By Sara Anbari
I feel so sick, I want to puke and pass out. It’s this heat and humidity. Give me a few minutes. Stop with the yelling and sirens and big black shoes blocking my view. Get that needle away from me, shut up for a second, and listen!
You have to understand—when I say we’re about to move, I mean, like, RIGHT NOW. Look around! This is a five-alarm decluttering emergency, complete with fire, police, EMS, and totally unplanned, I might add. No matter what, this move is happening and I do not have time for a stupid hospital.
We don’t even have a new apartment yet. If we manage to find a place, I’m sure it’ll be another slapdash two-and-one with a bleak, black front door that sticks. (Is a black door open or closed? No one can tell.) A teeny-tiny patio or firetrap balcony will house our giant bowls of sprouted dirt. The walls will be light gray, and the outgassing builder-grade carpet will be a darker gray, like living inside a wet cement fogbank. The cramped kitchen will have a dark laminate floor the exact color of cockroaches so big, you can hear them. The bare-bones apartment dishwasher will also be black, a yawning crawlspace of doom. I just hope the smoke detectors actually work.
Am I expecting?
You tell me, Chief.
This all started when my husband and I splurged on takeout from the new Persian place. It’s called Albert’s? Alders?—I can’t remember. Anyway, we wouldn’t have spent that much money on food delivery had we known we’d be moving this soon. It’s just that we were both tired and didn’t want to drag ourselves to a crowded restaurant for date night.
So we stayed in, put on some Taylor Swift, and made it a romantic evening. We lit candles against complex regulations. I used a big scarf as a tablecloth and wore a stretchy, strappy dress just for fun, with my bare feet and cute tummy and long brown hair.
The dinner was sublime beyond our shabby surroundings, a congress of warm comfort foods and smoky spices redolent of the rose-scented, saffron-touched valleys of Inanna and Gilgamesh. I had never eaten Persian food before and enjoyed it very much: barberry rice, mirza ghasemi, lubia polo, soltani, makhloot for dessert. To celebrate this date-night feast, we proudly used real dishes like real adults.
Looking back, we should have just eaten out of the takeout containers instead of dirtying up our wedding-present stoneware. But real dishes seemed like a fantastic idea at the time. We sipped from stemless goblets (water for me, wine for him) while loading our real grownup dishes into the dishwasher, feeling fancy even as we cleaned up.
Apartment dishwashers aren’t fancy. The interiors have two non-adjustable racks, and the insides are plastic, not upscale stainless. That’s okay, because at some point, a dishwasher is just a dishwasher. Either it works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you’re probably using cheap detergent or loading it incorrectly or need to turn up the temperature on your hot water. It’s usually not the dishwasher’s fault, unless it’s old.
If we can’t find a new apartment soon, we’ll go live with my parents and their fancy-pants dishwasher. It’s not as if my mother hasn’t mentioned before that we could move in with them. You’re always welcome here, she says when my husband isn’t in the room. You two are so young; don’t be afraid to ask for help.
My parents enjoy a big ol’ empty-nester Colonial all to themselves, with magnolias in the yard, a guest suite, and closets galore. Mom and I bond over decluttering those closets together in the way of mothers and daughters. Closet-cleaning needs to be done anyway, preferably on a non-emergency basis, when I’m not so exhausted. We sift through plastic bins of old photos, clothes, linens, craft supplies, books, notebooks, papers, trophies, toys, and ancient electronics. We divide things into Keep, Sell, and Donate boxes, with sturdy trash bags for the Toss items. Mom tells cautionary tales about hoarder-types nearby who post in the local giveaway group. She recites posts that make us shudder…
Does anyone want half a sugar-free pie? Only expired two days!
Artisan cheddar, small mold spot can be cut off
Mirror, still usable, broken eight years ago
Youth clothing up for grabs, pictured
… and the kids’ clothing often includes underwear! Seriously! Who wants used underwear? Do they not realize there are perverts who take that stuff?? Mom and I agree on this: it’s totally okay to throw away junk like expired food, or things that are moldy, or things that are broken or burnt or personal or cursed. Just throw that shit away.
I myself was decluttered once, by my parents! They bought me a set of luggage and shipped me off to college. If I move home now, I’ll take up more space than ever, arriving with a mate in tow. It’s like when you organize the kitchen and the cabinets look nice and neat, but a few months later, the dishes have been breeding and you’d swear there are more of them.
