Jay, Tim, Macie, and I enter my mother’s bedroom. We have a few hours to clean out what took a lifetime to accumulate before Tim and I need to drive back to the Bay Area. Tim parks the truck under the first-floor stucco balcony. We decide to drop everything we are going to donate in the bed of the truck. Willie, the building manager, who acts in television commercials, has given us the go-ahead to use the empty Dumpster, also just off the balcony, for whatever we will be throwing away.
Jay opens the top drawer of the dresser that towers against the wall only inches from the foot of her bed. For now, she is all around us, in the heavy air, her smell, in these most treasured remnants from her life, for the last time.
“Forks,” Jay says. He holds them out. Our Batman forks from Point Lookout. Woody Woodpecker and Robin. I haven’t seen them since we were little. “Toss them?”
“No,” I say. I take them from him.
There are more of our forks in the drawer, made for child-size hands, from our meals around the Point Lookout table. Meals and feeding, her offering sustenance to us. Later what she fed us represented her control, yes, but also the passing down of enlightenment. A new understanding that she believed would change everything. Jay pulls out a worn pillowcase with a mouse in yellow pajamas surrounded by white clouds. Mine when I was five, maybe six. He unfolds a tiny pair of boy’s shorts, holds up a stuffed frog. I consider how many moves she made since the Dakota, to Long Island, then Beverly Hills, and to Queens, and finally ending in this room in Los Angeles. Secretly carrying these remnants of her children with her, telling no one, our childhood tucked in this drawer. She never said, Don’t grow up, though I know she was missing us in the weeks before she died. Instead she carried us across the country and back again, carried us across her lifetime. Now Jay is under the small hallway sink, where I have cleared away the old ointments and creams. He pulls out the sci-fi water ionizer box and rips all the thin white hoses from their attachments to the sink’s water supply, dismantling this most recent prized possession of hers in seconds. We pull the boxes from underneath her bed, from behind the clothes in the hall closet, gather books off the shelves, sift through all the stacks and piles and heaps. Five hours later, both the back of the truck and the Dumpster are filled to overflowing. The inside cab of the truck holds what I will save, the things most important to her: photos, my grandmother’s hair combs, the purple jacket my mother wore for Illinois’s performances on the SS Norway, her photo album from her trip to Atlantic City for the Miss America pageant. I save the article in which the journalist wrote that if my mother had played the piano instead of the bassoon for her talent, she would have won the pageant. Also in the backseat cab of the truck is the sewing machine, still too heavy for me to lift, that she spent so many hours bent over when we were children in the Dakota. We found it tucked in the back of the closet.
I feel like I am killing her all over again, handing what we have decided to donate to the man accepting Goodwill donations who says he loves jazz. All these items, painstakingly gathered and stored for a lifetime, and it took less than half a day to clear the apartment and thirty minutes to transfer everything from the car into the Goodwill bins. But there is also a freedom in clearing out all the vitamins and herbs and supplements; the jars of Derma K and gardenia water and KinoTox pads and vitamin-D oil and bags of bath clay, jars filled with ionized water, with mysterious liquids, goopy with grime, dusty labels peeling. Bobby pins, hair clips, gathered in little round jars, all the evidence of her routine, her private and personal bath, stopped in an instant, made irrelevant. As if I have waited all my life for this moment. Her burden of things kept was our burden, pressing down on us still, even as we went about living our lives.