by Aimee Bender
“I can’t say I understand why she wanted that. But it was an honor to release her. To be the one to unlock the door in the morning, and return her to our family and daily life. My mother always thought it was upsetting, and worried, but Francie seemed happy about it, and I have always liked that I was given such an important task.
“I also think of college like a door you have to unlock. Inside are so many mysteries about the world, and I am excited to take on that job, the job of opening up one of those doors and seeing what’s inside. We are all locked in rooms in different ways, and part of growing up is finding different kinds of keys, and meeting the people who will help free you. I feel my experience with my sister has opened me up already to many of the ways I am lucky in the world. I want to learn all I can, and open all I can, and make my parents, and my sister, proud.”
17
After the Sunday dinner at Aunt Minn’s, over the course of the rest of that week, I tried to double my stock for the online object shop and increase speed of delivery. I wanted to create a new photography corner in my apartment, and after work took the bus to the fabric store to buy a yard apiece of a few colors of velvet—deep red, royal blue, midnight black, and silvery white, because most objects look their finest when placed upon velvet. I tried a few corners until I’d settled on one across from the balcony where the early morning sunlight was indirect and golden, fresh and also forgiving, and after careful placement, retook photographs of some of the objects I hadn’t yet sold, reposting them with new names and pictures, and within a few hours had found buyers for three, including an old-fashioned adorable bear to a young woman in Nevada, and a small metal mare I’d found just a few days earlier, so noble on its pasture of red velvet, to an older gentleman in Visalia, who said it reminded him of a beloved toy from his childhood. I sketched a business logo of a vase on a rock, and sent it away to some company that would make stickers which I would then use to seal the tissue paper I wrapped around each item, plus another matching sticker of my PO box information for the return addresses. I went to the art store and invested in an improved selection of tissue paper, all colors, and some more bubble wrap, and ordered four bricks of mushroom Styrofoam to give it a try. I changed my site backdrop to a lively plaid.
To continue to keep the days simple, I did not invite anyone over, or follow up on any plans, though I did tell Vicky again that she was always welcome.
I had officially quit the framing job the day after I had given the customer her completed beetle in its gilded frame. “It’s magnificent,” she’d said as I unwrapped it and we looked at it together. Right in the middle of the frame, perfectly centered. Inert. Something about seeing it under glass had made me feel ill, and when the woman walked out the door, the package rewrapped and tucked under her arm, ready to check it off her to-do list and out of her mind perhaps forever, I went to get my backpack and held it at my desk and when the clock changed to five, on my way out, I told my boss that this had been my last day and that I was truly regretful to give her such little notice but that framing was just not for me. “I’m very sorry,” I said again. “I cannot return.” My boss stared at me in confusion, but before she could respond, I left the building, and although I did not like to think of myself as the type of person who would leave her workplace and her coworkers in the lurch, the moment I walked into the glaring rays of afternoon on Victory, the cars driving by, the traffic lights tall and steady, the sun a blast of concentrated heat in contrast with the all-day monolithic chill of air-conditioning, I felt like shouting. On the walk home, I found a free curbside wooden CD shelf that might work well for somebody’s knickknacks, and hauled it under my arm, turning the corner onto Chandler, lifting it up the stairs, wiping it down as soon as I stepped in the door. There was a new and focused energy in me, that was for sure. With every step I took away from those right-angled corners and meaning-making shapes, it did seem that something was continuing to loosen.
