Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-05-17 - 7:02 a.m.

Houseguest

I am not a very good houseguest.

You have to love me, to have me as a houseguest. I'm trying very hard, but I'm just more the sort of person you invite for the weekend and have a great time with, but lean hard against the door after I leave.

Then you put all the crap I left at your house in a box and ship it to me.

It's very rude to be a houseguest and say you want to go home all the time, so I'm repressing it. When he points out gently that I didn't turn the heat down, or yelps because some horse's ass put the steak knives in the DRAWER instead of on the rack and he cut his finger, I repress. I don't want to be a bad-dog in someone else's house; I want to be a bad-dog in MY House, where the chatelaine is very forgiving - "Oh, look, you left a mess. Well, THAT'S all right - I'm sure you'll get to it when you have time."

I haven't enough memory to be a houseguest. I can't remember my OWN routines, much less learn new ones. Where do things go? I put HIS things back in the wrong places ("I'm HELPing") and our things - well, they're desperately scattered all to hell and gone. We have taken over his livingroom with backpacks and sheet music and the huge quantity of stuffed animals one needs when one is insecure - no, not MINE - and I keep leaving a half-full cup of coffee on his computer desk, which he patiently takes out to the kitchen where it should be. I have asked for and recieved a Box, a large cardboard Box, into which I am determined to corral our mess - clean laundry bereft of its own dressers, extra shoes, cosmetics cases, hairbrushes. But we're just not very contained people. We sprawl, and snore, and oversleep on your sofa, and get up demanding coffee, and excessive hot water, and solitude.

And now I have developed a terror of paper. When you're a houseguest, what do you do with your paper? The kids are always advancing on me with soccer signups and permission slips and notices about the end-of-the-year skating party. What am I supposed to do with all THAT? I know what I'd do with it at home - I'd throw it on top of the huge pile on my desk, so I could look forward to hours of fun trying to find it the morning it's due. I have routines, you see. So I tried throwing it on top of HIS pile, but damnit, it's just not the same. Then when I went to rummage through, I was rummaging through HIS papers, which my mother taught me was a rude thing for a houseguest to do. (I also looked in his medicine chest, come to think of it, which is also pretty gauche.) So now I have papers in my Box, with the clean laundry and the camera and everything else. I am a homeless person living in a cardboard box. A suburban homeless person, since I'm not actually SLEEPING in the box, but the indications are all there.

You see, other people's houses are just WRONG. I'm sorry, but there you have it: wrong. It's not us at all, it's THEM. Other people's houses have things in all the wrong places - of COURSE the steak knives go in the drawer, I was only making an IMPROVEMENT. Other people's houses have wrong shower heads and wrong TV channels and wrong food. How can there BE no Ritz Crackers? I would have bought them, except they're supposed to BE THERE in the first place - who'd have thought? Where are the q-tips? It's WRONG to have only dandruff shampoo. See? It would take me a year to whip this place into shape and retrain its inhabitants.

I want to go home.

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