(no subject)
there is something on me that smells like my mother's apartment.
she lives in a tiny box of smoke, the color of wax. all surfaces in there are covered in a tawny, tacky film that draws the dust and lint. the air is gauzy with cigarette smoke, it's like peering through a greasy lens. the window panes are only just translucent, and outside her door are flame-like traces of the inner murk exiting, as if the door once bravely held back a housefire. i can spend only one night there, as my sinuses become barnacled and my eyes ache. i am kept awake by her cough, which inspires rage and spite and agony. i am kept awake by sleeping on a futon mattress with a constellation of cigarette burns and a halo of ash around her sitting-spot, flattened by her slight weight there rocking, smoking, drinking, almost all day and night. it's like lying the wrong way across a bucket seat. it's like living in a scale replica of her own sickly lung. it is wretched, and it is as close to home as i get.
after much discrete sniffing of myself, i believe my tights are the culprit i seek, which i am guessing went unworn and managed too to go unwashed upon my return from visiting her a few weeks ago. there is a descaling process i undertake after every weekend i spend there; i wash my hair, my body, everything i brought with me, worn or unworn, i air out my coat and the bag i carried. there are always pockets of it left, lurking in the air trapped in my change purse, in my notebook's pages, in a mitten that missed the grand lavage, and here, now, in my tights. knotted up against the odor in the depths of my bag, i must have thought at the time that they'd escaped this fate. scent is the greatest memory trigger, so they say. perhaps there are other flashbacks lurking in my sock drawer, waiting to bite.
but out of my tights and back to the squalor i shall take you.
in addition to the toxic haze her apartment has been uninhabitably cold all winter. she was institutionalized for much of this after an alarming experiment with head injuries - drunken black-outs or tachycardiac collapses, no one seems to know. she could sometimes not recall what had occurred after her falls and often on the phone she would describe to me in her most rehearsed 'astonished' voice, since she was well aware of her own habit of braining herself on the kitchen counter, that she had begun 'bleeding spontaneously' and had needed stitches and another trip to the ER. the hospitalization has saved her money (which she now uses to upgrade from three-dollar pints of Bukoff vodka to the JD far dearer to her), and kept her warm.
her a/c unit was still in the window - it is January - buttressed by blocks of wood screwed into the frame. the storm wouldn't close and there were gusts of wind. i told her i wanted to remove the air conditioner and she became caustic, so i just hung coats over it and stuffed dishtowels in the gaps. the temperature rose to about 59 degrees.
everytime i am there i clean. dishes, walls, windows, grubby switchplates, stovetop, everything. i had been avoiding a visit for a long long time, and it showed. this time I couldn't quite bring myself to do it, though. i washed the dishes we used, her neglected coffee maker; i washed the rusty blood stains from the package of instant mashed potatoes some state agency had provided for her, and from the surrounding condiments; i washed an arcing dotted line of blood from the wall. many years ago, just before she was first institutionalized, i would visit her in old lyme, where she would sit talking to the mirrored elephant cloth that hung on the wall, ingesting nothing but cheap beer, birthday party cake from the supermarket, and gov't cheese, smoking the few butts she gleaned from patrician rural new england's generally butt-free gutters, awaiting her eviction. i went almost every day for weeks, i packed her a suitcase for god-knows-where, boxed up her belongings for storage, and again, i cleaned: over and over again, i washed the walls in what was once the room i slept in while she muttered to herselves. there was standing water in the crawlspace below the outbuilding our apartment was in, it was a humid summer, and there was a hot water leak from the tub faucet, all of which conspired to deck the walls in unstoppable thready grey mildew.
i am not fanatical about filth in general. honest, not at all. i am even a little partial to disorder. but this a mess i could drown in. i feel like some myth of sisyphus/lady macbeth/hints from heloise hybrid, doomed to be always trying to remove the traces of all this sickness and indignity and exhaustion, trying idiotically to keep it in check. i want some massive flood to wipe out all traces of it, so i can quit. and while i'm at it, i want my head opened like a jar and all the sour dreck removed from it as well, the one place i can't clean to my satisfaction.
