Grandma had one of those cushy government jobs, sorting mail for the post office, and Louise would ride the yellow bus to school every day, her clothes clean and pressed. Mom was mostly MIA in those years, descending without warning, smoking Pall Malls, her teeth loosening, fingers drumming on the kitchen table. Louise would find her passed out on the sofa upon her latchkey return from school, one shoe still on. What felt like an hour would unfold with Louise standing in the front doorway, backpack on, staring at her snoring form.
Stay or go?
And yet where would she go? This was the only home she had. So, as quietly as possible, Louise—nine, ten, eleven—would pad into her bedroom and close the door, vibrating. But remaining in her room wasn’t an option. Whenever Louise stayed in one place too long, the feeling would build inside her. The piranhas in her belly. The colored spots at the corner of her vision. Do something. Clean. Organize. It was her ritual. She was a straightener, a mopper, a duster of bookshelves. The alternative, inaction, was the same as nonexistence. So she would change into her cleaning clothes, psyching herself up in the mirror. You can do this. You are invulnerable. And then she’d open her door and get to work.
Everything.
Nothing.
Herself.
If you boiled her anxiety down, it came to these three things.
Everything meaning everything. The world. Six thousand years of human history, following one hundred and ninety-four million years of pure animal survival, in which the strong dominated the weak. Where tribes became kingdoms and kingdoms became democracies—civilized—and yet, under the surface, tribal allegiances remained. Who had power and who suffered from it. Who got rich and who stayed poor. Everything meaning everything you couldn’t say out loud about discrimination and inequality, about the way the world worked—not to lift people like you up but to keep you down.
Nothing meaning the absence of tangible threats—no gun to her head, no knife to her throat—and yet what is poverty if not a threat? What is being called that word or followed down the street by packs of boys if not a threat? Nothing meaning the dread that builds in your heart every morning and every night as you relive the insults of the day and agitate over what the next one will bring. Will you be dismissed? Will you be assaulted? Will you be killed?
Herself, meaning—well, just look at her—the girl her own mother didn’t want, flat chested and weird. The latchkey kid whose best friends were cleaning products, who used to bite her own tongue until it bled. She was like a child who had been made in a lab to provoke the hostility of privileged men.
And so she cleaned.
It was the same routine every day, starting in her grandma’s bathroom. She would organize the cupboards, scrubbing the sink basin. She used tile spray on the grout, mildew spray on the shower curtain. She scrubbed the toilet with bleach, using the wire brush, then washing the brush under scalding water in the tub. They lived in a two-bedroom clapboard house near the commuter line, trains rattling the glassware fifty-four times a day. Grandma had lived there for twenty-two years, first with Grandpa—who died at forty-eight in an industrial accident at the printing plant—then as a single mother. And now as a single grandmother, raising a twelve-year-old girl with a cleaning fixation.
“I can see myself in the toaster,” Grandma would say with amazement some mornings. “Did you do that?”
Louise would shrug. She didn’t like to talk about her need to clean. But every day after school she’d snap on the yellow gloves and get to work. It didn’t matter that the house hadn’t had time to get dirty since yesterday’s clean. Louise knew that even if you couldn’t see the dirt, it was there.
This is what would keep her from becoming a needle drug user ultimately, when she began to self-medicate her anxiety at the age of fourteen, the idea of that dirty spike going into her arm. Sharing a joint or a pipe was similarly untenable, all those germs and viruses passed back and forth. Booze and pills. That would be her route. A way to numb the cranial itch. Of course, all that started a couple of years later, in eighth grade. Gabby Macintosh stole some Valium from her mother’s vanity, and Hart Overman smuggled a fifth of watered-down vodka from his uncle’s shop. It was the third Tuesday in September 2022. They were in the rec room of Gabby’s house, Louise the only one with any melanin in her skin. She and Hart were drinking from the bottle, but Louise got herself a glass from the kitchen, poured herself a finger.
“Hey,” Gabby told her, “take this first.”
So Louise put the yellow Valium on her tongue, washed it down with the burn of vodka. She was hoping for oblivion but would settle for a dream. That was the first time she ever felt free. The first time the constant hum of anxiety disappeared. A fucking miracle, and so simple. One pill, one drink.