Alan’s cleaning and clearing. I hear the clink and clank as he moves his Stuff around from the scary, toppling storeroom in giant heaps. We normally keep that door closed. I’m gritting my teeth, trying not to get agitated as it all comes out, like unpacking Pandora’s box. There are tiny earthquake piles of grime, post mortem papershreds littering the destruction path. Alan’s very good at starting a monumental task and then giving up halfway, leaving it strewn around on the floor like he’s just emptied giant coat pockets after a long trip. Left, for me to trip over en route the the bathroom. Our apartment is big as San Francisco city apartments go, but no space is going to be roomy enough for a vomit episode of Alan’s personal collections and momentos.
Another Alan tactic is moving the bits and bobs around to different rooms. I call it geographic relocation. Transferal of membership. I’ll find myself sharing precious countertop at dinnertime with a blender manual we long since sold on Craigslist. In navigating my way across the study, I’ll stumble over skew piles of textbooks like the “What Color is Your Parachute” 1998 edition that introduces the internet.
I would take charge but I am truly nervous about I’ll find. This morning it was “Is this yours?” to a bottle of yellowing sickly sweet perfume. Most certainly not, I scrunched up my nose. These women who leave expensive personal momentos behind in their ex’s lives dumbfound me. It’s rare I’ll score a find of lah-de-daa anti-aging face cream over imagining why some woman would have left this in my husband’s life. I just am gleeful she needed wrinkle cream when I was just legally able to drink. But it is an awful lot like they’ve peed on a lampost determined to leave a mark for a settled wife to overcome years later.
It’s been collecting.
I’d take a before and after photo if I weren’t so shamefaced at it. Getting married, his becomes yours, and you become him, and as a We there is no, “that’s not mine”. I never expected I’d live in collective Stuff. I clean daily, tossing, purging and sorting. Organisation is my middle name. Lucinda Organised Tikwart. Didn’t you know it? I nearly killed Alan when he stood up on our wedding day and talked about my organisational skills instead of how perfect I am. “Who wants to be a Bree Van der Kamp?” I threw back at him across the room after the honeymoon was over. “Bree who?” he looked up at me from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. Ugh!
I couldn’t believe I was chosen because I know what to do with Stuff. Now I can. Silently, watching him unpack junk bags of gum, antibiotic fungal ointment, coins, pens and business cards from his last 10 years of junk drawers, I realise he needs me. And while I won’t touch a single coin, pen or card of his, unprompted, I will be there for him when he wants help with finishing the task.
Regardless, I probably should take it to heart and make something of my natural ability to find the right home for Stuff. My mother raised me echoing the organisational strategies of my grandfather, a brigadier in the South African army, he said to imagine your home to be that of a submarine. With size limitations everything has a place. And so you will never lose anything. I realise Alan’s normal and I am not. But the benefits are unending. Starting with how I never lose anything. And ending with how wonderful it is to wake up after a long trip to clean clothes and fresh milk. Getting one’s Stuff in order is the metaphor for being in a good place in one’s world in general.
And so I won’t stop him clinking and clunking for the world, because I know that his springcleaning has less to do with the heatwave we’re enjoying in the middle of January in San Francisco and more to do with him being in a place in hs life where he’s ready to lose the baggage and take on something new.
