20
Frannie packs me a to-go lunch of a giant turkey sandwich and a garden salad, and I head to Ethan’s. The door is ajar, so I let myself in. The four piles in the living room have grown since Saturday, suggesting a little progress.
“Ethan?” I call out.
“Up here,” he calls from the second floor. I find him in the master bedroom, lying flat on his back on the king-size bed.
“You okay?”
He smiles when he sees me and then motions toward the closet. “I cannot do this.”
It feels natural to plop down next to him on the bed, so I do.
He takes my hand, and I feel relieved. Like I’ve plugged back into an energy source. Warmth moves through my body as our fingers entwine. “So what are we going to do?” he asks.
“We’re going to clean this place out. Frannie made us lunch, and we get to eat it after we’ve worked for one hour. I’m going to set a timer on my phone.”
He groans and squeezes my hand. “I’ve been in that closet since eight a.m. Every single article of clothing feels like a relic, like a piece of history. It’s like it’s alive and someone’s asking me to kill it.”
It’s time for me to exert my forward-moving energy. I have an arsenal of questions that will unstick this stuck homeowner: Do you plan to use these items in the future? Would it be enough to photograph them and put the photos in a book to honor the memory? But I know exactly how he feels, every time I try to sort through our basement to clear space around the washing machine. Little-boy corduroy pants that crawled in the sandbox. Tiny Mary Janes that sashayed in the kindergarten play. I can’t let any of it go.
I stand up. “We are going to walk into that closet and choose the ten best costumes, and we are going to respectfully box them up and keep them. Is ten a good number? Can you commit to just ten?”
“I cannot remember ever being this overwhelmed.”
“It’s a thing,” I say. I know this because I feel this way in every room of my house.
“Can we move to the basement?” he says.
“No. One hour in the closet.” I let go of his hand and pull up the timer on my phone. “Starts now.” I walk into the closet and am hit with a wall of full-length ball gowns. Some of them are hilarious, and some are exquisite. He stands next to me as I pull each one out.
“Donate?” he asks.
“Okay, start a pile there.”
I pull out a shimmery silver flapper dress and hold it up to myself. “What about this?” He turns around and looks me over, up and down, and then settles on my face with that look that is absolutely not how Cliffy looks at me.
“Keep,” he says, and takes it from me.
We do this for an hour, until a quarter of the closet is empty and there’s one modest donation pile on the floor. He is unable to part with any of the good costumes, and I don’t blame him. They have the full cast of Alice in Wonderland and theater-quality costumes from The Wizard of Oz. There’s a dress and a wig for Morticia Addams that I’m dying to put on.
I turn off the alarm on my phone and say, “So that wasn’t too bad, was it?”
“It was horrible, I need a nap.”
I sort of feel the same way, and I don’t know why. This isn’t my stuff, but there’s something about the careful way their clothes were chosen and stored that makes it all feel so important.
Ethan flops down on his parents’ bed. Now his, I guess. He reaches his hand out to me and I take it. He pulls me to lie next to him. We lie there on our backs, looking up at the amber chandelier over the bed, and he keeps holding my hand. “It’s like they’re dead,” he says. “It feels weird to be doing this. What if they come back? What if they get sick of Florida and come back in time for the jack-o’-lantern lighting and there are no orange pants? Where are they going to find orange pants?”
“For a year after my mom died, I dreamed that she came back and was angry at me for cleaning out all of her stuff. She was going to a party and had nothing to wear.” I laugh a little to take the heaviness away. It’s been two years and I’m still not able to share light thoughts about my mom. In time, sweetheart.
Ethan turns to me. “You were able to clean out your mom’s stuff, but you can’t clean out your own? That seems a lot harder.”
“It was pretty horrible. There was so much stuff, both her lifetime and my childhood. But there was no one else to do it. I brought Cliffy with me most days, while the girls were in school, so that kept me from getting too dark about the whole thing. And I actually found treasures in there.”
“Like what?”
I shake my bracelet down on my wrist. “She had this made for me when I was eight. She was a jewelry designer. I don’t know if you knew that.”
He reaches over and touches the little silver soccer ball and his fingers graze the inside of my wrist. “I didn’t know that. So did you find jewelry?”
“No, just more hooks. Like the things she’d use to attach a charm to the bracelet.” He’s waiting for me to go on. “I don’t know, it just felt like hope or something, like she thought more things might happen to me.”
“Of course more things are going to happen to you.” Once he’s repeated it back to me, I am aware of the passive voice I’ve used. I want to correct myself: I might do more things.
“Maybe. So I kept the hooks, hundreds of them, and the tiny pliers she used to attach them.” She gave my girls bracelets too, but only lived long enough to give them a few charms. Soccer balls. A lightning bolt for when Iris finished the Harry Potter series, a gold hoop for when she took Greer to get her ears pierced. I’ve meant to keep up with it because that’s on me now, but I’m not a jewelry designer, and when I try to find similar charms online, it’s just sort of depressing. “I probably kept too much of her stuff, but the process was good for me. I guess it was a way of honoring her. Tidying up her life.”
“And that’s not something you’d do for yourself?” he asks.
Apparently not. I think of the half-unloaded groceries that are waiting for me at home. I don’t want to talk about this. “I honor myself plenty. I have enough candles in my bathroom to burn the house down.”
He turns onto his side to face me, so I do too. “What now?” he says. His mouth is so close to mine that I can feel his breath on my lips.
“What do you mean?”
He runs a finger down my neck, leaving goose bumps. “Please don’t make me go back into that nightmare of a closet.”
“Fifteen more minutes,” I say. “And then maybe we have our third date.”