The anguish returned to her face, and she doubled over as she sat. I wondered for a moment if she were about to vomit.
She sprang upright, carrying the frog around its neck like she was strangling it. She took it to a box we’d already filled with old books for the charity pile and marched her way outside. She put it on the charity pile in her garage, then she folded the box closed. Then she stacked other things on top of it. She stared at the pile sideways, as if trying not to let the box know she was looking.
She finally tore herself away, but braced herself on the outside of her garage, leaning on the siding, her breathing slow but shallow.
“I feel like I’m gonna be sick,” she said. “And my heart is freaking out, feel this.” She grabbed my hand and smashed it flat against her chest. I could feel it, thrashing away far too fast, flailing almost. I drew back.
She sank down to the ground, tipping her head back against her garage and saying into the air, “I’m never gonna survive this. Not if an old frog Jack never played with nearly kills me. We haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet.”
I suspected she meant that barricaded room. I sat down across from her, the rocks from her gravel driveway digging into my bottom. “We’ll think of something,” I told her. “We have to, so we will.”
In my head I rehearsed a conversation with Seth that would convince him to come help us.
As the sun continued to sink, Trish got faster, but more agitated. She was making quicker decisions, but she would gasp and flinch as she threw out old clothes from Jack’s toddler days, or when she ran across something too small and never worn that was going into the Sell pile.
Still, the room gradually cleared. I almost did a cartwheel when Trish came upon a cache of scrapbooking supplies she’d stowed away in there and with only the briefest glance said, “Toss, it’s mildewed.”
We’d cleared off the floor in Jack’s room and the clothes off the top of the bed—these were clothes he wore, and Trish ran them through the washing machine, along with his bedsheets—and then we both knelt down next to Jack’s bed to inspect the underbed clutter.
At first, Trish and I just yanked the pile into the daylight, not really looking at the items. But then, we both slowed down, exchanging wordless glances.
School papers. Birthday cards. Birthday party invitations from other children. There were objects, too, besides just paper. Little pieces of detritus that were dirty and scuffed up and unrecognizable. Odd bits of metal and plastic. Some rocks and acorns. More coloring pages were at the bottom, back when coloring was a novel thing for him, obviously, when it didn’t matter if Mickey Mouse had a purple face, and coloring inside the lines wasn’t important. There were photocopied worksheets with shaky, uneven letters scrawled barely inside the manuscript lines.
I could tell by the look on Trish’s face she hadn’t known about any of this.
“Now, what?” she breathed.
I shook my head. I was sure both of us were replaying that movie in our head of the time Mom came home from Florida and saw what we’d done.
As recently as yesterday morning I would have told her just to trash it, that he’d never know, or even if he got briefly upset, the bigger goal was a clean space. That he had to learn to let things go.
But yesterday morning I hadn’t yet seen Trish nearly vomit over an old mildewed frog. I hadn’t yet felt her heart thrashing in her chest. And she was a motivated adult, not a sensitive little boy with an injured arm.
Would Seth know what to do? As a professional?
“Maybe we put these things in a box,” I ventured. “And show them to him when he gets back and help him choose.”
Trish nodded, head bobbing gently like a marionette on a string.
I continued, reaching out to touch her, bring her back to me. “Let’s get him a scrapbook. He can put the best things in the scrapbook and store it on his shelf. He can display his things, we’ll tell him. Be proud of them, not just shove them under his bed.”
Trish fingered the mangled edge of one of the papers. It had a distinctly chewed look and I tried not to think about what chewed it.
“Look, why don’t we go get something to eat. Jack’s room is almost done. We’re hungry. We can go eat and pick up a scrapbook at the store. He’ll feel better if we respect his stuff, right?”
Trish came back to life then. “OK, yes. Good idea.”
As she left Jack’s room, she stared hard at the pile next to his bed, walking out backward, transfixed until I pulled her away by her elbow down the hall, toward the outside world.
Chapter 17
My heart lifted as that bright red bull’s-eye came into view. Target! Target of the cheap but trendy, where the middle class and even the nearly poor can afford Isaac Mizrahi. Target of the whimsical commercials and catchy jingles. Target, which has pulled me out of a funk more times than I care to consider.
Shallow? Well, duh. However, it’s not like I was shooting heroin. Retail therapy is a time-honored tradition and though Saint Mary over there would never cop to it, I’d bet my filthy house that she’s bought herself a lip gloss on a bad day.
Mary lagged behind me walking into the store, her arms folded around her, hands tucked under her upper arms. We really should have gone to a craft store, but the ones I knew of in town were closed on Sundays.
The store was crowded with shoppers, and we had to step lively to avoid being bumped. It was like highway driving, pushing the cart.
“Why do we have a big cart?” Mary asked, as I swung around a mother fussing with her baby and its pacifier.
“I need a few things,” I said, paying careful attention to navigate the red plastic cart around someone stopping to fondle the scarves near the jewelry counter.
