We all do most of these things some of the time; with my system you do all of them all of the time. Never don’t do them. Before you know it, it’s second nature, and the next time you’re down in the dumps it operates on its own. Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order — and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy. At its best, my system gives me a smoother living experience. My days become dreamlike, no edges anywhere, none of the snags and snafus that life is so famous for. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.
The doorbell rang at quarter to nine and I still hadn’t heard from Phillip. If he called while I was with her I would just have to excuse myself. What if she still looked like a gang person? Or she might feel terrible about the imposition and start apologizing the moment she saw me. As I walked to the door the map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. Not necessarily an indicator of anything.
She was much older than she’d been when she was fourteen. She was a woman. So much a woman that for a moment I wasn’t sure what I was. An enormous purple duffel bag was slung over her shoulder.
“Clee! Welcome!” She stepped back quickly as if I intended to embrace her. “It’s a shoeless household, so you can put your shoes right there.” I pointed and smiled and waited and pointed again. She looked at the row of my shoes, different brown shapes, and then down at her own shoes, which seemed to be made out of pink gum.
“I don’t think so,” she said in a surprisingly low, husky voice.
We stood there for a moment. I told her to hold on, and went and got a plastic produce bag. She looked at me with an aggressively blank expression while she kicked off her shoes and put them in the bag.
“When you leave make sure to lock both dead bolts, but when you’re in the house it’s fine to just lock one. If the doorbell rings, you can open this”—I opened the tiny door within the front door and peeked through it—“to see who it is.” When I pulled my face out of the peephole she was in the kitchen.
“Eat anything,” I said, jogging to catch up. “Pretend this is your home.” She took two apples and started to put them in her purse, but then saw one had a bruise and switched it out for another. I showed her the ironing room. She popped the mint into her mouth and left the wrapper on the washcloth.
“There’s no TV in here?”
“The TV is in the common area. The living room.”
We walked out to the living room and she stared at the TV. It wasn’t the flat kind, but it was big, built into the bookshelves. It had a little Tibetan cloth hanging over it.
“You have cable?”
“No. I have a good antenna, though, so all the local stations come in very clearly.” Before I was done talking she took out her phone and started typing on it. I stood there for a moment, waiting, until she glanced up at me as if to say Why are you still here?
I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. Using my peripheral vision, I could still see her and it was hard not to wonder if Carl’s mother had been very busty. Suzanne, though tall and attractive, would not be described as a “bombshell,” whereas this person leaning against the couch did bring that word to mind. It was more than just her chest dimensions — she had a blond, tan largeness of scale. She was maybe even slightly overweight. Or maybe not, it could just have been the way she wore her clothes, tight magenta sweatpants low on her hips and several tank tops, or maybe a purple bra and two tank tops — there was an accumulation of straps on her shoulders. Her face was pretty but it wasn’t equal to her body. There was too much room between her eyes and her little nose. Also some excess face under her mouth. Big chin. Obviously her features were better than mine, but if you just looked at the spaces between the features, I won. She might have thanked me; a small welcome gift wouldn’t have been unheard-of. The kettle whistled. She looked up from her phone and widened her eyes mockingly, meaning that’s what I looked like.
At dinnertime I asked Clee if she wanted to join me for chicken and kale on toast. If she was surprised by toast for dinner, I was going to explain how it’s easier to make than rice or pasta but still counts as a grain. I wouldn’t lay out my whole system at once, just a little tip here, a little tip there. She said she had some food she’d brought with her.
“Do you need a plate?”
“I can eat it out of the thing.”
“A fork?”
“Okay.”
I gave her the fork and turned up the ringer on my phone. “I’m waiting for an important phone call,” I explained. She glanced behind herself, as if looking for the person who might be interested to know this.
“When you’re done, just wash your fork and put it right here with your other things.” I pointed to the small bin on the shelf where her cup, bowl, plate, knife and spoon were. “My dishes go here, but of course they’re in use now.” I tapped the empty bin beside hers.
She stared at the two bins, then her fork, then the bins again.
“I know it seems like it might be confusing, because our dishes look the same, but as long as everything is either in use, being washed, or in its bin, there won’t be a problem.”
“Where are all the other dishes?”
“I’ve been doing it this way for years, because nothing’s worse than a sink full of dirty dishes.”
“But where are they?”
“Well, I do have more. If, for example, you want to invite a friend over for dinner…” The more I tried not to look at the box on the top shelf the more I looked at it. She followed my eyes up and smiled.
BY THE NEXT EVENING, THERE was a full sink of dirty dishes and Phillip hadn’t called. Since the ironing room didn’t have a TV, Clee nested in the living room with her clothes and food and liters of Diet Pepsi all within arm’s distance of the couch, which she’d outfitted with her own giant flowery pillow and purple sleeping bag. She talked on the phone there, texted there, and more than anything watched TV there. I moved my computer back to the ironing room, folded up the cot, and pushed it up into the attic. While my head was on the other side of the ceiling, she explained that someone had come to the door with a free-trial cable offer.
“When you were at work. You can cancel it at the end of the month, after I go. So there’s no cost.”
I didn’t fight her on it because it seemed like a kind of insurance that she would leave. The TV was on all the time, day and night, whether or not she was awake or watching it. I had heard of people like this, or seen them, on TV actually. When it had been three days I wrote Phillip’s name on a piece of paper and ripped it up but the trick didn’t work — it never does when you lean too heavily on it. I also tried dialing his number backward, which isn’t anything, and then no area code, and then all ten but in a random order.
A smell began to coagulate around Clee, a brothy, intimate musk that she seemed unaware of, or unconcerned by. I had presumed she would shower every morning, using noxious blue cleansing gels and plasticky sweet lotions. But, in fact, she didn’t wash. Not the day after she arrived or the day after that. The body odor was on top of her pungent foot fungus, which hit two seconds after she passed by — it had sneaky delay. At the end of the week she finally bathed, using what smelled like my shampoo.
“You’re welcome to use my shampoo,” I said when she came out of the bathroom. Her hair was combed back and a towel hung around her neck.