Dirty Secret (3 page)

“What's going on?” I asked her. “Why does your house look this bad?”

“I'm busy. I don't have time to clean.”

I knew that was true; she was working as many doubles as the nursing home would let her. But still. “You can't be so busy that you have to throw Popsicle sticks on the floor,” I said, pointing at a cluster on the other side of the doorway, in the living room. “Why can't you put them in the trash? This place is an absolute disaster.”

“Oh, it's fine,” she said.

“Tell me the truth. You really don't see anything wrong here?”

She shook her head. “It's not perfect, but it's not too bad.”

All four burners on the stove were stacked with dirty pans, and the stove itself was crusted with grease that was cracked in places like a topographical map of the continents before they split apart.

“When was the last time you cooked?” I asked. My husband hadn't said anything; he probably had no idea
what
to say.

“I don't know,” my mother answered. “I only liked to cook for Roger.”

Family members of hoarders can often point to a particular trauma that occurred right before the hoarding began (though most hoarders show signs of it from an earlier age, often in their teens). My mother had always been a compulsive thrift-store shopper, and untidy and disorganized, but when I saw her house that day for the first time since Roger died, I knew this was different. And it wasn't just the trash everywhere. Her kitchen seemed utterly unusable, for one thing, and it was hard to walk from one room to the next. I'd heard the word “hoarder” in association with the famous Collyer brothers, and I suppose it stayed in my mind because I subconsciously suspected my mother was on the road to being one too—after all, as soon as she and my dad split up when I was seven, I began doing the cleaning, and as a kid I'd spend my summers weeding her front garden and planting flowers so my fellow students at the school across the street wouldn't guess at the mess inside.

But what I saw that day was a whole new level of clutter. Clearly, Roger's death had triggered my mother's true hoarding. And what disturbed me most was that she couldn't even tell.

Over the next few months I kept picturing her in that house, alone. So my husband and I came up with a plan. We usually visited Minneapolis once in the winter and once for a long weekend each summer; we decided that the next summer we'd extend our long weekend by a few days and clean her house.

David and I arrived, full of purpose, determined. But my mother was uncooperative—I had to explain each and every item I wanted to get rid of and she fought me on almost everything. Still, we ended up driving seven loads of stuff to the Salvation Army in her car and leaving a mound of full trash bags out by her garbage bins in the alley. When we left, the house was
better, but it wasn't done. Somehow I managed, though, to push her house to the bottom of my priority list. Until the cancer. Until now.

“Honey, come on, I'll make some coffee. We'll sit and visit,” my mother says, excited again. “Just for a few minutes. Please.”

I follow her into the kitchen. But none of her three coffeemakers work.

“I know you don't go a day without coffee,” I say, “so how have you been making it?”

“That one just broke,” she says, pointing to an industrial-sized machine that looks like it was once white. “Oh, Jessie, now we
have
to go to Perkins!”

“The problem is, I need to start. There's a lot to organize, and Joe's showing up at one o'clock.” Joe does construction and lawn work for my dad and I've arranged for him to help me haul the heavier items outside. At the end of the day another guy is coming with a truck to take the stuff away.

“Do you think Joe would help cut down this tree in the backyard?” my mom asks.

“Tree? What tree?”

“Wait a minute, Jessie, I've got something to tell you. You know how they say there are no atheists in foxholes?” she asks, a laugh already starting to crack her voice, “I'm proof that that's not true! I'm still an atheist!”

“Good for you, Mom. Now what about that tree? What tree are you talking about?” Good Lord, I'm a humorless bitch. But someone has to take care of business and it certainly isn't going to be her.

“It's just this branch that's been growing against the house. It's not a problem.” She waves it off. How does a “branch” grow against a house? I walk past her, toward the back door, which is blocked by empty paper grocery bags, more plastic bins,
dirty dish rags, rolls of paper towels, the skeletons of shelving units she never got around to properly installing, giant metal pots still in boxes, and full bags of garbage I don't even want to guess the ages of. She stands behind me, watching as I try to get through it all.

