did all the housework: cooking, sewing, decorating, repainting and, with Phillip’s help, a fair amount of repairing and rebuilding. Most of all, she had her own intensive method of cleaning, which was a way of putting her seal on something, of exerting control, of making something turn out right. Her methods of housekeeping were excessive and needlessly repeated, but this was a benign compulsion. And so she scrubbed and cleaned and reorganized her closets, and then she cleaned some more, and applied fresh paint to the cupboards. “There were spells between cooking, cleaning, washing and sewing
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