The Rug Doctor
Matthew Evans Chelf
Ashley wants to rent a shampooer and shampoo the rugs. Her logic: It’s a record heat wave and the rugs will dry fast.
“Okay,” I say, not putting up a fight, even though all I want to do is hide in the bedroom and bask in the coolness of our sole AC unit. It isn’t even noon, and I can feel the sun beat down on our south facing windows, the living room warming up like an oven preheating.
As we have done for the entirety of the heat wave, we hang out naked in the living room, blinds drawn so our neighbors across the courtyard can’t see us and also in an effort to reduce the heat. Our plants hunger for the direct light we deprive them, but the only way Ashley and I stand a chance is in the shadows. And anyway, the sun is so bright and so strong the blinds don’t really do much to dull the place.
We live in Portland, where a heatwave has settled on Oregon and the rest of the Pacific Northwest, roasting us with unusually obstinate temperatures. It is Sunday, supposedly the sixth and last day. A cold front, hopefully, is supposed to roll in tonight, breaking this monotonous torture that has confined us to just one room of our two bedroom flat, reducing our living space, effectively, to even less than we had during the pandemic. In quarantine, we couldn’t go outside. In the heat wave, we can’t leave our bedroom past 2 p.m.
I sit at my desk, writing this and hoping Ashley will change her mind.
She says, chirpily, “Wonder if we shampoo it, we’ll get the bubble out?” Aglow, her face turns to me. My eyes fall onto the mountainous dimples rolling through the center of the rug like the Rocky Mountains, and I say, “Maybe,” as brightly as I can.
She goes to the bedroom to put on clothes so we can go to Fred Meyer to pick up the shampooer. I stay at my desk, writing a check so I can conveniently drop it off at the blue box at the store. It's the first of the month. Time to pay bills. I look down in disbelief. I’m less bothered by the ritual bleeding of money than I am the passage of time. I can make more money: I work two, three jobs as a teacher. But life is something I can’t get back. It is a finite substance (I dare not call it resource). I remember from not long ago the Oregon rain. Still a couple of months away, I yearn for the wet coolness to pour from the sky.
“Honey,” I shout, “Can you believe I’m writing an HOA check for August?” I set the pen down and exclaim, “Where is life going?”
She appears behind me in an ivory linen dress, a bright yellow belt and a bright yellow bow around her waist. Spring yellow flats. Her dark hair pulled back and her pale skin glossy from sunscreen, she says, “Honey, don’t ask questions like that.”
She steps away to examine herself in the mirror and adds, “Well, we wasted a week of it in here.” She lifts her arms to the living room, which doubles as our dining room and our kitchen, and then her hands glide down the pearly curvature of her waist.
I say, “You look good.”
She asks, “What are you doing?”
“Writing this down,” I say, guiltily, hanging my face, trying to drape my arm over the giant Moleskin page. “I feel strangely compelled to write this down. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” she says, more than accustomed to my proclivities, and scans my page and giggles at what I’ve written.
I put on jeans and a shirt, socks and shoes, and I’m ready to leave. Keys, phone, wallet, and canvas grocery bags over my shoulder and stamped envelope in my back pocket.
Ashley says, “I was thinking about your question–where has life gone?–and I was thinking, ever since life began it’s been a constant struggle to maintain life. That’s what life is,” hand gesture to yellow glare in the window, the heat of all time.
At first I’m caught off guard by the shift in mood, but I quickly become excited to listen.
Her eyes squint behind cat-eye glasses.
“The idea that life is enriching or exciting is a pretty recent invention. Some people may have been able to achieve a state of excitement and pleasure, but the idea it is natural is idealistic and foolhardy. Life has always been work.”
I’m stuck on what I’m doing, writing this down, being attentive–no, voracious–to the moment. On the way to the store, coasting along a street shaded by tall, aged oaks, I feel the need to explain myself.
“Used to, when I first started writing, I’d write down everything that happened. I tried to turn everything into a story. My mind was always working the present moment, trying to turn it into something, as if the moment wasn’t good enough on its own.” I turn to look at Ashley, who gazes out the passenger side window, probably thinking about the sun-split shadows covering the colorful Portland houses. “I don’t really do that anymore,” I say.
