by Erin Duffy
I hurried back up the driveway, and into the garage, and found a lamp that Owen used to have in his apartment when we dated. It stood behind the ugly leather chair he loved more than anything that was still inside the house. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a basic black iron lamp with a woven rattan shade that could’ve been in a million apartments nationwide, but the mere sight of it made my skin crawl. I grabbed the lamp and wrapped the cord around the base, walked halfway down the driveway, and threw it like a javelin toward the curb. It didn’t make it, and I probably should’ve taken the lightbulb out of it before I launched it onto the concrete, so that glass didn’t shatter all over my driveway, but I wasn’t all that concerned with the details of its removal. I just knew I had to get it out of the house.
“Claire, you need to stop. You’ve lost it. You need to pull it together,” Antonia said at some point during my Owen exorcism when she appeared in the driveway with my son on her hip. “You don’t need to do this. We can get rid of his stuff. I get it. But there’s a better way to do it.”
“Nah, I like this way,” I answered. I raced back up into the garage, accidentally tripped over a crack in the floor, and knocked myself into the wall. No biggie. I pushed the large blue recycling bin out of the way to expose more boxes, and began to frantically pull at them one by one until I found the one I was looking for. I opened it and was knocked backward by Owen’s smell, carefully preserved for the better part of a year by masking tape and a cardboard box. I dug around inside of it until I found the sweater I was looking for, and held it up to my nose, and even though I didn’t want to, because I knew nothing good would come from it, I closed my eyes and inhaled. It was the sweater he was wearing when we met, an auburn, cashmere sweater with a half-zip collar and ribbing at the cuffs. Just the sight of it immediately brought me back to that bar—the smell of the yeast from the beer and the grease from the deep fryer and the cold whipping off Clark Street every time the door opened, causing my face to flush just in case the sight of Owen wasn’t enough.
My moment of nostalgia quickly passed, and now I wanted to light it on fire. The box of clothes wasn’t heavy, which was a welcome change, and I dragged it easily off the shelf and carried it down to the bottom of the driveway, dropping it right next to the container of pictures, the makeshift paperweight, the broken lamp, and the shards of broken lightbulb. It was really starting to look like a legit yard sale. I was proud.
I heard a car door close, and then Lissy’s voice. “Hey, guys, I’m happy you’re here. I was on my way home and figured I’d swing by, I hope that’s okay.” Lissy walked up the driveway carrying a magazine of some kind in her hand. “I wanted you to take a look at the table and chairs I found. I thought maybe they’d make a nice seating area for people to sit and look through the books.”
“Great, Lissy!” I said over my shoulder. “Just leave it on the grass. I’ll take a look at it in a little bit, I’m kind of in the middle of something.”
“Yeah, a nervous breakdown,” Antonia said.
“What are you doing? Why is there a broken lamp at the bottom of your driveway?”
“Owen won’t let her sell the house and so she’s decided to get rid of all of his stuff,” Antonia said, which seemed unnecessary because I thought my actions were pretty obvious.
“So she’s gone crazy? Does she do this kind of stuff often?”
“No. This is a first.”
“Mind if I watch?” Lissy asked.
“You’re going to have to because there’s no stopping her. I tried.”
I decided on my next trip I’d tackle Owen’s old wooden kitchen table with its three mismatched chairs, but the table was heavier than it looked. “You know what? I don’t think I need to move this,” I said.
“Good, I think that’s the right idea. Why don’t you sit down,” Antonia suggested.
“Firewood. We don’t have any firewood! I think this stuff will burn great, don’t you think? Let’s just chop it up. Where’s the hammer? Can you chop wood with a hammer?” I asked. “No, of course you can’t,” I said, answering my own question and suddenly wishing I had a pet woodchuck. “Maybe I have an axe. Funny that I never needed one until now.”
“We don’t need firewood. It’s May.”
“I still really think we do. I’ll stack it neatly next to the hearth. It’s basically recycling.”
