remained garbled, as if Olivia had given up trying to correct them. But Charlotte was able to understand that these opening paragraphs were written during her husband Ronson Targman’s dying days.
You call for him, and he will not come, you call for me and only part of me arrives. I go through the motions, wash your body as if I were washing the floor: wet, swab, polish dry, just another one of your soldier boys…. The pain seizes you and you blame me. They tell me that you don’t mean it, this is the dementia, but it is not, it is the same thing you have always said have always done….Now they can care for you and I walk away, they will wipe my spittle from your face, thinking it is yours….
The dark sentiment took Charlotte by surprise, yet she knew it shouldn’t have done so, after meeting its author. Was the entire notebook like this? She moved to the last paragraphs on the last page in the notebook, dated roughly six months ago, the writing marginally clearer:
Golden girl, I always knew you would end up in the same place as me, small and insignificant, alone alone alone…. What good do your glory days do you now? We’re just a collage of ticket stubs from journeys to other times. The fat conductor never cared how much you paid, he would only look you over and decide if he would collect your ticket or not, if he would let you ride. But there were no free rides, only uncollected deaths.
This was not the sort of reading she needed at the moment, and she tossed the notebook back on the coffee table.
Housework. Housework was her catharsis. She suddenly remembered that the real estate agent was coming tomorrow morning, as well, and at the very least she ought to get the kitchen sanitary. She switched off the fireplace, took her dinner things back into the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, turned on the TV for company, and set to work, starting with taking the clean dishes out of the dishwasher and putting the dirty ones in, folding the clean linens and gathering the dirty, dumping the burnt bagel and scrubbing the cutting board, putting the trash bags in the large wheeled bins in the garage, and getting out a roll of new trash bags to tackle the junk mail and other papers.
Charlotte looked at the covers of the magazines and catalogs, their enticing headlines and pictures of perfect rooms and perfect outfits. The new reality that these things were no longer within her reach—or even her professional business to know about—suddenly made them abstract. The brown cashmere sweater with the fake fur collar on the cover model was as out of her price range as a ticket on the space shuttle. She found a notepad and wrote “TO DO” at the top. The first item: cancel subscriptions and mailing lists. It was one of the items on Diane’s budget plan. Canned laughter from the sitcom on the TV reminded her to add canceling the cable service, as well.
The refrigerator and freezer came next, tossing out expired food and putting the empty containers for the next dishwasher load in the sink. She made a decision not to buy any more food until she ate up everything she already had in the freezer, fridge, and pantry. That should save a few dollars on groceries and get the kitchen emptied out at the same time. The junk food, however, she sent straight to the trash. It was time to stop the pity-party food. Her jeans were getting tight, and it wasn’t like she would be able to run out and buy a new pair. It also made her feel guilty to have it around, because she didn’t let Ellis eat much junk food, no matter how much she begged for it.
There was still too much stuff on the counters: all the containers of utensils and dry goods, along with the toaster, the food processor, the large stand mixer, the blender, the coffeemaker, the microwave, and the many decorative things. Apart from the coffeemaker, most of it ought to go in the cabinets, she thought—or just go. But there wasn’t room, because the cabinets were full of old things she hadn’t used in years, and a large assortment of plastic containers. She recalled Olivia’s back porch, unusable because of the huge stacks of those containers and newspapers. That is not going to be me, I swear it, she thought. She moved all the containers into the recycling bin, collected the vacuum sweeper from the hall closet and used it to get the now-empty cabinet spotless, then moved all the appliances save the coffeemaker and the microwave into it. She did the same with another section of cabinet, and moved in the jars of dry goods and bottles of oil and vinegar.