I think about my younger self. I don’t feel the desperation for meaning I used to feel. I’m at a point where some of the neuroticism is starting to fall away and the ritual of the everyday is sustaining, is meaning making, is satisfying in a way that my younger self would have never believed and would have denounced in an instant as bourgeois. Now I live for the moment. I’m happy. I’m in the AC with Ashley and we’re going to rent a rug shampooer.
Ashley says, “To think life is anything but work is a beautiful human invention. It’s what heaven is.” She looks at me and I look at her. Stoplight. “We work a lot. Our work distracts us from the meaninglessness of life.”
I love it when Ashley goes on these bents. She fixates, and all there is is the fixation. The problem has to work itself out in her mind before she’ll quit it. Meanwhile, the flame of the problem brings the light and dark out of her eyes and emboldens her face. We have these kinds of conversations a lot, every day pretty much, and we’re largely on the same page so we don’t depress each other more than we would if we were solitary. I mean, Ashley isn’t sad or depressed as she says these things. Nor do they bother me. I go on plenty of existential tirades. It’s what we do. It’s why we work.
*
The Rug Doctor is a clunky hard box on wheels. It barely fit into the trunk of our tiny Kia Rio. Tore a small hole in the lining of our trunk. It is ours for twenty-four hours. It cost Ashley $39.99.
“A lot of fucking money for that thing,” she says.
It sits in our living room, dormant, where we eat hummus sandwiches in the thickening heat. Maybe we’re just warmed up by our jaunt into the outside world, or maybe it’s gotten ten degrees hotter in this living room in the last thirty minutes.
And thus begins the work of taking the house apart so we can shampoo the rugs. We have three of them in the living room. Two are long, wide Persian rugs. One is pink and the other is red. The other, the oddball, is much smaller, blue, and square and thick. It sits in front of my record player and I like to sit on it while I flip through albums, searching for the right one. The Persian rugs are thin, and, while nice on the feet, coarse.
I hoist arm chairs and table chairs to the laminate floor.
We tag team our tiny but heavy bistro table.
We move all the whatnot–Ashley’s open sketch book, her graphite pencils and erasers, her Mary Oliver, her Virginia Woolf, her scattered leaves of junk mail–off the coffee table and onto the couch. Then we both take an end and lift.
It quickly becomes too hot and we shed to nakedness.
“This would be a good time to polish it,” she says about the coffee table. “I want to get it refinished.”
Ashley runs the sweeper in just her cotton underwear.
Clutter everywhere else, we dance in the hot open space to KMHD jazz radio.
“I’ll start shampooing in here,” Ashley says. “Go get the office ready.”
More of a junk room and walk-in closet than an office, I wheel in our $20 Amazon Dirt Devil and it smells bad. I have a headache already from sweeping and moving furniture around, but something about the office has always been wrong. Sometimes, like when we keep the door shut and don’t go in for a long time, it stinks like sewage. So, I keep the window cracked. By and large, the cracked window helps but there’s something just wrong. Probably another reason Ashley wants to shampoo the rugs.
I haul out tubs filled with folded clothes. I pack out tennis rackets. I pick up some of Ashley’s mom’s large-print paperback romances from her last visit and stare at titles like Deadly Amish Reunion.
I run the vacuum over soft gray carpet. The smell of hot, burned dust worsens my head throb. The more I vacuum, the more the room starts to smell like stale cigarette smoke. No, not cigarettes, reefer, the pungent, rank, sticky odor of marijuana. But no, that’s not right either. There’s something septic and sharp about the odor.
I feel like I’m about to figure out what smells so bad when Ashley shouts, “Matt! It’s working! It’s working!”
I don’t know what’s working, but I rush into the living room to find out.
Ashley heaves the Rug Doctor over the pink rug. The heat and solution deflates the crinkle in the middle that has been driving us crazy ever since we bought the rug a year ago.
“Wow,” I say, finally appreciating the painful, earsplitting howl of the Rug Doctor.
“It’s finally gone!”
Ashley grips the handle and pushes from her waist, putting her back into it. Long strides, maximum stroke. The Rug Doctor lurches backward and forward dumbly. Hisses when she pulls back, when she pauses, like it angrily takes a breath. It smoothes over the unruly rug like a steamroller, leaving the most perfect flatness in its wake.
