Maybe I could put my headphones on and enjoy last week’s episode of Black-ish on the iPad despite the screen detox imposed on this house’s smaller people, but can I really enjoy it when a floppy-haired ball of angst with preteen emotions is glaring at me over the top of the book his mother is forcing him to read?! No, I cannot. This must be what it’s like to grow up with siblings your own age; you did all your spelling homework and got moist, delicious cake after dinner, but your brother didn’t, so his was followed by a side of jealousy and rage that he projects onto you and your delicious cake. And it stops tasting good, because homeboy has leeched the sweetness from it with his beady, resentful eyes. This is my life on “Turn Off Those Cartoons and Read a Book” Tuesday or “You Didn’t Clean Your Room, So the iPod is Going on Top of the Refrigerator” Sunday.
Last Tuesday there were friends over. I didn’t even stop to ask who the little blond heads belonged to as they whizzed past me (into our house, out of our house, pounding up the staircase to the second floor, thundering down another into the basement). There are too many of them, and everyone under the age of twenty-seven looks alike to me, so why embarrass myself or them by confusing an Adeline with a Madeline when they don’t give a shit about talking to me anyway? Whenever I hear the screen door slam shut, I cock my head for the indistinguishable cacophony of high-pitched squealing, then barricade myself and the cat in the nearest room full of boring adult shit (bank statements, topical analgesics) until they all run away to terrorize some unsuspecting neighbor’s tranquil home.
Beelzebub and I were sitting on the bed, debating whether to apply for a reverse mortgage, when I heard the unmistakable feedback of the karaoke machine followed by a Taylor Swift song crackling through its tinny speakers. Moments later, three high-pitched voices warbled through the air-conditioning vent. I nudged Helen awake. “Should we waste a bunch of energy dragging all our shit downstairs or do you wanna just murder-suicide right here?” She considered it for a few seconds, glancing warily around the room, her eyes coming to rest on a pair of recently laundered compression stockings hung out to dry on the back of a chair.
She sighed. “Is our enemy list up-to-date?”
I pulled a faded sheet of crumpled graph paper from where I’d hidden it deep within a dresser drawer and quickly added 543 names to it. “Now it is. Help me find something sharp.”
Helen nodded toward the at-home blood pressure cuff propped up on the desk. “Is that thing sharp?” She smirked.
“Get out!” I screamed, and she heaved herself off the bed and slowly lumbered down the stairs in search of the sharp knives we kept out of reach of tiny pink hands.
—
Helen made her (half-)white-flight pilgrimage first. I was out of town for a few days and returned to find my dining room covered in shattered drywall after a radiator pipe had burst and partially collapsed the ceiling. I knew something was off as soon as I opened the door and was greeted by a surge of moist heat. My first thought was that I’d left a Lean Cuisine smoldering in the oven and that no one had noticed because I never replaced the battery in the carbon monoxide detector after it died six years ago. But then I rounded the corner to find Helen, coated in a fine layer of asbestos dust and glaring at me from next to the empty bag of food I had left for her to eat while I was away. I immediately threw her in a box and surveyed the ruined landscape. Eighty percent of my considerable trash library was a warped, pulpy mess; there was condensation beaded on practically every surface; the clothes hanging in my walk-in closet were damp to the touch; and my lipsticks oozed wetly from their shiny cases. It was too overwhelming to even think about, so I didn’t. After cutting some air holes in Helen’s box, I hauled her down three flights of stairs, then stood on the curb googling “how many months can I skip paying rent over some straight-up bullshit” while we waited for an Uber.
After depositing the Antichrist in a dog-size kennel at work, I went back to sort through the wreckage of my life. I’m pretty much a scorch-the-earth kind of dude, so I spent the night dragging bags of waterlogged pillows and damp clothes down to the dumpster. As I was attempting to dry my mattress with a neighbor’s borrowed hair dryer, my landlord let himself in to tell me he’d shrug emoji “have some guys take a look” in the coming week. Like there wasn’t a giant hole in my fucking wall. Like the goddamned ceiling beams weren’t goddamn exposed. Honestly, I’m not smart enough and this thing about my dead cat probably isn’t the place to get into it, but what is life when you work a hundred hours a week in order to live in a dump with a toilet that leaks shitwater every time you flush, and the guy who cashes your uncomfortably large checks (which still don’t feel quite right, considering the neighborhood you live in) looks at the child-size hole in your wall and is like, “WOW, THIS SUCKS”?
Helen lived at the hospital for a few weeks while our decaying apartment was torn apart and put back together again. She loved it, man. The techs would just leave the cage door open and let her walk around like a queen, one who occasionally let her subjects pet her lustrous fur. Helen didn’t give a fuck about dogs and would just sit there, daring them, as they were brought back for shots or treatment. She got really good at laying on stuff and rolling her eyes every time I walked past her perch to grab a box of Heartgard or drop a urine sample in the lab. She was having as much of a blast as I imagine the King of Babylon can when forced to mingle with the mentally inferior inhabitants of earth, while I was spending every night alone in my empty apartment sitting in front of a television that had shorted out because it wasn’t equipped to deal with junglelike conditions and still feeling kind of guilty about my miserable cat all alone in a cold, sterile cage. So I asked if Mavis wanted her in Michigan.
“What is ‘Michigan’ again?” Helen asked, eyeing the atlas I’d handed her warily.
“It’s beautiful! They have trees there! And squirrels for you to watch!” I grasped for some enthusiasm.
She turned her nose up at the idea that she could be bothered to pay attention to anything, let alone a “squirrel.”
I tried again. “Um…apples? Deer?!”
Helen sighed grudgingly, then wrapped some catnip and a handful of salmon treats in a hobo bindle before demanding I carry her out to the car. She cheered up as soon as we hit Lake Shore Drive, emerging from her travel box to sniff cautiously at the lake breeze wafting in through the car windows. She sat on the armrest between us for the entire trip, alternately napping and shaking herself awake solely to express her displeasure at the outfit I’d chosen for the drive. We pulled up to the house in the early evening, the sidewalk dotted with children playing as they waited for dinner.
“I hate it here,” Helen announced, peeking out the window at a girl jumping rope next door. “Take me back to the place where I know I can get good ribs.”