Perfectitude

In her frantic efforts to catch up with a never-ending string of chores, a busy single mother experiences a radical shift in perspective that could change her life forever.

What Kimberly Anne Clay wanted more than anything, more than the promotion that she deserved or a man capable of monogamy or a bra that fit well, was to finally, for once in her life, just get everything done.

Why then, she asked herself daily, if not hourly, would someone who thrived on control and order choose to go to law school, to join the top firm in the city, to give birth to three boys, and then to divorce her husband? It all seemed to be crumbling, and blame was a boomerang that kept circling back around to herself.

“If you don’t keep a tight grip on life’s balls,” Kim’s mother had told her from her deathbed—and at least once a week in the thirty-eight years leading up to that deathbed—“then you’re lettin’ life get a grip on yours.”

“I’m a woman, mom. I don’t have balls.”

“Doesn’t matter. The balls are metaphorical. It’s the grip that’s real.” She died that night, the house that surrounded her still as organized and immaculate as ever.

When other kids were unwrapping CD players and Nikes and designer makeup palettes on Christmas morning, Kim was feigning excitement for her brand-new sock drawer organizer, her daily planner for the year to come, and her mint green hand-held vacuum. She was allowed to go out and play with the neighborhood children, but only after the bed was made with perfect corners, the plates stacked in order by size.

There were answers in the branches of the family tree when she bothered to look. She’d heard the stories many times. Her uncle George had been murdered by police at age seventeen. Her baby brother Anton screamed in the night, bent in half by sickle-celled agonies. Grandma Cherish had died of the sugar. Even her own father had been unable to escape the maelstrom of fate, tempted by the other end of the predictability spectrum to gamble on games of chance and leave them all behind to fend for themselves.

The world had teeth and it waited outside the door for something soft to bite. Like a sorceress’s apprentice, she had been taught, straight from her own mother’s spell book, how to take the loose threads of her life and weave them into a chainmail she could wear beneath her delicate and spotless wardrobe.

Preparation.

Time management.

Organization.

Control.

Kim’s mind was always busy, ever-alert for risk—the overlooked danger, the missed opportunity. It was exhausting work. By age forty-three, her hold upon the testicles of the cosmos was slipping. There was no rest, no way to let the guard down unless she had finished every task. Unless every duck was in its row with each feather in place. And that was a state of affairs that seemed forever just out of reach.

It was the beautiful, crystalline fantasy that lulled her to sleep at night when her thoughts raced around the track. The reliable daydream. An image more erotic than any physical desire. A perpetual longing for one state of being. She had even given it a name.

Perfectitude.

If she made it there, crossed the border into that elusive land, she could finally live the life she craved. Something authentic. Satisfying.

Instead, springtime sprung out of nowhere, her case load piled up, the boys all started sports simultaneously, and to top it off, she discovered a lump in her breast while showering, which turned out to be a benign cyst, but Christ Almighty anyway.

That was when the panic attacks began.

When she wasn’t trapped in the dark embrace of an acute episode—feeling as though she were dying of a heart attack, unable to breath, sweating and shivering with no voice to speak—she was worrying about when the next one would come.

“I’m losing it,” she confided in Ellie, her paralegal. “Clients are talking to me and I’m looking in their eyes, but I don’t hear a thing they’re saying. All I can hear is my brain screaming at me.”

“Really,” Ellie leaned toward her, intrigued. “What does it say?”

“It says, ‘You’re out of control! Everyone can see it! Imposter! Faker! You are going to fuck up and cost people their lives! Then you will lose your job and your kids and your house and your reputation and go to jail and you’ll have to find a way to kill yourself in your cell because you can’t face another day of it!’”

“Wow.”

“I could go on.”

“I guess I get the gist.”

“I have to get on top of things, but I can’t focus. I start something and then get distracted by something else, then go to that thing and get distracted by something else, and nothing gets finished. I’m surrounded by piles of half-done stuff.”