In no time, her struggle turns to grace, and she walks with the Rug Doctor, having found a groove, a working relationship. She works it north and south, then she works it east and west, and then she works it in seemingly random diagonal bursts of inspiration. Black, swampy muck percolates in the Rug Doctor’s big, clear belly. Now it screeches like steam engine brakes grinding on a hot rail. Ashley’s leg tendons tense.
The red petals of the flowers in the rug glow like never before.
“Can you take a turn? Don’t squeeze. Just suck out the dirt and moisture.” Her skin runs with sweat. Her chest heaves. She smiles wildly. She smiles the way she smiles when we wash the car or complete some other tedious but essential grown-up task.
“Squeeze?”
“The red button under the handle.” She stares from across the way.
I look and quickly figure out the controls. You squeeze the red bar under the handle and it shoots soap. Don’t depress the bar and the Rug Doctor eats.
I flip the power button and let the Rug Doctor rip.
I grin at Ashley, who leans against the wall and happily pants, and eager to display my masculine prowess I push, but the Rug Doctor hardly gives. It is heavy, cumbersome, almost unyielding. I have none of the grace or control Ashley exhibited. My forward thrusts take all my might. My pulls test my back. Soon my chest hurts like I’m doing pushups. My heart rate spikes and sweat coats the entirety of my naked body.
“How many swipes?” I pant.
“Four or five,” Ashley says, red and bright. “I’m sweating,” she says, beaming.
*
As I heave and ho, my thoughts drift to an article I read just yesterday in the The Guardian as I cowered in bed with the AC blasting. It was about a leading climate expert who just put out a book where his thesis was basically that we’re past the point of no return and we need to shift our focus to managing and minimizing the destruction of the imminent climate catastrophe.
While this heat wave isn’t as extreme as last year’s heat dome, which topped at 116 degrees Fahrenheit and killed 72 people in Multnomah county alone, this heat event is striking because it is one of our longest. According to an OPB article, Sunday–the day I write this–breaks a record for Portland for being the seventh day of temperatures above 95 Fahrenheit. This is in a city where, when I moved in 2016, no one had an AC. Even six short years ago, the word was you don’t need AC for Portland summer.
So not as violent as the heat dome, but longer lasting, more enduring. The heat dome was a fluke, a thousand- year occurrence, something we can (maybe) put behind us. Not this. This heat wave feels like a portent of things to come. Reality where doing tasks like shampooing carpet in the heat is a normal thing. Our home–a unit in a condominium that started off as an apartment building, constructed in the seventies–wasn’t built with this heat in mind. I can feel previous generations’ lack of foresight regarding the changes to come. I can’t ignore that climate change is our present reality and our future.
People say about the Portland winter, “Don’t let the rain stop you from living your life.” What will we say about the Portland summer?
That article may or may not be more of the usual fearmongering schlock–the fatalist narrative of doom endemic to so much climate and environmental writing–but it certainly did the job of turning my living room into a hell cave as I nakedly shampooed the rug.
Ashley disagreed when I told her about what I had read. She watched a YouTube video about what climate change is on a molecular photon level. She said, “We know what the problem is and we know how to solve the problem. If we act now, life won’t go back to the way things were, but the catastrophe is avoidable. We just need consensus and to do the work.”
*
Our bodies glisten as we deliberate how to get the Doctor to the office, through the barricade we made in the hallways in our effort to clear the rugs. I move chairs back to their rightful spot, rugs still a little damp under my feet. We move the coffee table back. We push tubs together. Finally, there’s a way through the mess to the office.
I’m in, first, with the Doctor. I bend down to plug him. The smell is bad. I recoil. I take a breath at the window. It’s like all this cleaning brought out the funk.
Ashley pokes her head through the door. “It smells pissy in here.” Then the lightbulb goes on. She points at the dog sticker on the Doctor. “Their dog pissed in here,” she exclaims.
She means the previous owner, the man we bought the flat from who tried to sell the place with blankets of mold coating the attic walls, a person we refer to as “Moldy Mark.” And like that the last two years of stink suddenly comes into focus. I stare at my bare feet.
“That’s it,” Ashley says. “Their fucking dogs.”
She stands in the doorway, cursing. When she’s done she says, “Want to take care of the office while I clear the bedroom?”
I'm mad for maybe twenty seconds. I imagine punting a yappy house dog. But the rank combination of piss, soap solution, dust, and record heat saps my brain of any ability to focus or conjure imagery. I am simply a body laboring. I push the Doctor, which heavily slumps forward and backward.