That left the jars of utensils, the knife block, and the collection of animal cook figurines. She pulled out the only two knives she ever really seemed to use, and moved the block in with the appliances. The utensils could go in a drawer. That’s how Helene’s lovely kitchen was set up: everything stored in the cabinets and drawers. Her own four drawers, however, were full: one had the everyday flatware and another the good silver and serving pieces, but the other two were crammed with the miscellany every household seemed to collect: the junk drawers. Charlotte looked over the tape, scissors, envelopes, stamps, rubber bands, twist-ties, corks, matches, marbles, tiny pieces from doll clothes and puzzles, fast-food toys, miscellaneous spare parts for appliances she no longer had, recipe cards from friends and family, manufacturers’ coupons, and a mass of nearly unidentifiable objects that once had a designated purpose, now long forgotten. They reminded her of the jars full of such trivia in Olivia’s kitchen, only here they were unsorted. She took the drawers off their tracks and then over to the breakfast nook to sit and have coffee while she cleaned them out.
The TV was replaying the morning show from earlier in the day, with world news, bad news, economic news, mortgage crisis, political promises, and new diseases, interspersed with celebrity and sappy stories. Mixed in were commercials for cars, insurance, cell phones, and, for all she knew, magic wands. There was a story about some guy living with fifty things in a loft with beautiful windows. The simplicity of the space with its beautiful light caught her attention. Ten of his fifty things were in his closet. A small closet. A laptop. His well-fitting jeans and the laptop were expensive. No furniture, just some kind of roll-up bedding right on the floor. He called himself a minimalist, and he wrote a blog and some books about it. He said he was happy and free, and he looked it. Then came more commercials for cars, insurance, cell phones, and magic wands.
The morning show hosts were still talking about the guy with fifty things. The woman said it was weird. Elegant but weird, and couldn’t imagine any sane woman doing the same. The man said he couldn’t see his wife doing it, either, but thought a lot of men could, especially young men without kids or a house to worry about. The sports guy said he thought it was cool. The weather guy said, well, that might be okay in Southern California, but folks we have a big cold front blowing down from Canada next week and sure hope that one of those fifty things is a nice warm coat. Then a sports update, but Charlotte ignored it while trying to imagine herself living with only fifty things.
If, right at the moment, she only had fifty personal items to worry about, she would not be cleaning and sorting into the wee hours of the morning, particularly these five hundred pieces of trivia in two drawers on the breakfast table. She could “walk” from this house if she dared, like the Panettis did last year—just packed some bags, went to Argentina, and left everything else behind, from furniture to lawn mowers, for the bank to sort out. With only fifty things, she could live in a single room, like she did in her college dorm days, back when all she needed was a room of her own, simple and quiet, in which to do her work. Charlotte imagined what those things would be: her laptop, certainly, and her cell phone. A few clothes, grooming items, then cooking things, a decent bed—sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor like the guy on TV would not be doable for long—her favorite pieces of art, the photo albums, her favorite dishes, rugs, and—!
The so-called minimalist probably had a storage unit somewhere that he raided on a regular basis, Charlotte thought. It would be hard to know how to live with so few things, since she was attached to an awful lot of her stuff as well as her creature comforts. She’d just spent the last ten years, after all, writing about stuff, caring about it, having opinions about it, and making recommendations about it. But when she looked down at the jumble in the drawers, h
er brain hit the wall and she was overwhelmed by an almost life-or-death urge: No more.
She worked quickly, picking out a few things from the drawers that she knew were needed or used fairly recently, then dumped out everything else into a cardboard box. A quick wipe and sweep of the drawers, then in went the things she used the most. It was now easy to find and grab every single item, every spoon, spatula, scissors, knife, ball of twine, roll of tape. Everything current. She now had two entire drawers that looked like she wished life would be: comprehensible.
Charlotte gathered some more boxes from the garage and filled one of them with the cooking utensils she didn’t often use and the jars that held them. She filled another two boxes with the animal cook figurines, and recalled how she and Jack would pick them up at restaurant gift shops, resorts, antique shops, and flea markets. She had actually been tired of them for a long time, and they were a pain to keep clean, especially in a kitchen. She wiped down each one before it went into a box.
By the time her mind felt clearer and more settled, it was two in the morning and she’d