“You need a few things like you need another arm.”
“I don’t know, another arm might come in handy sometimes.” I paused by the shoes. My dressy boots for work were wearing down in the heel, and these were on clearance, making way for sandals and such. I nudged my tennis shoe off with one foot and bent to find a size eight.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“My old boots are wearing out.” They had black and brown, both in my size. I mentally reviewed my work clothes, trying to weigh which would be better. Then as I pulled on a brown boot I realized that with the clearance price I could buy them both for the price of one pair. Nearly, anyway.
Mary grabbed the box as I made to put it in the cart.
“No.”
“I’m sorry, did you just tell me no like you’re my mother?”
Both of us stood on opposite sides of the cart, holding the boot box. She was lightly pushing it back toward me, toward the shelf.
“You cannot buy more things now.”
I shoved the box hard, downward, so that it smacked into the cart. Then I grabbed the black pair as well and dropped that in, too.
“These boots matter more to you than Jack, I see.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Every time I make a decision you don’t like, you all throw my son into it, every one of you. Like it’s really so simple, if by choosing these boots I’m sending him away. Am I not allowed to have anything, then? At all?”
“You don’t need them!”
“My boots are wearing out!”
“They’re not worn out yet, are they? Until you walked by these boots you didn’t think you needed any. You didn’t say, let’s go to Target and buy boots. If these boots hadn’t been here, if we hadn’t come here, you never would have thought of new boots.”
“I just needed to be reminded.”
“Let me remind you of Mom’s purses.”
Drew had complained about a secret sister code and he was right—we did have a language between us, a shorthand of phrases that only we truly understood.
Mom was notorious for hoarding purses, and the sick thing was, t
hey were nearly all the same: large, black, with a long strap. Dad used to ask aloud how many variations could there be for a black bag? Before Mary and Dad moved out, I’d gone batshit crazy over seeing one more purse come into the house. I’d started screaming at her, yanking purses out of her closet until I’d made a pile of them in the middle of her bedroom floor. Mount Handbag. And Mom screamed back at me, things like, how dare you? As if I had no say over what she was doing to the house we all lived in. Now that I have a teenager of my own, I see what she meant, though. Once you’ve squeezed a child into the world through a hole no bigger than an orange, cleaned up vomit and fretted over homework, and waited up past curfew, there’s a special kind of gall it takes for that very child to try to run your life.
Mary was still staring at me. Shoppers were starting to turn and gawk at our standoff.
“I don’t have a dozen pairs of boots,” I told her. It was not the same as the purses. It just wasn’t.
“No, you have bags of yarn and broken coffee mugs and outdated clothes and paperwork.”
“You are not in charge of me.”
“Mom said that one, too.”
“I’m not going to end up like her over one pair of boots.”
“How do you know you won’t end up like her?”
“Because I’m careful. Because I don’t burn candles next to giant stacks of paper like Mom used to, trying to cover up the smell of cat piss. Because I don’t have any pets.”
“Where are you going to put these?”
“In my closet, obviously.”
“We can’t even see your closet right now.”
“But we will.”
Mary threw up her hands. Tipped her head back as if stargazing. She blinked several times and if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she was crying or something.
“Whatever. Let’s get the scrapbook, get dinner, and get out of here.”
I tried to hide my smile as I pushed the cart away, so she wouldn’t think I was being smug. I always could outlast her. That much had never changed.
We were in a restaurant booth eating lukewarm burgers when my ex-husband called me.
A large woman was trying to get her kids to settle down at the table across from me, and she was blocking my exit. The rest of the place was jammed with families and dudes watching basketball. So I answered the call in front of my sister, who, thank goodness, looked away and pretended she couldn’t hear me.
“Hi,” I said, trying to act like all was normal.
“I called the house and there was no answer,” Ron said, sounding puzzled.
“What, I went out. I can’t leave the house on a Sunday afternoon?”
“I guess. It’s just different, is all.”
Sunday used to be our family day together. Ron’s jobs would often bleed over into Saturday, so Sunday was the day we refused to make plans for anything but spending time together, even if that meant dragging our boys along on errands. I’d had trouble filling up those long Sundays after Ron left, and I often found myself driving to Target, especially on days he had Jack.
“Everything OK?” Ron continued.
“Everything’s fine,” I said, looking down at the table and pointedly away from Mary.
“Can I talk to Jack?”
“He’s visiting my dad and Ellen.”
“Huh.”
“What, he can’t visit?”
“No, that’s fine. It’s just . . . odd. Usually you keep him with you. You don’t like to be apart from him on your weekends.”
My weekend, his weekend. I always hated the possessiveness of those weekends.
“I’m just doing some cleaning up at the house.”
“Because of that social worker?”
“Because it needs cleaning, Ron. I told you that was no big deal. It’s already over with, if you must know.”
“If you’re cleaning, why aren’t you home?”
“I’m taking a dinner break. Do you need something, or did you just call to grill me about my Sunday activities?”
