Fridays I clean. I begin by flipping the kitchen chairs upside down on the table, taking the bin of newspapers from the place near the couch and balancing it in the rungs of one of the upended chairs. I do the same with the crate of dog toys, and then make sure there aren’t any unforeseen ponytail holders or Legos lingering beneath the couch. Our ninety-pound lab Shepherd mix sheds, so the first step is to vacuum. I prefer to do it right. I pick the flattened pads of dog hair that stick to the bottoms of the chairs, and then I fill a bucket with hot water and add a generous amount of vinegar.
There’s only one right way to clean floors. That’s on hands and knees. Bent at the waist, reaching beneath the lip of the cabinets, running a rag on the baseboard, the vinegar catches the splattered spaghetti sauce and the sand the girls brought in from the backyard sandbox. I scrub a dried green bit and assume it’s lettuce or broccoli and move on.
My husband thought I was insane when he discovered me on hands and knees on the floor of our Cleveland apartment during our first year of marriage. I didn’t try and persuade him on this longstanding method, I just went on with my work. The floors of our Indiana home, where we live now, are hardwood everywhere except the kitchen and bath, both of which respond nicely to vinegar. Still, despite the grime the dog or our daughters trample in, it’s the floors that concern me. No matter what freelance deadline I’ve got on my plate or student work that begs a response, I’ve got to clean the floors or something in me feels unsettled.
All the women in my family swear by vinegar. We use it to clean our floors and sour the tomato sauce that simmers around our cabbage rolls. It cleans windows streak-free and even removes chlorine from hair. We discovered this thanks to Mrs. Borlen, Mom’s friend who cut our hair as kids and permed Mom’s in her basement’s makeshift salon. We swam competitively and each time we went for a trim, Mrs. Borlen rubbed the strands of our hair between her fingers, mouth puckered in disgust. But once we began to squirt our heads with vinegar and water, then followed this with shampoo, Mrs. Borlen announced our hair much improved. I couldn’t feel the chlorine build up, no matter how much I fingered my hair, but I liked the satisfaction I felt eliminating something unnatural.
***
As a child, weekends were spent camping. My parents were proud to say they paid cash for our 1978 Starcraft pop up. Dad had accepted a new job and they used his pay to buy the camper. When we arrived at a campground Mom would help Dad back into the site, and then Dad would unhitch the car, fit a crank into the camper’s frame, and with each turn, the canvas walls unfurled. The lid of the camper rose until it became the ceiling. It took two of us to pull out the bunks—and it was my responsibility to fasten the support poles beneath each bunk.
Dad and Chris blocked the front and back of each tire with a chunk of wood, and then hooked up the electricity and water by fastening two feet of severed hose to the side of the camper, letting this drain into an old paint bucket. Mom says now that camping was a way to feel like we were vacationing despite the fact we didn’t have money for extravagance. Meals were prepared on a charcoal fire. Hobo dinners were a favorite—squares of tinfoil pocketed with a beef patty, slices of potatoes, onions, tomatoes and zucchini, a dash of salt, pepper, and half a cube of beef bouillon. During thunderstorms, we huddled around the Formica table that collapsed to form the base of Chris’s bed and ate bowls of canned soup with Saltine crackers, or spaghetti and meatballs that Mom would bring in a Tupperware from home, white blocks of ice crusting around hunks of meat. Rain beat the canvas walls in a dull hum. The fabric flapped as trees shook their leaves, tossed down twigs and sometimes branches.
During good weather, we ate our dinners outside at a picnic table provided by the campground and followed this with a campfire, mismatched lawn chairs folded in a semicircle. We made s’mores or pudgie pies by fitting crustless slices of buttered bread and pie filling inside cast iron sandwich makers that we suspended over the fire until they sizzled. Mom would use a potholder to unclasp the lock and flip our pies onto paper plates. They steamed in the light of the fire, glistened golden brown.
