David Sedaris - Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

"You'll have to ask them." He reached into an open drawer and pulled out a plastic device the size of a Walkman. "I've got an idea," he said. "What do you say we test your blood sugar?"

"Now?"

"Sure," he said. "Why not?"

I could think of dozens of reasons.

"I just prick your finger, wipe the blood onto a bit of paper, and feed it into the machine. Come on, what do you say?"

"That's all right."

"But the needle is prepackaged," he said. "Completely sterile. You're not going to catch anything."

"Thanks for asking, but I think I'll pass."

I was trying to make the bed, and as I reached for a pillow he grabbed my wrist and stabbed me with his short needle. "Gotcha!" he said. Blood pooled on the tip of my index finger, and he swooped in to blot it with a small slip of paper. "Now we just feed it into the machine. . and we wait."

The good news was that my blood sugar was normal. "You should count yourself lucky," Martin said. "Mine is all over the place." He showed me a scar on the crown of his head and told me of the time, several months earlier, when he'd awoken on the living-room floor, lying in a pool of blood. "Complete blackout," he said. "I must have hit the glass coffee table on my way down." A year before that, he'd passed out in the street and spent the night in the gutter. "With a condition like mine, anything can happen," he told me.

The implication was that he could not be held responsible for his actions. It was not a comforting message, but still I stayed, not because I felt sorry for him but because I didn't know how to leave. It would have been awkward — or rather,more awkward — and while I definitely thought about it, the mechanics were beyond me. Then, too, I couldn't help believe that I'ddeserved to have my blood tested. I had asked whom his mother loved more, him or his sister. I'd thought I was clever, had prided myself on my ability to drive someone away, and this had been my punishment. The way I saw it, we were even.

When I'd finished with the bedroom, we moved on to the living room, Martin toddling two steps behind me. I gathered some scattered newspapers and magazines into a single pile and had just started dusting the TV when he sank down onto the sofa and activated a porno tape preset in the VCR. It was a military story. A buck private had failed to properly shine his sergeant's boots, and now there would be hell to pay. "You ever seen this?" Martin asked. I told him I didn't have a VCR, and as he pulled off his shorts, I turned away.

My housecleaning role model was a woman named Lena Payne, who worked for my family in the late 1960s. I used to come home from school and watch with great interest as she tackled the kitchen floor. "Use a mop," my mother would say, "that's what I do," and Lena would lower her head in pity. She knew what my mother did not: either you want a clean floor or you want to use a mop, but you can't have both. Whether it was ironing or deciding how to punish a child, Lena knew best, and so she became indispensable. Like her, I wanted to control households and make people feel lazy and spoiled without ever coming out and saying so. "Didn't you have potato chipsyesterday?" she'd ask, frowning at the can as big as a kettledrum my sisters and I parked in front of the TV. Suggesting that potato chips were an overindulged luxury caused them to lose their taste and meant there'd be fewer crumbs to vacuum at the end of the day. She was smart, and very good at her job. I worshipped her.

Standing in Martin's living room, the sweat dripping off my face, I wondered how Lena might have reacted had one of us peeled off our pants and proceeded to masturbate to a movie calledFort Dicks. We didn't have video back then, but if we did, I imagine she'd have said exactly what I had, "I don't have a VCR." It would have stoppedme, but this guy was obviously wired differently.

Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack. Martin's forearm batted against a newspaper lying at his side, and I turned on the vacuum in order to cover the noise. There was no way I was going to acknowledge either him or the TV, and so I kept my head down, reworking the same spot until my shoulder started to ache and I switched arms.Just pretend it isn 't happening, I told myself, but this was unlike ignoring a subway car musician or a crazy stranger seated next to you at a restaurant counter. Like the cough of a sick person, Martin's efforts broadcast germs, a debilitating shame bug that traveled across the room in search of a new host. How terrible it is to be wrong, to go out on a limb and make an advance that isn't reciprocated. I thought of the topless stay-at-home wife, opening the door to the gay UPS driver, of all those articles suggesting you surprise that certain someone by serving dessert in the nude or offering up an unexpected striptease. They never tell you what to do should that someone walk out of the room or look at you with that mix of disgust and pity that ten, twenty, fifty years later will still cause you to burn every time you think about it. I've had some experience in this department, and Martin's depressing, wrongheaded display brought it all flooding back. I thought of the time. . And of the time. .

Whack, whack, whack. Whack, whack, whack.

It had now become the kind of masturbation that's an exercise in determination rather than pleasure. You'd give up but, godammit, you're the kind of person who carries a job through to the end, whether it's making a fool of yourself in front of a stranger or vacuuming somebody's living room.I will finish this, you think.I will finish this. And he did, eventually, climaxing with a bleak, long-winded moan. The paper at his elbow ceased its rattling, the video was turned off, and after pulling up his pants, he scooted into the bedroom. I didn't expect him to come back out and was surprised when he returned moments later with a stack of cash.

"You can stop vacuuming now," he said.

"But I'm not finished."

"I think you are," he said. Then he stepped closer and started handing me money. "Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty…" He counted softly, and with a different voice than he'd been using for the past two hours. This one was higher and passive, shaded with the kind of relief that follows a prolonged impersonation. "A hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty…" He counted to two hundred, which was over six times what I normally would have made. "Is that right?" he asked, and before I could answer, he topped the stack with a thirty-dollar tip.

"Let me ask you something," I said.

In recounting the rest of the story, it would be the next part that I could never get quite right, in part because it was so implausible but mainly because, between the blood taking and the five blankets, it was just too much. I assumed that Martin had learned about me from theNew York Times, and he had. He'd read the article, written my name on a piece of paper, and looked me up in the phone book. He had also, it seemed, taken down the number of an erotic housecleaning service he'd found in the back of a porno magazine. The names and numbers had gotten confused, and he had phoned thinking that I was the sexpot. Such things happen, I guess, but you'd think that on seeing me, he might have realized his mistake. I've never dealt with an erotic housecleaning service, but something tells me the employees are hired for their looks rather than their vacuuming skills. Something tells me they only surface clean.

I'd wonder for weeks why Martin had put up with me. In his growing impatience, it seemed he would have simply told me what he wanted, but that would have required a different temperament, a straightforwardness that neither of us was capable of. In the phrase book of the indirect, "FIRE ISLAND" means "Let us masturbate together," while "Who does your mother love more?" translates to "I prefer to clean the kitchen in private, please." "I don't have a VCR" equals "Your behavior troubles me," and "You can always. . you know" means "I think you should probably take your clothes off now." "What do you say we test your blood sugar" — that was just craziness talking.