Ellie scooped a small orange bottle out of her purse and twisted off the cap. “Here.”

“What is it,” Kim took the capsule. It was colored like candy.

“Atentorin,” she said. “I go and list off all the symptoms of ADHD to my doctor and he gives me these.”

“You have ADHD?”

“No. Well, no more than anyone else. I just recite them from Tik Tok videos. The pills help me with weight loss and energy. It’s the highest dose though, so, you know.”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Just, like, don’t drink a venti espresso with it or whatever.”

Kim put the pill in her jacket pocket and went back to ignoring work, scrolling on her phone until five o’clock. Her laptop was still cold when she slid it into her carrying case and left the office for the weekend.

•

After another Friday night of picking up fast food for the boys and hiding in her bedroom to watch the Real Housewives while writing lists of things to get done over the next forty-eight hours, she finally fell into a fitful sleep in which she dreamt that she was on a toilet, pants around her ankles, when she realized it was situated in the middle of the boardroom, surrounded by all the partners in their perfectly starched suits, watching to see what heresy she might commit next.

Somehow, despite her nightmares, she managed to sleep in, her body unwittingly strong-armed into paying back the sleep debt she’d racked up over the previous five nights of broken slumber. By the time she stumbled downstairs, Alexander had picked up the boys for his one weekend of the month.

Her one weekend alone.

The quiet stillness of the house juxtaposed harshly with the mounds of discordant clutter, mud-splattered sports equipment, stacks of dirty plates and cups, clothes strewn over top of unidentifiable carpet stains, unopened mail scattered like an abandoned poker game. The heaviness descended upon her shoulders and chest as she lifted the handle on the Keurig, removing yestermorning’s K-cup.

She stopped.

Right. The pill.

Part of her was afraid to take it, not for fear of side effects—although that was a small portion—but instead, it was the dreadful thought that if she couldn’t even get her shit together with the assistance of pharmaceutical-grade amphetamines, things may truly be hopeless.

Screw it. How could it get any worse?

She swallowed the colorful capsule with a handful of tap water and sat on the couch, staring at the TV while lost in a whirlpool of thoughts. The channels flicked by as her thumb pushed buttons on the remote randomly.

Fifteen minutes later, her mouth was dry. She went back to the kitchen, filled a glass with orange juice, and drank the whole thing in four gulps. Then she poured another.

The sink was overflowing with three night’s worth of dishes that could not be moved out of the sink until the dishwasher was emptied. On the TV, an 80’s pop video streaked neon across the screen and she found her head bobbing to the beat.

I can at least get the clean ones put away, she thought and pulled down the dishwasher door.

It was not uncommon for her to find every step of such a project frustrating. A dropped fork, a knuckle scraped against the bottom of a shelf. Yet, the minor inconveniences that could easily threaten to ignite panic or rage did not seem to register as they typically would. In fact, she found herself turning the steps of the task into a sort of game. Her nervous system fell into a choreography of efficiency, fluidly finding the trajectory through space that allowed for each bowl and utensil to reach its destination most economically.

When the racks were empty, she turned up the volume on the music channel, finished off the OJ, and applied her melodic moves to the spaghetti-encrusted dishes.

For the next several hours, Kim flitted from one chore to the next, wiping down surfaces, vacuuming carpets, and Windexing windows, the washer and dryer chugging in the background all the while.

Once every identifiable household job was complete, she tackled the mail, sorting out bills, paying them online, balancing the budget and working out the next month’s finances. Daily planner, bullet journal, wall calendar, and laptop were splayed before her like musicians under the baton of their conductor.

She went through each of one-hundred and thirty-nine work emails, composing erudite responses to everyone from lowly clerks to senior partners. After making a cold chicken sandwich and eating only half, she finished the Boonshoft brief and transcribed Judge Breckenridge’s dissent in State v. Olley.

Must be a storm out there, she thought, looking up at the darkness in the big front window with muted confusion before realizing that the sun had set.

Still, more remained.

