House Lessons

by Erica Bauermeister

  One thing was clear, however. We were in this, and there was no way out but through. I knew with utter certainty that this was more than we could handle—and that we would do it anyway.

  * * *

  —

  “WELL,” SAID BEN, TURNING to me. “Wanna get started?”

  We went back upstairs, where our children were making their way along the trail through the living room like Hansel and Gretel in a very strange forest, picking up small and fascinating objects. A white ceramic tiger, its snarling face looking back over one shoulder; a miniature Model A car that proved to be a container for bourbon. A pair of wing-tip shoes. A lavender-colored toilet seat. A black-and-white photograph of a child.

  “Okay, guys,” I declared, hoisting up my box of forty-gallon plastic bags. “Dust masks on. Recycling goes in this bag; garage-sale stuff goes”—I looked around—”on the front porch after we clear it off, and trash goes straight to the dump truck. Everybody got it?”

  “Hey, check this out!” Kate had picked up a palm-sized white paper packet from the floor. “Instant Pussy!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Just add hot water,” she read solemnly.

  “A cat?” asked Ry. At almost eleven, he was not far from the age where a small, encapsulated sponge could turn into a giant dinosaur in the water of a bathtub.

  “No.” Kate’s voice held an air of weary superiority. “It’s—”

  “Hey, Ry!” Ben interrupted from where he was standing next to the couch. “Look at this!”

  How he spotted it, I still don’t know, but he’d reached down into the depths between the cushions, past decades of newspapers and coats, and was pulling out a brand-new wooden-handled jump rope, still sealed in its cellophane package. We all stared at it for a moment; it seemed entirely plausible that it would simply disappear again.

  “Wow,” Ry said.

  “Why don’t you go try it?” I suggested. “Outside.”

  Ben and I watched until our son was safely beyond the front door, and then turned to Kate.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “This is waaaaay too interesting.”

  * * *

  —

  THERE IS SOMETHING FASCINATING about hoarders. We watch them on cable television shows, slow down as we drive by their houses, as if observing the scene of an automobile accident. Perhaps the most infamous American hoarders were the Collyer brothers, who lived in a three-story brownstone in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century. When police went to check out a report of a dead body on March 21, 1947, they encountered far more than they bargained for. After failing to get in through any of the entry doors because of the mass of objects behind them, officers finally entered through a second-floor window, where they found a universe of junk that rose eight feet high. They discovered Homer’s body first. It took them almost three weeks to find Langley, ten feet away, crushed by the weight of newspapers triggered by one of his own booby traps. Workers took out over 170 tons of trash, including a Model T Ford, a canoe, an x-ray machine, a two-headed fetus, and fourteen grand pianos.

  The brothers had come from a wealthy and distinguished family—in fact, one of those fourteen pianos was a gift from Queen Victoria herself. Both brothers went to Columbia University, where Homer was Phi Beta Kappa. Homer studied law; Langley, engineering. But something, obviously, went sideways. Their parents’ deaths in the 1920s likely helped trigger their hoarding, but the brothers had already disconnected their phone by 1917. As their world grew smaller, it became dense with possessions. One of the last times anyone saw Homer outside of his house was in 1940, when he was spotted dragging a tree limb inside. Their goal was to be self-sufficient, Langley once said.

  * * *

  —

  IT IS ESTIMATED THAT up to 6 percent of the US population has a problem with hoarding that is serious enough to affect their ability to live normal lives. That means as many as nineteen million people. And yet the desire to acquire is a human trait, shared by many animals as well. According to researchers Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, the way most nonhoarding people feel about their possessions is not that different from someone who hoards. All of us tend to feel responsible for the things we bring into our lives—they help define our identities, give us a feeling of safety, and create a sense of personal history. The difference with hoarders is in scope and intensity.

  For a hoarder, each object has its own story, its own many possible uses. Frost and Steketee relate the example of a woman who could not throw away a pen cap because it could potentially be used as a piece for a board game. Some hoarders buy future birthday gifts for people they do not yet know. Still others collect articles that have no particular relevance to their lives, but might be interesting to someone else, someday.

  In fact, seen from a different angle, a hoarder’s desire to collect and preserve could be perceived as generous, while my need to organize and minimize might be considered overly judgmental. The weekend we spent cleaning out the house made me reexamine my own emotional relationship with possessions—but at that point in time, with only forty-eight hours at our disposal, the only obvious thing to me was that a wheelbarrow is more useful than theories when it comes to getting rid of trash.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU KNOW, MOM,” KATE mused as she pulled a Barrel of Monkeys from a warren of shiny graduation gowns and started to make a long orange simian chain, “if the house is tilting anyway, why not just tip it over and dump all this out?”

  In actuality, that felt exactly like what had already happened. Across the floor of the living room, pirated porn videos nestled up to religious tracts. Thirty-year-old encyclopedias commingled with cracked bench-press weights and fishing rods and used light bulbs, family photos scattered throughout it all like broadcast fertilizer. It was as if someone had taken the possessions of thirty years of living, from the most deeply intimate to the most profoundly impersonal, dropped them in a huge bag, and shaken it, then poured them, clattering and banging, back into the house. It was unnerving, frustrating, impossible.

