Excerpt from Hoarder

We don’t laugh when we talk about how we used to live. come to HR. I still swipe my hand across my arm when I think I feel something crawling on my skin. At the old house, cobwebs would grow into fine felts, collecting insects.

A house full of old shoes, children’s toys, and anything and everything you might need, but only two people lived there. Entering felt like taking a stroll through a dustpan. The air was thick with grit, leaving a persistent sandy taste in my mouth and a chalkiness in my lungs.  I’d shuffle sideways through the narrow openings of rotting objects to the living room where I’d see my mother lying on the couch. She’d sometimes be like that for five days straight, with old black and white movies playing on the TV. After the fabric on the couch began turning brown beneath her, she started tearing pages from old magazines laying them over the stained fabric. The scent of perfume ads mixed with stale, damp body odor, wafted through every room. When she got up, the magazine pages stuck to her thighs, giving her the look of a half-plucked chicken. The collections of objects grew up the walls. Piled high around her were fifty years of knickknacks and society’s expectations of what kind of woman she should be. So much “stuff,” that really had no use. 

I’d arrive at school, greasy haired and in stale clothes. I saw a debate in the teacher’s eyes as I walked into the classroom. Do we report? Is it worth the trouble? Would that be better for the student? They couldn’t know my mother and I showered in the backyard with a garden hose because the bathtub was overflowing with mother’s darling findings. They couldn’t know the microwave was covered in a thick coat of oil and grease, dead ants stuck to it like toy dinosaurs lined on a shelf. She told me to stay out of sight when the women in blazers came knocking, clipboards in hand. It wasn’t hard finding a hiding place. I’d peer at them from tiny spaces between cardboard boxes. The next day I’d tell my mother how they aren’t going to let me keep living here if she keeps all this in her house. She moved the furniture to block the windows.

One cloudy morning, a doe, with its long neck, peered over the furniture into the foyer window. She was curious about the decay happening inside. After a bad hurricane, the house seemed to sink a little into the soil. A week later I found a green vine sprouting through one of the visible floorboards. It wouldn’t be long now, till the house sunk below sea level and the walls would give in, buried. 

The day before I left for college, I walked barefoot in the heavy Florida air along the exterior and laid flat on the Saint Augustine grass, the top of my head against the house. Raindrops fell from the palmetto leaves. I felt them land on my body.  Grey clouds in the windows above me, and I could feel them drift into my eyes like two cool river streams. They waterfalled from the back of my eyes, down my throat but, after that, I’m not quite sure where it goes.

Ten years later, I still can’t get clean.

Human Resources

Welcome to HR. I never intended to work for a fashion company but a month after I started here, the company owner suggested I lay off my direct report and add her pay to my salary. So I decided to stay. 

This office uses an open floor plan. There are no wall dividers. Employees can see and hear each other from anywhere in the building. Once, an accountant tried tapping a poster board to the edge of her desk to hide behind. I immediately confiscated it. It’s still in my office.

Over there is Kamille, Senior Textile Designer. Kamille eats only one bowl of leek soup a day to lose weight before her wedding. If you must speak to her, open the conversation with a quip about how thin she looks. Across from her is Marie, the new Assistant Textile Designer, fresh out of college, twenty-three, who is very thin despite eating pasta every day. Half the women in the office do not like Marie because of this.

The Senior Women’s Wear Designer, Estelle, sits in the corner over there. On her desk are two teacup chihuahuas that she dresses in different outfits every day. She bought them on the internet one night while online shopping after her gynecologist told her that she couldn’t have children. Both dogs have deformed jaws making their tongues hang out the sides of their mouths. 

Claire, Associate Women’s Wear Designer, sits at the adjacent desk. Last week we celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday in the office with acai popsicles. Her fifty-year-old boyfriend drops her off at work because she’s afraid to drive. He also pays for her apartment. The other Associate, Chrissy, shares a one-bedroom apartment with three other girls. She sometimes eats canned salmon, straight out of the can. If you smell something like dog food around lunchtime, it’s probably her. 

Be sure to wear at least one article of clothing from the company every day. Doing so shows that you support the company, and will help you fit in with the culture. Jeans start at $250 and blouses at $220.

The bathroom walls are floor-to-ceiling mirrors. In the handicap stall, you can watch yourself pee. Take all the time you need to look in the mirror. Correct any imperfections before returning to work. Ignore the sobs coming from the center stall. That’s Marie, the new assistant. She’s here almost every time I have to use the bathroom.  Sometimes she’s pacing the room, other times she’s staring at herself, hyperventilating on the wall. “Why doesn’t my hair grow anymore?” I’ve heard her ask to her reflection. Another time I came in to see her applying eyeliner with a shaky hand while crying. Her tears washed away the makeup faster than she could redraw it. Black pools ran down her cheeks as she continuously reapplied in between whimpers. I told her waterproof eyeliner would solve her problems, but this just made her cry even harder. I don’t know why I even bother. 

Paul, I.T., is in the center of the building. If your laptop is having technical problems, I recommend trying to fix it over email. If you go to his office, he tends to stand very close to women when he talks to them. 