It all left space, is what it did. Lots of space, and unfilled hours. Once my new rhythm settled in, I would likely be busier than before, but I would be bound only to the schedules supplied by the yard sales, and the open/closed limitations of the post office, and about other things that took up time, I could be more particular. I would, for example, I told myself, tidying up the corners of the new piles of cheerful tissue paper, making little stacks so that I could easily access different colors, hold off on anything resembling a relationship, or a date. It had been good to hear that my mother was courting someone; I, however, would not. At the nearby Ralphs, close to my apartment, I often stood in line to have my food run through the sensors by an affable checker with oak bark–colored eyes and capable hands who liked to tell me when I asked about the cloud patterns—nimbus, cumulus, none. Sometimes, he floated questions with interest in his face that another person or even a future self might enjoy answering. I moved away from the tissue paper and laid out all the different kinds of tape: clear, packing, iridescent for special sales. I liked that man at Ralphs, I thought to myself, settling the tapes in their spots, placing a stapler at the edge, but there was no place for him at this current stage, and as the sunlight reached through the balcony window and brightened the side walls, illuminating the wall cracks like little lightning bolts, storming the light switch, this did not strike me as bleak, or lonely, but right, and real, and like the recent texting with that friend about the made-up trip to Portland that had shut down any further questions from her and given me the space to do as I pleased, I could titrate the interactions with the checker at Ralphs in such a way as to leave nothing loose. What for another person might feel lonely and damaging would be, right now, for me, a kind of vitamin. I arranged the Styrofoam peanut packing supplies in another corner, next to the assortment of folded boxes. One must, at certain times in a life, burrow, I thought, standing up. The new packing and shipping area was ready to go. Clouds belong to open air.
I photographed the CD shelf with a few well-chosen knickknacks (also for sale) to demonstrate its efficacy, selling it within two days to a buyer in Butte who collected small milkmaid sculptures that needed a display case, and while I worked on perfecting my email manners to reply to customers, and fine-tuning my packing to fit more sales within each day, I also looped, on and off, around Vicky’s sticky memory idea. The conversation from Sunday’s dinner had been living right with me. How could I make that work? Why was what she had said so interesting to me? The idea for a structure started to emerge on its own, and by Friday, I called Vicky up and asked her if she was willing to take me on Saturday to shop at a lumberyard for a few beams, and to the nearby fabric store for canvas and sturdy zippers. It was scheduled to be a hot weekend, into the triple digits. “I can’t carry it all,” I told her, “and it’s related to something you said.” By that point, the image of the tent was fairly clear to me. Four sides, triangle top, one-person-sized. “About Mom?” “About the sticky memories,” I said. “About cheese?” “It’s a new project,” I said. “It’ll be easier to explain in person. Oh, can you bring your toolkit? We’ll need to build a little. And you know that old rose? Would it be possible to bring that too?” “What rose?” “You know the old one from long ago that I put in the trash?” “You mean the magic rose?” “I just thought we could dust the canvas with it or something. I don’t know. Just have it be there for a moment.” “Okay.” “You still have it?” “Francie.” “Oh, and bring a copy of the essay, too, if you’d like. We can work on that after.”
* * *
—
Early on Saturday morning, before Vicky came by, I went to a couple more sales in the neighborhood, easy walks away, in which I found an expensive crystal pitcher that the seller wanted to get rid of for cheap as it was reflecting prismatically all the pain of her divorce, a quality ukulele, two broken but fixable iPods, and an assortment of outrageous costume jewelry made of celluloid blue triangles that if photographed correctly (on silver-white velvet) could be priced very well.
Due to the heat, the sales had started early to catch the motivated buyers—I had my choices in hand by eight a.m., walking home before the vicious sun started marching up the sky.
