The following personal essay will be published in The Petigru Review, a literary journal in South Carolina, this October.
The Shoebox
by S. Jane Gari
There are many places that made me. I’m taking inventory. Gathering all the fragments together and making canvas out of mosaic. Next week I’m getting married, and I need to feel like just one person.
Packing is an act I perform in solitude. My fiancé has offered his help. But I don’t want it. His only big move was to college. And his parents are still together. Moving can be cathartic for me in a way I’m glad he’ll never understand. Each time I move I conduct a forced examination. Like revising the manuscript of my life- it’s always in the drafting stage.
Each piece of memorabilia imposes its voice as it is neatly wrapped, tucked in a box, sealed with tape. A large white shoebox collects odds and ends that deserve more than “Miscellaneous.” There is a list on the side of that precious box: address book, diplomas, passport, old letters, photographs.
The box has traveled with me to five states. I always look through it when I’m moving. A ritual. The photo on the top of the stack shows my six-year-old sister and an eight-year-old me in identical winter coats, our eyes red with tears. We are leaving our father’s house to return to our mother’s. When I was a kid I thought it was strange for him to photograph us looking so miserable. Now I think he did it to remind himself that we missed him.
When my parents split we were living in Monroe Falls, Ohio, during the abysmal economy of the early 80’s. Dad had been sleeping on the couch in our den for days. My sister Terri and I had taken refuge under my bed while we listened to our parents shouting at each other in their bedroom. “Divorce” was in my vocabulary, but it wasn’t in my world. It was not yet the epidemic that would later sweep more than half of my friends’ lives. It was a remote idea that floated in the same murky realm of sexual innuendo we laughed at without understanding. But it was closing in on us, imposing itself until it was tangible. It was my father looking up at me, suitcases in hand, while I stood moping at the top of the stairs. It was my mother, sitting us down on the living room couch we associated with Christmas, Easter and extended family to present us with a picture she had drawn in crayon. On the far left of the picture was my father, then my mother, me, and Terri. Mom ripped the far left figure from the page, leaving the three of us alone, save for my father’s cartoon thumb that nearly grasped my mother’s open hand. My sister was only five and the vision of our family literally torn asunder sent her reeling to the floor in hysterics. My mother calmly stated that Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, that we would still see him on weekends. She continued talking in that eerie calm, perhaps trying to diffuse my sister’s anguish as she writhed on the floor. My mother’s voice grew dimmer and was muted by a pounding rhythm in the back of my head that would become the migraines I would know for the rest of my life. For now it was just pain. Unbelievable pain.
In the next few weeks my mother often voiced her fears that we were just one step away from “the poor house,” and although I was not familiar with the exact Dickensian images she intended to conjure, I knew that it wasn’t a condition I wanted to endure. I fantasized about being able to get a job so I could assuage her fears, but at seven, I had no skills, no mode of transportation. My mother began dressing in skirts and blouses and painting her nails as her hands rested on the steering wheel of our silver Buick. Interviews. Many interviews. On yet another fruitless job search day for my mother, the bus dropped Terri and me off at the bottom of the steep hill that led to our house that modestly sprouted amid others on the cul-de-sac of Forest Hill Drive. As we made our way to the sidewalk I saw my mom. She was hunched over at the stop sign combing through the grass with her right hand until she found something, plucked it from the ground and transferred it to her left hand. Then she began combing again. She was sobbing.
We approached my mother cautiously. “What are you doing?” I asked softly.
“I’m looking for money. I saw you throw your lunch down the sewer yesterday.”
It was true. She had made me baloney sandwiches every day for three weeks, and I couldn’t stand the sight of baloney anymore. The hawk-eyed lunch ladies would report such wastefulness, so I had stashed the wrapped sandwich in my jacket and chucked it down the sewer drain halfway up the hill to my house, stealthily. Or so I thought.
“I’m sorry Mommy. I just couldn’t eat it, and I knew you’d be mad.”
“Mad!” she shrieked. “Mad! I don’t know where our next meal is coming from! I don’t know what we’re going to do! I am picking up spare change from the side of the road! This is what I did today while you were in school and while your father was doing God knows what! And you think you can throw a sandwich away! We are headed for the poor house!”
There was that ominous and mysterious threat again. My stomach tightened; I hugged my jacket closer, concealing the second baloney sandwich I knew I couldn’t throw away now. She turned from us and trudged up the hill, counting the change in her left hand.
“Seventy five cents!” she screamed, presumably at us, although her back was turned, and she pumped her fist full of change in mock victory toward the grey sky.
That night my mother made us peanut butter and jelly for diner, citing that’s all there was. My sister later complained to me while we took our bath that her stomach was growling.
“I have a baloney sandwich I could split with you.”
“I don’t want baloney.”
“Neither do I.”
“What’s the poor house?” she asked, brushing the hair of her mermaid doll.
“I’m not sure” I responded, disappointed that I couldn’t answer her.
That night, I sat up in my bed with the baloney sandwich I had pulled from my jacket. I ate it, each bite soggy with warm mayonnaise. The light from my mother’s bedroom seeped under the crack of my door and expanded outward on my floor until it lost itself in the corner among my toys. My mother cried audibly in her bedroom for several minutes before going silent. Her light went out. Change jingled softly, like little bells.
The Saturday after the stop sign incident my mother decided to indulge in a luxury: bacon. It baked in the oven while my sister and I salivated over the aroma as we watched our cartoons in the adjacent den. And then we smelled smoke. And then we heard the pounding footsteps in the kitchen, the frantic opening of the oven door, and the screams of my mother being burned as bacon grease siphoned off the corner of a tilted baking sheet. We scurried into the room where my mother, slumped in a corner, oven mitts still in hand stared at the ceiling wailing, “I just wanted to make a nice breakfast! I just wanted to make a nice breakfast!” The wailing tapered off to a whimper while I inspected her arms. She had burned herself, but I couldn’t be sure how badly.
“Mom? Are you okay?” She couldn’t answer my question. She only stared at the ceiling and cried, repeating her earlier mantra as if that would somehow resurrect the bacon. Terri sat on a kitchen chair, her legs dangling, her face blank. I called the only other person I could trust and that could help us, and the last person my mother probably wanted to see. I don’t know how long it took for my father to get to our house. In my mind, it’s as if I told him what happened and then he materialized in our kitchen. But he knelt on the floor, rocking our crying mother gently in his arms, whispering to her, examining her forearm and then holding an ice pack to it. She calmed down after a few minutes, but my father stayed with her, cradling her exhausted body that he folded into his own. Their embrace conveyed all the devastation of La Pieta, and I held that picture in my head for days.
Photographs neatly stacked once more, I close and tape my shoebox that will never be closed and taped. Not by my father. Not by my husband. Not by anyone.
