Twenty

I was fine until I saw the sign. Then my palms began to sweat. My stomach became a living thing, churning and flipping, threatening to reach up my esophagus and strangle me from within. Adrenaline spurted into my bloodstream. My hands trembled. The sign said:

Exit 12
Framingham
1 Mile

My mother lived in Framingham, a bedroom suburb thirty miles west of Boston and seventy miles east of Pittsfield. She had moved from our big house in Wellesley to a small cookie-cutter ranch about a year after Dad died. I was studying at MIT when she called and told me that my childhood home had been sold to a very nice proctologist and that I needed to come home that weekend to clean out my stuff.

I exited the highway and drove down Route 9, past an unremitting collection of auto malls and restaurants, until I turned off the road at Framingham State University. FSU had once been Framingham State College, but it apparently had received a promotion. I turned down Edgell Road, past the spot where Henry Knox had dragged the cannons he had swiped from the British at Fort Ticonderoga, then I swung onto Central and navigated a maze of ranch-filled roads. My stomach clenched at each turn. A small voice in my mind said, It’s not too late. You can still run. I would have lost my nerve, but I had called my mother in advance. She was expecting me. The call forced me to go through with the visit.

I parked in front of my mother’s Campanelli ranch house. The Campanelli ranches had been dropped all over Framingham by a 1950s builder named, oddly enough, Campanelli. It was as if he had gotten hold of the SimCity house-building tool and had indiscriminately drawn great swaths of identical houses, some flipped in mirror-image fashion for variety.

My mother’s small house lay low at the top of a lawn. Its façade featured a picture window from the living room and two bedroom windows. The house blocked the setting sun, casting a long shadow across the lawn. A curtain covered the picture window and pressed against the glass as if a couch had pinched it there, but I knew there was no couch in that room.

I took a deep breath, steeled myself. I got out of the Volvo and climbed the driveway, past my mother’s car, which had long ago been expelled from the garage. I approached the front door and rang the bell. A simple chime announced my presence. A faint rustling sound whispered through the door, but the door remained locked.

I knocked and called out, “Are you okay?”

My mother’s voice said, “Just a minute!”

I heard more shuffling and scraping from beyond the door. The lock cycled. The door creaked partially open. I pressed on it, but it couldn’t open any farther. The smell hit me, as it always did—a musty library smell. A shiver ran down my spine.

My mother called from behind the door, “Well, get in here. It’s cold out.”

I stepped in. The door closed behind me, trapping me in hoarding hell.

After my dad died, my mother had decided to save all his papers. She felt it was his legacy. She collected each scrap that he had written and more scraps about him from the newspaper. Obituaries had run in the local paper, in the Boston Globe, in the Boston Herald, and on the Internet. She’d gotten sympathy cards and insurance forms and his old wallet and bank statements and cancelled checks with his signature on them. There were books that he had read and books that he had intended to read, books that he had bought for me and books that he had bought for her. There was the newspaper that came out the day after his funeral, the first paper that was printed in a world without him, and then a second paper printed in a world without him—three papers, actually, the Globe, the Herald, and the New York Times. For a while, my mother would go through the newspapers looking for mentions of Global Defense Systems and cutting them out to put in scrapbooks. When she ran out of time to do that, she started storing the newspapers, saying that she would “get to them later.”

When my mother moved, she had the movers put all the papers into the living room until she could find a place for them. She never did. Instead, she discovered free circulars. She saw opportunities in little boxes on every street corner. She’d open the door to the little box and take out that week’s Real Estate News, or Writing Workshop Newsletter, or coupon book for local stores. These went into the house. She gathered take-out menus. These went into the house. Framingham had a free newspaper called the Tab. It went into the house. The Middlesex News? That went into the house. Junk mail went into the house. Receipts went into the house. Magazine subscriptions to the Reader’s Digest went into the house. Money, Runner’s World, Real Simple, and AARP newsletters all went into the house. Everything my mother could touch or see or read went into that house.

Nothing came out.

Towers of paper as tall as me crowded every corner of the living room. My mother would stack paper in one place until she couldn’t reach the top, and then she’d start a new pile. Fortunately, she was only five feet tall. The house was dark, since every window had been blocked by stacks of paper. She was unable to stack paper in the kitchen sink, so that window alone remained uncovered.

A sliver of setting sun slipped through the window and traced an orange rectangle across the ceiling. The dying light made the room look gloomier.

My mother had been standing on the small pile of papers that she had moved to open the door. She climbed off the pile and stood in front of me on the goat path that wound between stacks of newsprint. Her body had adopted an untended plumpness. She wore a faded housedress, no shoes, and a tired expression. Every time I looked at her, I felt guilty for not visiting more often. Then I’d look around the house and feel disgusted for having visited at all.

My mother said, “Well, give me a kiss,” and she raised her cheek so I could kiss it.

I kissed her cheek and said, “Hi, Ma.”

She said, “I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to the door faster. I was straightening up before you came over.”

