IzzysMama was complaining about housework again. Candy sat up, her fingers poised to type a response. She started a sentence and then pressed the backspace button. IzzysMama might not mind her response, but sometimes the other moms in the Baby Born Birth Club got a little snippy with her when she offered advice…especially on things like housework. She was a housewife, like most of them, but she didn’t have a baby to run after.
She’d signed up for the club back when it was still a Baby Born Due Date Club, but ended up having an ectopic pregnancy. The doctor told them that the egg had implanted in one of Candy’s tubes and wasn’t viable. Brent had rubbed his head, pulling his hair back to reveal the two bald spots that had been steadily growing over the past three years, and sighed. There was a small, quickly disappearing smile at the end of that sigh. She posted in the Due Date Club about her empty uterus. All of the women responded with promises of prayers (or good thoughts from the ones who weren’t the praying type).
Candy stayed in the group. She liked the prayers. She knew that the moms pitied her, but she wasn’t bothered by her due date coming and going. That little peek-a-boo smile made it okay: her due date could come and go and turn into a birth date. One that she would never endure or worry about. One she wouldn’t pack a labor bag for or start a baby registry full of bottles and bibs and lots and lots of burp cloths for (because you can never have too many burp cloths).
She liked the club with its questions, opinions, advice, and venting. Most of all, she liked the endlessly rotating Big Problems, which were problems that seemed insurmountable until they disappeared: teething pain, diaper rash, development milestones, the bitchy mom at the playground, buying formula without getting a dirty look, breastfeeding without getting a dirty look (new moms hated getting a dirty look; it was a Big Problem). Occasionally, one of the moms would slip and forget that Candy didn’t have a baby. She would blame it on something called Mom Brain—which cannot be explained to someone who was not a mom. That was Candy. Not a Mom. So, of course, she couldn’t comment on IzzysMama’s Big Problem that her house was a wreck now that Izzy was starting to walk, but she wrote a response in her head as she walked around the apartment, straightening up.
Cleaning is easy, IzzysMama, you just have to keep on top of it. It’s not something that you can just do before people show up, or even once a week. It’s a daily process. You need to stay one step ahead of the little face-eating bugs. See, there are millions of microscopic bugs all over our bodies, feeding off of our dead skin cells and pooping them out all over the place…and that kind of thing needs to be cleaned every day.
But IzzysMama would never know about the bug poop filling up the corners and surfaces of her house because Candy was Not a Mom.
Candy grabbed the duster off the nail. Sometimes, when she was dusting, Candy imagined what it would be like if she stopped. If she let the dust, grime, hair and bug poop collect everywhere. She imagined a thick layer of the stuff growing and growing, day after day, year after year into the future—a future hopelessly clogged with dust. Thick and sticky with a powdery top, like the sugar Brent put on his desserts and then burned with a torch. But then she thought about the fact that, eventually, someone would have to clean it all and figured that someone might as well be her.
She flicked the duster across the bookshelf, around the base of the television. She liked the way her wrist moved as she did it. She like the way her wrist looked—fit, thin, athletic. She wanted IzzysMama to understand that cleaning was like exercise, that you don’t just do it once and you’re done. You do it every day…or at least six days a week if you want to maintain your body. The moms wouldn’t like that. They were all struggling to lose their baby weight (their jelly bellies, they liked to call them). A woman who’d ended her non-viable pregnancy with a D and C would not understand, and they would tell her that, pity or no pity. So, she didn’t say anything. Still, she liked to think that she understood—at least the struggling part.
She put the duster back, and the nail wiggled a bit. A white chalky dust fell from the hole, adding to the constant flow of skin cells and bug poop on the kitchen floor. Candy stared at it for a moment. It would need to be fixed, but she’d ask Brent. He wouldn’t mind. He wasn’t one for cleaning or big household projects, but he liked fixing small, easily-fixable things. She never complained to the Birth Club about Brent’s distaste for housework because she didn’t mind. She liked cleaning. When she brought it up, she didn’t complain, she’d just type a laughing smiley face and say that he was always throwing dinner parties that she had to clean up for—before and after. The moms typed their own winking and smiling faces before pointing out that she didn’t have to do any of the cooking because her husband was a chef—something they would kill for.
She didn’t tell them that it was much harder cleaning up after a chef. There were rules. No knives in the dishwasher. No soap on the cutting board. The hand-towel drawer needed to be stocked. Pans had to be cleaned when they were still hot with just a sponge and water. Once, the steam from a wet sponge against a hot frying pan burnt her thumb. The skin blistered and filled with clear liquid. She’d popped it and put a band-aid on it.
The rules didn’t matter anymore. After the pregnancy fail, Brent started hosting dinner parties at the restaurant. He was doing it for her, but without Brent’s restaurant friends, Candy only had her mom, and she lived on the other side of the country. Brent always invited her to the parties, but when they weren’t held at the apartment, his crowd made less of an effort to include her in conversation, and she always felt like she was on the outside of an inside joke. So, she just stayed home and cleaned or checked in with the Birth Club.
She ran a quick sponge over the edge of the sink. It was the dirtiest spot in the kitchen, and no matter how many times she cleaned it, it just kept getting dirtier. She placed the sponge in its holder. It was almost time for Brent to get home. She walked over to the window and looked out on the odd chance she would see him on the sidewalk below. She wasn’t really expecting to see him, but there he was. His bald spots looked bigger from up here—like he was balancing two shiny, white eggs on his skull and if he moved his head, slightly, those eggs would fall and splatter onto the pavement.