“Leave the table alone, please,” Antonia begged. “It’s not a good idea.”
“I have an axe,” Lissy offered. “Not in my car, though.”
“Then it’s not really helpful, sadly,” I said. “Maybe bring it over next time in case I need it in the future, though.”
“No problem,” Lissy said. I appreciated her being willing to lend me her axe. Maybe next we could trade sweaters or something.
“There will be no axes. Aren’t you supposed to be helping?” Antonia asked Lissy.
“Sorry. You’re right,” Lissy agreed.
No axe, no problem. I figured I’d just deal with his foosball table instead. I certainly didn’t need that. In fact, I didn’t know why any man over the age of twenty-three even had a foosball table, but there it was, pushed up against the wall right below the box that held my Christmas ornaments. I liked that box. That box held the tinsel-covered swags and the red-ribboned wreaths and the new ornaments I bought last year for our first Christmas together in the new house. There was a plate buried in that box that I bought for when Bo was older, a large cookie platter with the words “Cookies for Santa” painted across the top in forest green paint. I liked that plate a lot, and I’d dreamed of Bo being old enough to help me make cookies on Christmas Eve. I’d dreamed of red and green sprinkles, and of powdered sugar and nonpareils, and of aluminum cutters shaped like angel wings and snowmen. They were all in that box. That box had to do with Bo, not Owen. If a single box survived my yard sale, that would be it.
But the fucking foosball table was toast. Then I’d worry about the old kitchen set.
“Help me move this, guys,” I said, my mania now at stratospheric levels. I threw all my weight against one side of the game table, and tried to force it out of the garage. “Go put Bo down, and let’s get this out of here. It’s not that heavy, but it’s a two-person job,” I ordered. I was breathless, and sweating, and the blood was still pumping loudly through my veins, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, and I felt like I finally had control of this situation. As soon as the table was out of the garage I was fairly sure I’d have my life back. Then all I had to do was figure out how to get the leather chair out of the house, and rip the marble slabs off the kitchen counters, and I’d be all set. Easy peasy. Antonia hadn’t moved. That was fine, because I’d changed my mind anyway. I could move it by myself.
The squad car pulled up with its red and blue lights twirling, but without the siren, so I didn’t notice it at first. The officer climbed out and came toward me up the driveway, the walkie-talkie he had with him squawking, and beeping, and interrupting my concentration as I tried to drag the table down the Belgian bricks to its final resting place on the sidewalk.
“Ma’am, what are you doing?” the officer asked. I looked up at his puffy cheeks, beady, dark eyes buried deep in the flesh of his face that reminded me of the black-buttoned eyes on the Teddy Ruxpin I was obsessed with when I was little. He was so heavy his belly hung over his belt and concealed his crotch, and the various pieces of police equipment he had hanging from his belt weren’t helping his situation any. Cops in the Nutmeg State would do themselves a favor to lay off the apple pies if they wanted to intimidate anyone, though I’d admit that this town wasn’t exactly a hotbed of activity for the criminal underground unless they were looking to knock over stores carrying whale-patterned tie and cummerbund sets, or pig snouts.
“Hi, Officer. Yard sale,” I answered, as I continued to try and push the foosball table down the driveway, which wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. The officer stepped in front of me and put his hands on the end of the table. “Oh, thank you so much. W
e can just move it to the curb. Thanks for the help. You’re a godsend.”
“I’m not helping you, ma’am. I’m here because your neighbors complained. You need to stop dragging your personal items out to the curb.”
“They’re not my personal items. They belong to my husband, well, he’s my soon-to-be ex-husband, technically. That doesn’t really matter. I’m not allowed to move home to Chicago, and I’m not even allowed to move out of this house, and that’s fine, but I really don’t need his foosball table, you know? I mean, if he’s going to force me to live here, then he’s not going to use it as a storage locker. So, I’ll just leave it down here at the curb and I’m sure in a few days some kids will catch wind of it, and it’ll be gone. No harm, no foul. Everyone’s happy. Now, do you want to lift that side for me, please?”