I do two wet passes. I dry until the carpet starts to boil. I can’t smell anything.
Ashley appears in the doorway. “You can definitely smell the dog piss.”
I give it one more go and then I drag the Doctor into our last room, the bedroom, the most important and also the hardest to clear.
Vacuuming the bedroom is a fraught act. Our bed becomes a table of floor mess. All the shirts and dresses. The actual square footage to detox is the smallest of our areas, owing to the unmovable furniture. Ashley takes the last go.
Meanwhile, I crack all the windows.
The stink and the heat–all in the name of cleanliness–has rendered our living space uninhabitable once the bedroom is completed. We’ll have nowhere to go but out. Thankfully, Ashley has strategically plotted a 4 p.m. movie and then dinner out with friends. So I pray that upon our return we walk into a crystal ball of fresh smelling carpet, purified of sweat, labor, and dog piss.
The Doctor roars in the bedroom.
*
Ashley strips off her cotton underwear and we hop in the shower.
“This feels good,” I say as the grime slides down my legs.
She faces me. She gets in the spray. We’ve been naked and close all day, but now we’re comfortable. In this tub, this tiny cell cordoned off by a plastic sheet, we are finally cool and clean.
“It’s so hot. I felt so greasy. I dread going outside.”
“The world is a lard encrusted frying pan right now,” Ashley says, and then quotes Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Ah love, let us be kind to one another.
Feeling suddenly devious, I say, “Want me to wash your back?”
Spray beats against us. We have cold water and naked skin and each other.
“Yes,” she says. She lathers the washcloth with thick, creamy soap. “Turn around,” she says.
She makes slow, circular strokes at my shoulders. I straighten my back so she gets it good. The softness of the soap and the rag eases the tension between my shoulder blades. She works her way down my back, slowly, covering every inch. She’s pushing the tension down my spine so it falls to the floor through my feet and washes down the drain. She notices the spots where I sigh and exclaim the most and she goes back over them.
“Turn around,” she says.
The cold jets wash soap like sea foam over my shoulders and down my back.
Ashley gives me her back, bending forward slightly, as if in prayer.
Matthew Evans Chelf
Ashley wants to rent a shampooer and shampoo the rugs. Her logic: It’s a record heat wave and the rugs will dry fast.
“Okay,” I say, not putting up a fight, even though all I want to do is hide in the bedroom and bask in the coolness of our sole AC unit. It isn’t even noon, and I can feel the sun beat down on our south facing windows, the living room warming up like an oven preheating.
As we have done for the entirety of the heat wave, we hang out naked in the living room, blinds drawn so our neighbors across the courtyard can’t see us and also in an effort to reduce the heat. Our plants hunger for the direct light we deprive them, but the only way Ashley and I stand a chance is in the shadows. And anyway, the sun is so bright and so strong the blinds don’t really do much to dull the place.
We live in Portland, where a heatwave has settled on Oregon and the rest of the Pacific Northwest, roasting us with unusually obstinate temperatures. It is Sunday, supposedly the sixth and last day. A cold front, hopefully, is supposed to roll in tonight, breaking this monotonous torture that has confined us to just one room of our two bedroom flat, reducing our living space, effectively, to even less than we had during the pandemic. In quarantine, we couldn’t go outside. In the heat wave, we can’t leave our bedroom past 2 p.m.
I sit at my desk, writing this and hoping Ashley will change her mind.
She says, chirpily, “Wonder if we shampoo it, we’ll get the bubble out?” Aglow, her face turns to me. My eyes fall onto the mountainous dimples rolling through the center of the rug like the Rocky Mountains, and I say, “Maybe,” as brightly as I can.
She goes to the bedroom to put on clothes so we can go to Fred Meyer to pick up the shampooer. I stay at my desk, writing a check so I can conveniently drop it off at the blue box at the store. It's the first of the month. Time to pay bills. I look down in disbelief. I’m less bothered by the ritual bleeding of money than I am the passage of time. I can make more money: I work two, three jobs as a teacher. But life is something I can’t get back. It is a finite substance (I dare not call it resource). I remember from not long ago the Oregon rain. Still a couple of months away, I yearn for the wet coolness to pour from the sky.
“Honey,” I shout, “Can you believe I’m writing an HOA check for August?” I set the pen down and exclaim, “Where is life going?”