  “Hey, Mom,” Kate said, “are we still doing a garage sale?”

  I looked at the ancient handheld vacuum cleaner she was holding up—and its size compared to the monumental task in front of us felt like a textbook definition of irony. I remembered a moment, barely an hour earlier, when I had dutifully plucked a receipt from a cluster of plastic name tags in order to put it in the recycling bag. I had a system, intricate and calming, through which I would create a new world order out of chaos. But it was simply absurd; every pile led to another pile. Did you categorize by genre? Car parts, lingerie, books, toothpaste, passports? Or maybe condition: Dusty, moldy, alive? With so many variables, my mind spun endlessly, looking for a single starting point, but there was none to be found. Nothing made sense.

  Never had my need for structure and organization been more obvious. For all our married life, Ben had been trying to get me to concede control—to fate, to fun, to him. In the trash, I had met my match.

  “Just pitch it,” I said to Kate in frustration.

  * * *

  —

  WE WERE A COUPLE hours into our task when our friend Tom showed up at the front door. In feng shui, they say that a front door located on the right side of the house is the “helpful-people door.” At that moment, it was absolutely true.

  “Need another worker?” Tom said. He stood there, a box of doughnuts in his hands, his girlfriend’s black pickup truck visible in the driveway behind him. I didn’t know which I was happier to see.

  Ben and Tom and I go a long way back. We met in college, where Tom had arrived after a year at a scientific institution that left him gasping for a bit of liberal arts. Tom is brilliant and mercurial, known for his wide-ranging reading habits and practical jokes. He and Ben get along famously.

  When Ben and I moved to Seattle, we stayed for the first week with Tom and his girlfriend, Connie. But while Ben’s and my focus quickly narrowed to graduate school
and jobs, then babies, Tom and Connie set off on a three-year journey around the world, teaching English in Japan, picking apples in England, biking across the United States. Their letters would arrive occasionally, exotic sound bites on blue aerogram paper, still carrying the faint scents of curry or train travel, and I would read them while breastfeeding a child or formulating some arcane theory concerning nineteenth-century female American novelists.

  I could never decide if I wanted what Tom and Connie had, or if I wanted them to come back and have what I did. But it became obvious that neither would happen. Eventually, Tom and Connie did move back to Seattle, but not to have children, and our lives ran in alternate universes, separated by five miles and a whole lot of plastic toys. And yet they were true friends, and when there was a need they were always the first to offer assistance. At the sight of Tom in our doorway in Port Townsend, I could feel my shoulders drop with relief.

  “Lots to do,” Tom commented, looking about. “Connie’s coming tomorrow. Should I start with the dining room?”

  And with that, he pulled out a dust mask and went to work.

  * * *

  —

  YOU CAN’T DO JOBS like these without help. Professional assistance, certainly, and we would have that. But what was even more important was the support of those friends who believed in us, who came and dug us out. The friends whose eyebrows never raised, who never cringed in disbelief, who told us they saw the potential in the house even if they didn’t. Because, believe me, we had enough concerns of our own. We didn’t need a chorus; we needed a team. And we got it.

  Connie would arrive on Sunday, a whisper of a woman who nevertheless tackled that camping porta-potty, which was, unfortunately, as full as we had feared. Our friends Reed and Tina would come, too, throwing stained and dusty mattresses out of second-story windows into the dump truck, joking as if it were all a great adventure. They would give us a foundation when truly we had none.

  * * *

  —

  BUT FIRST, WE HAD to get through Saturday.

  “Ready for the yuck room?” Ben asked as we finished our lunch.

  It had been a quiet affair; no one felt terribly hungry except for Ry, who had spent three hours jumping rope outside. We sat on the front porch steps sucking in the clean, cold air, ignoring how much we had left to do. Even Kate, whose morning had been punctuated by the intriguing discoveries of stacks of Playboy magazines and boxes of bullets, was getting tired, slumped against the porch walls, dust mask pushed down around her neck like a cowl. It seemed every time I moved, something fell out of my hair, and I kept my hands as far away from my grimy clothes as possible.

  Earlier that day, in an effort to keep ourselves amused, we had started a tally on one wall: Bowling Balls vs. Rats. The former had risen up through the assembled detritus on the floor, one after another like a forest of multicolored mushrooms. Their number on the tally list had already reached ten. The rats so far had just been sightings, the fast flash of a tail on the way out the door, but their numbers had been coming on strong. It was hard to convince ourselves to go back inside, especially with the room we knew was waiting.

  * * *

  —

  THE YUCK ROOM WAS the fourth square of our Foursquare house, backing up to the dining room. After considering the layout of the house, it seemed likely it had once been the original kitchen, back before the butler’s pantry had been remodeled to take over that function. Now the yuck room was a junk graveyard. Of its three doors, two were completely blocked by piles of objects. The one to the back porch could be opened a slim ten inches. We’d tried pushing on one of the doors earlier that morning and gotten nowhere. It had been easier to put the room off; there was plenty else to do.