Laundry to fold and put away.

Meals to plan for the week ahead.

Presents to order for cousin Dana.

Thank you cards. Get well cards. Graduations and anniversaries and condolences.

She spun through the steps of the dopamine dance, the productivity polka, all through the night, the hands of the clock her twirling partner. Not until she was forced to grip the back of the couch with both hands to avoid passing out did she stop to crack a cold diet Coke and allow herself to sit for a moment.

Birds called to each other from the elm outside the window.

The sun had begun to warm the cloud-bottoms from its perch below the horizon.

She was surprised, not with fear but a curious confusion, when it seemed that someone invisible reached from behind and placed a heavy, dark blanket over her body, pressing her bones deep into the cushions of the couch. She released a long sigh and then was lost to an opaque and dreamless sleep.

Eleven hours later, Kim woke with a sore back and a full bladder. The dusky light was disorienting, and she had to look at her phone several times before her internal clock could catch up. After a long an satisfying trip to the bathroom, she was struck with an intense hunger. She stood in the chilled air of the open refrigerator while devouring lunch meat and grapes and packs of string cheese until her jaws hurt from their labor.

With a large glass of ice water, she returned to the couch. The television had switched itself off long ago. Silence rang in her ears.

The familiar radar in her head scanned the environment outside of herself, and then scanned the thoughts swirling inside, and then scanned the future with all its potentialities, just as it always had. The process created a buzzing urgency in her tendons, preparing her muscles to act.

But there was nothing.

No blips on the screen of her mind.

No task to be completed.

No appointment or arrangement or engagement to address.

This is it, she thought, and then dared to speak it aloud. “Perfectitude.”

She shook her head.

“Everything is done.”

Finally, she could do as she pleased. A world of options lay before her, like a menu of fulfillment, contentment, and leisure.

It did not take long for the realization to dawn. She had no idea what to do with her newfound freedom. This was her chance and it would slip away. She braced for the panic, but it did not come. What arrived in its place was something much more profound than run-of-the-mill anxiety. This was a paradigm shift in her consciousness.

This was an existential crisis.

“I’ve spent my whole life paying attention to the wrong things,” she whispered to the universe. Tears were splashing across her chest and arms before she was aware of crying.

An image of her mother wavered on the stage of her mind, young and energetic and always distracted by the next task on the checklist. A stranger, even in the end. It was a fate that Kim felt desperate to avoid.

The components of a strategy began to assemble in her mind.

1. Research books on life purpose

2. Start a motivational journal (one with a bright cover like pink or yellow)

3. Schedule time in the mornings to meditate

4. Organize—

“Shit! I’m right back on the goddam hamster wheel,” she shook with frustration. “Bills and birthday cards aren’t what’s going to be important when I’m on my deathbed.”

A weariness clung heavy like a web, beguiling, pulling at her eyelids. The muscles of her neck seemed no match for the weight of her skull. Thick sleep was just there, inching up beside her, when the front door opened. The room filled with shuffles and squeaks, backpack thuds and the clatter of lacrosse sticks.

And laughter.

“Oops, mom’s in there.”

“Better go upstairs.”

“Boys?” She swam back to the surface of consciousness.

“Sorry, mom. We’ll stay outta your hair.”

“No, it’s fine. Come sit down. All of you.”

They glided into the living room and sat, children still, but each already projecting the spirit of the young men they would soon become.

“Did you guys eat dinner?”

“Nah. We haven’t had anything since before the game this afternoon.”

“Yeah, I’m dying.”

“Seriously.”

She sat up straighter. “I’ll order us pizza.”

“You okay, mom? Have you been crying?”

“A little, but I’m okay. There is something that would make me feel better, though.”

They watched her, unsure what this stranger they’d known their whole lives could be thinking.

“I want to hear all about your weekend.”

“You do? Is there time for that?”

“Definitely,” she smiled at her sons and the brightness of their faces left no room for fears about an unknowable future. “Tell me everything.”

•