In those days, I thought my parents knew everything—they could drive, set up a portable home on wheels, feed my siblings and me tasty food. But only now do I realize they were as uncertain of the way forward as every parent. Exhausted at the end of the night, worrying about paying our tuition at the Catholic school, wondering if they could stomach another season with their bosses, fearful this might be the year our basement sump pump would fail.
No matter where we went, my parents always brought along a blue train case that they had filled with pills and bandages, bottles of Dimetap for sore throats and Donagel, which tasted like chalky bananas, for upset stomachs. The train case had been a wedding gift and when you opened it the silky blue lining gave off the faint scent of Coppertone. It had a pocket along the inside that looked like a garter with its gathered folds. Maybe during their honeymoon Mom had used such a pocket to hold a fancy nightgown. But growing up, it became our portable medicine cabinet. Dad was a pharmacist, Mom a nurse, and when one of us were ill, if they decided it was something that could be remedied without a visit to our pediatrician, they’d open the train case and sort through the bottles and pills.
I frequently had ear infections and sore throats that felt like someone was rubbing my flesh with sand paper. In the haze of a fever, sticky with fatigue and slumped in my bed or on the corner of the couch, I’d hear them open the train case. “Carl, should we start her on something?”
“I don’t know, Judy. Try the amoxicillian.” And, moments later, I’d hear him uncorking the childproof cap from a bottle of powdered medicine, mixing this with sterilized water from a jug, then shaking this until it formed a thin pink liquid that tasted as candied as I imagined the color pink would taste. When Mom approached me in my bed holding the plastic medicine dispenser, she would ask me to sit up and then put an arm around me, maybe cup my shoulder. She looked both concerned and deeply interested, like I was a puzzle worth solving. I’d sit in her deep gaze, throat flaming, maybe sticky with sweat as she held the dispenser to my mouth and told me to drink all of it. A wave of contentment would drop over me and suddenly everything felt new: the sheets on my feet softened, caressed my legs with a cool touch; the ticking of the closed shades in the open window, a bird far off sweetly trilling.
Everything about Mom seemed so sure and impenetrable. I don’t remember thinking that I, too, would one day become a mother, but at some point I must have made the connection because my 5th grade journal includes a list at the back with the header “Notes to Myself When I am a Mom.”
“Wear fashionable clothes!” The first note says. And another—Sidewalk painting: water + food coloring + paintbrushes is an easy outdoor activity for kids. If only parenthood had been as easy as figuring out how to keep kids entertained.
***
Maybe Pete and I would have had more kids if we’d married earlier, although we are fortunate to have our daughters. I didn’t have a problem getting pregnant, holding onto the pregnancies proved more difficult. With my first pregnancy, we had been trying for a few months and I had been reading books and blogs about conception signs, so when I woke in the middle of the night with cramps, I knew it was implantation. By the time I finally bought a drugstore test, the plus sign was a mere formality. I couldn’t have been more elated. Suddenly everything had purpose—a bit of orange, a sip of milk. Everything I did or ate held greater meaning.
I read What to Expect When You’re Expecting three or more times a day, memorizing the illustrations, noticing how the fetus’s bulbous eyes moved closer together with each week, the dome head narrowing, growing round. I scrutinized drawings at seven weeks as hands and feet began to develop. At eight weeks eyelids appeared. Nine weeks the long fish-like tail shrunk to a stump and split to form two leg buds. And by week 10, when I began to spot, the illustration looked like a human fetus. I called the nurse as soon as the splotches darkened the toilet bowl.
A long, cold winter followed. I remember curling up on the sofa uninterested in reading or writing, eating, talking or exisiting. We planted a white bud tree in a corner of our suburban house. I watched how a strong wind pushed the branches against the windows, made them bend but not break.
