Coming Clean: A Memoir by Miller Kimberly Rae

Author:Miller, Kimberly Rae [Miller, Kimberly Rae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2013-07-23T07:00:00+00:00

I got lucky when the show I interned for was cancelled in December. I considered it a get-out-of-LA-free card. I’d stick around until shooting wrapped, and afterward I could move back to New York having tried and failed through no fault of my own. After two years of convincing myself that I never wanted to go back home again, I was actually excited to be with my family—despite my mother’s preflight warning call.

“I just don’t want you to hate me when you see it,” she said. “I made sure the door to your bedroom is always closed so nothing sneaks in there.” I could hear the shame in her voice and the fear, as if she thought I would come home, take one look at their apartment, and slit my wrists.

“It’s okay, Mom. I’ll help you clean up.” There was no point in making her feel worse by telling her I was disappointed. It’s nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

When I made it home after my flight, the two-bedroom apartment was worse than I had expected. My father’s papers had taken over the entire loveseat and two thirds of the couch in the living room—that was his “office,” he said, as if bus drivers everywhere needed an office to sort their timesheets and behavioral reports on second graders. There was a thin pathway between his wall of papers and the television that allowed us to walk through the apartment from the kitchen to the bedrooms, but no one but my father could actually sit down and watch a movie in the stuffed sitting area.

My mother had a wall in their bedroom that consisted of her computer desk and boxes of things she had ordered online but hadn’t found use for or time to return. If she wasn’t in the kitchen cooking something, she was there, sitting at the computer with her back to the rest of the house.

Piles of clothes took over the top of their dresser, and my father’s side of the bed consisted of bags and bags of papers. The kitchen fared better than the rest of the house. There were still some parts of the floor visible, and the kitchen table was kept half-cleared so that we could at least eat as a family if we sat close together. My room, as my mother had promised, was spotless, just as I’d left it the last time I visited them.

I told myself that the apartment was fine; we could cook food, the heating worked, and showers could be had any time of the day. I couldn’t ask for more.

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