I've called this woman a pussyface behind her back more times than I can remember, but I pretend to agree with her when she tells me this, shaking my head with aversion. "Like, what is wrong, people?" I ask, as she pantomimes the forbidden bar lather she is talking about, pussying up her face into a scowl. In reality, I am thinking about my own shower and how I would be lucky to have a loofah and how the bar of soap I use is fashioned from melded shards and crumbs of other soaps, some stolen from hotels I have never even been too, others that came originally in the shapes of gingerbread men and bunnies in the stockings and Easter baskets I still get from my mother, and still more that were meant for scrubbing laundry in youth hostile-type situations. I think about the completely scum-encrusted soap rack, devoid of all drainage capability now that unrinsed lather has formed a triumphant land bridge in-between the tarnished chrome bars. I see the corners of the bathtub, one with a capless bottle of generic Head & Shoulders, another housing rusty disposable razors and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Pussyface and I are clearly from different planets, and while I really kind of hate her, I want to go live among her people. Because I bet you anything their tile has grout and their television can be operated without the aid of a bobby-pin.

Where I live, there are three creaky levels of strangely orchestrated floor plans, 100-year-old crust, and floors made entirely of splinters. Upstairs, there are four rooms ranging in size from weirdly big to painfully small and one half-bath so tiny it requires you shit standing up. On a whim, when I first moved in I paid my landlord's crew of Polish workmen several hundred dollars of student loan money to move and plumb a cast-iron claw-foot tub that I feared languishing in a remote area of the basement into one of the side rooms, and so to your right, at the top of the stairs, you will find the ever-ubiquitous full-size bedroom with nothing but a claw foot tub in it. The other small side room I made into a dressing room, which is a romantic idea if by dressing room you do not mean a room completely engulfed from corner to corner with piles of clothes in sedimentary layers of increasing size and cleanliness. Of the two larger rooms, one is for sleeping, and in an unprecedented show of practicality sports a bed. The remaining room exists only to house an ever-circulating population of giant tumbleweeds made of hair and lint. There is an ancient gas space heater in the corner of the giant-tumbleweeds-of-hair-and-lint room that costs $150 a month even if you never turn it on, so I had the gas company turn off the heat in the upstairs altogether, and instead leave an electric space heater plugged in and turned on 24 hours a day in the fall and winter. There is a smoke detector with a dead battery and a carbon monoxide detector still in its package on the floor near the space heater. They have been there for close to three years.

If by chance there ever is a fire, several hundred feet and one floor away you will find a fire extinguisher mounted by the stove. It is covered in a layer of grease to which has adhered a full half-inch of errant pet hair. Once, the piles of petrified crumbs collected in the bottom of my toaster caught fire enough to sprout actual flames and though I instinctively turned toward the extinguisher, several seconds of algebra regarding the likelihood I would be able to figure out the pull-pin trigger release mechanism before my house burned to the ground resulted instead in a tumbler full of water thrown at the still plugged in, and by then hopelessly in flames, toaster.

Five cats and three dogs and one husband also live in my house. When I tell people I have five cats and three dogs, I know that the laws of time and space will absolutely preclude me from stopping the formation of a mental image of a middle-age, pink bedazzled t-shirt-wearing cat lady with a blog called "Hang in There" before I can explain that I have five cats but I hate each and every one of them, and of my three dogs only one is not one hundred percent full-on retarded. My husband sits in a recliner in the living room and accumulates clutter in an ever-expanding radius around the base of his chair, presumably to amass a wall between us so vast and impenetrable that no amount or manner of nagging will pervade the igneous layers of cigarette butts or mount the beer-can turrets. The remaining rooms of the downstairs are used as kitchen, downstairs dressing room, cat-food-bowl/ever-fallow-craft-table room, and full bath with the aforementioned bar soap abetting shower.

The stairs in my house were once exterior to the structure, and at some point in a past just distant enough to ensure a state of disrepair equal to the rest of the property, were enclosed in a battleship gray box with space enough between the boards to create a bio dome with its own atmosphere. This back stairwell rains, snows, forms clouds and rainbows and is also home to three gigantic Rubbermaid tubs full of cat litter, also unaffectionately known as the Las Vegas dog buffet, and while I wish what happened there stayed there, when a pack of overenthusiastic dogs tackles you and licks your face with tongues covered in cat shit, you know someone's been to The Strip.

I have a huge back yard but no lawn mower. About once a season I am forced to deal with what inevitably becomes a situation worthy of neighbor if not city intervention. In the winter, this involves waiting for a well-timed frost and chipping mount dog shit into lawn bags for removal. In the summer, I place a full-disclosure ad on Craigslist and hope someone with a hacksaw and machete will come to my aid for $50 and a 12-pack of Natural Light.

My television really does need to be turned on with a bobby pin because in a close-to-epileptic fit induced by post 9/11 news coverage my husband launched it out one of our front windows into the shrubbery. It stayed outside until I dragged it back in to watch Wife Swap, and it does still work, like I said, with the mere aid of a bobby-pin and a ginger hand. The television is sitting on top of a hollowed-out RCA cabinet now home to the consumer electronic graveyard, in which two vcrs, a dvd player and small home stereo have met their heat-related deaths and remain victims of extension-cord schemes so complicated that only a graduate of ITT Tech could release them into purgatory.

But regardless of its looming pointlessness, my house has windows in every single room, even the bathrooms. And no matter the season, if I wander around it long enough, I will eventually come across a bit of sun, coming in somewhere, through one of the chipped panes, through one of the cracked transoms, streaming in while I look for bits of soap behind beer cans. It will trap bits of dust and cat dander and suspend them in front me, trapping them in transparent yellow tendrils. And they will look beautiful there even if it is just for a second, even though I know I'll just have to sweep them the minute that they fall.

IN CRAWLING PLACE


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