He was holding a white plastic bag–thin plastic, the kind they give out in restaurants. Popovers. He always brought leftover popovers home for her because she said she liked them. She liked them when they were still hot, fresh, and soft, not after they’d gotten thick and stale, but she ate them anyway. It was better than tossing them into the compost bin and hiding them under a paper towel. Brent wasn’t moving towards the door. He was looking at something up the block and swinging that thin, plastic bag. She watched him swing it, back and forth, faster and further. He was going to drop it. It would go skittering into traffic and get run over. Suddenly, she was hungry. She wanted that popover, stale or not. She pushed the window open.
She wanted to tell him to stop swinging her food, but decided she would just say, “Is that for me?” Then she saw what he was looking at. It was Linda, the fat waitress from the restaurant. It wasn’t that she was really that big, but she had a roll of fat around her hips that she allowed to spill over her boy-cut pants. She almost seemed proud of it, like it was a trophy she’d won for not caring about her looks. Candy couldn’t see his face, but something about the way he swung the bag into his other hand made her think that he was smiling at Linda. She wasn’t jealous. Linda was always saying loud, random stuff that made him smile or laugh—stuff that sounded old and tattered like it had been said over and over so many times that words had fallen off, inflections had been muted and turned down at the corners.
She wanted to yell at him to stop talking to the fat waitress and bring up her food, but she just watched as they slanted on the sidewalk like a pair of tilted lawn flamingoes—her talking, him swinging. Linda shrugged in her boyish way and then waved at him. He waved back. They were standing close enough together to make the gestures seem silly, even from Candy’s vantage point up on the windowsill. The two were embracing—an innocent hug between friends slash co-workers. Then, as they broke off the hug, Linda put her hand on his neck and moved it back and forth. Back and forth in a measured bead. Like a metronome.
HE’S HAVING AN AFFAIR.
The words appeared in Candy’s mind in all caps, like a subject line for a Big Problem post in the Baby Born Birth Club. As she slipped away from the window and walked down the hall, she imagined the offers of prayers, the heartfelt advice, the exclamation points punctuating calls for her to “dump that asshole.” She went to the computer, pressed the Caps Lock button, and typed. When she looked down at the list of posts one jumped out at her—also in all caps: THE WORST MESS EVER!
OMG! As I am typing this I am shaking, I want to cry and I don’t know if I’m ever going to use my kitchen again. It seems my cats decided to have a freaking BALL while I was at the grocery store. They jumped up onto the refrigerator and knocked down a heavy lead glass vase that my MIL gave us for our engagement. That would have been fine, but OH NO the stupid beasts also managed to knock down a jar of honey. So…to keep score, on my natural wood floor is one SHATTERED lead glass vase, one big ass jar of honey, and it’s all mixed together and seeping into the spaces. DD is in her exersaucer, DH is still deployed and there is a lake of honey and broken glass between me and that glass of wine I desperately NEED!!! What can I do? Besides move. Or arson. Lol!
There were just a few responses, mostly just echoing her OMG sentiments. Kayleenrowan suggested she put on a Disney DVD for the baby and call a cleaning service. Candy typed fast. She imagined herself cleaning up the mess herself, felt the scraping of glass against wood as she pulled it from between the boards. She typed faster.
Kayleenrowan is right. Go ahead and put on the DVD, but skip the expensive cleaning service. Put on some soothing music and a kettle and the heaviest gloves you can find! Next, pour the hot water onto the floor. Careful! Don’t get burned. (Did you put those gloves on?) Then, get the broom and sweep up the mess (hot water, honey and all) as best you can into a dustpan. Pour more water on the floor. Wipe with rags until it looks clean. Pour more hot water on the floor. Keep doing this until you are confident that your DD could crawl on the floor without getting cut. Then, take a clean sponge and rub it along the floor. Inspect the sponge for glass shards. If you see any, (use a magnifying glass) start the whole process over again. Let us know how it works out!
She looked up. Brent wasn’t there. He hadn’t silently walked in while she was engrossed in her post. Or maybe he had. She walked through the apartment. She went into the kitchen last. He wasn’t there. She cleaned the edge of the sink again. There were a few knives on the side of the sink. Sharp and dirty. She put them into the dishwasher. The point of one slipped through the grates of the cutlery holder and threatened to scrape the bottom of the dishwasher. She poured in the soap, shut the door and clicked it on. She stood and listened to the droning hum for a long time, as though it were soothing honey-and-glass-cleaning music.
She was watching TV when he finally arrived. It was late. A sous chef had called in, he told her. “I brought you a popover.” He held up the bag. It swung back and forth.
She turned to the TV. She was watching a home buying show. A couple was trying to decide if they could afford to move to Copenhagen. They couldn’t, of course. Not practically, but Candy knew they would even though she hadn’t seen this episode before. “Just put it in the fridge. I’ll eat it tomorrow.” She would compost it but wouldn’t waste a paper towel to hide it. She looked up at him. He was still standing there, holding the bag and looking at her. The bald spots that she could see so well from the window were still there, but she could see his eyes, now. They were still young and made his bald spots seem out-of-place. He looked like he wanted to say something but just turned and walked into the kitchen. She heard him open the dishwasher.
“Shit!”
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” He walked back in and squinted at her. She squinted back. She could see lines around his eyes. Tiny ones at the corners. “Did you put the knives in the dishwasher?”
“Sorry. I forgot.”
“It’s not your fault. Maybe I should keep them at the restaurant.”
She stared at his bald spots, waiting for them to slip off his head and hit the floor with a splat.
# # #
Melinda Bailey is a freelance writer and comedian based in San Francisco. She has studied Creative Writing at Harvard University and Rivier University. She’s written for Devil in the Woods, VegNews, The Boston Phoenix and High Fructose. Her short stories have appeared in Litbreak and Open Thought Vortex Magazine. https://melindabailey.wordpress.com/
