Cleaning Memory's Fields

Cleaning Memory's Fields

I used to think I was a packrat. That was before my sister’s cry for help. She recently listed her house for sale and had called me for help packing.

“Please come,” she begged me. “I can’t do this by myself! It’s too hard.”

“What’s hard about it? I mean, I don’t mind helping you, not at all, but I don’t get what you mean? What’s the hard part?”

“Are you kidding? This is my life – my life I have to go through ! Jeez, Mary, of all people, I’d expect you to understand.”

And well she might, for I did have an awful lot of experience at navigating through memory’s many highways, and had learned where the shortcuts were. At one time, I had been a keep-everything-my-children-ever-touched-in-school kind of person. I was the one who kept every yearbook, every greeting card. Had not only the negatives of every photo ever taken (yes, even the ones that didn’t come out right – as long as they contained the image of any part of my child’s body, I could not let it go), but duplicates as well. Sometimes, in the case of school pictures or those done at professional studios, I even had quadruplicates of photos. And that’s after I had given anyone related to the child a copy.

But every time I’ve moved from one house to another – which has been twelve times since my first child was born in 1971, I’ve been forced to purge my boxes of memorabilia. Tossing any of my mementos in the garbage can may bring on an anxious “Oh, my God! What have I done?” bout of regret and remorse when watching the trash truck turning the corner. Still, I fight the good fight against clutter and sift through everything I hold dear, tearfully letting go of some, and holding back only the most sacred. The kindergarten handprints, the blue ribbons from swim team, the championship-winning football jersey. And, of course, the most seductive and tender of love letters.

So, after having one through this painful but necessary ritual for the zillionth time a few months ago, I felt expertly up to the task of guiding my sister to sift through her stuff and glean the trash from the treasures (and, to tell the whole truth didn’t feel so awfully bad that she had to go through it because she had told me many times that she thought my houses – she never called them “homes” – looked too stark and not warm enough, that they lacked “character.”) I thought I was prepared for a lot of “trash.”

I wasn’t. Upon inspection of my sister’s home, I had another Xanax-demanding, horror-stricken, “Oh, my God” moment, but this one was of the “Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?” category.

“Jesus H. Christ, Shirley! Haven’t you ever thrown out anything? A single piece of paper? A greeting card? A stained tablecloth?”

She could’ve at least gotten rid of that little Halloween witch that broke three days after she bought it ten years ago and has never been repaired. What about all the malfunctioning electronic devices lying around? Was she waiting for a technological miracle to occur? Jesus turning eight-track tape players into modern CD players? What in the world was she thinking?

Before I got there that day to help, I thought I knew her pretty well, this woman. I have to refer to her here with some distance or I’ll feel disloyal and backbiting. Hmmm…am I backbiting and disloyal? This woman, my sister, the one who never let her kids eat in her car, the one who balks at paper napkins in restaurants, whose business is run with the efficiency and precision of a brain surgery team in the first half hour of their work. What had happened to her?

“I can’t believe you have a whole box of those things,” I told her. I was referring to the cute little “Precious Moments” ceramic figures that have witless, overused clichés inscribed on them, the ones about friends and homes and kitchens. The ones that no one (at least no one I thought I knew) ever really looks at, nobody wants to keep dusting week after week.

“Who gave you that one?” I asked.

“Irene.”

“Who is Irene?”

“I worked with her at my first job – remember? At the music store. In 1968. She’s dead now.”

“I don’t remember you ever talking about an Irene,” I say, curious as to why I had never heard her name mentioned.

“Well, we weren’t really ever friends.”

“You knew her over thirty years ago, you weren’t friends, she’s dead now, and you want to keep this Godawful thing because…”

“See? That’s what I mean. You are so cold.”

“Cold? That’s cold? To want to trash something that you never did value sentimentally, never will value sentimentally, and has no other value whatsoever? That’s cold? Man, you’ve got it bad, Sis.”

“Got what bad? What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”

“Ah, jeez. Never mind. We’re never going to get anywhere this way. Let’s stop fussing and start getting through this stuff, alright? You only have two months, you know.”

“See? There you go again. Insult by inference.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I was joking, for God’s sake.”

“Well, stop the joking, will ya? This isn’t exactly fun for me, you know?”

Oh, but it was going to be fun for me. Really. I couldn’t wait to start. There was not a single flat surface (or any other kind) that wasn’t shouldering part of that poor house’s burden. I was aghast and eager at the same time. Could this possibly be my sister? My God. She must’ve been desperate for help to allow me to see this visual cacophony. It had to mean she was at the point of breakdown. That point where you know that inertia is your enemy and that if you don’t reverse direction, or at least stop, you will (or in her case, her house would) implode, leaving detritus strewn about. I believed, at least at that point, that the state of her home was probably indicative also of the state of her mental health. It had to be. No one could live with so much stuff and not feel smothered. Was she ready for an intervention?

I didn’t think so. I seriously began to doubt that she was after the box of Precious Moments incident, but was further convinced when I opened the fridge to get a Coke and saw the preserves that our aunt gave all the women in our family for Christmas about seven years ago.

“What’s this?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Aunt Polly’s kumquat preserves.”

“She’s been dead for five years. You can’t eat these. You’ll get food poisoning.”

“I know,” she answered. “What? You think I’m stupid?”

“Um…no. But why are they in here if you know you can’t eat them?”

“Because she’s dead…duh!”

“And…”

“And that’s all I have to remember her by,” my sister said. “What, you think I should throw those away, too?”