I am the dishes. I will make more dishes. I will contribute dishes to their crazy-expensive dishwasher, a vessel of domestic abundance that Mom named Anne Boleyn because it has a third rack. Because King Henry VIII’s second wife reportedly had a third breast… rack… get it? My mom is so weird.
Sure, rumors of this third breast were greatly exaggerated, but Anne Boleyn was still the damn Queen of England. She gave birth to Elizabeth I. And a third rack in a dishwasher is freakin’ amazing.
I shit you not: over the two normal racks, there’s a shallow rack at the tippy-top for coffee mugs and little bowls and things that are a pain to fit in otherwise, at least for me at my remedial level of dishwasher skills. My spouse is far better at dishwasher management than I am and should appreciate this miracle of engineering, the gift of a third. However, he remains stubbornly unimpressed by my parents’ pretentious machine. And we argued because he thinks Anne Boleyn is a stupid name for a dishwasher.
He was like, that’s not what rack means. It’s a collective noun for all the boobs together, so three boobs is still only one rack.
What about ten boobs, like a pig? I asked, even though I don’t literally know how many tits a pig has.
He said, what do pigs have to do with anything? My point is that naming a dishwasher is even stupider than not knowing what a rack is.
My mom comes from a family that names things, I said. You know that.
I realize that, he said, and I don’t see why that would be considered anything but idiotic.
I was like, well, you named your dick. You named it Porky. Who’s the pig now?
Honestly, he’s just jealous. Queen Anne is an absolute treasure, a hidden gem. She is noiseless, odorless, and attired in the sumptuous invisibility-cloak of a perfectly matched cabinet facing. She is majestic and worth every cent of her exorbitant cost.
My parents, who expect nothing less than the best in home appliances, paid for her with money from a secret closet hidden somewhere in their house. That closet had stored things like fabric remnants and threadbare towels and crinkly waterproof mattress pads. But—and Mom didn’t tell me this, I guessed it on my own—they threw away those old, junky things and filled that closet with money.
I don’t remember where or when, but I know I’ve seen that closet before, the memory surfacing like a body in a bayou. Dozens of brown paper lunch sacks stand with their tops neatly folded over on pristine white shelves, lined up like luxury handbags. All these sacks are labeled with the weird-ass, spelling-bee house-shit they hoard money to buy, things like DEHUMIDIFIER and TUCKPOINTING and HARDIEPLANK (SOFFITS).
They bought Annie with money stashed in a sack with DISHWASHER written on it in black magic marker.
The great-granddaddy longlegs of all their money bags is a big brown grocery sack at the bottom of the closet labeled SWANK SENIOR HOME THAT WON’T TRY TO KILL US.
We’re already moving. Our old apartment is gone. If we move in with my parents, I’ll whisper to my spouse about the hidden riches. I’ll rack my brain trying to remember when I saw this closet, and where it might be. We will canvas the house during the day, knocking on walls and panels. We will roam together at night with flashlights, dressed like ninjas in case my dad gets up for a snack & jack (which horrified my husband until I explained it’s Jack Daniels).
One day or night, we will find my parents’ secret closet. Then, Grinch-like, we will declutter that closet. We’ll take the sacks of cash off their hands to supplement our own measly little dime bags labeled STUDENT LOANS and FUTURE DAYCARE and DENTAL/ORTHODONTIA.
A treasure hunt is something my husband and I can enjoy together. I don’t want to give the impression that we fight all the time. We mostly get along as well as any couple. I’m really just grateful for the amazing life I have, with a job, a car, and a loving spouse. My parents are absolutely the most generous and caring parents in the world. So many people have it so much worse. I’m truly thankful and blessed and try to remember that, with gratitude, every single day.
The thing about any dishwasher, whether it’s Queen Anne or a dark portal to hell, is that you’re not supposed to shut it all the way, right?—at least that’s the way I’ve always been taught. You close it without engaging the latch so it’s easier to yank open when dirty things need to go in. You only close it all the way when the magical swirly pod is placed inside and you run it, sometimes two magical pods if things are really filthy, like if you had a party. Then, when the cycle is done, you get the clean dishes out and put them away and start over.
We discovered after the romantic Persian takeout, after we used the real dishes, that someone closed the dishwasher improperly. They closed the black hatch all the way by mistake with our dirty dishes inside. It could have been either one of us, tired and distracted after a long day. Let’s say it was clearly an accident.
So after it had been shut wrong, allowing none of the odors to slowly disperse, the dishwasher smelled gamey. Pungent Persian vapors trapped inside created what I can only describe as this weird raisiny menstrual smell. Then someone (not I!) closed the dishwasher on purpose to contain the odor. This made it even stinkier.
