Balancing act

My mother has never let us run out of toilet paper. I never realized how difficult that is, especially for a family of four asses, until I lived away from home and struggled to keep enough toilet paper around to wipe my own ass. 

Our house is a toilet. The gaping hole in the roof is a urinal for God’s hot piss every time it rains. My mom has arranged a careful pile of clear plastic storage bins to catch the downpour and bails them with an empty Dean’s sorbet bucket into the bathtub. She’s been Catholic all of her life, teaching me how to pray at night to thank God and Jesus for my health and safety, including the roof over my head. 

My parents bought this house in 1996. A classic American Foursquare layout, spacious enough for the small family they wanted to start there. They didn’t know the plumbing would falter and nothing could ever be flushed out. Twenty years of shit has accumulated and sits rotting, and we live around it. 

I’m seven years old, and I unwrap an artificial strawberry breakfast bar, dropping the wrapper on the floor and leaving it there. It feels pointless to discern actual garbage from the useless crap we keep around. We haven’t bought garbage bags in years, I don’t know how to take out the trash. 

My dad loves a deal. He drives around town hitting garage sales and thrift stores, bringing home trunk loads of treasures that he will never look at again after a week. It’s books, clothing, lamps, decorative wooden boxes, stained chairs, side tables, costume jewelry, sunglasses, instruments, and whatever else he thinks is valuable. He used to party and take a lot of uppers, but in his middle age, finding these things he thinks are valuable and buying them for what he considers a steal is how he gets high. 

My mom can’t possibly keep up with his frequent carloads of shit, and things pile up around. Precarious stacks of books and magazines become a new layer of insulation in every room. Furniture and boxes stack up in corners and we lose the basement, the attic, and the bedrooms to the overwhelming waste. 

“Tell your friends we are redoing the basement,” my mom instructs me. My friends asked me why they never come over. We are redoing the basement for six years before I learn how to hint at the truth. 

It’s impossible to keep the house clean, because trying to mop or dust would mean acknowledging the towers of decaying trash looming around our trodden carpet paths. Admitting that they’re there would only be crushing, and not even my mom can handle that weight. I want to take a bath in bleach. I feel covered in a second skin of grime and dirt and dust. My younger brother is seventeen now and showers three times a day. I know he feels dirty like me, and I know showering doesn’t help. 

My grandparents’ house is like this, too. It’s not there anymore, but the scene is burned in my brain. A trailer in a shithole town in Missouri. Literally a hole in the ground, the town is in a subtle crater, and the 10 acres my grandparents own is on the lip. This is prime real estate, because from that slightly raised earth, you can see for miles. Miles of neglected nothing land. 

My grandmother’s specialty was dolls. She collected every dolly she found at estate sales, thrift stores, garage sales, or on the side of the road. Her dolls collect dust in every room, some posed on stands or sit on shelves, but most are strewn on piles of newspapers or sprawled like homicide victims on any flat surface. I am four and I take baths in the whirlpool tub surrounded by mirrors. The dolls sit around the sinks, on the radiator, and on top of the toilet. They watch me watch myself, watch me watching them, seeing what they are. 

She gifts one to me every time we visit. When we get back to Chicago, each porcelain girl gets swallowed by our house, lost somewhere in the swamp of debris. 

“Do you ever think about your parents dying?” I ask. 

“Yes,” says my friend. “Going through all their shit and boxing it up for donation is gonna be hell.”

I know my mom will outlive my dad. I imagine her drowning alone in a river of muddy piss as torrential rain pours in through the roof. And after everything, my brother and I call a plumber to come around and plunge our drain.