Southern Lady Code: Essays
Helen Ellis
I have the reputation of living what Marie Kondo would call a “magically tidy” life. My tights are rolled like sushi, my tabletops are bare, my kitchen is so clean I could perform surgery in it. But I wasn’t always this way. When I was twenty-three, I left my New York City apartment with a panty liner stuck to my back.
Yes, it was used. Yes, earlier that day, I’d taken it off and tossed it onto my twin bed like a bear throws salmon bones onto a rock. Once it was there, I guess I forgot about it. It was probably camouflaged. I promise you there was other stuff on the bed. My bed used to look like a landfill.
Maybe I threw my coat over it and it stuck. And then I put my coat back on and rode a bus thirty blocks with a panty liner between my shoulder blades. No, nobody said a word. I didn’t know it was there until my date gave me a hug and then peeled it off like he was at a burlesque show in hell.
This was not the man I married.
The man I married walked into my apartment and found Pop-Tart crusts on my couch. I can still see his face, bewildered and big-eyed, pointing at the crusts as if to ask, “Do you see them too?”
I shrugged.
He sat on the sofa. It is my husband’s nature to accept me the way that I am.
My nature is to leave every cabinet and drawer open like a burglar. My superpower is balancing the most stuff on a bathroom sink. If I had my druthers, I’d let cat puke dry on a carpet so it’s easier to scrape up. If druthers were things, and I had a coupon for druthers, I’d stockpile them like Jell-O because you never know when you might need some druthers.
My husband fell in love with a creative woman. “Creative” is Southern Lady Code for slob.
But it is one thing to accept a slob for who she is; it is another to live with her.
A year into our marriage, my husband complained.
He said, “Would you mind keeping the dining room table clean? It’s the first thing I see when I come home.”
What I heard was: “I want a divorce.”
What I said was: “Do you want a divorce?”
“No,” he said. “I just want a clean table.”
I called my mother.
Mama asked, “What’s on the table?”
“Oh, everything. Whatever comes off my body when I come home. Shopping bags, food, coffee cups, mail. My coat.”
“Your coat?”
“So I don’t hang my coat in the closet—that makes me a terrible person? He knew who he was marrying. Why do I have to change?”
Mama said, “Helen Michelle, for heaven’s sake, this is a problem that can be easily solved. Do you know what other married women deal with? Drunks, cheaters, poverty, men married to their Atari.”
“Mama, there’s no such thing as Atari anymore.”
“Helen Michelle, some women would be beaten with a bag of oranges for sass talk like that. You married a saint. Clean the goddamned table.”
And so, to save my marriage, I taught myself to clean.
Not knowing where to start, I knelt before the TV at the Church of Joan Crawford, who said as Mildred Pierce, “Never leave one room without something for another.”
Yes, I’ll admit she had a temper, but she knew how to clean.
You scrub a floor on your hands and knees. You shake a can of Comet like a piggy bank. You hang your clothes in your closet a finger’s width apart. And no, you do not have wire hangers. Ever.
I have wooden hangers from the Container Store. They’re walnut and cost $7.99 for a pack of six. I bought the hangers online because stepping into the Container Store for me is like stepping into a crack den. See, you’re an addict trying to organize your crack, and they’re selling you pretty boxes to put your crack in.
Pretty boxes are crack, so now you have more crack. But wooden hangers are okay. They’re like mimosas. Nobody’s going to OD on mimosas. Wooden hangers give you a boost of confidence. They make you feel rich and thin. They make a plain white shirt sexy. You promise yourself you’ll fill one closet, and then you’ll quit.
But I didn’t quit. To keep my buzz going, I asked my husband if I could clean his closet.
He asked, “What does that mean?”
I said, “Switch out your plastic hangers for wooden ones. What do you think I mean?”
“I don’t know, something new for Saturday night?” He did the air quotes: “Clean my closet.”
My new ways were so new he assumed I was making sexual advances. It’s understandable—so much dirty talk sounds so hygienic: salad spinning and putting a teabag on a saucer. It’s like Martha Stewart wrote Urban Dictionary.
My husband opened his closet door and stepped aside. The man trusts me. I rehung his closet with military precision.
He said, “I never knew it could be this good.”
We kissed.
And then I relapsed.
I don’t know how it happened. Maybe it was leaving the Dutch oven to soak overnight. Maybe it was tee-peeing books on my desk like a bonfire. Maybe it was shucking my panties off like shoes. And then my coat fell off the dining room table. And I left it there because the cats were using it as a bed. There it stayed along with laundry, newspapers, restaurant leftovers (that never made it to the fridge), and Zappos returns.
My husband played hopscotch, never uttering a word of contempt, seemingly okay to coast on the memory of a pristine home as if it had been a once-in-a-lifetime bucket-list thrill like white-water rafting or winning a Pulitzer. Sure, he could have put things away, but every closet except for his was bulging and breathing like a porthole to another dimension.