I said that this someone could just, I don’t know, maybe run the dishwasher to eliminate the funk? But no—it couldn’t be run because the dishwasher wasn’t yet filled to regulation.
You see, one of the two of a couple has a badge somewhere, I swear, they have a badge that says they are the Dishwasher Police. So they are the enforcers of Dishwasher Law, whereas I am the perp who seeks to run a half-full dishwasher against all moral authority and experiences a perverse thrill at the soulless whitespace of a clean, half-empty rack.
I was informed that the dishwasher Shall Not Be Run until it is FULL even if it offends.
As the hours passed, the dishwasher became positively rancid, like dumpsters on a hot summer day. But we still couldn’t run the dishwasher, so I was reminded by the friendly local Dishwasher PD. Nope. It still wasn’t full! And He with the badge is a licensed architect of Dishwasher Canon whose high authority ordains him to load up the machine like a clown car of plates and mugs and cutlery, and the dishwasher Shall Not Be Run until it is fecund with dinnerware, including plastics that never dry completely, taking forever to put away what with toweling off the flat bottoms of the tumblers and IKEA snack bowls.
So we kept the dishwasher closed up tight, only opening it to thrust in some spoons and knives and spatulas, breath held, and the sweet-rot fumes festered. The situation deteriorated to where the smell literally made me sick. Going anywhere near the kitchen brought on a sweaty, hot-cold nausea and percolating discomfort in my gut.
Maybe if I’d felt like eating, I would have used a few more mugs and bowls. Then the dishwasher would have been full already. Maybe it could have been run before it was too late.
I woke up too early this morning. Let me tell you, I knew immediately that something was bad wrong. I lay awake for a time, bathed in perspiration and the poisonous stench permeating the apartment. Pain twisted my insides from my neck to my knees. My chest hurt and invisible sparks poked at my skin. Yes sir, still hurts.
I rolled out of bed and went to the living room. In the kitchen, black smoke curled around the edges of the dishwasher. The wisps of smoke flashed into billows. Then the dishwasher burst into flames! Burning roaches ran everywhere, pulling smoke and fire behind the walls to incinerate a hundred thousand more. Fire everywhere! Fire! Fire!
Chief came out of the bathroom in his gym clothes. Call 9-1-1, I yelled over roach screams—like the worst tinnitus in the universe.
Chief was like, sit down, calm down, we’re okay. If there were a fire, wouldn’t the smoke detectors be going off? There’s no fire.
The fire is hiding inside the walls, and we are not okay, I said. Why are you just standing there, where’s your fat red fire extinguisher now? We should have run the dishwasher already, but no one listens to me!
What are you even talking about, he said.
And then he was like, oh sure, we should probably go. As if it was his idea instead of mine. We staggered down to the parking lot. Chief made me lay in the grass even though fire ants are swarming and biting and stinging!
And now a whole bunch of you are here, grabbing at me, holding my arm. Her Majesty the Queen Ant has escaped the mound and she’s pissed, injecting venom into the back of my hand. I hate this, I hate getting stuffed into an ambulance, I hope Mom will let me have her secret money sack labeled AMBULANCE RIDES.
My Chief appears next to me. He regards me with reddened eyes. Why didn’t you grab the hospital bag, his swollen squint begs to inquire.
Why couldn’t you just run the goddamn dishwasher, I say through another wave of nausea. Did you honestly intend to kill us both?
So this is how it will be when we move in with my parents. We’ll become bickering, septic pseudo-siblings sharing a bedroom, two bachelor-degreed brats in footie pajamas who fight about whose turn it is to clean the toilet and empty Anne Boleyn. It’ll be the end of We because cast as children, We are only interested in Me.
He’s got to be steamed that his precious badge is burning, as if that’s what matters! I can picture it all going up: books, notebooks, furniture, linens, electronics, big clothes, bigger clothes, tiny clothes, hospital bag, everything, the dishwasher a crematorium of domestic kitchenware.
Hot darkness rolls through the ambulance with flashes of orange. I close my eyes. It can all go. Just let that shit go. I can’t deal with the heavy stuff.
About the Author:
Sara Anbari lives in Austin, Texas. She’s a GenXer whose reproductive years fell during a time when women assigned female at birth had more women’s rights than any US generation before or since. Sara studied creative writing at Austin Community College, where her work appeared in Rio Review. Influences on her writing include fiction by Samanta Schweblin, Jean Shepherd, Alice Munro, Gillian Flynn, Nic Pizzolatto, and Charlotte Brontë.