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Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 14 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Clean

By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 22 | Aired on 04.28.2013

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She does so much. She pours a glass, a double glass. She waits, interminably. Laundry out, towels folded. The clock and the silence. She turns on Matthew Ashbaugh's music box, and listens to the Bach Concerto. "So they'd get bored."

All the voices in his head, all the people watching, judging: the Bach chased them off, reminded him he was alone. Clean. Nobody was watching, and nobody cared.

You're sitting at an intersection in the dead of night. The stars are clear as anything, you're so far from the city they're bright as the sun. Nobody's coming, nobody cares. Nobody's watching. The light has been red for so, so long.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.

The woman in the mirror looks different. It's not just the hair, there's something... She's gained something, or lost something. Both. She has done both. She is less clean. She is stronger and she is older, and so much wiser, but she's a little dinged up. A little less clean than the last time we sat here, in this mirror by the door, and waited for the knock.

(She's looking in the mirror when the knock comes. No kids, no Peter, no neighbors to hear her. She's been feasting on her life; she's been saying this is about her. Finally, first and forever, not about her kids or her family or her duties or her goodness or her badness or anything other than watching those shells shift around again and coming up with one thing she knows she wants, just for her: The feast.)

But nothing is very clean, nothing is ever that way. You're sitting at an intersection, and the light isn't changing, and nobody cares, and nobody is watching. Waiting for ... what? A sign? What if the light's just broken, did you think of that? What if it never changes? Waiting for what, somebody else to march through the door first, so you can say you were just following behind? Waiting for what, exactly?

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