Genetic Predisposition

Dear Nana,
When you arrived from New York City to our house in Michigan for each of your twice-yearly visits, I would sit on one of the twin beds in the guest room and watch you unpack. Your clothes were always folded perfectly, as pin straight and ironed flat as one might see in a military school drawer. Your delicates and finer clothes were wrapped in slightly crinkled tissue paper that had undoubtedly been recycled from a Lord & Taylor’s box or some other such gift packaging and then re-recycled trip after trip. As you unwrapped each article of clothing you would hang it in the closet or place it neatly into one of the dressing table drawers, according to its need. Skirts, slacks, and blouses were hung in the closet an inch or so apart to avoid wrinkling. Sweaters and underthings were stacked or placed side by side in a drawer. The tissue paper was neatly folded and placed into the drawer next to the stockings to be used once again when it was time to pack and return to New York City.

On each of your visits, I watched this process of unpacking and wondered why on Earth someone would go to all that trouble just to avoid a wrinkle. And yet, there was something exciting about watching you unpack. You had turned a mundane activity into something more. The tissue paper held surprises, as if each cashmere sweater or silk blouse was a gift unwrapped and set eyes upon for the first time.

When you visited, you kept the guest room in pristine condition at all times. You made the bed every morning, your book was perfectly aligned on the night table, and the towels were hung carefully. I would mimic you and try to make my own bedroom a picture of perfection during her visits, hoping you’d walk by and comment on my ability to keep a tidy room. Tidiness was a virtue that ranked at the top of your list, just above good grammar and careful penmanship. At the age of eight, I hadn’t yet mastered the latter two, but I was pretty certain that I could get a head start on number one.

You visited on Christmas every other year, and I would I watch wide-eyed as you unwrapped a gift delicately so as not to tear the paper. “Open it!” we’d yell excitedly. “But the wrapping is gorgeous,” you'd say, as if the paper itself were the gift. You would carefully slice the tape with your painted fingernail, and gently open the paper. The paper, aside from the creases, was pristine. You would neatly fold it and hand it back to my mom. “We should save it for next year, ” you’d say. You didn’t even make a mess on Christmas morning.

Dad inherited your affinity for all things neat and orderly. His desk is piled high with tidy, purposeful stacks of papers. His music collection is alphabetized. He dries in between each individual toe after a shower or a swim. He’s never left a sweater or stray sock strewn on the bedroom floor. And he wouldn’t go within ten feet of a caramel apple. If cleanliness is next to Godliness, then, to my father, the ultimate evil is something sticky.

On my brother’s first birthday, my dad watched in utter revulsion as his son, his firstborn, painted his face with cake and ice cream. Milky drips hung from his lips and his chin. His pudgy fingers were covered in moist brown cake. Graham, my brother, was in gooey heaven. My dad on the other hand was in, well, quite a different place. As my mom tells the story, my dad had to practically look away in order to shield his eyes from the sticky horror show that was unfolding before him. He kept trying to clean Graham’s face and hands because he could almost feel the sweet gumminess on his own, and he couldn’t take it. My mom, however, was unaffected by my brother’s mess, happily snapping pictures, but she tired of my dad’s grumbling. In one of the most famous acts in Shullman history, a triumph that will be retold for generations to come, my mom filled a bowl with ice cream, marched over to my dad, and turned it upside down on his very bald, and now very sticky, head.
The overturned bowl of cold chocolate quieted my dad’s complaints for the remainder of the party and Graham was allowed to continue his dessert bath, as any one year old should on his first birthday. Yet, my dad was not transformed. His extreme distaste for mess, particularly for all things foodstuff, was not eradicated. To this day when he has a cup of coffee, he must always have a napkin handy. Crumbs are neatly swept into an open palm and discarded after every meal or a snack, my dad leaning eye level to the table to make sure no morsel is left behind. And when my brother spills, something he, to my father’s dismay, is liable to do at nearly every meal, my dad pushes his chair back with such immediate and swift force one might think a bomb had gone off or a mouse had just skittered across the table. He jumps up and away with precision to avoid the approaching seepage of milk or beer or even water, swearing aloud and wondering how this boy could possibly be his own offspring.

My brother, needless to say, did not inherit the Shullman neat gene. His car is often covered – on the passenger seat, the floor, the backseat – with leftover paper coffee cups and loose CDs and empty jewel cases. When my parents visited him his senior year of college, my mom actually cried when she walked into the house where he was living because it was so filthy. My dad would have worn a hazmat suit if he had been duly warned. And while he no longer lives in total squalor, his current apartment got so dirty one time that someone mistook a dust bunny under his dresser for a rather large pair of rolled up men’s socks.

So, it was left to me to carry on your and Dad’s propensity for orderliness. It’s not a choice that I made. It simply courses through my veins. It is part of my genetic makeup as surely as my hazel eyes or slight frame.

I got a sticker book for my 8th birthday and placed my stickers in neat rows, each according to its category. One row for hearts, one for animals, another for scratch and sniffs, a page devoted to puffy stickers. I’m not sure if I showed my dad, but if I had, I’m sure he’d have been proud. Here was one child who appreciated organization.

During my senior year of college I lived in a house with four other girls. I became the self-appointed house manager, collecting checks for rent and utilities, cleaning the living room of empty soda or beer cans each morning, Windexing the coffee table. At times I would get resentful of my roommates because I seemed to be doing so much to keep the house in order. And then I realized that, to my shock, they didn’t need it to be orderly and clean as I did. They could walk by a coffee table with an overflowing ashtray surrounded by gray smudges of ash on the table and sticky rings of spilled brown soda, and be unaffected. I, on the other hand, could not sit and enjoy an episode of Seinfeld until the mess had been cleared away. It would eat at me and my eyes would stray from the television to the chaos on the table before me, the cigarette butts taunting me, seeming to say, “You just can’t stand it can you?” So I accepted it as my burden and cleaned. And my obsession with orderliness stretched beyond even my own living space. Years later living in New York City, when I visited my then boyfriend, now husband, at his studio apartment, I would walk in, give him a kiss hello, then get some Fantastic, a roll of paper towels, and get to work. If I was going to sit there and watch an entire Yankees game on his sofa, I was not going to do it amidst empty takeout boxes and strewn plastic bottles. Five minutes of tidying, a few spritzes of spray cleaner, and then I could relax. Ahh. Now that was more like it. I wasn’t doing it for him. I was doing it for me.
Yet, my appetite for organization is not satisfied by simply keeping a neat and tidy environment. It touches nearly every facet of my life. My checkbook is perpetually balanced. I know, down to the penny, how much money we have in the bank at any given moment. I make list upon list upon list. To-do lists, grocery lists, things-to-do-around-the-house lists, restaurants-I’d-like-to-try lists, and when I cross something off a list, I make a new list because that first list, well, now it looks messy.

Every once in a while I try and tell myself to relax, live on the edge, throw caution to the wind and just let that dirtied plate sit there for an hour or so while I finish a movie. Don’t make the bed today. To hell with the to-do list. But inevitably I pause the movie after a few tortured moments and remove the dish. I fluff the pillows, placing the decorative ones just so. I compose yet another list, and, while doing so, I remind myself that it’s a genetic predisposition. It is out of my control. Nature is to blame. And thanks to nature, I rarely have to buy wrapping paper anymore. Last year’s barely creased paper works just fine.
Love, Katie