She appears behind me in an ivory linen dress, a bright yellow belt and a bright yellow bow around her waist. Spring yellow flats. Her dark hair pulled back and her pale skin glossy from sunscreen, she says, “Honey, don’t ask questions like that.”
She steps away to examine herself in the mirror and adds, “Well, we wasted a week of it in here.” She lifts her arms to the living room, which doubles as our dining room and our kitchen, and then her hands glide down the pearly curvature of her waist.
I say, “You look good.”
She asks, “What are you doing?”
“Writing this down,” I say, guiltily, hanging my face, trying to drape my arm over the giant Moleskin page. “I feel strangely compelled to write this down. Is that okay?”
“Of course,” she says, more than accustomed to my proclivities, and scans my page and giggles at what I’ve written.
I put on jeans and a shirt, socks and shoes, and I’m ready to leave. Keys, phone, wallet, and canvas grocery bags over my shoulder and stamped envelope in my back pocket.
Ashley says, “I was thinking about your question–where has life gone?–and I was thinking, ever since life began it’s been a constant struggle to maintain life. That’s what life is,” hand gesture to yellow glare in the window, the heat of all time.
At first I’m caught off guard by the shift in mood, but I quickly become excited to listen.
Her eyes squint behind cat-eye glasses.
“The idea that life is enriching or exciting is a pretty recent invention. Some people may have been able to achieve a state of excitement and pleasure, but the idea it is natural is idealistic and foolhardy. Life has always been work.”
I’m stuck on what I’m doing, writing this down, being attentive–no, voracious–to the moment. On the way to the store, coasting along a street shaded by tall, aged oaks, I feel the need to explain myself.
“Used to, when I first started writing, I’d write down everything that happened. I tried to turn everything into a story. My mind was always working the present moment, trying to turn it into something, as if the moment wasn’t good enough on its own.” I turn to look at Ashley, who gazes out the passenger side window, probably thinking about the sun-split shadows covering the colorful Portland houses. “I don’t really do that anymore,” I say.
I think about my younger self. I don’t feel the desperation for meaning I used to feel. I’m at a point where some of the neuroticism is starting to fall away and the ritual of the everyday is sustaining, is meaning making, is satisfying in a way that my younger self would have never believed and would have denounced in an instant as bourgeois. Now I live for the moment. I’m happy. I’m in the AC with Ashley and we’re going to rent a rug shampooer.
Ashley says, “To think life is anything but work is a beautiful human invention. It’s what heaven is.” She looks at me and I look at her. Stoplight. “We work a lot. Our work distracts us from the meaninglessness of life.”
I love it when Ashley goes on these bents. She fixates, and all there is is the fixation. The problem has to work itself out in her mind before she’ll quit it. Meanwhile, the flame of the problem brings the light and dark out of her eyes and emboldens her face. We have these kinds of conversations a lot, every day pretty much, and we’re largely on the same page so we don’t depress each other more than we would if we were solitary. I mean, Ashley isn’t sad or depressed as she says these things. Nor do they bother me. I go on plenty of existential tirades. It’s what we do. It’s why we work.
*
The Rug Doctor is a clunky hard box on wheels. It barely fit into the trunk of our tiny Kia Rio. Tore a small hole in the lining of our trunk. It is ours for twenty-four hours. It cost Ashley $39.99.
“A lot of fucking money for that thing,” she says.
It sits in our living room, dormant, where we eat hummus sandwiches in the thickening heat. Maybe we’re just warmed up by our jaunt into the outside world, or maybe it’s gotten ten degrees hotter in this living room in the last thirty minutes.
And thus begins the work of taking the house apart so we can shampoo the rugs. We have three of them in the living room. Two are long, wide Persian rugs. One is pink and the other is red. The other, the oddball, is much smaller, blue, and square and thick. It sits in front of my record player and I like to sit on it while I flip through albums, searching for the right one. The Persian rugs are thin, and, while nice on the feet, coarse.
I hoist arm chairs and table chairs to the laminate floor.
We tag team our tiny but heavy bistro table.
We move all the whatnot–Ashley’s open sketch book, her graphite pencils and erasers, her Mary Oliver, her Virginia Woolf, her scattered leaves of junk mail–off the coffee table and onto the couch. Then we both take an end and lift.
