The couple lived in a very clean, lovely and sparse but not empty house
on the edge of Amazon Park.They were contemporaries of my grandfather,
and perhaps like him, also professors. As a 9-year-old, I thought of
them the way I thought of him - old. Old and neat. Old and contained.
Old and kind.
They seemed sort of perfect to me. For one thing, each week when I
went with my mom to clean their house, it was spotless. It smelled good
too. Not like our place with its gaggle of barefoot children, sticky
kid-sized wooden tables and avocado pits growing sprouts in murky water
in Ball jars on the windowsill over the kitchen sink. No, their
house smelled like it never got dirty and never was out of order. There
weren't bands of children, or random hippie parents going in and out of
the front door with its broken wooden framed screen door hanging loosely
on one hinge. There weren't smudged honey-imbued fingerprints on the
front windows. You wouldn't find remnants of dry Koolaid powder in the
bathroom where one child had convinced another that it tasted good, even
though she knew that the tiny packet was so sour it would make her
intended target spit into the toilet.
Theirs was a house of calm and order. It was quiet, reserved and so
beautiful to the girl that she wanted to stay there forever, lovingly
wiping down the already clean walls of the shower with scrubbing bubbles
and a soft cloth. Polishing an already perfectly clean window just for
the fun of watching the Windex streaks dry on the warm days of summer.
She liked the way they folded their newspapers after breakfast every
morning and put them into a neat wicker bin next to the chair in the
living room. And she liked the orange rubber mats on the dining room
table which sat near the daisy motif ceramic napkin holder and matching
salt and pepper shakers in the middle.
She liked to listen to her mom hum as she vacuumed the wall-to-wall
carpet in the living room and bedrooms, and she loved to feel like a
grown up as she gently folded the dish towels the way her mom showed her.
The only other people she knew who went by Mr. and Mrs. were at her
school back in California. They were kind, but couldn't help her with
her ache. She wanted to be with her mom during the year and wasn't, and
every day seemed like torture waiting for summer. It was the best when
she and her mom left her three brothers at the daycare house where they
lived and went to clean the immaculate house. Humming and
folding and wiping and dusting. No dirt, no mess, no noise. Just them,
together.
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