Vicky picked me up after lunch in Aunt Minn’s sedan, and we drove together to the lumberyard. She’d stopped at a convenience store on the way to buy a large-size bag of shelled sunflower seeds, her favorite, as if we were on a road trip, and she tossed them in her mouth as we talked, giving updates from the week, including how Aunt Minn had agreed to let her go to the pool party the next day as long as she promised to come home right after and not to drink anything, anything, from any punch bowl, to which Vicky had said she had never in her life been to a party with a punch bowl, and who could fit such a thing into a cabinet anyway. “They’re huge, right?” she asked. “Huge,” I said, not knowing. We pulled into the parking lot of the lumberyard. The storefront loomed ahead with its brown and assertive lettering. “The rose is in here,” she said, patting her backpack on the center console. “I wrapped it in tissue. It’s really delicate.” “Thank you,” I said, “truly.” As Vicky tugged up the parking brake, I told her I wanted to try to explain to her what we were doing, why we were here, how more of these memories had been leaking into my thinking, almost formlessly, so we sat in our bucket seats and I described some of what I’d been recalling over the week about my mother and the hammer smashing, and the details of that day of change in general. How I wanted to spend more time with those memories. How her “sticky” idea had stayed with me. Vicky ate one sunflower seed at a time, listening with her attentive gold eyes, chewing, and outside the windshield, the store was a fixed presence, a goal that was allowing me to tell her, because every word I said was pressured, helpfully, by the knowledge that we would soon be leaving the car. Vicky shook her head, and said she hadn’t even really known it was a hammer smashing, of my mother’s hand? really? and I told her how her father had flown in on the day of her birth and picked me up in the main office and had taken me to lunch before rushing back to fly home to meet her. “You mean me?” “You.” “You’re saying it was my birthday?” “Exactly. He had a chicken burrito,” I added. “And a coffee.” I put my fingers on the door handle, and then so did she, like I’d given us both permission to leave, and we exited together into the scathing heat of midday, with Vicky keeping the sunflower seed bag with her, because it seemed to be offering some sort of modulating role in her experience, whatever that was. She reached out to hug me on a cement island in the parking lot, and her face was sad, saying it was hard to imagine this about me as a little kid, when she was just a baby, and how scary it all must’ve been, but as we approached the building, and I continued to fill in the story, she jumped to open the electric doors and let out a kind of amazed bark. “But, I mean,” she said, “the level of detail is outrageous. Sugar packets? Alberta’s paper dolls? I know you have a good memory, but you can’t possibly recall all of this.” Inside, the store was beautifully air-conditioned, and we strolled the aisles, passing rows of golden pine boards and planks, looking for smaller beams they could saw to size to establish what would become the four ends of the tent. She offered me the bag and I ate a few of the seeds too, though I’ve never really liked them, their insipid grayness, and I lied and told Vicky no, of course I didn’t remember all of it, that I was just making up some stuff on the spot to make it more interesting for her.
“I like the details,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it’s impossible for anyone to remember that closely.”
We carried the beams to the outside back area, where the carpenter sawed them to my specifications, and down the street, at the fabric store, I found a roll of orange canvas, and some long sturdy zippers wrapped in plastic casing. I wanted the tent to be orange, and canvas, with four ends, and a triangular shape. I had briefly explained the structure to Vicky as we did the shopping, asking also for her building expertise, since she’d made a few sets in her play production courses. “Does it have to be exactly like this?” she asked at the cashier’s counter, licking salt off her fingers, and I told her yes, yes, it did. That I wasn’t sure why, but it did. We carried the bags to her car. As she drove, she kept circling her free arm because she’d injured her shoulder removing the lighting gels from the last show, and for a while, we sat in silence, her arm moving through space like a lever, until it pulled something up and she started telling me about her own earliest memory, how it had been someone’s skirt, likely her mom’s, such a crimson swirling red, and how part of the hem had been coming loose and she could recall picking at the tiny red threads. “I guess at a party?” Then we parked and unpacked, and she showed me a photo on her phone of the guy she was currently liking in history class, the one who would hopefully be at the pool party, and the girl who was likely to land the role of Emily. I lugged the bags upstairs to spare her shoulder. At the top of the staircase, I could see the cars tooling on the streets below us, going about their days. The canvas smelled good. The orange shade was just right. Vicky was walking slowly up the stairs to meet me, absorbed in writing a text on her phone, her toolkit tucked under her arm, and I felt, as I had so many times before, a wave of almost overwhelming relief and appreciation at her existence.
