An Italian Gas Chamber
Written by Guest Blogger Thom Agliata
Those of us who grew up in a household with only one income can relate to the story that follows.
My mother, like many mothers of that time, was a stay-at-home mom. They ran the household with an iron fist. Cooking, cleaning, shopping, and refereeing not only their kids but all the kids from the neighborhood
Each mother had a specialty of their own. My mother happened to be cleaning. That woman could clean a house that would pass the strictest of military muster.
For example, she once stormed into my room at six-fifty-five on a Monday morning in the middle of the summer to strip and remake my bed.
While I was still in it!
She then told me to stop wasting my day, opened all the windows, and then commenced to vacuum my room.
Truly, I can’t recall what my father, two brothers, and myself did in the house for it to be so sloppy and dirty. However, to combat that mess, my mother had a seasonal cleaning regiment (spring, summer, winter, autumn without fail) that would rival that of any local area hospital.
Being the middle child, and forever getting the messy end of every stick, I was chosen to help my mother clean.
We started cleaning at the crack of dawn and ended just before my father came home from work. However, I use the word cleaning very loosely.
It was more like sterilizing.
Also, back in those days, I had to prove my ability to be responsible with pets. My parents started off small, with fish, quickly graduated to salamanders, then onto parakeets.
Now, you may be thinking, How does this relate to cleaning the house?’
Wait, we’ll get there...
The first day of summer, I was in elementary school, and my day started when my mother said, “We have to tear this house apart…”
“...to the kitchen!”
We had this vinyl wallpaper, ugly and dated, that my mother insisted we wash. We scrubbed from top to bottom (and ceiling) with a toxic solution of ammonia and bleach. To complete the potion, my mom added a degreaser and some secret chemical that could strip chrome from metal.
Before we get to the next part of the story, let’s not be too hard on my mom.
Mom came from a strong lineage of cleaning visionaries.
Nana G would not make toast for me one morning when I was a child because the toaster was dirty.
Aunty J was more Inspector General than a relative, with a glare that searched and judged every square inch of the house.
Then there was Aunty A.
Aunty A would go into a hotel room, restaurant, or rental property (even my own house) with her own cleaning supplies and would take it upon herself to sterilize, re-organize, and sometimes even re-decorate.
So my mother had a lot of cleaning heritage to live up to.
And, boy, did she ever.
But first, back to my pets.
At this time, I had two parakeets in a cage that hung from the kitchen ceiling.
A blue and white parakeet named ‘Happy’ and a white one named ‘Prince’.
It was my job to clean the cage, put in fresh newspaper, give them feed and water and tend to all their needs.
I did all that just before we started to scrub the walls with my mom’s cleaning solution
We worked the walls, but should have picked up on the clue that something was wrong. As we scrubbed, we gasped for air and needed to open every window and door in the house before we keeled over.
That didn’t stop my mother, however, as she was determined that we cleaned that goddamn house better than it’s ever been cleaned before.
We finished by the end of the day, and Mom started to make dinner as Dad was on his way home from work.
When we finally sat down for dinner, talked about the day’s work, and how much I helped my mother clean the kitchen.
That’s when my dad noticed something was wrong.
“What happened to the birds?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, “I cleaned the cage, gave them water before we started cleaning.”
My dad looked up at the cage again, and asked, “So where are they?”
Confused, I got up from the table, stood on a chair, and looked into the cage.
To my horror, both parakeets lay at the bottom of the cage, feet up toward the sky, stiff as two logs.
With all the cleaning we did that day with my mother’s cleaning concoction, we gassed those poor birds to death.
And yet, somehow this was my fault and the reason I couldn’t have a dog until I was in my twenties.
In hindsight, I’m glad it happened then and not today.
If it happened today, I’d probably be visiting my mother, her dressed in an orange jumpsuit, as we talked to each other through a glass wall.