“I, uh . . .” He coughed into the phone, and my body tensed. That was Ron’s nervous noise. He coughed before he told me he was leaving, in fact. Divorced or not, I knew every nuance of his personality, every hill and valley of his body, every scar and birthmark and secret fear.
He continued, “I thought over spring break I’d like Jack to meet Summer.”
“Summer what?”
“Summer. The girl I’ve been seeing.”
It felt like someone turned up the volume in the restaurant. No, that was a ringing in my ears, obscuring the chatter, the TV sports, and Ron’s voice growing tinny. I grabbed the edge of the restaurant table.
“Sorry, I lost you for a minute there,” I said when the ringing subsided. “I’ve never heard of Summer before.”
“Well, it’s not something I like to share with you. My dates. But now we’ve been seeing each other a while and she’d kinda like to meet Jack.”
Dates. Plural. “Who . . . who is she?”
“Her name is Summer, like I said. She works out at Belding Supply with her dad.”
“You make her sound about sixteen!” I laughed, as if this were funny.
“Naw, she’s not sixteen.”
I noticed he did not supply her actual age.
“Well, fine, if you want him to meet her. That’s fine. That’s good of you to check with me first.”
Ron usually was a good ex-husband. If one had to have an ex.
“We thought we’d take him out to . . .”
I couldn’t hear any more. The use of “we” so casually had interrupted any hope I had of following the conversation. Ron sounded relaxed now, like the storm he’d feared had missed him after all. Made me wish I had freaked out on him. It would have been cathartic.
“I can’t hear you,” I told him. “You’re breaking up. Call me later.”
And I hung up, rejoining the world of the restaurant.
Mary had finished her burger. She’d draped a napkin over the top of the dirty plate like drawing a sheet over a corpse.
“That sounded difficult,” Mary said, folding her hands on the table.
“I thought he left me because of the stuff. The clutter.” I pushed my own plate away. “But now he’s got a new girl.”
Mary had that look on her face, where she wanted to say something but knew it would come out wrong.
“What? Spit it out.”
“How long have you been divorced now?”
“Only two years.”
“Only two?”
“Two years is like . . .” I snapped my fingers. “Hardly any time. It’s been fourteen years since Mom died and do you miss her any less?”
She flinched, as I knew she would. I reminded her, “I loved that man more than almost everything.”
Mary wrinkled her forehead at me, and I heard her loud and clear. I jabbed my finger across the table at her and said, “Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare say that I chose the clutter over him. It’s not that fucking simple. Anyway, what would you know about it?”
“About what?”
“Marriage.”
“Thanks for reminding me that I’m a cold, lonely hag. I’d forgotten for about thirty seconds.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Sure you did. I’ll have you know I’ve been in love for years.” Mary flushed pink from her chin to her hair.
“What? With who?”
“Don’t sound so stunned.”
“I just . . . You never said anything.”
Now it was Mary’s turn to look at me like I was the moron, reminding me with just a tilt of her head that we’d barely spoken since Mom died. Then she shook her head, brushed nonexistent crumbs from her shirt. “His name was George, and I worked for him for thirteen years.”
“Thirteen years? And you didn’t get married or something?”
Her mouth twisted into a smirk on her pale oval face. “He never returned the favor of loving me back. Oh, I thought maybe he did, you know, secretly. Then I found out otherwise. So actually, you were right, Trish, in assuming I don’t know anything about human relationships. I withdraw my earlier remark.”
I tried to drum up sympathy for her. But years of pining for your boss doesn’t compare to a marriage dissolving, children caught in the middle, and now a new girlfriend named Summer. Who wanted to meet my boy.
I waved our waitress over.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
“Daylight’s burning,” added Mary, prompting me to look at my watch. We were not yet done with Jack’s room. Monday was bearing down on me with my psycho boss and its long workweek, the return of Ayana with her notebook and camera, and that appointment with the fucking government shrink.
Bitter resentment rose up into my throat at the box they had put me in. They were always against me, the whole lot of them, just like they lined up against Mom, who defied them all at every turn.
Mary paid the bill and crooked her finger for me to go, and I followed, silently, allowing myself to be led and bossed and ordered around, for the privilege of keeping my own son.
Chapter 18
Jack’s room had been cleaned of clutter, but what remained . . . a layer of dust covered everything. The walls, too, seemed to have a coating of mysterious grime. With one swipe of the sponge we’d realized just how thick the dirt had gotten.
As the sun fell to earth again, Trish’s determination became a frenzy.
Trish assigned me the task of sweeping the baseboards and vacuuming, and I tried not to think about the cobwebs in the corners, and what must have been lurking nearby. I tried not to pay any attention to the black flecks of half-eaten bugs trapped therein.
Living with Mom, I’d battled back a case of arachnophobia as a matter of survival. It was simply not possible to freak out over every spider, when spiders seemed to love the dark crevices created by her piles of junk.
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