“Probably be a good idea, hon. Just in case someone besides you gets hungry and doesn’t know the whole story. Besides, it’s just one more thing you won’t have to move and you’ll have more room in the fridge, to boot.”

“Oh, my God. You are hollow, I swear. You’d probably throw away your best friends ashes if you didn’t like the urn anymore.”

I didn’t respond. She was out of control now. I suggested that we sit and chat for a few minutes before we began in earnest. She was huffy already and we hadn’t done anything. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so much fun after all.

We chatted for a few minutes before we started. We discussed a preliminary plan of attack, deciding to start with the hall tree at the front door (the receptacle for untold numbers of back-issue magazines she’d intended to read, objects left behind by guests who never seemed to miss them and which she’d intended to “drop by” their homes. Some – no, a lot – of mail dated, some of it, as far back as the last time I had moved: eleven months ago. We would blaze a path to the kitchen/dining room area and move on to the family room next door. There were reasons that we decided to proceed in that particular order. First, because of the amount of – well, I’ll be charitable and call it junk – that had piled up on the hall tree and its environs, all who entered the house had to come through the garage door. In short, the way through the hallway into the house was constipated. It wouldn’t budge. We’d have to start at the farthest point from the door and proceed laxatatively toward it. The kitchen and dining room would be next because there no longer remained any space in which to prepare a meal, or anyplace to sit to eat it. Yes, even the chairs in the dining room looked like poor Atlas trying valiantly to shrug.

She made a fresh pot of coffee – from in the bathroom, using its water, its electricity and its one empty flat surface (don’t ask!) to prepare it). We rolled up our sleeves and began.

After three hours work, I had been allowed to dispose of exactly three magazines (out of thirty-seven), one pair of athletic socks (but not the three greasy ball caps or the broken Birkenstocks whose owners no doubt had forgotten all about them), and several announcements by Ed McMahon that she had won at least thousands – if not millions – of dollars.

“Can I toss these?” I asked. There were probably well over twenty credit card offers from various banks and other, less reputable organizations.

“No! I’m going to read them and choose one to transfer all my balances over. Just think how much money I’ll save after I move all my current high percentage rates to a zero-rate card.”

“They’re probably all expired.”

“Yeah, but they want the business. I’ll bet they’ll honor them.”

Poor thing. Didn’t she realize that since she had so many late charges because she couldn’t ever find her bills that came in, neither these nor any credit card companies would grant her any credit at all, much less a zero rate? No. She didn’t

Near the beginning of the fourth hour and second pot of potty coffee, I suggested a break. I told her that our approach wasn’t working. That if she wanted me to help she would have to start tossing more stuff; that we wouldn’t ever be done and she would end up having to take ninety percent of the junk with her. I told her that it might be a good idea if she just left for a few hours and let me go through some of her things without her . I promised not to throw out anything…anything, that she might possibly be emotionally attached to. She was confused, hurt. She’d thought that we’d been making great strides in conquering the chaos. Like a British Nanny, I felt it was my duty to stand firm. It was in her best interest, after all. I was empathetic, but not sympathetic. I stood my ground. For a while. Until she started crying. I never could stand to hear my sister cry. She doesn’t cry pretty. She cries like a calf bawls when it is separated from it’s mother. I realized that this was not just about the stuff. It was about what the stuff represented to her. She demanded to be present for the funeral of every leftover fragment of her life which might hold the glimpse of a moment she could not get back – perhaps a can’t-live-without-recipe for cooking a meal she had gotten from a friend, or a book about raising a child that she had relied on to help her figure out how to push wind under her kids’ wings and send them out of the nest.

Exasperated, we decided to compromise. We would begin anew the next morning, working together, but separately – from different rooms.

Once back at my own home, I began looking around at the condition in which I lived, remembering the things she had said to me. Where was all the stuff of life? The things that made a house look lived in, look like a home? Gone. Thrown out. Or, hidden, organized, categorized and filed away from human eyes.

I had systematically removed the heart from my home. I moved quickly to the garage and began frantically ripping open carefully stacked and labeled banker’s boxes, grabbing handfuls of stuff to bring back into my house and toss casually about the various rooms. There. Now it felt right. Homey. Used. Worn and human and cluttered with a little love.

Later that night as I lay in my bed, mentally tackling my sister’s dining room, I started to squirm a bit. Recognizing the symptoms of what I now considered my psychological disorder, I resisted as long as I could. Then, when sleep would simply not come, I tiptoed down the stairs to the family room and started neatening up the photo albums I had brought in from the garage earlier that evening. Feeling somewhat mollified, I thought I had it licked. There was one stack of books, however, that was staring at me. Maybe even calling my name. I decided just to look through them. Certainly not all of them were absolutely necessary in order to warm up the room.

When the phone rang and startled me, I was still in the garage, in my pajamas, and was freezing. I held a small box marked “KIDS’ SUMMER CAMP PROJECTS.” I walked into the kitchen to answer the phone. “Hello?” I said.

It was my sister. “Hey, what’s happening? I thought you said you’d be here at 8 o’clock.”

I glanced through the kitchen door to the garage, turned upside down. My eyes moved to the trash barrels, full of more of my life.

“I can’t help you today. I’m sick,” I told her.

“Oh, that’s okay,” she said. “I realized how right you were about the way I’ve been living. I couldn’t sleep, so I spent the night tossing stuff. I have to make a trip to the dump this morning, anyhow. By the way…what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered, gulping and visualizing my sister as a cold-hearted crone, living in a sterilized home.

“But whatever it is, it’s contagious as hell. Stop by here on your way to the dump, will you? I’ve got a few things I want you to take.”