It quickly becomes too hot and we shed to nakedness.
“This would be a good time to polish it,” she says about the coffee table. “I want to get it refinished.”
Ashley runs the sweeper in just her cotton underwear.
Clutter everywhere else, we dance in the hot open space to KMHD jazz radio.
“I’ll start shampooing in here,” Ashley says. “Go get the office ready.”
More of a junk room and walk-in closet than an office, I wheel in our $20 Amazon Dirt Devil and it smells bad. I have a headache already from sweeping and moving furniture around, but something about the office has always been wrong. Sometimes, like when we keep the door shut and don’t go in for a long time, it stinks like sewage. So, I keep the window cracked. By and large, the cracked window helps but there’s something just wrong. Probably another reason Ashley wants to shampoo the rugs.
I haul out tubs filled with folded clothes. I pack out tennis rackets. I pick up some of Ashley’s mom’s large-print paperback romances from her last visit and stare at titles like Deadly Amish Reunion.
I run the vacuum over soft gray carpet. The smell of hot, burned dust worsens my head throb. The more I vacuum, the more the room starts to smell like stale cigarette smoke. No, not cigarettes, reefer, the pungent, rank, sticky odor of marijuana. But no, that’s not right either. There’s something septic and sharp about the odor.
I feel like I’m about to figure out what smells so bad when Ashley shouts, “Matt! It’s working! It’s working!”
I don’t know what’s working, but I rush into the living room to find out.
Ashley heaves the Rug Doctor over the pink rug. The heat and solution deflates the crinkle in the middle that has been driving us crazy ever since we bought the rug a year ago.
“Wow,” I say, finally appreciating the painful, earsplitting howl of the Rug Doctor.
“It’s finally gone!”
Ashley grips the handle and pushes from her waist, putting her back into it. Long strides, maximum stroke. The Rug Doctor lurches backward and forward dumbly. Hisses when she pulls back, when she pauses, like it angrily takes a breath. It smoothes over the unruly rug like a steamroller, leaving the most perfect flatness in its wake.
In no time, her struggle turns to grace, and she walks with the Rug Doctor, having found a groove, a working relationship. She works it north and south, then she works it east and west, and then she works it in seemingly random diagonal bursts of inspiration. Black, swampy muck percolates in the Rug Doctor’s big, clear belly. Now it screeches like steam engine brakes grinding on a hot rail. Ashley’s leg tendons tense.
The red petals of the flowers in the rug glow like never before.
“Can you take a turn? Don’t squeeze. Just suck out the dirt and moisture.” Her skin runs with sweat. Her chest heaves. She smiles wildly. She smiles the way she smiles when we wash the car or complete some other tedious but essential grown-up task.
“Squeeze?”
“The red button under the handle.” She stares from across the way.
I look and quickly figure out the controls. You squeeze the red bar under the handle and it shoots soap. Don’t depress the bar and the Rug Doctor eats.
I flip the power button and let the Rug Doctor rip.
I grin at Ashley, who leans against the wall and happily pants, and eager to display my masculine prowess I push, but the Rug Doctor hardly gives. It is heavy, cumbersome, almost unyielding. I have none of the grace or control Ashley exhibited. My forward thrusts take all my might. My pulls test my back. Soon my chest hurts like I’m doing pushups. My heart rate spikes and sweat coats the entirety of my naked body.
“How many swipes?” I pant.
“Four or five,” Ashley says, red and bright. “I’m sweating,” she says, beaming.
*
As I heave and ho, my thoughts drift to an article I read just yesterday in the The Guardian as I cowered in bed with the AC blasting. It was about a leading climate expert who just put out a book where his thesis was basically that we’re past the point of no return and we need to shift our focus to managing and minimizing the destruction of the imminent climate catastrophe.
While this heat wave isn’t as extreme as last year’s heat dome, which topped at 116 degrees Fahrenheit and killed 72 people in Multnomah county alone, this heat event is striking because it is one of our longest. According to an OPB article, Sunday–the day I write this–breaks a record for Portland for being the seventh day of temperatures above 95 Fahrenheit. This is in a city where, when I moved in 2016, no one had an AC. Even six short years ago, the word was you don’t need AC for Portland summer.
