Spring Cleaning

I woke up earlier than I wanted to but for once it wasn’t because of the kids. They’re eight-ten-thirteen, old enough to be able to entertain themselves quietly for a few hours in the morning or at least they’re supposed to be. More often than not I get woken up before seven by something or other. Yelling at a video game or each other or one of their friends over the phone. That domain is exclusively Violet. Her and her friends are constantly screaming at each other like the world is ending and then acting like nothing happened. Don’t much understand teenage girls, even though I apparently was one for seven whole years.

Anyway, that morning it wasn’t the kids. Lonnie is the worm-catcher and he was already downstairs making up pancakes. He tells me Violet tried to call one of her friends but he told her off and instead she was furiously texting, her thumbs flying over the keyboard before she pressed send near-hard enough to break the damn thing, then she’d sit there staring at the screen and biting her thumbnail until the response came and was swiftly met with the type of scoff only teenage girls are capable of and more quick jabs at the screen.

These are the same girls she invited to the water park for her birthday and they all had a great time. Go figure.

The boys were being quiet, too. Alex had gotten hooked onto Kitchen Nightmares and suddenly decided he wanted to be a hard-boiled chef when he grew up so he was actually the one making the pancakes while Lonnie corrected him here and there. The cursing he kept to a minimum and under his breath so Lonnie let it go. Alex’s mouth had been getting him into trouble since pre-school and after six years we were just glad he’d stopped dropping the f and s bombs in front of the littler kids.

Billy was reading and anxiously looking at the clock. Some new video game had come out, one he’d already dedicated his summer vacation to, but he had a tendency to yell when things weren’t going his way, or when things were going his way, or simply when he was surprised, so Lonnie had told him no video game until I was up, and no waking me up just so he could get to the video game faster.

I know all this might make me sound like some delinquent mother, sleeping in while my poor put-upon husband does all the work, but it ain’t like that. True, Lonnie always wanted kids more than I do, but I love the little bastards just as much as he does. Once I wake up and get a half-gallon of coffee in me I take over so he can spend the rest of the morning in his shed making wood carvings to sell on Etsy, and then at night all five of us fight to survive each other. We make it work.

Actually, none of this has anything to do with anything. The point is, I woke up earlier than I wanted to that morning but not for the usual reasons. I woke up because I could smell the smoke.

It’s funny the things that are still hardwired into the human brain after three or four millennia of not really needing it anymore. Did you know the human eye can pick out more shades of green than any other color? We were monkeys in the forest, right? Had to be able to tell the difference between, say, a leafy stick and a snake.

And we can sleep through a lot of stuff. Televisions babbling on and on and on, the garbage truck picking up, Lonnie getting out of bed to stumble to the bathroom. But the other night some flying bug got into the bedroom and was buzzing up against the window, and the two of us were instantly awake. Instincts, I guess. Don’t want to get stung at night.

And don’t want to die in a fire, neither, so when I first smelled that smoke I was awake. I don’t wake up easy. Usually takes fifteen or twenty minutes to shake all the sleep off. But I swear that smoke entered my nose and I was up and off to the races. Standing next to the bed before I even knew why I was doing it. The smell was only getting stronger, but I couldn’t see nothing wrong. Everything in the bedroom was as it should be.

I raced out of the bedroom and stuck my head in every room, even the closets, and then I raced downstairs. Lonnie followed me around asking me what the matter was while I did the same down there, and then I turned on him.

“Don’t you smell that?”

He sniffed. He didn’t.

I sniffed. I didn’t.

The smell of smoke wasn’t down here. Then I started thinking, maybe I dreamed it. But I’d dreamed of smoke and fires before, and I don’t know about you, but I can’t really smell nothing in my dreams. I smelled smoke. It was there.

Then I remembered that the windows above the bed were open. And there were no windows downstairs open. I didn’t even tell Lonnie what I was thinking, just strode through the house in my nightgown, my family trailing behind me, and flung open the front door.

“Ah. Now I smell it,” Lonnie said, standing next to me.

The smoke was outside. You could barely see it hanging in the air, but boy howdy could you smell it. And it was getting stronger. Luckily, it didn’t take me long to figure out where it was coming from, because it was coming from directly across the street.

“That’s Mrs. Woods’ house!” Violet yelled, pointing, as though we all hadn’t seen the heavy black smoke billowing out of every single window.

“Ms. Woods, now,” I muttered.

“I’ll call 911,” Lonnie said, already back in the house.

“Is she still inside?” Billy asked, clinging to my leg.

“No,” I said, feeling strangely calm. Strange, because I had been woken up by an adrenaline dump and had spent the last five minutes thinking I was losing my mind and my heart was still racing. But even with the ticker tick-tick-ticking away, there was still this odd serene feeling covering me. And I knew Lorraine wasn’t inside getting burnt up into long-pork because she was sitting in a deck chair at the end of her driveway, right next to the mailbox.

“Stay here,” I said, and crossed the yard and the road to get to her.

“Good morning, Lorrie,” I said, bracing myself for what I would find.

Lorrie looked up at me and shaded her face with her hand. There were bags under her eyes. Those were red, too, she’d obviously been crying. And she was thinner, of course, we’d all noticed that last week. Apparently when her good-for-nothing cheater of a husband had fucked off he’d taken Lorrie’s appetite with him.

“Morning, Sam,” she said brightly. In fact, she was the happiest I’d seen her in months. As though Gary hadn’t run off with the mistress he’d had for a disgusting amount of time. As though her house wasn’t burning right in front of her. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m good. Had a summer cold but that finally cleared up.”

