As predicted, the moment school started we were back to running at full throttle. Work was crazy with students e-mailing me excuses and pleas for extensions and Katherine’s patients, whose needs approached actual pathos, saving their worst crises for nights and weekends, as if they somehow knew that social workers, like cell phone plans, worked for free after hours. Add in choir and swimming and Galen begging on bended knee to please, please, pretty please take a karate class after a martial artist at a school assembly broke real wood boards with his forehead and, well, we were busy. September nights turned cold and smoky, fireplaces across town all of a sudden crackling and blazing. Katherine and I referred to the previous summer as “Ireland,” which was our way of saying that the entire season, not just the month we spent there, felt like a lush but distant country.
We did our best to keep up during the week and then used the weekends to make up the difference. Galen had crossed the five-foot mark and now stood a mere three inches below his mom. Hayden appeared shorter only by comparison. In that year’s school photo, he looked like Big Bird among the Muppets. Groceries intended to last all week disappeared quickly, and the wrappers and boxes and stems ended up inside the couch cushions or chucked behind the television.
By Friday, the fridge and cupboards were picked clean. Our dinner choices were either cans of baked beans heaped atop bowls of rice or else leftover “Crock-Pot shit,” which consisted of a slab of meat excavated from the back of the freezer and thrown into the slow cooker on Thursday morning as Katherine ran out the door for work. When I came downstairs on Saturday mornings, the house looked like the grounds at Woodstock the day the music died.
Okay, not quite that bad. But bad enough that cleaning the house was the top of the weekend to-do list. Katherine took the bathrooms and kitchen, and I took the beds and floors. On Sunday afternoon, after mopping the kitchen and hallway and running the vacuum over the rugs, I was working the wand attachment into the corner of the basement stairs where the finest mites liked to hide. The dirt crackled as it whirled up the tube and I took no small delight in watching the cyclone of dust and debris spin inside the transparent canister. The boys never grew tired of bragging that our vacuum really sucked.
I could hear the boys above me, through the plaster and wood that separated the basement ceiling from the living room floor. They were jumping between the sofa and the coffee table, built from a massive hunk of reclaimed wood and standing on iron legs sturdy enough to jack up a car. Their noises, though, were a dangerous mixture of laughing and grunting that portended someone—Hayden, usually—getting hurt. I shut off the vacuum. Then, the sound of a kid landing on the floor. Hayden started to cry while Galen kept right on cackling. “Galen!” I screamed at the ceiling.
It was after three, and I was scrambling to finish cleaning while Katherine was at the grocery store. The boys had commenced their tirade of evil only minutes after she left, clomping in dirty sneakers across the kitchen floor and then proceeding to shower graham cracker crumbs over the living room rugs.
Galen appeared at the landing, five steps above me. His unlaced high-tops made his feet look enormous, a reminder of how much he’d grown in the last year and, I thought, confirmation that he ought to know how to behave.
“What do I have to do to get you to settle down?” I asked. My voice was high, a little whiny.
“I’m bored,” he said. “There’s nothing to do.”
“Go outside.”
“There’s no one to play with,” he said.
“Play with your brother.”
“My brother’s an asswipe.”
“Hey!” I jabbed the vacuum attachment in the air. “Language.”
The sky above our neighbor’s roof was the same lapis blue as the shirt he was wearing, and the sunlight through the window in the back door turned his ginger hair the color of a new penny. He looked back at me. “Do you want to come outside with me?”
For some reason, one I can neither explain nor justify, his request only further inflamed my ire. I went from steaming red to white hot. “I’m working!” I growled. “What do you think I’ve been doing while you and your brother have been tearing the house apart? I’m trying to get the floors clean before Mom gets home. You two are making a mess faster than I can clean it up!”
Galen’s eyes narrowed, and his chin balled up beneath his bottom lip. He turned to look out the window behind him. “Sometimes I hate weekends,” he said. “All we do is chores.”
“Go ride your bike,” I said, waving my hand. “Let me finish.”
He left through the back door, and I returned to vacuuming, muttering to myself the list of tasks still to accomplish: unloading the car once Katherine returned, moving the food from their sacks to the refrigerator and cupboards, packing the boys’ lunches, ironing a shirt for work tomorrow, getting started on dinner. I looked up again in time to see Galen’s red bike helmet, like a carnival balloon against the backdrop of the sky, glide past the window. I moved another step down and pushed the wand into the corner of the stairs.
For as long as we’d been together, save the few months between moving to Wisconsin and Hayden’s birth, Katherine had worked full-time. She worked full-time throughout college in order to pay her own way (and graduated a year early, I’ll add proudly). She managed the lifeguards at the county pool when we met but soon after left it for the hospital, first as a clerk in the emergency room and then as a paid social worker once she’d finished her degree. She’d worked in hospitals ever since, and hospitals, as most people know, never shut down. That meant she worked a lot of irregular hours at inconvenient times (like, say, when she ought to be sleeping), and trouble could crash through the door at any time.
My schedule, though plenty busy, had more flexibility. I couldn’t recall a single death resulting from a skipped faculty meeting. We didn’t have the cash for a house cleaner or a private chef, so unless we wanted to stew in our own filth and order pizza seven nights a week, someone had to clean and someone had to buy and prepare the food. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I could clean better than Alice from The Brady Bunch. I was a maestro with a vacuum cleaner and even more of one when it came to making beds. I could make a bed so square and tight that were a drill sergeant to inspect our rooms, he’d raise his hand in crisp salute.
