BETSY GRAZIANI FASBINDER
We used to argue about it, my little brother and I. John always said it was his. I claimed it was mine. Deep in my heart, I knew the truth. I only told myself it was mine because as the fourth of five children in my family, so very few mementos of my little-girl life exist.
Ours was not a family that commemorated special events or took pictures of little faces aglow in the light of birthday candles. Particularly for those of us at the ragged end of the birth order. Perhaps this was because enduring life in our limping, lopsided, twisted family was hard enough without trying to fashion artificial faces for celebratory photos. No energy remained for bronzing baby shoes or saving science fair projects. Few childhood artifacts survived the baker’s dozen of moves my family made around the country before I was out of elementary school.
Each “company transfer” triggered by one of my dad’s alcohol-fueled episodes had instigated yet another move to yet another factory, in yet another town, across yet another state line. I guess that’s what they did in the 50s and 60s when you got hammered and pissed yourself on the dance floor at the company Christmas party. They didn’t fire you or get you help. They just paid for a moving van to foist the problem off onto another plant manager and you moved with your bedraggled family in tow.
It didn’t seem fair or right to my little-girl self that my younger brother had a little silver cup to commemorate his babyhood. It seemed to me such a substantial thing, made to last, fashioned not of construction paper that would wither and fade, nor cotton that would yellow, but silver that would survive the storms that would inevitably swirl around it. The cup survived the purging and the garage sales. It was spared the fate of the discard pile during each of our sudden cross-country moves.
It’s a little thing, this cup. Two shot glasses would fill it with water or whiskey. Or blood.
Each time it was rediscovered among the boxes after a move, the slim-handled cup was grayer with tarnish and more dented from its haphazard care. Each time we unpacked the boxes in a new and unfamiliar house, I’d snag the cup and display it on the curio shelf on my side of our shared room. It sometimes took weeks or months for John to spy the cup among my things. Saying nothing, he’d make a grand display of snatching the cup from my shelf and placing it prominently among his Hot Wheels cars and the broken Batmobile on his shelf. I’d silently concede the point, knowing he’d forget about it again and I’d have it back in the next house. I have some wisp of a memory that a boss or secretary at the battery factory where my dad worked in Leavenworth, Kansas—the stopover where my younger brother happened to be born—gave it to my parents as a shower present. John’s luck-of-the-draw in the geographical birth lottery.
While I’m searching through my brother’s things all these years later, first for the answers to the overwhelming why of it all, a familiar part of me conducts a secondary search, hoping to find the little silver cup, just this one last time.
We enter the messy living room after cutting through the coroner’s red tape and the sticker that seals his front door. We sneak under the tape before we’re technically allowed to. And while we have been told to take nothing, I can’t bear waiting another day. I must see.
The whole drive to Reno, I ran a movie in my mind of what would greet me and my husband, Tom, when we got to John’s house. Would it be a scene from Psycho? Helter Skelter? I couldn’t let myself admit it aloud, but I was sure I’d find a letter. A definitive answer. Explanation. Understanding.
After sneaking past the cluttered living room, I stand at his bedroom door, drawing breath into my belly and willing myself to enter. The light in the room is blue. Unearthly. I drop—or perhaps fall—to my knees beside his blood-soaked mattress with the manhole-sized crater and the headboard with the two broken slats, cracked by the impact of his body when the gun went off. My eyes take in the morbid detail that his blood, even in that quantity, could not hold its redness for four whole days exposed to the air. Instead of the crimson red I’d conjured in my mental horror movie, the massive stain was a putrid golden-brown hue. I stood in reverence to him, my spirit hovering somewhere other than inside my body.
I’d spoken to him just the day before he died. We’d planned Thanksgiving and Christmas ravioli making. He was making Harvest Beer as a special treat. He’d joked. We’d laughed. Plans had been made. What did the kids want for Christmas? Could he bring his dog to Thanksgiving? No, she didn’t still have scabs all over and her fur had grown back. As many times—hundreds, thousands maybe—as I’ve replayed that last conversation in my mind, I still find no coded hint of what was to come later that night. Instead I find hints of a long future to come; a future that didn’t happen. The phone call ended as all of mine did with my baby brother. He closed every call, every departure with, “Love you a bunch.” His last words to me.
I pull the bedspread up without thinking. Perhaps it’s to spare my baby brother the immodesty of others seeing what he’s left behind. He was private and modest in life. I felt like an intruder. But I had to see it with my own eyes, smell the earthy fragrance of the last bit of my brother’s human form. I had to look at the coroner’s photographs to take in his last expression; just one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle that I was trying to assemble of who he was and how he’d left. I had to touch the bedcovers with my own fingers, feel the stiffness of dried blood, and the hardened tufts of amber-stained mattress cotton.
Not seeing is always worse for me. Hitchcock knew my kind; for me, what takes place off screen is far more horrifying than anything even the master of suspense could design to show on the screen. What I can conjure is almost always worse than what is.
And while the scene in my brother’s bedroom isn’t more horrifying than the one I’d conjured, neither is it less horrifying.
