The Law of Tall Girls

by Joanne Macgregor

  “It was difficult,” I said, as we headed toward the landing, picking our way between teetering towers of bulk packs of toilet paper. “And it got worse over time. I don’t just mean the mess, though obviously that escalated. I mean my experience of it. I grew up with this all around me, so it was my normal, you know? And my mother messed with my head by minimizing it, and saying it was just a bit untidy, and acting like everything was just fine.”

  “Look, dear, I bought you these new dresses – aren’t they pretty?”

  “Before I pack away all my lovely things, why don’t we play a game of hide-and-seek?”

  “We’d play games amongst the piles of crap, have treasure hunts. It was fun. So, for the longest time, I didn’t realize how stuffed up it really was.” I gave a little laugh. “Literally.”

  ~ 38 ~

  Jay and I paused on the landing at the top of the stairs and, like a pair of pioneers surveying an unexplored wilderness, contemplated the haphazard landslide of junk that clogged the way down.

  Clothes, fraying blankets, and old towels swathed the bannisters like climbing creepers weighing down a trellis. Draped on top were a bunch of tacky plastic party banners — one of my mother’s “irresistible” online purchases. They’d probably been printed somewhere they didn’t speak much English — Happy Birday! Congratulation! Mazel Tov on your Bar Mitsah! — but she insisted on keeping them for a party she was planning.

  A party. In this dump.

  “You think she would have tossed these two, at least.” I smiled grimly, pointing to a pair of grimy banners which read: Is a boy! and Happy Anniversary! “But this place is a black hole. No matter ever escapes.”

  “When did you realize that it wasn’t normal?” Jay asked.

  I thought about that for a while, kicking at a rolled-up carpet lying on the top stair.

  “I think it must have been in fourth or fifth grade, when I went to a birthday party at Bree Rogerson’s house. It was my first sleepover at a friend’s who wasn’t Chloe.”

  “Does Chloe know?”

  “About this? Yeah. But she’s the only one. And now you.” I puffed out a breath. “You’ve no idea how hard this is for me — to let someone else into the secret.”

  He nodded slowly, and I was suddenly aware how still he’d been holding his body. He was guarding his facial expressions and keeping his voice neutral. He looked relaxed, but he was an actor. I could sense that he was anything but at ease. If he surrendered to his instincts, he’d probably run screaming from this madhouse and spend the rest of the day scrubbing himself clean in a hot shower.

  Too late to turn back now, Jay, for either of us.

  “Chloe and I have been best friends since kindergarten,” I explained as we made our way down the stairs, hanging onto each other for balance as we stepped over and around the junk. “We kind of grew up in each other’s houses, so she knew. But somehow I never compared the way she lived to the way we did. That was just how Chloe’s house was. I guess I thought everyone’s house was different and unique. Careful here, these are sharp and rusty.”

  I edged around a brace of rebar rods. Why we had steel reinforcing bars inside our house, let alone on our staircase, was anybody’s guess.

  “But the penny dropped at Bree’s house that night, because her house was just like Chloe’s: clean, neat and tidy. And her mother was” — I struggled to find the right word — “I don’t know, put together. A bit like your mom. Hair combed, face made up, bright smiles as she handed out the hotdogs and buttered popcorn and reminded us to brush our teeth before we went to bed. And then I saw the pattern: it wasn’t that Chloe’s house was different from mine, it was that my house was different from everyone else’s. We were the abnormal ones, the freaks.”

  “Freaks?”

  I pushed aside a broken fax machine spewing a trail of paper and took another step down.

  “I was already looking kind of freakish — I was at least a foot taller than the other girls in my grade — and my mom was undeniably acting freakish. And there were things I just couldn’t say or do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Apart from Chloe, I couldn’t have any friends over — not even for a playdate, let alone a sleepover.”

  “No, Peyton, I’m afraid not. They wouldn’t … understand.”