  But now the rest of the main floor was done. No more excuses. We walked around to the west side of the house. Tom and I started grabbing the stacks of newspapers that filled the back porch, passing them down to Kate and Ry, who carted them to Tom’s truck for recycling. When the pathway was clear, Ben moved the dump truck into position and he, Tom, and I switched from dust masks to respirators and jammed our way into the yuck room.

  “Holy shit,” Tom said.

  The window in the room was covered by a piece of cardboard, but in the shaft of light from the back porch, we could just make out a roiling conglomeration of junk. A headless baby doll sat on top, a hand raised in welcome—storage à la Stephen King. At the very back of the room, we spotted a tall white freezer with a lock on the door.

  “If there’s a body in there, we just stop, right?” I said in an undertone to Ben and Tom.

  “You got that right,” Tom replied.

  “Kids, don’t come inside,” I said firmly, over my shoulder.

  This time, there was no argument.

  * * *

  —

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG before our muffled commentary diminished to silence, punctuated only by the occasional shocked blurt of noise. Inside my respirator, the world narrowed to the sound of my breathing, the dim and watery light. I had entered some kind of new and surreal ecosystem, an alternative chain of being: the thing, the box it came in, the remains of what it made, the remains of the thing that ate the remains. A package of bacon, the grease gone iridescent along the edge. A molten bag of bread. A birthday card, dark speckles erasing the words like time itself.

  Ben went outside and came back with pairs of goggles, which he distributed wordlessly to Tom and me. My sight was reduced even further to the foggy view through heavy plastic, and the rest of my body followed suit, shrinking back from contact with everything around me. I dove into my head. But the room wanted in, the smells of dust and mold and death pushing against the respirator, the sticky floor grabbing at my feet, objects reaching out to brush against my arms, my back, my hair in invitation: Come in. Join us. You know you want to.

  “How’s it going?” Ry called in the back door.

  “Stay out,” we yelled in unison.

  Even though there were objects worth saving—huge bottles of shampoo, never used; ten-packs of socks still in their original packaging—without even consulting one another, Tom and Ben and I made a pact: everything from that room went away. We bagged, lugged, and pitched our loads into the truck without stopping, without talking, for three hours.

  We finally made it to the freezer. The lock was not clasped, and we opened the door.

  Inside was elk, in neatly wrapped foil packages. One was dated two years before.

  “But how…?” I said.

  An hour earlier, Ben had found a child’s drawing, done by one of the heirs now fully grown, two-thirds of the way down the pile blocking the freezer. If you followed basic rules of an archaeological dig, those objects must have been accumulating for decades. It didn’t make sense. None of it did.

  As I shoved someone else’s old underwear into a trash bag, an anger swirled up in me that I didn’t know I could feel. I was angry with these people. For the way they had treated their house. For the way they had treated themselves. And I was furious with us, because I knew that the only reason we were in that room was because we had practically begged to be allowed to do the job. We’d put ourselves there because we’d thought it might be exciting in some way, a story worth telling. The stories I found in that house, however, just made me want to run.

  * * *

  —

  BUT THERE’S A CATCH to this, as there so often is. All my life I’d wanted to be a writer, and the writers I admire most are the ones who do exactly the opposite of running away. They bravely enter the most hidden parts of human minds, embracing the beauties and tragedies of who we really are. They have an ability to explore the recesses of another’s soul in a way that most of us could only dream of achieving.

  Some twenty years before that trash weekend, I had gone to see a famous author speak. She talked about her fictional characters—how they became real, took over her books. I found myself yearning for that experience, but it seemed so foreign that I wondered if perhaps her agent
had told her to say those things to make herself sound more mysterious.

  When I went up to have my book signed, I told her—in that slightly cynical manner of twenty-three-year-olds who don’t know any better—that I was a writer, but that no characters had ever spoken to me.

  The author looked up and gave me a gracious, if somewhat amused, smile. “Well,” she said, “maybe you’re not listening.”

  Sometimes, particularly when you are in a yuck room surrounded by rat skeletons, listening is the last thing you want to do. And yet as writers and, more importantly, as human beings, it is our job to listen even when it is hard. It’s too easy to stand on the sidelines, certain we would never allow our lives to descend into such disarray—ignoring the fact that we don’t for a minute know what this situation meant for the other person. In fact, given what researchers have learned about hoarders, it could well be that what I encountered in the house was not chaos for the person who lived here. It might have meant safety. Comfort. It was certainly the result of human needs we all share in some degree or another.

  Earlier that morning, as I’d stood in that debacle of a dining room, I’d gazed out the window and seen the outlines of the orchard under a sea of ivy, fruit trees planted by someone’s hand in a neat double row. Out on the front deck, we’d found a delicately painted ceramic coffee cup, left behind perhaps by someone who had come outside for a slow moment in the sun.

  At one point, as I was carrying a bucket full of leaking antifreeze bottles to our hazmat pile outside, I ran into one of our neighbors. I expressed my disgust with the job we were doing, and my frustration with the former owner.

  “He was always a really nice guy,” the neighbor said, giving me a quieting look.