Over there is Andrea’s desk, the owner. She likes to be in the open space with the rest of the designers. She usually comes in around 11 am and leaves by 1 pm. Today, she is back in the office after being out all last week. She has vases of dead roses on her desk. They were gifted to her by her husband before she caught him with a younger woman in their bed. Her desk faces Marie, the Assistant Textile Designer. I’ve noticed Andrea glaring at her.

Now, we see Marie, still teary-eyed, walking from the bathroom towards my office. For the last two weeks, her sleep paralysis demon has been following her to work. It towers behind her desk as she works at her computer.  I immediately emailed her the employee pet policy, saying that she must first register the pet and that all pets are required to wear a flea collar. This is a fashion house full of clothing, for peat’s sake! Bed bugs and fleas would be the end of us. Last week I tried slipping a flea collar on it as it bent down to fit in the office entrance, but I couldn’t get the collar past its ears. 

Kamille, Marie’s boss, has requested I make her leave the company and Andrea agrees. Lay her off? Heavens no, if we laid her off we would be liable for severance! When she walks into my office her boss and I will greet her with a printed list of grievances. One of the bullet points says she takes too much time off for doctor’s appointments. Another says she sometimes forgets to ask her boss for permission to leave at the end of the workday. None of the items on the list are violations of her contract, but that doesn’t matter. After she reads the list, I’ll tell her this requires disciplinary action and give her a two-week work suspension, no pay. This is her first job out of college, we can get away with these types of things. She can’t survive two weeks of no pay, so she’ll quit, on the spot. 

And that’s exactly what happened. 

 “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want to work here.” she croaked as she started sobbing again. This was all choreographed perfectly and I got what I wanted. I couldn’t help but smile to myself. Her former boss and I watched her for a minute. Eventually, her breathing slowed, her eyes closed and she slumped into her chair. Her sleep paralysis demon, who had been waiting outside my office door, reached its hand in and dragged the girl by her shirt collar out of the chair, across the floor, past the designers’ desks, and out the main entrance. That's the last time I ever saw her. I assume she found another company that was a better fit for her. 

Guitar

Spruce is the best wood for sound, but my guitar is pine.  An antique, but notoriously difficult to work on because of a lack of standardization at the time of production. Its small size makes it a quiet guitar that rarely raises its voice, except when you try to tune or change its strings. It screeches like a ship’s hull as you turn its pegs and occasionally pops new strings under your hands, leaving little cuts and beads of blood. But once the new strings have time to stretch and settle its tone is even and consistent. When it was gifted to my father as a child, the guitar’s thin neck allowed his hands to touch the strings.

At 10 years old my father learned the Malaguena on this guitar, then taught me once my fingers could reach the frets. Before the deployment, he sat beside me and held my hand to the guitar’s neck. His fingers were so much bigger than mine; I wondered how they ever fit on the narrow strings. When he arranged my fingers on the fretboard I saw the same bump on his left index finger as I had from playing. If we were the same age, our palms facing up would show the same pattern of callouses and lines.  

After school I’d sit on the living room floor, the guitar in my lap, plucking it’s strings. When my hands tired, I’d roll onto my stomach, resting my chin on the guitar’s face as I watched the war rage on TV.  The soundhole smelled like old family photo albums. The TV screen showed troops in beige uniforms patrolling desert cities made of sand. “The Invasion of Iraq,” echoed from the news anchor’s mouths around the sun-filled room. Warm light shone through the tall blue skied windows and illuminated the white curtains. A pair of my father’s boots sat by the door collecting a thin film of dust. While practicing I felt his fingers guiding mine.  

Every two weeks, we received a long-distance call, sometimes from the ship, and sometimes from a port city pay phone. I knew it was the latter when I could hear traffic and yelling in a foreign language in the background. 

“How was school today?” he’d ask hoarsely. 

“Dad it’s Sunday. No school today.” 

My father told me that he also practiced after school when he was young. A boy, small for his age with sun-tanned skin, the guitar in his lap, bright blue eyes on the TV screen. Did he see soldiers with dirty faces in the lush green jungles of Vietnam, wondering if he’d see his father on the screen? Did he rest his back against the couch while sitting on the floor, like I do? Did he wait for a phone call from his father?

While my father was away, a family friend came over to help my mom fix the gutters.

“Oh, honey let me tune your guitar,” he said as he strummed a few chords.

“No, it’s fine!” I insisted, running across the room to take the guitar back. My dad was the only one who could tune the guitar. He would always replace the strings before he had to leave again. 

After college, I decided to move cross-country against my father’s wishes. I had never been west of Texas and wanted to see the country. I called him after my car was packed to tell him I was headed to California, ready for him to recite the same speech he gave a week before about how it was unsafe. 

“What!? This is stupid. You want to become a hippie or something?” he cursed at the receiver. 

“No, I just want to try something new…” I trailed off, scatterbrained from the magnitude of his reaction. He hung up. He didn’t talk to me for a week after that.

When I got to Los Angeles, he called me and offered to fly out and help me get set up in my new apartment. No apology was given from either of us as we moved used furniture and cardboard boxes into my tiny apartment. 

He seemed surprised when he found the guitar leaning against the wall in my closet.  

“You still have this?” he asked, pulling the guitar from the closet.

     “Yeah, I’ve always had it.”