It would be inaccurate, however, to say that my cleanliness was purely the product of my desire to be a good husband. My mom was fairly obsessive when it came to keeping a clean house, and as an adult I’d inherited a number of the same anal-retentive habits. My mom made the bed when she stayed in a hotel. I was in third grade when she stood in the driveway in her bathrobe, the school bus idling in front of our house, while I refolded my hospital corners until they were tight enough to pass inspection. By high school, the conditioning had become Pavlovian: I straightened and tucked the sheets the moment my feet hit the floor, even if it was five in the morning and I was headed to swimming practice. To this day, lying down in a pile of rumpled blankets makes me feel sick for no other reason than because, as a kid, fever and vomiting were the only allowable excuses for not making the bed in the morning. And only then because I was still sleeping in it.
In our house in Texas—a house that, it’s worth mentioning, backed onto a muddy bayou that filled with snakes and mice and bugs every time it rained—my mom decorated our front sitting room entirely in white. White twill sofas, white cabinets, a white coffee table, white lamps spilling white light through white shades. Even the carpet was white. To make sure it stayed clean, she forbade anyone from ever setting foot inside it, including our golden retriever. The dog used to lie on the tile floor in the foyer with his chin nested on the living room carpet, and he knew to move his head when he heard Mom coming down the hall. We were granted access on two days each year—Easter Sunday and Christmas morning. The splendor and solemnity of those two holidays seemed compounded by the thrill of crossing that forbidden threshold into a room devoid of color. When some years later my mom and stepdad decided to sell the house, they gave the sofas to my stepbrother. They still looked brand-new.
For much of my growing up, my mom, like Katherine, worked all day and then spent all afternoon and evening shuttling between swimming and ballet and soccer, juggling dinner with homework and making sure our clothes were clean. I remember her switching out loads of laundry from the washer and dryer directly across from my room at eleven o’clock at night. Children are by nature blind to their parents’ sacrifices; I took my mother’s good efforts and hard work for granted as surely as the boys took for granted the things Katherine and I did for them. Ironically, though, it wasn’t our lack of gratitude, or even her job, but rather the cleanliness of our house itself that often seemed the source of my mom’s greatest stress. Occasionally one of us would tell her to let a few things go, to give herself (and us) a break; that a pile of dishes left in the sink overnight or a footprint in the vacuum tracks wasn’t the end of the world. But a disorderly house was for her emblematic of an inner state of disorder, while a clean house meant she had everything under control, even when she didn’t.
During the divorce, the house stayed as pristine as a museum. At the time, I took her compulsive cleaning as an unwillingness to accept the sordid state of her life, the fact that she and Dad had bottomed out. She didn’t like me hanging around other kids from divorced homes, as though a broken marriage were some kind of virus she needed to quarantine. I thought her too concerned with the optics of respectability, and I accused her, sometimes venomously, of being shallow and materialistic. Years later, I could finally see her differently: When I recalled her Windexing the bathroom mirror with one hand while applying her makeup with the other, I saw her wishing she could undo her mistakes, hers and my dad’s, and return them both to a former unblemished state. I also saw her finding the courage to move forward in the wake of what she couldn’t repair. When the dust of the divorce finally settled, both my parents were deeply in debt and the mortgage was underwater, but no matter how bad things got, my mother never once called in sick for work or spent the day in bed with the curtains drawn.
The night after I yelled at Galen, I woke up at two in the morning racked with guilt of a different sort. Though the boys and I had been home together for two days, we’d spent most of the time in different rooms. An entire weekend had slipped by, and we’d barely looked each other in the eye . . . until the moment I’d spurned Galen’s invitation to join him outside. Our exchange on the staircase was the closest we’d come to a conversation all weekend, and I’d screamed at him. I pictured Galen’s contorted face at the top of the stairs, his big feet, his oversized adult front teeth docked into place, the basement stairs descending to a room we used only for laundry and storage. I saw the irony with a clarity only insomnia could provide: My urgency to clean the space where we stored the artifacts from our past had cost me time with the boys in the present. I lay awake for the rest of the night, foreseeing the day when the mention of my name would cause my sons to remember not our days together at the beach or the pool or even Ireland but a plum-faced man brandishing a vacuum wand.
When my alarm rang out at five, I slipped downstairs to brush my teeth and gather up my clothes before heading to the pool to swim. I stopped in the driveway and stared up at the house. The sun wouldn’t be up for two more hours; because of an event that night on campus, the boys would be in bed when I returned home. The weekend, my next best chance to make good on my promise to be a better father, felt like a long way off.
Then, as if I’d summoned him, Galen’s light turned on and his head appeared in the glass. I watched his hands work the locks on the sash, heard the shush of the pane sliding up. He pressed his nose to the screen. “Hey, Dad,” he said.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No. I was already awake.”
“Me, too,” I said. I looked away, into the yard. Brown leaves wreathed the trunk of the maple; winter would be here soon. I looked back up to Galen, his silhouette backlit by the bulb in his ceiling. I could see only the outline of his face, like a priest behind a confessional screen. “I’m sorry we didn’t get much time together this weekend,” I said. “I’m sorry I yell so much.”
“We don’t have as much time to do our chores during the week,” he said. “We have to do them on the weekend. Sometimes you’re too busy to play.” I could hear my own flimsy rationalizing in his voice, the litany of reasons my mother used to give to explain why she was upset, the truer sadness she needed to hide. I could imagine Galen one day using these same words to shoo away his own child. We were the links in an unending chain of chores and householding, our meager and ephemeral time away from school and work too often devoted to work of another kind. It felt wrong, standing there in the dark. But—I could hear it in his voice—he was also forgiving me.