3.19 The Furies

Randy, Cathy, Debbie, August 1960

1960 • La Habra ~ Debbie, Randy, and I had daily chores. We made our beds, cleaned our bathroom, and fixed our breakfast. We vacuumed, swept, and dusted. I helped with dinner. Debbie set the plates and Randy got out the silverware. After dinner I washed the dishes, Debbie dried, and Randy put away the utensils. He was so small he sat on the kitchen drainboard to reach the drawer.

The most tedious job delegated to us was to separate the small red gravel from the small white gravel that got kicked together when we ran through the four gravel-filled triangles along the walkway. It was Chuck’s idea of creative landscaping.

Every six months Carleen turned into a cleaning fanatic. I could see it in her eyes, and there were no idle hands in our house when she was possessed. No cobweb, dust ball, tub ring, fingerprint, carpet spot, sink stain, scuffmark, or messy closet, drawer, cabinet or shelf escaped her. Even the kitchen junk drawer got organized. Shooting down the hall in a frenzy, she’d whip us kids up to participate in her whirl to get the house spotless, arming us with something from her arsenal.

If we weren’t dusting, we were vacuuming. If we weren’t vacuuming we were polishing, disinfecting, sweeping, shining, washing, waxing, or scrubbing something. Every cleaning product made was crammed under the sink: Comet, Brillo, Borax and Ajax; Windex, Tuffys, Pine-Sol and Lysol, Lemon Ammonia, Lemon Joy, Lemon Pledge and Lemon Bleach. There were SOS pads, sponges, bottle brushes and toothbrushes. There were towels, dustpans, dust rags and dishrags, with barely enough room for the brown paper garbage bags.

When her cleaning furies didn’t calm her, we rearranged the furniture, painted the walls, or scraped the waxy-yellow-build-up off the narrow linoleum strip of kitchen floor. We used old teaspoons; their curved edges didn’t knick the floor like the flat metal spackling knife or wide paint scraper did. We got down on our hands and knees, Carleen, Debbie, and I, and cleaned that floor a scrape at a time. My knees and elbows hurt along with my back and blistering finger. It took us the good part of an entire day. When we were finished, my sister got out two cans, one can of Johnson & Johnson’s Floor Wax, and a can of Johnson & Johnson’s Overcoat. A single coat of yellow wax was poured and smoothed all over the newly scraped floor, then a second coat and after that, a coat of shellac Clearcoat to protect the new wax from wearing away. The first time she did this I wanted to throw my body on the floor, flailing my arms and legs like a stricken snow angel to stop her. What was she thinking?

Each week we’d mop; once a month we’d wax; once a year, when she’d gone totally mad, we’d scrape. Thankfully, someone finally invented floor stripper. Then she discovered paint stripper, furniture stripper and wallpaper stripper.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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