Brother Billy Cleans House

I once started an email to a friend with "Well, I decided to clean house today -- so I flushed the toilet."

And that's not such a great exaggeration, either. Dust and cobwebs hold no terror for me, and dirty dishes feel at home in my kitchen sink and often overstay their welcome. Vacuuming is a concept I am only vaguely committed to.

As I look back on the major influences of my childhood, this slovenly trait is certainly an anomaly -- for my mother was a dedicated foe of dirt, grime, dust and tarnish of any kind. She drilled it into me that cleanliness was not only next to godliness but one of the Ten Commandments if you read between the lines, as she did.

She kept an arsenal of chemical cleaners underneath the kitchen sink to help her eradicate the merest suggestion of a smudge. There was always a large canister of Bon Ami powder, with its absurd logo of a baby chick emerging from the shell; I thought maybe you were supposed to sprinkle the powder on eggs to make them hatch. I tried it once, to no effect. 

Mom went through a bottle of Mr. Clean every other week. And as a television addict with a vast retentive memory of every commercial I ever saw I would break out into the refrain "Mr. Clean . . . Mr. Clean . . . Mr. Clean . . . " whenever I smelled that pungent aroma. 

There was Clorox bleach; Pledge furniture polish; Weiman silver polish; Brillo pads; Palmolive dish washing liquid; Arm&Hammer baking soda; Windex; Johnson floor wax; Lysol spray; Glade air freshener spray; a packet of chamois strips for delicate jobs; and of course a pair of sturdy yellow rubber gloves. 

 Strange to say, my older brother Billy, ten years my senior, who was on the high school football team and kept a set of weights in the basement to stay buff, was also a clean freak. He seconded my mother's continuous commando actions against dirt. 

Thus it came to pass one summer day when I was six that my mother had to leave unexpectedly on some urgent errand, with the housework incomplete, so she prevailed upon brother Billy to not only look after my sisters and me, but to finish up cleaning the house. Billy was only too glad to do so. He parked us kids in front of the television set just in time for the Mel Jass Matinee Movie on Channel 11, then began tidying things up.

But the Mel Jass movie that day was a dud -- "Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour" or some such dreck -- so I swiftly grew bored and wandered away from the boob tube, looking for a little action.

I found it in the dining room, where Billy had unwisely left the Electrolux vacuum in a vulnerable and wide open position while he took the vacuum bag out to the trash. In a flash I saw the possibilities of stuffing the innards of the Electrolux with a dozen or so small plastic cowboys and indians I kept handy in a bag under the living room couch. That done, I wandered into the kitchen to open the refrigerator door for ten minutes, staring blankly at the milk, eggs, and the remains of last night's fish sticks. Meanwhile Billy began swearing softly to himself as he attempted to inject a new bag into the vacuum. Repeatedly foiled, he finally gave up, pushed the vacuum to the side, and began industriously polishing the dining room table. Closing the fridge door I walked up behind him to demand a Popsicle. The magical word "Popsicle" brought my sisters running, screaming that they wanted one too.

"You kids go back to the TV and leave me alone -- Mom said you can't have any cuz you didn't finish your lunch!" he said. But Billy was not mom, and could be hectored unmercifully until he caved in. So we yelled and blubbered and wheedled until he caved, as we knew he would, and got us each an orange Popsicle from the freezer and told us to go eat them outside. 

We promptly took them back to the TV in the living room instead, where they melted all over our clothes and dribbled onto the carpet. When Billy discovered this he got the Mr. Clean to rub out the evidence of his dereliction of duty from the carpet and had us strip down to our skivvies so he could put our dirty sticky clothes in the laundry hamper and hunt us up something clean to wear. Then the doorbell rang.

"Don't answer that!" Billy hollered from our bedrooms upstairs.

I answered it. It was a tall lugubrious gentleman selling life insurance door to door. They used to do that back in the 1950's.

He was somewhat startled to find himself confronting a little boy in only his underwear.

"Is your mother home, son?" he asked.

"Nope. But Billy's upstairs. You wanna talk to him?"

Door to door salesmen would talk to anyone they thought might buy their wares, so he stepped in and said sure, go get him.

I ran upstairs to tell Billy there was a tall man with a briefcase wanted him to come down. Billy was big for his age, so the life insurance salesman actually went into his spiel the minute he saw Billy -- but Billy would have none of it and politely steered the man back out the front door.

Then he gave us clean clothes to put on. Then, with a disturbing gleam in his eye and a tremor in his voice, he asked if we'd like to play a game. 

"What kind of game?" I asked suspiciously. Billy was not known for his love of childish frolic. He mostly went out with girls or pumped iron in the basement. 

"Come on over to the fireplace and I'll show you" he said sweetly.

Now our house had a very fine brick fireplace in the living room, but the builders had never built a chimney to go with it. It was strictly ornamental. Mom had all the accessories for a real fireplace around it -- andirons, bellows, black cast iron tools, and even a heavy chain fire screen. Billy told us to go into the fireplace and he would hide us with the fire screen until mom came home. Then we could jump out to frighten her. Did we like the idea? We liked; so he stowed us away behind the fire screen in the fireplace, telling us not to make a peep until we heard the front door open. 

Then he went back to cleaning the house. We could hear him whistling happily as he dusted and swept. My sisters and I gradually fell into a semi-stupor behind the firescreen. When mom returned we hadn't the energy to pop out and cry "Boo!" She exclaimed over the fine job that Billy had done. Then, noticing the quiet, she asked where Timmy and the others were.

"I put them in the fireplace" said Billy matter-of-factly. 

Mom moved the fire screen to reveal the three of us squatting contentedly. It didn't seem odd to any of us that we three had spent the better part of an afternoon cooped up in the hearth. 

"Hi mom" I said. "Can I have a Popsicle?"