Fiction by C. White
When she was growing up, she hid from the violent attempts of her parents to keep the
house clean. On Saturday mornings, blanket over her head, hands over her ears, she tried to avoid the loud drone of the vacuum, the hurried footfalls up and down the stairs, the sound of rinsing and flushing, the picking up and dumping of objects from here, to there, to there.
“Guests are coming,” they would intone for days beforehand.
The guests would come and eat meat and corn on the back patio in the warm months. In the colder ones, they sat drinking scotch or tea in the living room, simple except for two paintings, a bowl of potpourri, and plush textiles that whispered “sit on me, don’t sit on me, sit just for a moment.” When they left, the father especially used his hands and the vacuum to stroke the fibres back into place, in one direction only: southwest.
When her own children were young, she bought homemaking magazines once in awhile for tips on how to: manage finances, dust lampshades, diplomatically tell your neighbours their dog is bothering you, bake a quick healthy loaf, take deep breathes in the morning, make pork in five different and affordable ways that will last the family a week. Printed on one spine in teal ink: A clean home is a sign of a wasted life.
Once a neighbour dropped off a book. The two stood in the doorway, and the woman invited the neighbour in, but the neighbour very subtly scrunched up her nose and swept her eyes behind the woman’s feet where the kitty litter sat, full of cat turds like dark dead mice, wafting a smell. The neighbour declined.
Another time, an old friend was visiting from out of the country. The table had been taken
over by the children’s toys and stacks of books and papers. The guest sat on the one spot of the couch that was not covered with one hill of unfolded laundry and three piles of folded laundry. The host sat on the floor drinking coffee, an open tin of shortbread cookies on her lap, absentmindedly trailing her fingers over the carpet, and she realized her hand was like a rake and her fingers had become entangled with long strands of hair, pouffs of dust, cat fur, and crumbs.
In all scenarios, her yelling children were invariably tearing through the house as she hosted. She wouldn’t sacrifice these particular monsters and their mess for the more banal and fleeting monstrosity of guests.
Before sleeping she wiped her face with a tissue premoistened with salicylic acid and
cucumber extract, and then wiped her feet with it, because the soles were always smudged with a darkness from walking barefoot on the floors she never cleaned, and she liked the bottom envelope of her bedsheets to not be dirty, at least.
At some point, the cat died.
Now that she lives alone, she’s cut her hair short like a boy’s, and in the mirror she watches
it turn grey.
She’s expecting her high school friend to come over and tell her about endometriosis and a
reckless fling, both alluded to over text. She has time now that she has moved to a small apartment, so over the course of two days she slowly and meditatively dusts the top of the range hood, cleans in and around the toilet, washes and puts away all the dishes, vacuums and then sweeps the long lines where the walls and the floors meet to create a box around her body, its movements, its patterns. The morning of the visit she looks in her fridge to see what’s left, and slices up some cheese and red pepper. She rinses some strawberries. She puts these things on a plate in the centre of the wooden table.
Later on she and her friend will eat the food then consider ordering out, because all there’s
left to eat other than what’s on the table is black beans that would need to be soaked overnight then cooked for an hour, and a handful of brown jasmine rice. But they will end up instead going to the diner down the street to eat greek salads and pork souvlaki. Snow will rush by horizontally outside. They will talk about their mutual friend, a magazine editor, and how his balls are so long and droopy with a million folds that the woman couldn’t even fit one of them in her mouth if she tried. “It would reach my diaphragm,” she will say, and they will both make gagging sounds, tzatziki at the corners of their mouths, the muscles of their elongated necks bulging with noise, forks poised in the air.
But for now she sits at the wooden table, her wasted self available. The rain outside turns to
snow. She wonders what she should do: cook the jasmine rice? With blueberries from the freezer maybe, and cardamom. Memorize haiku by Issa? Attempt a cartwheel across the bare wooden floor?
C. White is a writer and educator living in Toronto and Montreal. Her work has previously appeared in The New Quarterly, Grain, The Madison Review, and Sycamore Review.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
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