Eve and Bob: Date #5
By Eve Sturges
I am not myself
My house is currently in the utmost state of disaster.
This includes, but is not limited to:
• Laundry, though clean, in 6 piles on the floor: Jeans, mine. Panties, Lily’s. Frilly dresses, Lily’s. Pink things, Lily’s. Kitchen towels, kitchen’s. Socks with lace, Lily’s. So typical.
• 1 Selena Tee Shirt. Also clean, and semi folded. But 1 shirt isn’t a pile, is it? (You know, SELENA. Jennifer Lopez? Hellooo)
• 1 vase of lilies, wilted all the way, now sad stalks of greenish brown which reach all the way over the rim of the vase to the counter top.
• Dishes in the sink—dirty. All of them. No, I mean, all the dishes I own.
• 2 (more) piles of clothes on a chair and the couch, costumes from 36 hours of shooting this weekend. They are still on their hangers. Now there is no place to sit
• 1 chocolate soy box drink, ½ full, straw in place. On. The. Floor. I do not know how old, or for how long it has been there.
• All my purses and hats and belts on the floor at the foot of my bed.
• Bath towels? Every single one (6) on the bathroom floor.
• Bills, piled on desk.
• Other papers of mysterious importance…everywhere.
• 2 children’s’ books on my bedside table: People, by Peter Spier, and Lilly’s Big Day, by Kevin Henkes.
• ALSO on bedside table: 1 of my books (Autobiography of Malcom X by Alex Haley) a dish towel, a ½ full bottle of water, and a photo index card.
• 1 more bottle of water, same bedside table. It is a large bed side table.
• A sketch pad of Lily’s, 2’ x 3’, face up on my bedroom floor, on which she rendered a representation of me, in blue crayon.
• 3 reusable Trader Joe’s bags, opened and empty, in the middle of the main floor.
I’m no Donna Reed, but my house is never like this. Never ever ever. It’s a long story, mostly uninteresting.
I really should clean. I should be manically, obsessively, excitedly cleaning, putting the dishes in the dishwasher (concept!) and the clothes in their proper drawers. It can be the best kind of cleaning when it starts this bad, because the results are so glorious! I should hang the costumes back in the closet. I should pick those towels up and at least drape them over the shower rod so I can use them in the morning. The wilted flowers should be compost, the chocolate soy dumped.
Instead, I called Bob.
“And you should know that my house is in the utmost state of disaster.”
“That’s okay,” he said. He’ll be here any minute.