Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 5

  You may think that, having had my better half (and never was that designation more apt, I'm forced to admit, now that some of the pus has drained from my wound), my life's companion ripped away over fresh laundry during an afternoon argument lasting less than half an hour, I would immediately go into a steep decline. But for better or worse, the cannon shots we'd fired at each other, many of which had found their mark, on me at least, had left me awash in rage and despair. The result was an intense rush of adrenaline. And in fact my normally lethargic schedule under the Barbara Plan showed quite a spike of activity in the week or two after Leilah stalked out, with only her suitcase, plus the cat in her United Airlines pet carrier. At some point in the proceedings I'd heard myself screaming “Well take the fucking cat, then!” even though I knew on some level that I would thus be sending away the only other organism on the planet that had a real interest in me, based though it was on my expertise in opening cans.

  My first impulse after she stomped down the stairs, yelling over her shoulder “I'll be back for my stuff. Just leave it alone!” was to rid myself of everything in the apartment that might remind me of her. By the time the anger and hurt had subsided a little bit I was already well embarked on this project, and it was too late to turn back. Probably I should just have moved, leaving all her possessions in their piles; but of course that wasn't an option, rents being what they are in this very popular city. Or I could have just put all her stuff in storage. But I was in a vengeful mood, and anyway this step did have the benefit of excising one major splinter that had been embedded in our relationship for 25 years: namely, her refusal to get rid of anything once it entered the apartment.

  First to go were the slag heaps left behind by her routine daily activities. Leilah never stacked anything, or if she did, the iron rule was that bigger things should always be placed on top of smaller ones, so that her piles had the unnatural appearance of balancing boulders. But rather than the earth’s old clay, worn into strange shapes by the patient strokes of sun and weather, her structures were made up of used kleenex and eraserless pencils, old ticket stubs, the opened envelopes of bills paid years before, post-its scribbled with cryptic reminders (“Myrtle bulky pickup”), strips of bubble wrap, computerized blood test results, unused postcards, packets of wildflower mix, worms of yarn, and the loosest, most corroded pocket change you can imagine. It’s surprising how many unread books could hide in one of those piles; in fact, it was one of the small securities of our relationship that I could always be sure, when my own neat tower of current books had been pulled down one by one, that there would be something to read, somewhere, in one of Leilah’s piles. I had to be careful not to move anything else when I removed a book, though, because she had a phenomenal ability to detect any change in the contours of any pile in the house. “Damn it, have you been going through my things?” With her hands on her hips. I can see that now. It was one of the few things that visibly annoyed her.

  I stomped over to Safeway right after she left and bought several dozen giant black garbage bags and began just loading the piles into them wholesale. I had to work fast, because I discovered right away things I had never noticed before. For example, I found that the creases and curves of a used kleenex somehow embody the personality of the person who crumpled it, as the biologists are always telling us the particular bends and folds in a chain of amino acids reveal what protein it belongs to. Some of those piles went way back in our marriage, years even, and to examine them closely might have sapped my will to remove them. On the other hand, it was satisfying to see the lost horizontal surfaces of our apartment reappear, smooth and unscratched, preserved from the ravages of time by the overburden of Leilah’s life. Over the next couple of days I hauled probably a dozen of the black bags down to the stinky garbage room and tossed them in the trash bin, in my fury not even trying to sort out the recyclables.

  Once the piles had been cleared, I started on the clothes. Despite her storming out and her unkind parting words, I was afraid to take this step over the brink, which I knew would make her furious, even though I was also sure that in her new birdwatcher persona she would never wear any of those elegant duds again. Not to mention that clothes are even more personal than crumpled kleenexes. I started with the things that had the most dust on their shoulders, the ones hanging high up on the storage racks I’d built for her – too high for her to reach in fact, which suggested to me that Leilah herself had given up on them. I took them down, trying not to disturb the dust too much, and stuffed them into black bags. Then I moved lower, into the more recent epochs, the printed silk tops and jackets, a few sweaters she had knitted and only worn a couple of times, pants made out of thin stuff that had clung around her hips and then fallen loose to the tops of her feet. . . into the black bags. I had more trouble with the bottoms of the closets, where I might find, among the polar fleece jackets clotted with cat hair, a silk nightgown or two and some bras still billowing with ghostly curves. After a while, though, I was able to get into a rhythm of just grabbing and stuffing, so it went pretty fast.

  My frugal nature would not allow me to just take all this down to the garbage room, so I had to make many trips to Community Thrift, with a couple of bags at a time, but I finally got it done. And then there was the jewelry, and the books, a weird combination of 19th-century French realist novels and field guides to the sparrows of Arizona. . . Well, what’s the point in detailing all the stages? I cleared it all out, except for the yarn, don’t ask me what premonition made me save that. With all the other stuff gone, however, the yarn wasn’t a problem, because it all fitted in Leilah’s now empty closets, after I vacuumed out the thick layers of dust and scrubbed down the walls. And the knitting magazines, of course. There were hundreds, and I left them, but now stacked neatly on the shelves and floors of the relatively bare closets. I bought a bunch of transparent plastic storage boxes at the Container Store and arranged the yarn neatly in them, where sunbeams from the forgotten window, now uncovered by the removal of all those silk tops and unencumbered by the cat, could pass slowly over all the surprisingly rich colors once a day.

  It took me a couple of weeks to accomplish all this removal, storing, tidying, and cleaning, but when I got done the apartment looked as I had fantasized it should, through the 25 long years during which I had watched, with a gradually growing dread, the sediment of our lives, especially hers, accruing. By leaving, Leilah had at least solved one of my emotional problems, my uneasy imaginings about how we’d be living in another 25 years. How high would the piles be? How deep the parabolas in the wooden rods that supported her thousand garments on their hangers? How many shopping bags and tote bags could be crammed into one four-room apartment? Would we eventually live in a labyrinth of interconnected tunnels, like rodents, with walls that had to be braced and watchfully maintained to prevent dangerous cave-ins? These were the questions I would ask every time I vacuumed, after waiting for Leilah to go shopping for more clothes or off to her knitting group, while picking up the tote bags mounded around her chair to get the vacuum cleaner hose under them, and then trying to replace them in exactly their original orientations. Now the piles and tote bags were gone, the wadded kleenexes collected and thrown out, the cat hair all vacuumed up and never to be replenished, the closets empty except for their neat stacks of magazines and storage boxes full of yarn, all horizontal surfaces free of dust, the kitchen table swept clean of extraneous papers and little white pubic curls of dental floss. As the piles eroded, the half-obscured windows reemerged, and it was clear that they had to be washed. Once that was done, the whole quality of light in the apartment had changed, becoming whiter, purer, more sharp-edged. The sunbeams of advancing spring moved slowly, empty, invisible in the dustless air, sweeping for the missing cat across spotless carpets. It was magical.

  The only problem being that, like all fantasies, the impeccably ordered living space was far better as a daydream than it could ever b
e as a reality. I guess I would have taken the whole mess back if Leilah had come with it. I know that's lame. But having had my beastly way with the apartment, I found that I no longer had any wish to be in it. All I wanted to do was roll over and go to sleep.