“Oh, Jessie, the lock on the back door is broken. Do you think your dad and Sandy know a good locksmith?”

“I'll ask them tonight. Although I can't see why anyone would want to break in,” I add, rudely. I can't help it. Most people, I imagine anyway, whose mothers are about to undergo surgery for cancer have visits where they get to know each other better or discuss fond memories or whatever it is that normal families do. I, on the eve of my mother's surgery, get to begin cleaning out her junk-filled house because she can't. The one bright side to this is that I'm too busy to worry about the cancer.

She's not offended by my rudeness, anyway. “I know, you can think of all this stuff as a burglar deterrent! It's my own free version of home security!”

As she laughs hysterically, I finally make it through the pantry and open the back door. She follows me out.

It is indeed a tree and it's growing right against the house. To my untrained eye it looks big enough to crack the foundation if left untended. The whole yard looks like something out of
Wild Kingdom
: There should be lions and tigers prowling the lawn, hunting prey. It was once a beautiful backyard, with neatly cut emerald-green grass, two lilac trees that every spring and summer filled the air with their purple scent, and a long garden running the length of it. Someone has put planks of wood down where the garden once was, which is odd because it's right up against the metal fence that divides my mother's lawn from the neighbor's. What is the purpose of the wood? It's like a shabby catwalk to nowhere. And the two lilac trees look like something
you'd see in a movie involving a haunted forest with evil foliage that comes to life and strangles passersby. At the back of it all, the rickety, paint-flaking garage looks about to tip over.

“And there're those, too,” my mom says, pointing at the rain gutters running up the side of the house to the roof. “Could he do those?”

They're totally rusted through in places, hanging off the house like a trapeze artist flailing in the wind. Then I notice the trim around the windows: The wood is coming apart from the house—it's as if nothing wants to be part of this decaying landscape. And I don't blame any of it. I don't want to be here either.

“Jesus Christ,” I say.

“Oh, Jessie—” my mom says. “I just remembered something. The dryer guy is coming tomorrow.”

“What dryer guy? What's wrong with your dryer?”

“It hasn't worked in over a year.”

“How have you been drying your clothes?”

“I've been going to the Laundromat,” she says, shrugging. “But I don't think I'll be able to get there with my clothes while I'm recovering from the surgery. . . .”

“What's your basement like right now?” I doubt a stranger should go down there.

“It's fine,” she says, a nervous smile on her face.

She's lying. She brought it up for a reason. I need to make sure it's in decent shape. Except there's a problem: I haven't been able to go down to her basement in well over a decade. Even imagining entering that musty jungle makes my skin crawl. I'm not sure I can do it.

But someone has to. What my mother refuses to believe is that her house is borderline condemnable. If she needs private nurses to come in and care for her after the surgery, they could report her to social services. She could be taken from her house;
her house could be taken from her. I've told her this many times, but she just laughs and tells me I'm being ridiculous. The cleaning charts, the suggestions about Clutterers Anonymous meetings, my nagging these last few years about getting a retirement fund: all ridiculous.

It's a miracle that she finally listened to me about getting health insurance.

“Let's get started so we can be ready for Joe when he gets here,” I say, intending to put off the basement for as long as possible. My mother huffs up the back steps ahead of me.

Inside, she says she needs coffee and threatens to go to Perkins without me.

“That's fine—you go, and I'll stay here and get started,” I say, and she waddles out the front door. It'll be easier for me to work without her here, anyway.