When I became pregnant the second time, my doctor prescribed progesterone, a hormone that the body naturally produces during pregnancy. Around eight o’clock each night, Pete washed his hands and drew up the medicine while I held a pack of ice to my backside. We did this for 12-weeks and it gradually became routine. During that same period, I was scheduled to attend a work conference in New Orleans. I invited Mom to join me so she could help administer the progesterone. A nurse by trade, she began by scrubbing her hands, then carefully drew the injection into the 8-guage needle, her reading glasses perched at the end of her nose. I stretched out on the hotel bed, pants pulled to the side. I don’t remember us talking about what it was like for her to help me in this way, but I wonder now what thoughts came to mind. As a nurse, she respected medicine and its accompanying regimens. I wonder if she thought of her own unborn children, the two miscarriages she endured. It isn’t something we’ve ever discussed. This loss is something we’ve shared.
***
On Fridays when I wash the floors with vinegar, this is where it all returns to me. This is where Estelle released her bladder with her last seizure. This is where Pete drops his bags each day he returns from work. This is where last month Josie walked into the counter, the blood-streaking fast down her forehead, this is where we stood, talking about our neighbor with stage-four pancreatic cancer, his bland yellow skin foreshadowing his eventual passing.
I do the bathrooms next, scrubbing the toilets and sinks, Windex the glass in the shower stall, clean the dried saliva off the windows where the dog stands barking at the neighbor’s cat. There are cobwebs in certain corners of the walls. I’ll see them randomly on a Tuesday and swat it with the back of my hand, then wipe this on my jeans or just take the crumbled web and drop it in the garbage. Dirt and dust accumulates.
There are other things I could be doing with my time: a class to prep for, emails to answer, laundry piles that demands folding. Yet, when I am on hands and knees dunking an old burp cloth into a bucket of vinegar water, then swiping this on the place where my daughter spilled her milk, really scrubbing it, I only feel progress. The back and forth of the damp rag, dropping it in the bucket, swishing it around a few times then picking it back up, twisting out the excess into the grey water that stills the bucket. I think of my mother and her mother on their knees, washing their own floors, hands pruned by the hot water, vinegar permeating their skin. I wonder what occupied their minds as they worked. I imagine my grandma worrying about what would happen when my grandpa noticed the empty bottle of scotch, the contents of which she had dumped into the sink. The bills that remained unpaid. I can see my mom perseverating upon the harsh words of a fellow swim team parent and trying to figure out how to sew a costume for the school play, maybe wondering if she had enough potatoes for stew or if she needed to run to the store before her hospital shift. After finishing their floors, both of them, in the real of their lifetimes, would sit back on her heels and inspect her work.
Most of my friends pay for someone to clean their homes. Even the friend who struggles to make the mortgage on her condo has a woman who comes to her door each month with a bucket and rags, various bottles of cleaning agents. We had a cleaning lady for a few months when we moved to Indiana. Pete became ill and my constitution was as thin as broth. I was sleeping little then, waking early to read poetry, to journal, but I was unable to remain with paragraphs. Pages of text felt as overwhelming as the sight of Pete’s sallow color and skeletal shape. The girls were not yet two and I had to keep them occupied and out of the way of the cleaning lady as she worked. She’d be in our house for four or five hours—running the vacuum, pushing a mop and hoisting a bucket of various cleansers upstairs. But after she left I’d discover wads of dust beneath our bed, sauce still stuck on the range. Footprints clouded the floor like ghosted remains she failed to erase.
During those mornings, while everyone else slept, I tried to find my way around the uncertainty of Pete’s health. I huddled close to the silence. I wrote words I have yet to return to. Pete took his pills, met with doctors. I revised my resume and began freelance writing. We saved everything we brought in, unsure what the future might hold. Spring arrived and gradually, his white blood count improved. His face held color and his pants hugged his waist. This house—our house—has witnessed all of it.
The girls are six now. So much of that time feels washed out, faded. Being together has become our cornerstone—our faith in one another paramount. After the dinner dishes are put away, we head onto the porch where the girls like to play the telephone game. We sit beside one another and one person whispers a sentence to the person beside her and the meaning changes with each listener. Weekends when Pete isn’t working, we hike at a state park or pick apples at a local orchard. At night, after presetting the coffee pot and locking the back door, I creep into the girls’ room, push their hair back, kiss their faces. I whisper that I love them. Hope the words take root, offer steadiness for whatever is ahead.