So not as violent as the heat dome, but longer lasting, more enduring. The heat dome was a fluke, a thousand- year occurrence, something we can (maybe) put behind us. Not this. This heat wave feels like a portent of things to come. Reality where doing tasks like shampooing carpet in the heat is a normal thing. Our home–a unit in a condominium that started off as an apartment building, constructed in the seventies–wasn’t built with this heat in mind. I can feel previous generations’ lack of foresight regarding the changes to come. I can’t ignore that climate change is our present reality and our future.
People say about the Portland winter, “Don’t let the rain stop you from living your life.” What will we say about the Portland summer?
That article may or may not be more of the usual fearmongering schlock–the fatalist narrative of doom endemic to so much climate and environmental writing–but it certainly did the job of turning my living room into a hell cave as I nakedly shampooed the rug.
Ashley disagreed when I told her about what I had read. She watched a YouTube video about what climate change is on a molecular photon level. She said, “We know what the problem is and we know how to solve the problem. If we act now, life won’t go back to the way things were, but the catastrophe is avoidable. We just need consensus and to do the work.”
*
Our bodies glisten as we deliberate how to get the Doctor to the office, through the barricade we made in the hallways in our effort to clear the rugs. I move chairs back to their rightful spot, rugs still a little damp under my feet. We move the coffee table back. We push tubs together. Finally, there’s a way through the mess to the office.
I’m in, first, with the Doctor. I bend down to plug him. The smell is bad. I recoil. I take a breath at the window. It’s like all this cleaning brought out the funk.
Ashley pokes her head through the door. “It smells pissy in here.” Then the lightbulb goes on. She points at the dog sticker on the Doctor. “Their dog pissed in here,” she exclaims.
She means the previous owner, the man we bought the flat from who tried to sell the place with blankets of mold coating the attic walls, a person we refer to as “Moldy Mark.” And like that the last two years of stink suddenly comes into focus. I stare at my bare feet.
“That’s it,” Ashley says. “Their fucking dogs.”
She stands in the doorway, cursing. When she’s done she says, “Want to take care of the office while I clear the bedroom?”
I'm mad for maybe twenty seconds. I imagine punting a yappy house dog. But the rank combination of piss, soap solution, dust, and record heat saps my brain of any ability to focus or conjure imagery. I am simply a body laboring. I push the Doctor, which heavily slumps forward and backward.
I do two wet passes. I dry until the carpet starts to boil. I can’t smell anything.
Ashley appears in the doorway. “You can definitely smell the dog piss.”
I give it one more go and then I drag the Doctor into our last room, the bedroom, the most important and also the hardest to clear.
Vacuuming the bedroom is a fraught act. Our bed becomes a table of floor mess. All the shirts and dresses. The actual square footage to detox is the smallest of our areas, owing to the unmovable furniture. Ashley takes the last go.
Meanwhile, I crack all the windows.
The stink and the heat–all in the name of cleanliness–has rendered our living space uninhabitable once the bedroom is completed. We’ll have nowhere to go but out. Thankfully, Ashley has strategically plotted a 4 p.m. movie and then dinner out with friends. So I pray that upon our return we walk into a crystal ball of fresh smelling carpet, purified of sweat, labor, and dog piss.
The Doctor roars in the bedroom.
*
Ashley strips off her cotton underwear and we hop in the shower.
“This feels good,” I say as the grime slides down my legs.
She faces me. She gets in the spray. We’ve been naked and close all day, but now we’re comfortable. In this tub, this tiny cell cordoned off by a plastic sheet, we are finally cool and clean.
“It’s so hot. I felt so greasy. I dread going outside.”
“The world is a lard encrusted frying pan right now,” Ashley says, and then quotes Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Ah love, let us be kind to one another.
Feeling suddenly devious, I say, “Want me to wash your back?”
Spray beats against us. We have cold water and naked skin and each other.
“Yes,” she says. She lathers the washcloth with thick, creamy soap. “Turn around,” she says.
She makes slow, circular strokes at my shoulders. I straighten my back so she gets it good. The softness of the soap and the rag eases the tension between my shoulder blades. She works her way down my back, slowly, covering every inch. She’s pushing the tension down my spine so it falls to the floor through my feet and washes down the drain. She notices the spots where I sigh and exclaim the most and she goes back over them.
“Turn around,” she says.
The cold jets wash soap like sea foam over my shoulders and down my back.
Ashley gives me her back, bending forward slightly, as if in prayer.