“Ma’am, you can’t do this,” he reiterated.
“There’s that word again, can’t. When the hell is someone going to come here and tell me what I can do, and not what I can’t do?”
“Please put the table down. The neighbors don’t want the block looking like a junkyard.”
“The neighbors?” I squealed, for the first time remembering that they existed. “Why do the neighbors care if I want to give away Owen’s old sweaters? I don’t care about the neighbors! I don’t care about these stupid sweaters! I don’t care about this house, or this street, or this state, or anything right now, except getting these boxes out of here. And you know what? The neighbors are lucky that I can’t lift the bathtub, or they’d have bigger things to complain about than a couple of boxes and a fucking foosball table!” I screamed. Then, without thinking, I flipped the table over onto its side, snapping one of the legs in half.
“Officer, please forgive her. She’s in the middle of a nervous breakdown. I have it under control. She’s just had a string of really bad luck and this is kind of the culmination of a lot of very unfortunate events. I’ll take care of it,” Antonia promised.
“We didn’t give her the axe, if that matters,” Lissy said.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a wife throw her husband’s things out of the house,” he answered. “I get it. But please, get her under control. If I have to come back here, we’re going to have to have a different conversation. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Antonia said, always so respectful of authority figures, even those who weighed seven hundred pounds, and yet wouldn’t help me move a foosball table. Jerk.
“I’m under control!” I insisted, just in case my flushed face, frantic movements, and pupils the size of dinner plates didn’t make that clear. “I just don’t understand why I’m not allowed to throw this stuff out? Why do I need his permission to throw out our pictures? I’m in them. Doesn’t that mean I own them just as much as he does?” I asked, so exasperated, and frustrated, and crazy that I thought about lunging at Officer Fat Ass and beating him with his own walkie-talkie. “Are you trying to tell me that I needed a notarized release in order to get rid of stuff from my garage without breaking the law?”
“I’m sorry for whatever happened to you. I really am. I’ll do my best to get your neighbors to lay off you for a little while, but you’re going to need to move this stuff off the curb sooner rather than later, okay? Take it to the dump, or, better yet, call the Salvation Army,” he suggested, and I realized that those beady little button eyes were filled with love, and understanding, and I hoped that he went home at night and had someone to spoon in bed because he was the most compassionate person I’d ever met in my life.
“Oh,” I sighed, the swoosh, swoosh, swoosh in my ears starting to slow to a gurgle. “Why didn’t you say so?”
Chapter 10
MY NAME IS Claire Stevens. I’m a thirty-six-year-old divorcée and mother of one and I’m about to go on my first date in years with a man named Fred. “So what?” I said to myself as I examined my face, and I mean really examined my face, in the bathroom mirror. There she was—the quirky best friend—the one who wore sensible underwear and couldn’t seem to master the art of applying eyeliner, reporting for duty in the mirror just like I knew she would. I was hoping maybe she’d call in sick and send someone sultry to fill in for her, but for some reason she was never sick. Her freckly, perky, cute-in-a-nonthreatening-way face stared right back at me. I had to restrain myself from head-butting the mirror and knocking her unconscious. I didn’t want to see her tonight. Just once, I’d like to see someone else.
I went to Sephora and bought fake eyelashes for this occasion. I had no idea why I thought having fake eyelashes would somehow make this date any less scary, or that fake eyelashes were somehow going to help me rid myself and the mirror of my girl-next-door image, but I thought that maybe they could. They couldn’t. What they could do was make my eyelids look like they’d grown fringe that could very easily be attached to the side of a cowboy boot rather than to my face. I thought I might have overdone it.