* * *
—
On the balcony, we pulled the canvas off its roll to stretch it for size against the back wall. I made a rough sketch on drafting paper and showed Vicky how I wanted the wood to stand; we had the rest of the afternoon to put it together, with a pizza arriving midway. Vicky got absorbed with setting up songs to play for us on her phone, and then, to the spring of pop music, she set the four planks into their spots and stood back to plan her approach. It was dry and hot, but the balcony was mostly shaded by a large ficus that had been breaking up the sidewalk with its roots for years, and I set up a standing fan in the living room that rotated and blew air to us through the opening in the glass door. While we worked, we went back and forth to the freezer in the kitchen to refill our waters with ice.
In my corner, I cut the canvas at its marked lines, and brought out a sewing kit to use to attach the zipper. The two of us worked companionably, mostly silent, sometimes singing along. Vicky is the person with whom I have done the most side-by-side activities in my life; we often studied together on the living room couch, or more often in her bedroom, me against one wall, her at her desk, then on her bed, then next to me, with her elaborate and sometimes glue-heavy elementary school projects, me plowing through various high school essays and test preparations. On the balcony, she hummed and surveyed the shape, trying out a few approaches for the top, finally deciding on a kind of gathered middle with the “door” in front, facing the balcony railing. She placed the planks and began to drill some holes. I finished the zipper attachment; the stitches were uneven and jerky, like stitches in a cartoon, but the zipper held, and I ran it up and down a few times, satisfied. After she’d set the screws, we took a break for pizza, and more ice water, and then washed our hands free of grease, and she waved off any offers to take a break to look at her essay, absorbed, she said, in this today, just this.
As the final step, we draped the canvas into place, and nailed it in at key corners and sides. At my request, she brought out the old rose from her backpack, unwrapping the tissue around it like inside was a series of tiny bones. It looked so crinkly and old and brownish, the petals almost cracking, and with careful hands, we moved it up and down the panels like someone waving sage through the rooms of a new house. Not cleansing, though. Orienting, maybe. “Like that?” she said, moving it inside and outside the tent, and I laughed a little and said sure. It was all a little humiliating. I found I could hardly even stand to look at the rose, which I had found in my adolescence at the base of the curtains at Deena’s house, and which Vicky herself had rescued from the garbage bin a few days after that. When she finished waving it around, she folded it back into its tissue and returned it to her backpack. The sun had set, and in the bluing light of evening, th
e serene coolness of the valley spreading out like a balm, Vicky leaned against me, and we stood back to survey our work.
It was a sturdy boxy structure, a one-person-sized space big enough for the triangular shape of myself sitting. “Cool,” said Vicky, bobbing her head. It all looked a little like a joke. She’d done good work with the nailing, and the pulling together of the canvas up top, but it still looked like something made in a few hours by people who didn’t really know what they were doing; this was especially true for me, but although she had done a functional job, Vicky had never built an actual structure before in set-building class—that had been more about large wooden panels for backdrops, and never anything so small. It was, by all accounts, a first attempt for us both. Vicky asked if I was going to try it out, or if she could, and I told her that I would wait until the morning but it was okay if she did just this one time, and she bent down solemnly and crawled in. Zipped it up. I stood on the balcony and gathered up the debris of our efforts: the leftover shreds of canvas, the sawdust from the planks, all the time aware of her there and not there, her enclosed presence so close to me and also, like a formalized version of the body, far away, separate. I fetched a broom to sweep up the area, thinking about how much I liked the idea of giving the memories a place to emerge, like they had an inherent gaseous nature, and the tent would prevent them from floating away. I had not dared say this aloud to her, but it was without question part of my own thinking. Vicky stayed inside for a few minutes, longer than I’d expected, and when the zipper moved down on its own, and she emerged like a little bright-eyed pink-cheeked birthed calf, she said as she hauled herself out that it actually did seem a little different somehow than just sitting and remembering in a regular chair or whatever other people did when they wanted to think about stuff, and she thought she could maybe feel things coming to her just by sitting in it—“murky things, like this mysterious mist,” and that she was now, despite her previous confusions, a little excited for me. “When will you start?” “Tomorrow,” I said. “You’ll tell me how it goes?” “I will.” “You won’t stay in there forever?” “I won’t. Not at all.” “You’ll check in with us regularly?” “I promise.”