I’ve never been prone to depression. My hard-wiring is more tuned for anxiety and panic. That’s why, I suppose, my mental movies are so often worse than reality and why I need to see things. John was different. He was wired for depression. He hid from sadness. And he hid his own sadness behind his wicked sense of humor, his extraordinary generosity, and his good-ol’-boy charm. And now his hiding and his sadness had proved fatal. Help was available. He was loved. But he made his choice behind a thick curtain. He made his choice alone.
The cup was not in the bedroom. After I’d etched the images of that room into my memory, I closed the door behind me.
I hunted under the cheap living room furniture and behind the two contraband slot machines my boys had always loved to play when they visited their Uncle John’s house. His whole place looked like a bad garage sale, full of the broken junk everyone picks through looking for the good stuff. I moved to the kitchen and rummaged through the hodgepodge of battered gadgets and the mountains of pricey beer-making equipment that was his final, obsessive hobby. I plowed through the broken and rusty collection of tools and piles of meaningless paper that bore no secret messages or final wishes.
Or apologies.
Or words of love.
Or explanations.
All the while as I searched, that classic America song from the 1970s kept droning in my head. This is for all the lonely people/Thinking that life has passed them by/Don’t give up until you drink from the silver cup/And ride that highway in the sky. Had John felt life had passed him by?
I searched through papers and boxes, through closets and drawers. I hunted mostly for the answers to the why, a note or an email message yet unsent on his laptop. But I looked for the cup at the same time.
My husband sorts through bills and records, the paper flotsam and jetsam of a life not lived to its natural end. I search through the rubble, seeing evidence of tasks neglected and of more sadness than even I knew John carried.
As my hopes of finding answers dim, my craving for the cup becomes a full hunger of a hunt, mad and ravenous. The calm, decent, good man I’d married continues to sort through my brother’s bills, assuming we’ll be taking on the unfinished details of what he’s left behind. I cannot confess to Tom the object of my ravenous search, for fear of it sounding silly and sentimental.
The whole time we’re in the house, we know that we’re trespassers, that authorities will soon lock the doors permanently. The stuff that remains of my brother’s life will become the property of the county. The thought of that cup going to some probate auction, sold off as so much miscellaneous junk, seems such a small heartbreak, but it is unbearable.
The hours pass. Still no answers. No notes. No unsent emails. No reasons. No hints of an unrequited love that might have destroyed his heart. No crushing debt. No secret cancer diagnosis that would have doomed him to years of excruciating pain. None of these horrible, merciful, horrible explanations were to be located among the rubble.
Finally, my patient husband says, “I think I’m about done here. Are you just about ready to go?”
My heart turns to lead. My questions are unanswered and I don’t know if I can leave the silver cup behind. I close my eyes and swallow past the dryness of my throat, clearing the way for some kind of acceptance. Some surrender. “Okay,” I say, defeated. “I guess we’ve done all we can do here.” I give one more glance around the room through the blur of new tears, my eyes raw and stinging. How can there be any tears left in me?
Then, I see it.
The little cup is sitting in the back of the glass-fronted shelves of my mother’s secretary desk. She’d willed the desk to me, but I’d loaned it indefinitely to John because he really liked it. I’d teased him saying I wanted him to erect a plaque: Generously loaned from the Betsy Collection.
The cup was beyond gray, blackened with tarnish, shrouded with the dents and scars inflicted in all of the locations where it had been dragged and stuffed and jerked around, and treated with general carelessness. It sat on the shelf surrounded by nothing important: crumpled envelopes, a corkscrew with a horseshow on its end, a broken Rubik’s Cube, and a Reno Rodeo commemorative belt buckle from 1997.
This cup is a little nothing, a small something, and an everything all at once. It is what I have left to remind me that my brother was a little boy with me when I was a little girl. Hard evidence that he was.
The little silver cup that I once falsely claimed is now as mine as any physical item can be anyone’s. It’s one of only two objects I’d grab on the way out of my burning house once I knew my people and dog were safe. That valueless, tarnished cup is one of very few material things I would profoundly grieve if it were lost to me.
They say, “Be careful what you wish for.” But in my little-girl wishing, I never wished for or imagined that the cup might one day come to me in this way.
My mother’s desk has been returned to me too. Though technically, we stole it from my brother’s house before the probate vultures and courts and the official offices of the Washoe County Public Administrator could get their hands on it. This is what happens when someone exits stage-left without leaving a will. The mementos of their existence are confiscated, treated with no sentimental regard, and sold in unmarked boxes to junk dealers, who strip the boxes of anything with monetary value. Then the remnants are sold to other dealers that deal in junkier junk. The little silver cup and my mother’s battered desk will not be among my brother’s disregarded miscellany. I couldn’t let it happen that way. I couldn’t rescue him, but I could save one small enduring part of us.
Even as I write these words, the man I love is restoring my mother’s desk to its former glory. The drawers will no longer stick and the drop-leaf front will be secure. There, on the glass-fronted shelf where I found it, the cup will find its home. I will keep it polished. I will protect it from further injury. I will treasure it and treat it as a precious thing should be treated—the way I wish my brother had treated himself.