My mother had been a tidy child. She’d shared a room with her sister, who was not, and they’d fought about it until my aunt moved to Australia. Mom was lonely without her, but at least she had the room all to herself. It was her sanctuary. She found solace there after her father’s rampages and she forgot all her problems when she worked on improving it. That was her hobby, her preoccupation. She’d move things around, sand furniture, and paint, making sure all objects gleamed. Still, she never considered throwing everything out to start fresh. That came later, and when it did, a new realm of obsession opened to her.

The mom I knew had a volatile relationship with the stuff of life: her possessions, ours, and how to contain them. When she felt secure, making sure the house was immacu­late kept her satisfied. But stress made her other compulsion flare. This disorder—compulsive spartanism—is the oppo­site of hoarding, but like hoarding, it’s difficult to treat because it seems so reasonable to the person in its grip, even socially acceptable.

Doesn’t everybody love Marie Kondo? My mother was Marie Kondo on steroids. In certain moods, she’d look around the house and decide that everything in it was junk and clutter that was sucking the air out of the place, making her sick. Soon, she’d feel like the walls were closing in on her and she had to make space. So, she would purge, slowly to begin with, then in a panic.

First, she’d give away clothes that didn’t fit, books she wouldn’t read, gifts she had no use for. Still feeling claustro­phobic, she’d return her most recent purchases. After that, she’d discard everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. I tried to anticipate what was necessary and what wasn’t, but Mom’s ever-expanding definition of junk always caught me off guard.

When she was done, all our things swept away, she’d relax. A cleared house was a blessed house. It was a world before creation with the potential to be made perfect. In a house stripped to the walls, Mom could ponder her next move. Nothing would be decided until she was sure of doing it right, her restlessness building. Eventually, she’d erupt in a flurry of activity and an influx of acquisitions. Her enthu­siasm was infectious, and until the spending got out of con­trol, it amused my father. When she was done redecorating, she’d be so pleased. We’d all hope it would last. And it would. For a while. Then the cycle repeated.

As a child, I’d find Mom standing at the window, hyper­ventilating or crying, and I’d try to comfort her, believing that she wanted to create the perfect home because she loved us so much. My sister scoffed at that. She said stuff came into the house just so Mom could have the satisfaction of getting rid of it: pictures hung to be removed, nails pulled out, the walls repainted white. It was only later, after Vivien left home, that I realized my mother was as addicted to her compulsion as my father was to drink, which was why, when she had no more things of her own to throw away, she went after others’.

Sometimes she denied it. I’d ask her, “What happened to my pencil case?” and she’d say, “What pencil case?” I’d tell her, “The pink zippered one. I wrote my name on it, I drew a flower on it at school, with a Magic Marker,” and she’d say, “You never had a pencil case like that. I don’t remember it at all.” She’d sound so sure, I’d wonder if I’d dreamt it. If the flower and the name weren’t real, then maybe I wasn’t either until someone made me so.

Mom did that kind of clearing out at night. She was stealthy, gliding into rooms and sliding out drawers that she scanned with a penlight. I didn’t think it was strange until Augie, the younger of Uncle Jack’s sons, came for a sleepover. I was six, in first grade, and Vivien was nine. It wasn’t long after the first moon landing, the wonder of it still occupying a place of honour in my mind. Lying in the darkness, with Augie asleep in the other twin bed, I watched my mother drift in, wearing white pyjamas; she looked like the grainy image of an astronaut in the moonscape, and I felt a kind of pride in her. Someone out of the ordinary. Floating. A higher being glimpsed dimly like a space walker or a fairy, gracing the earth but not of it. I went back to sleep, the smell of trees and the creek wafting from the ravine behind our yard.

The next morning, after we woke up but weren’t yet out of bed, Augie asked, “What was your mother doing?” Clearly, he hadn’t been asleep. The question made me feel like one of the weird kids who had accidents in class. Panicking, I told him that Mom had to practise sneaking around because she was a space spy. It seemed like a plausible explanation, I thought—the moon was free of clutter, and so Mom would like it there.

Augie said, “I don’t believe you.”

