The misanthrope's corner

National Review, Oct 27, 1997 by Florence King

THE other day a woman I ran into at the post office asked me to stop by her apartment and autograph a book. She was neither friend nor acquaintance, just someone I knew to speak to, but by the time her "few minutes" had stretched into the hour of chaos that it became, she had worked her way up to Nemesis.

We walked over to her convenient downtown building that I had often thought of moving to and now can't. On the day in question, however, I was eager to see whether the rooms were as big as people said.

I never saw the rooms. It was impossible to get a feel for the place because her apartment was in a state of cyclonic chaos. She was a yuppie careerist who lived alone, not a beset mom, but the living room looked as if someone had forgotten to child-proof it. The end tables were cluttered with coffee cups and empty Coke cans. The coffee table was strewn with unopened junk mail, old newspapers, and a skein of tangled knitting wool that looked like a hair ball from a giant mutant cat. There was no place to sit; the sofa was taken up by a picture frame, an open tool box spilling out loose nails, and dry cleaning still in plastic bags. There were two armchairs but one contained a boom box with a broken antenna and the other a cardboard box full of withered potted plants, their leaves covered with dust.

She gave a merry laugh. "I won't apologize for the mess because I know writers understand." Here she threw her arms up in the air in the Unshackled Slave pose and sang out, "Creativity!"

She started looking for my book but couldn't find it. While she searched I stood there looking at the floor. It was littered with crumpled cellophane wrappers, empty envelopes, cards with empty plastic domes that had contained bobby pins or cosmetics, and a couple of yellow GE light-bulb sleeves with nothing in them. Evidently whenever she opened something she just tossed the wrapping on the floor.

"Oh, where is that book?" she wailed. "Would you mind helping me look for it? It'll jump right out at you."

Fool that I am, I looked in the bookcase but of course it wasn't there. "Try the bedroom," she called from inside the hall closet. I did. The bed looked like the mounds of Nineveh before the archaeologists arrived, heaped with bulging laundry bags, a cordless telephone, a TV remote, loose CDs, a CD player, a hair dryer, and six weeks' worth of TV schedules. Clothes were flung everywhere: over the top of the closet door, across the lampshades, and, of course, on the floor. The crowning irony was her vanity table, a cluster of gummy bottles in whose encrusted midst sat that quaint tribute to Victorian fastidiousness known as a "hair receiver."

My book finally turned up under a sack of plant food in the foyer, bringing forth an "Oh, no wonder!" from my hostess. I found it wondrous myself. Desperate to leave, I reached into my purse for a pen before she could start looking for one and signed the autograph, but I was not free yet.

"Listen, I'm going to drive you home. I insist."

That's when I saw the ultimate detritus. The back seat of her car and most of the floor was full of labels from canned food. No cans, just labels, dozens and dozens of them in a spreading heap. "I save them for my group," she explained. "We're making food maps of the world -- we cut out Mexico from a chili label, Germany from a sauerkraut label, and so on. We're distributing them to the schools." I didn't ask what kind of group; I could imagine.

As we turned a corner she slowed down and pointed with pride. "Look, there's my spot." Seeing my bemused look, she pulled over to the curb beside a sign that said ADOPT-A-SPOT. "It's my group's," she said. "We take turns making sure it's not littered. Last week I caught a man throwing away a cigarette pack and made him pick it up. Cigarettes! Yuk! Dirty, filthy, disgusting! Fwooey!"

She was making me crave. I hadn't had a cigarette since the one I smoked outside the post office before I went inside and met Typhoid Mary.

She let me out in front of my building. As I dragged myself up the stairs there was a crinkly sensation on the seat of my pants. I reached around and peeled off a can label that said, inaccurately, NO FAT. Opening the door, I looked around with relief and satisfaction. My little home, neat as a pin.

THE point of this story is not that I'm a fussy old maid. You already know that. The interesting thing here is what my contretemps says about America.

Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and other infantile credos, writes that people without magnetized messages all over their fridge doors are unfeeling. "Lighten up," he advises. "Get your stuff up there. Disorder is love."

The lovable slob is a fixture in American popular culture. Neil Simon gave us Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and Betty MacDonald gave us Ma Kettle in The Egg and I. But the slob alone is obnoxious. To be lovable he needs to play against his opposite number, the neat neurotic. Oscar's foil is peevish, honking Felix Unger who alienates his poker club when he washes the cards with ammonia; Ma Kettle's is the tight-lipped, disapproving Birdie Hicks, who scrubs out her henhouse with so much lye that she kills her hens while the Kettle hens roost in the parlor and flourish.