she lives in a tiny box of smoke, the color of wax. all surfaces in there are covered in a tawny, tacky film that draws the dust and lint. the air is gauzy with cigarette smoke, it's like peering through a greasy lens. the window panes are only just translucent, and outside her door are flame-like traces of the inner murk exiting, as if the door once bravely held back a housefire. i can spend only one night there, as my sinuses become barnacled and my eyes ache. i am kept awake by her cough, which inspires rage and spite and agony. i am kept awake by sleeping on a futon mattress with a constellation of cigarette burns and a halo of ash around her sitting-spot, flattened by her slight weight there rocking, smoking, drinking, almost all day and night. it's like lying the wrong way across a bucket seat. it's like living in a scale replica of her own sickly lung. it is wretched, and it is as close to home as i get.
after much discrete sniffing of myself, i believe my tights are the culprit i seek, which i am guessing went unworn and managed too to go unwashed upon my return from visiting her a few weeks ago. there is a descaling process i undertake after every weekend i spend there; i wash my hair, my body, everything i brought with me, worn or unworn, i air out my coat and the bag i carried. there are always pockets of it left, lurking in the air trapped in my change purse, in my notebook's pages, in a mitten that missed the grand lavage, and here, now, in my tights. knotted up against the odor in the depths of my bag, i must have thought at the time that they'd escaped this fate. scent is the greatest memory trigger, so they say. perhaps there are other flashbacks lurking in my sock drawer, waiting to bite.
but out of my tights and back to the squalor i shall take you.
in addition to the toxic haze her apartment has been uninhabitably cold all winter. she was institutionalized for much of this after an alarming experiment with head injuries - drunken black-outs or tachycardiac collapses, no one seems to know. she could sometimes not recall what had occurred after her falls and often on the phone she would describe to me in her most rehearsed 'astonished' voice, since she was well aware of her own habit of braining herself on the kitchen counter, that she had begun 'bleeding spontaneously' and had needed stitches and another trip to the ER. the hospitalization has saved her money (which she now uses to upgrade from three-dollar pints of Bukoff vodka to the JD far dearer to her), and kept her warm.
her a/c unit was still in the window - it is January - buttressed by blocks of wood screwed into the frame. the storm wouldn't close and there were gusts of wind. i told her i wanted to remove the air conditioner and she became caustic, so i just hung coats over it and stuffed dishtowels in the gaps. the temperature rose to about 59 degrees.
everytime i am there i clean. dishes, walls, windows, grubby switchplates, stovetop, everything. i had been avoiding a visit for a long long time, and it showed. this time I couldn't quite bring myself to do it, though. i washed the dishes we used, her neglected coffee maker; i washed the rusty blood stains from the package of instant mashed potatoes some state agency had provided for her, and from the surrounding condiments; i washed an arcing dotted line of blood from the wall. many years ago, just before she was first institutionalized, i would visit her in old lyme, where she would sit talking to the mirrored elephant cloth that hung on the wall, ingesting nothing but cheap beer, birthday party cake from the supermarket, and gov't cheese, smoking the few butts she gleaned from patrician rural new england's generally butt-free gutters, awaiting her eviction. i went almost every day for weeks, i packed her a suitcase for god-knows-where, boxed up her belongings for storage, and again, i cleaned: over and over again, i washed the walls in what was once the room i slept in while she muttered to herselves. there was standing water in the crawlspace below the outbuilding our apartment was in, it was a humid summer, and there was a hot water leak from the tub faucet, all of which conspired to deck the walls in unstoppable thready grey mildew.
i am not fanatical about filth in general. honest, not at all. i am even a little partial to disorder. but this a mess i could drown in. i feel like some myth of sisyphus/lady macbeth/hints from heloise hybrid, doomed to be always trying to remove the traces of all this sickness and indignity and exhaustion, trying idiotically to keep it in check. i want some massive flood to wipe out all traces of it, so i can quit. and while i'm at it, i want my head opened like a jar and all the sour dreck removed from it as well, the one place i can't clean to my satisfaction.