A number of years ago a friend–another writer–emailed me to ask if I would write a noir short story for an anthology she was pulling together with a another author, with a focus on noir in hot climates (Scandinavian noir was the “hot” thing in crime publishing at the time) that would be called Sunshine Noir, and since I lived in New Orleans, she knew I could write something dark and nasty despite the sunshine and heat.
The result was a story named “Housecleaning,” and it was also included in my collection Survivor’s Guilt and Other Stories. I was delighted to hear recently from wonderful Barb Goffman that she wanted to make it her “Selection” for Black Cat Weekly’s issue 148, and of course said BY ALL MEANS!!!!
And it just dropped this week.
The smell of bleach always reminded him of his mother.
It was probably one of the reasons he rarely used it, he thought, as he filled the blue plastic bucket with hot water from the kitchen tap. His mother had used it for practically everything. Everywhere she’d lived had always smelled slightly like bleach. She was always cleaning. He had so many memories of his mother cleaning something: steam rising from hot water pouring from the sink spigot; the sound of brush bristles as she scrubbed the floor (“Mops only move the dirt around. Good in a pinch but not for real cleaning.”); folding laundry scented by Downy; washing the dishes by hand before running them through the dishwasher (“It doesn’t wash the dishes clean enough. It’s only good for sterilization.”); running the vacuum cleaner over carpets and underneath the cushions on the couch.
In her world, dirt and germs were everywhere, and constant vigilance was the only solution. She judged people by how slovenly they looked or how messy their yards were or how filthy their houses were. He remembered one time—when they were living in the apartment in Wichita—watching her struggle at a neighbor’s to not say anything as they sat in a living room that hadn’t been cleaned or straightened in a while, the way her fingers absently wiped away dust on the side table as she smiled and made conversation, the nerve in her cheek jumping, the veins and chords in her neck trying to burst through her olive skin, her voice strained but still polite.
When the tea was finished, and the cookies just crumbs on a dirty plate with what looked like egg yolk dried onto its side, she couldn’t get the two of them out of there fast enough. Once back in the sterile safety of their own apartment, she’d taken a long, hot shower—and made him do the same. They’d never gone back there, the neighbor woman’s future friendliness rebuffed politely yet firmly, until they’d finally moved away again.
“People who keep slovenly homes are lazy and cannot be trusted,” she’d told him after refusing the woman’s invitation a second time. “A sloppy house means a sloppy soul.”
I’d written the first line long before I had a need for a story; I wrote it down in my journal with the title HOUSECLEANING underlined twice for further emphasis. In one of those great moments of serendipity, I had just been paging through that journal earlier that same morning and after I finished reading the email, I thought, “I’ll write ‘Housecleaning’ for this.” I literally opened a new Word document, wrote the title in all caps, hit return and typed The scent of bleach always reminded him of his mother.
And surprisingly, I was able to just keep going.
The funny thing is now I remember what triggered the initial note in the journal–I actually had that very same thought as I was filling a bucket in the sink with hot water and bleach. I poured the bleach into the water, smelled it, and thought of my mom. I then laughed and scribbled the sentence–and title–down because I rightly thought it was a great title and a great opening line. I used to always joke about my mom that she made Joan Crawford look like a slob, and it was true. Her house was always spotless. Her kitchen floor was cleaner than most people’s dishes. Her refrigerator and cabinets were organized to within an inch of their lives and she could put her hand on anything in the house within two minutes without even having to stop to think. She cleaned the house every day. I think I’ve told the story of the coffee spoons before? If you know this story, feel free to skip ahead.
Mom and Dad always drank their coffee black (she used to put milk in hers when I was a kid, but she stopped at some point) and I’ve always sweetened mine and put creamer in it. So, I need a spoon to stir it. At home, I have a spoon rest where I keep my coffee spoon so I can keep reusing it. Mom didn’t need one, so no spoon rest. Every time I’d get a cup of coffee when I was visiting once, I had to get another spoon because the one I’d just used had disappeared out of the sink. It took me another cup to realize she was washing the spoon I just used and put it in the dishwasher. I had already gone through three spoons before I caught on and kept it with me.
No one was ever going to drop in on my mother and find a dirty house. She took that seriously.
Obviously, my mother was vastly and dramatically different from the mother in this story. (I’ve always been reluctant to say my mother inspired the story for obvious reasons, but she did.)
The odd thing about this story was that I wrote it almost all in free form, with no real certainty where it was going to go, so it kind of was written organically; I didn’t put any thought into it and just started typing from that opening line, and the story came to me as I wrote it. It was messy in its first draft, but I worked on it and cleaned it up and cut out some excess, and I ended up very pleased with the story. The premise–that the main character is remembering his past growing up with his mother while doing a chore–I think really worked; even though the story is almost entirely about the past, there’s some present-day involvement that become increasingly clear as the story goes on.
Thanks again to my original friend for getting me to write the story in the first place (thank you, Annamaria Alfieri!) and for Barb for bringing it to Black Cat Weekly. And if you want to read it–and the other good stuff in the issue–you can order it here.
Queer and Loathing in America 