  “Which meant that I couldn’t accept their invitations either, because I wouldn’t be able to return the favor. And it’s hard to keep friends when you never hang out together, so I just stopped making friends. I never had a party or a movie night, and when I had to do group projects for school, I never offered to have the kids come to my house. I got a reputation for being snooty and unfriendly. At first, they called me a stuck-up cow, then ‘the snooty girooffy’.”

  “The what?”

  “The snooty girooffy. You know, like giraffe — because I was so tall?”

  “Oh. Hilarious,” Jay said, unamused.

  “I made up all kinds of excuses to keep the kids from trying to come inside — we had a vicious dog, our house was being renovated or fumigated, my mother was too sick.”

  “I believe I’ve heard that one.”

  “It’s the one I used most often. Still do. Because it’s not a total lie, you know? And I hated all the lies I had to tell, but I knew without anyone telling me that I had to keep the secret. I was scared that if anyone found out, we’d lose the house, and I’d die of embarrassment and humiliation. To be honest, I still worry about those things.”

  We both ducked to worm our way under a pair of crutches wedged across the bannisters.

  “If someone reported us, Social Services would come nosing around, and they’d haul my lunatic of a mother off to the nuthouse, and me to a scary orphanage.”

  “This story is breaking my heart,” Jay said. He sounded like he meant it.

  “Well, this tour of our house is more likely to break your lungs,” I said. We were several steps from the bottom of the stairs, and Jay had started sneezing again. “Here, you should put this on.”

  I handed him one of the two facemasks I’d stuffed into my pocket earlier.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I shook my head. “It’s real bad down there. Worse than upstairs.”

  “Worse?”

  “Worse,” I confirmed. “It just keeps getting worse.”

  “Keep going,” he said, and clarified, “With the story.”

  “But it’s so boring.”

  “I want to hear it,” he insisted.

  “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  I dusted my hands on my jeans as we stepped off the last stair and flicked the switch for the sconces. Amazingly, two of the lights still worked.

  “You were talking about the excuses,” Jay prompted, seemingly more interested in me than the cluttered chaos of the hall.

  “Okay, well, when my mother stopped leaving the house, I had to come up with all sorts of reasons as to why she couldn’t attend parent-teacher conferences, class mom get-togethers, or mother-and-daughter breakfasts. I’d forge an acceptance reply, then on the day of the event send an apology text or email in her name, saying she was sick, away on an unexpected business trip, had a family emergency in New York, had fallen down the stairs and broken her ankle. Oh my God, all those lies!”

  I’d collected deceit and excuses like my mother had hoarded crap.

  “No wonder you’re so good at keeping secrets and hiding your real self.”

  “I got skillz, yo!” Time for some humor — this was getting too intense for me.

  Jay gave me a sad smile and tucked a stray curl of my hair behind my ear. “And at deflecting.”

  “Deflecting?”

  “Yeah, deflecting. Warding off questions and closeness. Steering clear of intimacy. It’s like” — he ran fingers through his hair, clearly searching for the right words — “It’s like your shields are up so hard and so tight that people just ricochet off you.”

  “Now that’s just crazy talk.” I grabbed a broke
n umbrella with faded red fabric hanging forlornly off its jutting spikes, and slashed aside a snare of spiderwebs. “Look at us, just like Tarzan and Jane, hacking our way through the vines. It’s a jungle down here.”

  “You’re doing it right now,” he accused.

  Guilty as charged.

  I felt my fake smile subside into bleak lines, and my shoulders slump in defeat. “The family room,” I sighed, tossing aside the umbrella.

  The room was filled four feet high with stuff that held the unfulfilled promise of normal family life: an ancient Christmas tree still decorated with tinsel and baubles; racks of VHS tapes in disintegrating cardboard sleeves; a garden of mummified potted plants on the mantelpiece; dingy sun-faded drapes hanging off their rails; a bicycle wheel jammed between toppled lamp stands. And things never used: a sagging stack of old board games that I didn’t remember us ever playing; a bundled value-pack of cleaning equipment — broom, mop, feather duster — still sealed in plastic; and boxes of Ikea furniture, never opened or assembled.

  Our house was full of could’ves, would’ves, should’ves.

