Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [100]
Because an interesting metamorphosis has occurred. Against all odds, I am becoming domesticated.
The other day while I was at the doctor’s office waiting for my suspicious mole appointment, I was paging through Redbook magazine. I was reading about how crumpled newspapers are actually better than paper towels for cleaning windows because they don’t leave behind lint. And I was thinking, I’ve got to try this! I was so absorbed in the article that the receptionist had to call my name twice.
Our routine involves Dennis cooking dinner and me washing the dishes. And I love washing dishes by hand and even bought myself a stainless-steel dish rack from Williams-Sonoma. I was so excited in the cab with the box next to me that I went home and ate some gluey vanilla yogurt just so I could wash the bowl and place it in the new dish rack to dry.
Now I understand packaged-goods advertising. Softens hands while you do dishes. Before, when I had a loathsome job in advertising, I created lines like this without ever truly considering their meaning. I’ve gone from duping the public to being a target audience. I used to sit on the other side of the one-way mirror in focus groups and sneer at homemakers. “How pathetic,” I would comment. “She’s actually been brainwashed to believe in Tide with Bleach.” But now, I see that all along, she was right. And I was the smug fool. The fact is, Tide with Bleach does remove more stains than regular detergent and bleach. I’ve spent hours downstairs in the basement laundry room experimenting.
My domestication was not a spontaneous event, like the collapse of a star. It has occurred as a direct result of living with Dennis.
I moved into Dennis’s apartment one year, three months, and seventeen days after we met. It’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, five minutes from Central Park and close to the Hudson River. It is large, with an entire wall of windows facing north. It has tall ceilings, art on the walls, a sofa with boiled wool, down-filled cushions from Wales.
The water pressure in the shower could strip the paint off a car. There is a doorman. And an elevator. And a garbage chute. These are not uncommon amenities in New York City, the city I have made my home for fifteen years. But they are new for me.
My previous apartment was a filthy three-hundred-square-foot studio on the third floor of a five-story building in the East Village. When it rained, water poured from the center of the single overhead light fixture. During a heavy storm, I would have to empty the twenty-gallon plastic tub I kept beneath it several times. The ceiling was permanently damp, moldy, and falling away in whole sections.
There was no heat because of a wiring problem in the wall, somewhere between the thermostat and the furnace downstairs. But I didn’t care. I just opened the oven door in the winter and removed the smoke alarm so it wouldn’t beep at the carbon monoxide.
Friends suggested that at the very least I fix the leak. “Call the super for God sakes. There are laws about things like that, even in New York.”
But I didn’t mind. The constant sound of falling water was like living in a hut in the rain forest. It was very Gorillas in the Mist and made me feel somewhat exotic and adventurous.
“You’re like a serial killer,” my friend Suzanne commented. “You live in exactly the sort of apartment that ends up in a photograph on the cover of the Post. With a big fat headline over it: PSYCHO’S DEN OF SQUALOR.”
But I’ve always been comfortable in squalor. Because I was raised in chaos and filth, because the psychiatrist’s house was so messy and disgusting, this has become my default. What may horrify other people is mundane to me. “That’s just old chow fun, don’t worry. It’s dry. It doesn’t stink anymore, so no rats will smell it.”
While it’s true that I spent five thousand dollars on a shabby chic sofa, it is also true that the white slipcover eventually became beige, and the sofa itself vanished beneath a mound of clothing. I was in the habit of wearing