“Good, good! And Lonnie and the kids?”

“Hanging tough, I suppose. Say, Lorrie. I can’t help but notice your house is on fire.”

Lorrie looked at the house and I half expected her to jump up screaming, like she’d only just noticed. Or to say something like, well would you look at that? I guess it is?

Instead she sighed. “Yes. Well. It’s spring cleaning day.”

“Ah,” I said, like that explained it. I was already glad Lonnie was calling 911. Now I was gladder. Something had gone off in Lorrie’s brain, apparently.

“I’ve had this little ritual since I was a kid,” Lorrie said, staring at the flames now licking out the windows and up towards the roof. “Not a ‘kid’ kid. Nineteen. When I was living on my own. My mom always taught me to do spring cleaning, to get rid of the stuff in your life that’s holding you down. Otherwise, she said, every time you moved house you’d be dragging along a bunch of flotsam and jetsam that wasn’t doing anything but existing in your orbit.

“That same year my Aunt Becky died, and my God did I hate her. She was a mean, spiteful bitch who had spent her whole life bullying me.”

“Shoot,” I said, “An adult bullying a kid?”

Lorrie nodded with a peculiar expression, glad my tone indicated I believed her. I did. I’d had my own adult bullies as a weird little kid.

“It was always my weight. I was too chubby for her. If she saw me now she’d gush about how I finally look healthy, never mind I lost it all because every time I see so much as a piece of bread I want to puke. She died when I was nineteen of some heart defect she didn’t even know she had. I went to the funeral. They were giving out these little prayer cards with her face on it and I took one because you’re supposed to and I threw it in a drawer and I didn’t think of it again until I was spring cleaning and I…just…stared at it. At her. At her smug little smile, even in death she had this smug little smile. And it suddenly wasn’t enough that I was going to throw it away. Then it would still exist. In some landfill somewhere, sure, but it would still be there and I couldn’t take that. So I put it in a bowl, took it outside, and set it on fire. I cleansed the world of it.”

Other neighbors had woken up to the smoke, now, and were standing in their driveways or in the street, staring. Lonnie was in our drivewith the kids. He put his hands up and shook his head. There were no sirens in the distance, which really wasn’t surprising. We were the last little suburban cluster before the boonies well and truly began and the fire department was clear across town. We all knew the risks moving in.

I could see where all this was headed, now, but I wanted to hear Lorrie finish it.

“I’ve been burning stuff ever since.” Lorrie held up a hand. “For spring cleaning, mind you, I haven’t turned into a…a…whatchacallit….pyromania or whatever. But now when I do my spring cleaning, I have three piles. Donate. Trash. Burn. Usually small stuff. Usually enough to fit into the fire pit out back. I never told Gary. I’d wait until he was…well, apparently he was always with that woman…but I’d wait until he was gone and then I’d pour myself a stiff martini with lots of olives and watch all the things I couldn’t bear to be in the world anymore burn. Traffic tickets. Christmas cards from people who still thought we were family. Medical bills. Reminders of things I didn’t want to think about.”

I shifted my weight and looked behind me. The neighbors were staring at the house, yes, the flames shooting out of holes in the roof now, but they were also staring at us. At me. I’d gotten here first, so this was my mess to sort out. Only, I wasn’t sure what there was to sort out. Maybe crazy is catching, but Lorrie was starting to sound incredibly sane.

“He brought her here, didn’t she?” I asked.

“Drove her straight into the garage so no one would notice,” Lorrie said. “It was part of the ‘thrill,’ he told me. He told me all of this, can you believe it? He thought if he was honest about fucking this other woman in my living room, my kitchen, my bed, he would win me back. We can start to heal, Lorraine, he said. I wish I had said, heal from this, and then punched him in his face. Of course I didn’t. The lawyers were present.”

It was getting hard to stare at the house, too bright, too hot, but I did anyway. Tried to imagine Lonnie doing something so awful and coming up against a brick wall.

“Every room?”

“Every room worth a damn,” she said.

I sighed. “Lorrie, this ain’t right.”

“It’s my property, not even his name on the deed, and I think as long as I don’t go after insurance they can’t actually prosecute me for anything.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

I turned again and called for Lonnie, who came scuttling across the street once he was sure the kids wouldn’t follow. I spoke loud enough for the other neighbors in the street to hear. Maybe Lorrie didn’t want people to know any more than they’d already did, but maybe she had given up that right when she had set her house on fire.

“That motherfucker Gary was a bigger piece of shit than we thought,” I said. “He brought that woman to the house, and Lorraine has decided she can’t live with it. Can you go back to the house and make us some drinks? Stiff martinis.”

“With lots of olives.”

“With lots of olives,” I repeated.

I thought I already loved my husband as much as I was physically capable of, but that day I found more space because he didn’t even question me. He didn’t even hesitate.

“I got those big green olives stuffed with bleu cheese, Lorrie, you want those?”

“Oh, I love those! Thank you!”

The fire department showed up after another twenty minutes and they probably thought we were all mad. The whole neighborhood was in the street at seven thirty in the morning, only a decently-sized front yard separating us from a house that wasn’t a house anymore so much as it was a charred pile of rubble, all of us with some sort of cocktail or libation in our hand. Chatting away like nothing was wrong.

Because, by then, nothing was. The house no longer existed, and it had taken Lorrie’s pain away with it. We took her to breakfast after, and she ordered the pancake platter and ate everything up.

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