  Jay turned his back on the accumulated crazy of the living room and fixed his attention on me.

  “I think you and your mom are similar in many ways,” he said.

  “What?”

  I did not want to be like my mom, not at all. Not in any way. It was one of the reasons I kept my own space so immaculate. The horror movie that regularly played itself out in my nightmares was that I allowed myself to buy one nonessential item, to hang up a picture or keep a book after I’d read it, and the weeds of mess multiplied until my space was overrun. And I was trapped.

  “I’m like my mom?” I said. “You mean, more than us both being freaks?”

  “You’re not a freak, you’re a goddess,” Jay said, flicking my chin with a finger.

  He thought I was a goddess. I tucked that word deep inside my heart, where it would stay shiny-clean and beautiful.

  “And your mom’s … ill.”

  “Well, you know what they say about magazine hoarders? They have a lot of issues.”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “I’m no shrink, but it seems to me that both you and your mother keep people at bay. She uses clutter. No one can come around with the house like this, right? And she never interacts with people in the outside world because she’s stuck inside — what’s it called, that condition?”

  “Agoraphobia.”

  “Right. And you keep the world at arm’s length with your secrets and advanced skills in avoidance. I’ve seen how you hide behind your humor. I think you even hide behind your height.”

  “Huh?” How was that even possible? “I think my height makes me the opposite of invisible, Jay.”

  “Well I think that maybe you secretly like that it’s all people see of you. It’s like, I don’t know, maybe you’d rather they focused on your height than probed a little deeper.”

  Clever boy.

  “My point is,” he continued, “I reckon you and your mother are both protecting yourselves against the same thing.”

  “The Clean House crew? The men in white coats?”

  He didn’t smile. He frowned and puffed a breath out through his lips. “Rejection, I think. And abandonment.”

  Wow. That felt like a punch in the guts.

  “Hey, I could be wrong — I’m not a psychologist — but I figure you’re terrified of loving and losing again. And if you never get close to anyone, you don’t have to risk the pain of losing them, like you did with Ethan and your father.”

  There were tears rolling down my cheeks now. I made to wipe them away, but my hands were dirty, and my shirt was covered in dust and cobwebs. Jay stepped close, lifted his sweatshirt and wiped my face with the inside of it.

  “Thank you, Dr. Freud,” I said, twisting my mouth into something I hoped resembled a grin.

  This time, he allowed me to deflect the emotion.

  “You promised me a tour of the entire mansion, and I won’t feel I’ve had the full experience unless I see the kitchen,” he said.

  “Fine. Hope you’ve got a strong stomach.”

  ~ 39 ~

  Moving carefully in the dim light, Jay and I maneuvered our way through the maze of old furniture and piles of newspaper; past a broken ironing board; and around clothes and handbags mushrooming from broken-zipped suitcases, and headed toward what remained of the kitchen.

  We were hit by the smell of damp and mildew as we reached the guest bathroom. Inside, the basin overflowed with old deodorant cans, empty shampoo bottles, rusted disposable razors, and half-used bars of soap, while the floor and bath were buried under a mountain of old books infested with a thriving silverfish colony.

  “The library,” I announced.

  Jay gave a low whistle.

  “Not to worry, though. My mother says these won’t be here for long.”

  “I’m just storing them here temporarily. Some of those are first editions, you know. That means they’re valuable.”

  Jay eyed the heaps of crumbling paper, detached covers and mold-speckled spines. “How long have they already been here?”

  “Oh, just six or seven years.”

  Slipping and sliding on the compost of magazines underfoot, we covered the last few feet to the kitchen, squeezing through a narrow section of hallway where a mattress topped with old bedding slumped vertically against the wall. A brace of dusty pillows fell onto my head as I walked by, sending us both into coughing fits.

  “Time to put on our masks,” I said, pulling my own up.

  We couldn’t see much except shadows in the gloom beyond the open kitchen door. But we could smell it.