Vivien appeared in the doorway. She wasn’t beautiful yet—we were both ordinary and nearly as alike as twins. Even our parents could mistake a picture of Vivien at five for me before I needed glasses. I saw my sister as a bigger, badder self with perfect vision.

She said, “Mom was testing her new invisibility spray. Where are you, Augie?”

She walked blindly forward and dropped onto the bed on top of him. I was amazed that she’d chosen my side over a boy’s, especially one of Uncle Jack’s. Augie cried. Dad took him home.

When Dad came back, my parents had what they called a discussion. Mom discussed punishing Vivien with no TV for a week, and Dad discussed that his kid was just standing up for her little sister and she wouldn’t have had to do that if Mom didn’t prowl through the house at night. Mom wanted to know why he always took Vivien’s side, why he’d been at Uncle Jack’s for so long, and whether he’d been drinking. Dad had fewer questions: he just wanted to know if she was planning to replace everything that had disap­peared from the kitchen and overdraw their bank account again. As usual, the discussion occurred at high volume, and Mom cried.

While they were at it, I lay on my bed, fingers plugging my ears, face squashed into my pillow. Then Vivien tapped my shoulder and shoved a tiny teddy bear at me. It had mov­able legs. It had happy eyes. Vivien said, “Put that in your pocket and let’s go.” We crept down to the basement and out the back door, ran across our lawn to the ravine. The trail we followed led us up on a ridge above the creek, which then gradually sloped back down. No houses could be seen from there. Nothing but trees and the creek. We saw a fox cross the trail and trot into the bushes. We listened to crickets. We tried to skip rocks on the water.

By the time we got home, it was as if the argument had never happened. There was music on the hi-fi, and our par­ents were swaying to it. Mom’s eyes were dreamy, her arms around Dad’s neck. He had one hand on the small of her back, the other cupping her head, which rested on his shoul­der. When I went to the bathroom, I saw their bed was unmade and knew that meant Dad would be grilling burgers for dinner so Mom could relax and do her crossword. It did not mean I could skip my bath after dinner.

I needed to find a hiding place for the teddy bear. During bath time, Mom would put my clothes in the wash­ing machine, first emptying the pockets and tossing out any junk. I wasn’t sure whether a small teddy bear was junk, but I suspected that it could be. The best place to hide something was in the basement. It was Dad’s place, and Mom wasn’t allowed to touch anything down there, not the old radio or his bookcase or the Ping-Pong table or his chair, and especially not the locked cabinet where Dad kept his Scotch. I could have hidden something small in the cabinet if I found the key, but I was too scared to go down to the dark basement. Instead, I slid the happy teddy under my pillow, forgetting that my mother would find it when she changed the sheets, which she also did during bath time.

As soon as I was in bed that evening, I reached under the pillow, but my skinny, scrabbling hand felt nothing. I should have taken the teddy to the basement. Vivien wouldn’t have been scared of the dark. Why had she given a present to someone as careless as me? I didn’t deserve it, I thought, and then, Maybe I just dreamt it, like the pink pencil case. I wanted to ask Vivien if she remembered giving it to me, but I was afraid she’d say no. Feeling sick to my stomach, I got up and tore the corner of a page in the school exercise book where I’d been practising printing. On it, I drew something like a teddy bear and wrote, Vivien. As I kissed it, a spark passed between myself and the bit of paper. I folded it into a tiny square and hid it in a crack under my window ledge. Knowing it was safe, I fell asleep.

Dad left for work early the next morning, as he always did, and Mom stayed in bed. So, Vivien fixed us breakfast, pouring me a bowl of my favourite cereal, Frosted Flakes, and adding a handful of Smarties. I ate quickly before the flakes got mushy, the double hit of sugar coating my tongue while I read the back of the cereal box. (I loved Tony the Tiger, who looked like a happy drunk and was always saying, “Grrrreat!”) Then I asked Vivien how to spell pencil case and wrote it on another scrap of paper, which I slid into the hiding place in my room. Vivien didn’t make fun of me, but told me that when I ran out of space for my scraps under the windowsill, I should get an extra school notebook from my teacher and keep it in my schoolbag. Vivien was still in a good mood, so we walked to school together. I imagined that she carried an invisible, magic umbrella, and I had nothing to worry about as long as I was near her.