Outlawed

Our little house in Park Slope is roomier than most New York City apartments, especially since it's just the two of us, but nevertheless when it comes to overnight guests, we are spatially challenged. Slightly on purpose. Anyone in New York who has a guest bed has had someone overstay their welcome, either by a few days or by a few years. the rents here being what they are. I put my old daybed, the bed of my childhood, down in our musty basement, underneath that is a roll-out trundle bed. The extra bedroom upstairs is a little library/sewing/drawing/dabbling room, it's lined with its' crammed-to-bursting bookshelves, and a tattered Hepplewhite fainting couch alongside the window makes for a cozy spot to read or draw.

All of which is very nice, for us, but then when guests are imminent, there's always a level of panic because we aren't used to putting people up. A sleeper sofa upstairs would solve the problem, but since we don't really want to solve the problem and thus have a constant stream of guests, we're inclined to keep the recamier and its toss pillows and relegate our overnights to the basement bed. And then, a few weeks ago, my mother-in-law announced that she would be coming to stay a few days, along with Jane, Dale's sister. (During, I might add, the hottest part of the summer, and we have never installed central air, the house being so tiny it doesn't seem to warrant it.)Two guests are a little tricky, so I figured I'd just order a new mattress to replace the ancient piece of petrified foam that lay on the trundle bed, and in the meantime went on a cleaning frenzy, trying to sort through the piles of clutter and make the house somewhat presentable. Well, to make a long story short, I had to make do with a cushion from the fainting couch sheeted up to resemble a real mattress and tucked into the trundle bed downstairs. I guess the bright side is, they won't be back anytime soon, not after those sleeping arrangements. In all fairness, we did offer then our bed, but they would have had to share it, at which they demurred.

So, they came, they stayed, I cleaned within an inch of my life, and I am half-conscious now that they have finally gone. I ran around setting tables, cleaning, baking biscuits and pie, folding linens and fluffing pillows, like some crazed Stepford wife who is all amped-up on crystal meth. The whole visit was focused on what we were going to eat next, and when we were going to eat it, like some fat-people's Carnival Cruise. A breakfast of champions the first morning: bacon, as much as I could possibly fry up, piles of white toast, fresh brown eggs from the farmer's market scrambled up in glossy, fluffy curds, and fresh-squeezed (store-bought) orange juice, but I realized too late from the still-hungry looks around the table, that I should have tossed up some home fries, and maybe attempted Yankee-girl grits or some kippers. Sigh.

So, realizing that tonight's dinner is probably inadequate for these appetites, we pile into the car. The plan is for me to get dropped off at the farmer's market and Trader Joe's to hunt and gather and take the bus home laden like a pack mule, while Dale chauffeurs the girls in a peculiar scenic tour of the backside of Brooklyn. I fetch sausages, fresh chopped meat, corn on the cob, heirloom tomatoes, breads, fresh string beans, spring onions, and some snack food. I lumber onto the bus, swinging bags from both shoulders like a Sherpa climbing Everest, glad that the plan is to cook out, since last night for their arrival dinner, the homemade biscuits at 475º heated up the kitchen a bit oppressively.

My back and legs are throbbing, and a kidney stone is making its presence felt though not in the mindbending stage of pain yet. Still, when I get home I ache to lie down, but before I do I need to shuck corn and slice tomatoes, to have all the side dishes ready at dinner. In my mind's eye, Dale has pulled over during their tour and fed the ladies on empanadas or knishes, pupusas or somosas, dolmades or cuchifritos, babaganoush, hummus, any of the thousands of delicacies I iamagine they are bypassing on their scenic tour.

Except that the door clangs open and they troupe in, ravenous, because Dale has driven them around Lowe's, the piers, Ocean Parkway, Avenue S, a kind of odd's eye view of Brooklyn only without any lunch. He is suddenly nowhere to be found, no doubt desperately in need of a moment alone, but I know full well that it simply hadn't occurred to him since he wasn't hungry himself, so I pull down a platter and start tearing apart the cabinets for anything that will pass for a surprise late lunch, spreading crostini with artichoke pesto, slicing a summer sausage and some cheddar cheese, putting out little bowls of olives and nuts, crackers and then a few little cakes and ginger snaps, pouring tall glasses of iced tea for my exhausted in-laws who by now are ready to pass out from hunger. I leave it out on a tray for them, excusing myself, because at this point I really have to go upstairs and put ice on my back and take some mega-Advil.