  The acrid stink of rot and mold and decomposition enveloped us like a cloud of poison gas. It was rank — so pungent it was almost solid. It caught in my throat, turned my stomach and made my eyes water. Beside me, Jay had the back of his hand pressed against his masked mouth, holding back a gag.

  Oh yeah, worse.

  “The light switch is somewhere here,” I said, reaching around the doorway.

  As soon as the light flicked on, Jay cursed. Finally, I thought, now I’ll see the depth of his revulsion. Then I saw that he wasn’t reacting to the contents of the room. His worried gaze was fixed on the exposed wires and dangling metal plate of the light switch.

  “Damn, Peyton, those wires are live — you could have shocked yourself!”

  “I’m okay.”

  I was anything but. We were surrounded by a swamp of garbage bags — black ones stuffed with trash, and transparent ones filled with empty water bottles and soda cans.

  “I need to clean and sort them before I take them to the recycling depot. Stop nagging me, Peyton, I’ll get to it one day.”

  Jay glanced up at the sagging ceiling, with its water damage stain shaped like a giant, brown moth, and then down at the floor covered by a three-foot-deep mulch of debris and decay — scraps of waste and garbage that had never made it out to the trash: old pizza boxes; cheese and cracker trays with moldy crusts of food; an open, half-eaten jar of peanut-butter; empty cookie boxes and nested egg cartons; half-petrified apples with sunken, wrinkled cheeks; the remains of a birthday cake topped with a macabre frosting of blue-green fuzz. A rust-colored garden hose twisted its way under and around the silt of waste, and every surface was dotted with tiny black droppings.

  “This whole place is a death trap — one spark and it would go up in flames,” Jay said.

  “Would that be such a bad thing — if it burned to the ground?”

  “Don’t joke,” he replied, though I’d been entirely serious. “It’s not safe for you to live here. You could be burned to a crisp, or buried alive.”

  Buried alive? Been there, done that, got all the moth-eaten T-shirts lying somewhere here to prove it.

  He wasn’t wrong about the fire hazard, though. There was paper everywhere — shoeboxes overflowing with bills, letters, invoices, tax documents and appliance warranties, haphazardly filed alongside store ca
talogues, flyers, junk mail and cash register receipts.

  Jay clambered over a rusting laundry rack and lifted the top picture off a stack of my elementary school art cluttering a nearby counter. He grinned down at it before handing it to me.

  It was a macaroni-framed picture entitled, “My family, by Peyton Lane, 2nd grade.” Beside a red-roofed house with the obligatory border of flowers and yellow sun overhead stood a stick-figure family — all happy faces and splay-fingered hands — and a whiskered cat. Mom and Dad held hands, and I held a smiling blue bundle in my arms, even though by the time I’d drawn this, Dad had already left, and Ethan had been dead for a couple of years. And we’d never had a cat, thank God, or its desiccated corpse would probably be resting six feet under the crap in this room.

  I tossed the picture on the kitchen table, which was already piled high with dirty dishes, empty spice bottles, two computer keyboards, a knot of wire coat hangers snarled around a juicing machine, and an ornamental birdcage. We’d never had a pet bird, either.

  I caught Jay eyeing the refrigerator and quickly said, “Look, I don’t know about you, but I need to get outside and take some deep breaths of clean air. Have a quick look around, just so you can honestly say you earned your Medal of Honor for acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty, and then let’s get out of here.”

  I hated to think what putrefied remains might be entombed inside the refrigerator — it hadn’t worked for years.

  But Jay stayed where he was, rotating slowly on the spot like a man in a trance, staring at a broken-doored cupboard stuffed with bloated cans of long-expired foods, and a four-tiered shelf with peeling laminate that hung drunkenly off one wall, at the chipped tiles, peeling wallpaper, rotting linoleum, an overturned typist’s chair with a missing wheel. Everywhere things were broken, unrepaired, unused, expired and incomplete.

  Neglected.

  “It’s like the epicenter of an earthquake,” he said.

  He was onto something there. My mother’s hoarding was like a decade-long natural disaster — a slow-motion flood with no hope of rescue from emergency services.