous night I had carefully planned out Sheryl’s outfit. She would wear a purple and white corduroy dress that I had outgrown. The dress was too big for her, but it was my favorite. I carefully picked out a white undershirt for underneath the thin tie-straps. I didn’t like when the cloth part of her body showed.

Sheryl was a gigantic Thumbelina doll. Unlike her thumb-sized literary namesake, Sheryl was two feet tall, only slightly shorter than I was when I started kindergarten, and until something better came along, she was my sister.

Earlier that day I had been anticipating this moment, but as I
left my room I started to feel nervous. What if the social worker was mad at me? What if he took Sheryl away or took me to jail?

I made my way slowly down our now clean hallway and introduced the thin man with the short-sleeved shirt to my baby sister. When it became obvious that he wasn’t going to take me to prison, I crawled up on his lap and asked if he would play hide-and-seek with me.

“You go hide, and when I’m finished talking to your parents, I’ll come find you.”

I loved hide-and-seek, but the only person who ever played it with me was my dad. He was terrible at finding me. I knew this because he would spend the majority of the game declaring aloud how baffled he was and what an “efficient absconder” I was. Eventually he would find me, though, and a new game of tag would ensue.

Since I had a new playmate to impress that day, I went to my favorite hiding place of all. In my bedroom there was a bookshelf, the bottom of which was always empty. When I wanted to go somewhere clean, I would curl up and lie there.

I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up it was dark in my room. I crawled out, figuring it was about time to surrender my spot.