I decide to start in the living room. I pick up one of the white plastic Savers bags and tear the stapled receipt off the top so I can open it. Inside is a pair, no, two pairs, of those sneakers that have no back on them—the clog meets the sneaker. The white fabric is vaguely gray. I pick up another bag and the contents are identical, except this time it's three pairs. Then another bag, again with two pairs. I don't even know where to put anything; I just shove the sneaker-clogs into a garbage bag and hope that she won't find them. The room is crowded with paperback and hardcover books, five sewing machines with hundreds of sewing patterns heaped on top, two foot massagers still in their boxes, a water-jet-infused bath mat, three electric heating pads that look secondhand, old magazine clippings of restaurant and book reviews, two banged-up motorcycle helmets, at least eight pairs of moldy cowboy boots my mother's convinced she can sell for
a fortune,
two three-foot-tall antique radios—the wood scratched and warped—hulking in one corner like bullies.
Half-consumed boxes of Entenmann's donuts and empty soda bottles and flattened Lean Cuisine boxes and crinkled candy wrappers.

Toward the top of the wall, almost to the ceiling, the plate rail supports half a dozen of those round tin containers that butter cookies come in. There's a tin embossed with the image of two Scottie dogs facing each other, a red one with white stars circling the edge, a rusty one that was originally pink, one with a fat snowman and snowwoman surrounded by snowchildren, and two identical tins with a Rosie the Riveter–type character flexing her muscles. Scattered between the round tins are miniature perfume bottles, many of which I gave my mother when I was a kid, back when she was still a “collector.” They're relics of a road veered wildly off.

Tears spring to my eyes and I wipe them away with the back of my hand. I'm suddenly so exhausted that if there were anywhere for me to sit down in this room, in this whole house, I'd collapse right there. But I can't. Because every surface, every potential spot to sit down, is covered with junk. There's just so much junk, so much worthless, heartbreaking junk.

THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED
definition of hoarding comes from a 1996 article by doctors Randy Frost and Tamara Hartl: “The acquisition of and failure to discard possessions that are useless or of limited value, resulting in clutter that renders living spaces unusable and causes significant distress and impairment.” Hoarding was once thought to mainly afflict people who'd grown up in deprived circumstances—the Great Depression, for example—but most hoarding experts no longer subscribe to that theory. Therapists have treated hoarders as young as three, and their problem didn't necessarily come from watching an
afflicted parent. Studies have shown that genetics is more of a factor in the disorder than mimicking behavior—in fact 85 percent of hoarders have a first-degree relative they'd describe as a pack rat. Besides, if hoarding were caused by trying to make up for a previous lack, wouldn't hoarders keep only items they could use? Instead, they often keep things the rest of us find nonsensical, like newspapers from the past twenty years or my mother's many sneaker-clogs.

Initially hoarding was considered a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, like counting or frequent hand washing—since up to 30 percent of people with OCD have hoarding issues. But brain scans of hoarders reveal decreased activity in areas related to memory, decision making, spatial orientation, and emotions. As a result of those brain scan studies, and the fact that medications effective for OCD provide no benefit for hoarders, many specialists in the field are beginning to look at compulsive hoarding as its own discrete syndrome, most likely caused by brain abnormalities.

My mother clearly has problems with spatial orientation and memory: That's why all of her possessions have to be kept out in the open, while most of her shelves and drawers remain empty. That's why rather than an address book for phone numbers, my mother has scraps of paper taped to the door between the hallway and the kitchen. She's got three of my last phone numbers and addresses taped there, yet still, when she has to call me back for some reason or send me something in the mail, she asks each and every time for my information all over again.

BY THE TIME
she comes home from Perkins, I've made some piles and cleared a patch of the hardwood floor. I've filled two
garbage bags with junk. My mother doesn't ask to see what's in the garbage bags—as if once something is out of her sight it no longer exists—but she immediately starts rummaging through the piles that are out in the open.

“Jessie, I need these!” she says, holding up a mismatched pair of elbow pads.

“Why?”

“For when I start rollerblading. And these!” she says, grabbing a second pair.

“So you need all seven pairs I've found so far, then?”

“Yes.”

“No, you don't,” I say, and eventually I'm able to convince her to get rid of three pairs. Which seems pretty good, considering.