And so it goes, Dale manfully attempting to fend off the worst of the cooking for me by doing the grilling outside, we pray a blessing over every meal, also not a habit Dale and I are used to. Not that I altogether mind that, sometimes I feel like doing it when it's just we two, but after the hostess going to so much effort to serve the food piping hot, I think blessings should be kept short, sweet, and to the point. So, I grumble, but only because of the disturbance to the usual household routine: the truth is that it's helpful to have an excuse to get the place a bit cleaner, and to have an in-law visit without having to drive for ten hours to Ohio. And my in-laws, I know, are the best of their kind, because they have always been welcoming, warm, and eager to know me.

And yet---we wave goodbye and I am thrilled at our newly quiet house; no doubt they have found some glaring example of my inept care of Dale to chatter about during the drive, but overall I seem to have passed inspection, the food was eaten, the beds were slept in, small talk was made, pictures were shown and admired, stories told and applauded. The house is cleaner than it has been since the last in-law visit, and I can turn to Dale and bask in the grateful gleam in his eyes.

Disorderly Conduct

My mother used to tell me that when I was a toddler, I was obsessively neat and would always put my toys away just so, and fussing about anything out of place. Her heart must have soared, back then, because the reason she used to tell me this was that from there on in, I have never, ever, been able to manage to be neat. I'd like to be neat, in the sense of liking order, liking things to be beautifully placed in vignettes on every surface, of exquisite objects balancing each other in the room creating a sense of harmony by color, texture, and art objects that endow the room with mood. And I love to create order from chaos, to distill the objects in a room until they make sense, by editing them and regrouping, and that's something I do very well. So you'd think that with my mother-in-law about to visit, I'd be smugly getting my nails done, not cleaning and decluttering this house from top to bottom, right? Wrong-er-oonie.

I find it physically impossible to be neat. Just can't do it. I can't edit down the clutter, can't stem the tide of mess, like pigpen in the old Charlie Brown comics the dirt and dust just find me. Spotless? I can eat a grape in your spotless room and make a mess with it. I can use a q tip in your sparkling bathroom and somehow when I leave there will be toothpaste caked around the sink and a hairball sticking out of the bathtub drain. I can sit in a spotless living room and cross my legs, look down, behold--I have just ground something into the carpet. Oh, and that stain isn't coming out, either, damn. Where did that even come from? White blouse? Grape juice. Smoke a cigarette, the ash will dribble down the front of my blouse, and in a semi=circle around the ashtray sitting in front of me for the purpose. Dust motes fly from every surface when I enter the room, what can I say, I create a disturbance.

Mind you, you should know the context of my growing-up. My mother, the one whom you will remember tearfully reminiscing about my days of neatness, was completely obsessed with order, and there was never a spoon out of place in her spacious townhouse, every closet was neatly stacked, mothballed, swept, a friend of hers, helping after a hospital stay once, gasped in horror at the sight of my mother's underwear drawer, neatly folded stacks of sensible things in rigid rows.

"A place for everything, everything in its' place", I still have a little sign, in French, that presided over the cellar where odds and ends were kept. Neatly. Never a glass in the sink, a dirty dish, a pair of shoes in the hallway. Never a hair on the soap, or a sock on the floor, nor any object of any kind on the kitchen counter. Imagine, with three children, the iron grip with which one must run the ship in order to maintain that kind of order, there was one rule above all other rules, which was that if we made any mess whatsoever it was a dagger to our mother's heart, a deliberate affront, a statement that she was our "doormat", a domestic servant slaving away, righting our careless disturbance of order. Tirelessly, our mother railed at us for each and every slight, a dress un-hung was a statement of contempt, a dish in the sink was fraught with meaning, in that it signified that we expected her to hang dresses and wash dishes, that we thought her to be our maid, a laughable concept when you consider that she didn't clean or put away a thing, that was definitely the job of all of us children who had tied her to this prison of a house and by our very presence exuded expectations of her, which she resented. And she did have, by the way, more paid domestic help than most women of her generation. Not a day went by when we were not her greatest disappointment.

So for me, you see, that bra gaily hanging from the back of that antique chair upstairs is a flag of freedom, and that little curl of hair in the upstairs tub? A runic spell to the goddess, declaiming the liberty of sloth. That pile of papers and unsifted mail is a monument to the liberty of not having to deal with those things until I am damn good and ready, which might not be never but is definitely not going to be right this minute. And all of that is joyful, and liberating, and makes my house my own, except for one thing. My mother-in-law is coming over and I have been cleaning for a solid week. Shit. Why can't I be neat like my mother was?