I looked around the room. “Straightening up” meant that my mother had picked up some of the scraps of paper and moved them to other piles. She caught my glance and said, “Come on, let’s go to your room before you get all snippy and start judging my housekeeping.”

She led the way down the goat path. I was slightly wider than her, and paper brushed against my legs. At the fireplace, the goat path split. One branch went into the kitchen. My mother hadn’t given up cooking. This forced some spots to be clear of paper: a counter, the range top, and a spot on the kitchen table. There was a TV room off the kitchen. I knew she kept a spot clear in there as well so she could sit and watch her shows. The TV was playing the six o’clock news. I could hear the anchor’s breathless description of the latest tragedy. Apparently, a house had caught fire somewhere.

We took the goat path that led down the bedroom hallway. We walked past the bathroom. The door was jammed open by a stack of paper. Across from the bathroom was another bedroom. This one contained a new wrinkle in my mother’s hoarding: a growing pile of dolls and stuffed animals. They were crammed together, the gloom washing out their color, their lifeless eyes staring into the darkness as if they were awaiting mass burial.

My mother’s bedroom was at the end of the hallway. She grunted as she moved a pile of paper from in front of my door to in front of her door. I’d learned long ago not to offer to help. She got upset if I touched anything. She indicated the padlock on the door and said, “Go ahead.”

My mother and I had fought constantly for a full year after she had moved her hoard into this smaller house. I had just started my own life, with a new job and my own apartment. Each time I visited my mother, I’d be shocked by the growing piles and start moving things around and asking, “Do you need this? Do you need this?” My mother would wring her hands and tell me to put things into new piles. I couldn’t get her to throw anything away and our fights got worse. Finally, we struck a deal. My mother would give me one room to keep clean, and I would stop complaining about the mess.

She gave me the bedroom next to hers. We cleaned it out and furnished it with a couple of recliners and a television. The deal lasted until my first visit, when I found my room full of growing piles. I cleaned the piles out as my mother fretted and shouted. Then I put a padlock on the door and told her that I’d only visit if the room remained locked.

I worked the combination on the padlock, and we entered a clean, airy space. The two recliners, a big one for me and a smaller one for my mother, faced a small HDTV that tapped into my mother’s cable. We sat in our chairs and my breath came easily for the first time since I had left the highway. I sighed and rested.

My mother asked, “So, what’s new?”

I said, “Not much. I met a new girl. Lucy.”

“The poor thing. I suppose she’ll last as long as the others.”

The relaxation fled. I said, “Yeah. The poor thing. You know, my wife, Carol, lasted quite a while.”

“You and Carol fought all the time at the end. Just before she died.”

“I’m just saying—”

The silence hung between us. I struggled to remember why I had made this visit. I thought about the house in Pittsfield, full of light and air and pictures of my father being happy. I hadn’t seen any pictures of our family for a long time.

I asked, “Do you have any pictures from when I was little?”

My mother gestured out of my room and said, “They must be out there somewhere. Why do you ask?”

“I just realized that I don’t have many pictures of our family.”

“Well, film was expensive.”

“I guess.”

Silence. Then my mother said, “I saw on the news that a man was killed in the South End.”

“Yes.” I didn’t mention that it was in front my house.

“His name was John Tucker. The same name as your father.”

“I know. Isn’t that strange?”

The elephant had entered the room, but I wasn’t going to acknowledge him. People talk about the elephant in the room as if he’s a large, benign pet, who would be much happier if we stopped ignoring him.

That’s bullshit.

The elephant in the room is a raging rogue that stomps the shit out of anyone foolish enough to address him. I was not going to talk about JT, Pittsfield, or my father screwing the babysitter.

My mother said, “Why this sudden interest in pictures? You never cared about your childhood.”

I said, “I don’t know. Midlife crisis? I want to understand Dad better.”

“There is not much to understand. Your father was a very simple man. He worked hard and was a good provider. Our house was paid for by the time he died. We never wanted for anything. He was fond of you.”

Fond of me.

“He traveled a lot,” I said.

“Yes. He was always in Pittsfield, working all those hours. That’s all there was to do in Pittsfield. There’s nothing there.”

Nothing but his other family.

I said, “Do you have any of his old project papers?”

My mother stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“You know, diagrams, engineering books, things from his work.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m just curious. I’ve been feeling a need to connect with him.”

“Well, I’m sure they’re somewhere, but I don’t have the time to find them.”

“I could look.”

“No. I don’t want things disturbed. I know where everything is.”

“Then you can point out his papers?”

“Why are you suddenly so goddamn nosy? Did you come to see me, or did you just come out here to poke through my things?”

I said, “I came to see you.”

My mother said, “Turn on the TV. I want to watch the news.”

I turned on the TV. The twenty-four-hour news came on. Iran was being an international douchebag. Israel was intercepting missiles. The world was on the brink of collapse.

Situation normal.

My mother and I sat in the deepening gloom. The blue light of the TV washed over us as we settled into our visit.

Then the doorbell rang.