dawn I experienced an involuntary total voiding of my bowels. I took thirty milliliters of red and squeezed my globus. Still rock hard. Jim called at eleven and said there was a mini-emergency. Jim is the on-site office manager.
“Is it about Phillip?” Maybe we would have to rush over to his house and I could see where he lived.
“Michelle changed her mind about Clee.”
“Oh.”
“She wants Clee to move out.”
“Okay.”
“So can you take her?”
When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter.
“I wish I could, I really wish I could help out,” I said.
“This isn’t coming from me, it’s Carl and Suzanne’s idea. I think they kind of wonder why you didn’t offer in the first place, since you’re practically family.”
I pressed my lips together. Once Carl had called me ginjo, which I thought meant “sister” until he told me it’s Japanese for a man, usually an elderly man, who lives in isolation while he keeps the fire burning for the whole village.
“In the old myths he burns his clothes and then his bones to keep it going,” Carl said. I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described. “Then he has to find something else to keep the fire going so he has ubitsu. There’s no easy translation for that, but basically they are dreams so heavy that they have infinite mass and weight. He burns those and the fire never goes out.” Then he told me my managerial style was more effective from a distance, so my job was now work-from-home though I was welcome to come in one day a week and for board meetings.
My house isn’t very big; I tried to picture another person in here.
“They said I was practically family?”
“It goes without saying—I mean, do you say your mom is practically family?”
“No.”
“See?”
“When is this happening?”
“She’ll come with her stuff later tonight.”
“I have an important private phone call this evening.”
“Thanks a bunch, Cheryl.”
I CARRIED MY COMPUTER OUT of the ironing room and set up a cot that is more comfortable than it looks. I folded a washcloth on top of a hand towel on top of a bath towel and placed them on a duvet cover that she was welcome to use over her comforter. I put a sugarless mint on top of the washcloth. I Windexed all the bath and sink taps so they looked brand-new, and also the handle on the toilet. I put my fruit in a ceramic bowl so I could gesture to it when I said, “Eat anything. Pretend this is your home.” The rest of the house was perfectly in order, as it always is, thanks to my system.
It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple:
Fewer dishes.
They can’t pile up if you don’t have them. This is the main thing, but also:
Stop moving things around.
How much time do you spend moving objects to and fro? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you are carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling. Putting new soap in the bathroom? Maybe wait until the towels in the dryer are done and carry the towels and soap together. Maybe put the soap on the dryer until then. And maybe don’t fold the towels until the next time you have to use the restroom. When the time comes, see if you can put away the soap and fold towels while you’re on the toilet, since your hands are free. Before you wipe, use the toilet paper to blot excess oil from your face. Dinnertime: skip the plate. Just put the pan on a hot pad on the table. Plates are an extra step you can do for guests to make them feel like they’re at a restaurant. Does the pan need to be washed? Not if you only eat savory things out of it.
We all do most of these things some of the time; with my system you do all of them all of the time. Never don’t do them. Before you know it, it’s second nature, and the next time you’re down in the dumps it operates on its own. Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy. At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.
The doorbell rang at quarter to nine and I still hadn’t heard from Phillip. If he called while I was with her I would just have to excuse myself. What if she still looked like a gang person? Or she might feel terrible about the imposition and start apologizing the moment she saw me. As I walked to the door the map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. Not necessarily an indicator of anything.
She was much older than she’d been when she was fourteen. She was a woman. So much a woman that for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was. An enormous purple duffel bag was slung over her shoulder.
“Clee! Welcome!” She stepped back quickly as if I intended to embrace her. “It’s a shoeless household, so you can put your shoes right there.” I pointed and smiled and waited and pointed again. She looked at the row of my shoes, different brown shapes, and then down at her own shoes, which seemed to be made out of pink gum.
“I don’t think so,” she said in a surprisingly low, husky voice.
We stood there for a moment. I told her to hold on, and went and got a plastic produce bag. She looked at me with an aggressively blank expression while she kicked off her shoes and put them in the bag.
“When you leave make sure to lock both dead bolts, but when you’re in the house it’s fine to just lock one. If the doorbell rings, you can open this”—I opened the tiny door within the front door and peeked through it—“to see who it is.” When I pulled my face out of the peephole she was in the kitchen.
“Eat anything,” I said, jogging to catch up. “Pretend this is your home.” She took two apples and started to put them in her purse, but then saw one had a bruise and switched it out for another. I showed her the ironing room. She popped the mint into her mouth and left the wrapper on the washcloth.
“There’s no TV in here?”
“The TV is in the common area. The living room.”
We walked out to the living room and she stared at the TV. It wasn’t the flat kind, but it was big, built into the bookshelves. It had a little Tibetan cloth hanging over it.
“You have cable?”
“No. I have a good antenna, though, so all the local stations come in very clearly.” Before I was done talking she took out her phone and started typing on it. I stood there for a moment, waiting, until she glanced up at me as if to say Why are you still here?
I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Using my peripheral vision, I could still see her and it was hard not to wonder if Carl’s mother had