Dinner. Dinner’s not a big deal. I eat dinner every night, except for the first few weeks after my life blew up. There was a while there where I couldn’t manage to swallow spit, never mind a cheeseburger, and when I did eat, I did it in bed with my duvet pulled up over my chest like I was afraid the frozen pizza I managed to cook wanted to assault me or something. But that was March, and this was June, and I’d moved into the phase where I tried to put my life back together, and that meant that I’d now eat meals in public places with accountants named Fred—public places with tablecloths, and menus, and dim lighting that might help my eyelashes look less Itsy Bitsy Spider and more Marilyn Monroe. I stared at them in the mirror again, and decided that I looked like an idiot. Pointless, I sighed as I admitted defeat. I splashed water on my eyes in order to dissolve the glue strip holding the fringe to my skin, and watched as the spider leg lashes fell into the porcelain sink and stuck to the side of the basin right next to a crusty glob of Crest. Down came the rain and washed the spider out, I sang quietly, suddenly feeling very sad. There may have been a time in my life where I could’ve reinvented myself as a vixen if I wanted to, but that time was long gone. Now I was a nursery-rhyme-singing single mother, and there were not enough artificial embellishments to attach to any part of my body to make that fact any less true.
I shoved my feet into pumps and checked my black dress one last time in the full-length mirror affixed to the back of my bathroom door. I was happy with the way I looked. My dress was appropriate, but still fitted, and it didn’t scream frigid or slutty, the two things I was trying to avoid, and so I deemed it a success. I grabbed my enormous black bag from the foot of my bed and decided to just lug the entire thing with me tonight because I had no idea where I’d stashed my evening clutch. Respectable single mother slash divorcées didn’t carry lip gloss and condoms with them in tiny little decorative bags covered in sequins or snakeskin when they left the house. Instead, I took a twenty-pound duffel bag with me everywhere I went. It held diapers, teething rings, packets of formula, a nail file, manicure scissors, wet wipes, a phone charger, no less than three pairs of sunglasses, a bottle of aspirin, and a bag of Cheerios, and that was just the list of things I could name off the top of my head. I was exhausted from worrying about my dress, and my shoes, and my eyelashes, and I simply didn’t have the energy to start fretting over the size of my bag, too. It was easier to take the whole thing with me than it would be to find my wallet in it anyway.
Fred the accountant was not Owen the WASP and that was a good thing. I didn’t know too much about him other than that, and that was helpful on a first date because it meant we’d have lots to talk about. I didn’t know what sports he liked. I didn’t know where he grew up, or what kind of music he liked to sing in the shower before work. I didn’t know his favorite meal, or if he was a neat freak, or a slob, or if he had OCD or something. I didn’t even know his favorite color, but I needed to make sure it wasn’t purple. I decided maybe that would be my first question. I’d ask him his favorite color while we were in the car on the way to the restaurant, and if he
said purple, I’d just jump out of it while he was still driving. All I knew for sure was that he didn’t like to text, and that might be kind of a big problem, but I wasn’t ready to worry about any other potential problems, so I decided to let it go.
I closed my eyes tightly and promised myself that when I opened them I wouldn’t be thinking about Owen or my divorce anymore. I deserved to have a nice time, to laugh, and to have upbeat conversation about innocuous topics. I flipped on the TV and stopped thinking about a slut named Dee Dee, and started thinking about an accountant named Fred. I started thinking about how nice it will be when he arrives, and takes me to dinner, and tells me I look pretty, and that he likes my eyelashes just the way they are. He was a few minutes late, but I wasn’t worried about it. I was busy watching HGTV and listening to a decorator assure a woman that she could change her whole life just by updating her living room curtains. It was riveting reality television.
“You look really nice,” Antonia said. She breezed toward me with a cup of hot chocolate in her hand, and her notebook stuffed under her armpit. “You’re going to have a great time. Just relax.”
“She’s totally right,” Lissy said. “You need to wear lipstick, though.”
“But I don’t wear lipstick.”
“You don’t usually wear fake eyelashes either and you bought those. What’s wrong with a nice red lipstick? It says ‘kiss me.’ That’s what you want a guy to think on a date.”
