Dumpster full of Windows
The train slows and the automated woman’s voice goes, “This station stop is: Pearl River.” Peering out I see a vacant lot and a dumpster overflowing with discarded, wooden-framed windows, and I immediately think how nice it would be to have them.
“Why?” Pam asks later.
“I don’t know. To make something.”
“What are you going to make out of used windows?”
I have no idea what I am going to make out of used windows. Greenhouses, maybe, even though I do not know how to build greenhouses. I have only a beginner’s carpentry set that has been used mainly to hammer nails into the walls and assemble shelving. But I could come up with something, I think. There is a full dumpster of rustic, faded-white windows that I could use for something but at this point the train is starting to move and I am watching the windows recede into the past but am still thinking, “I know where they are. When I get to my parents’ house I can borrow the car and then drive back here for them.” I press my face longingly to the train’s own window, watching the dumpster as though it were a relative I am sad to be leaving.
The train slows and the woman’s automated voice says, “This station stop is: Nanuet.” My friend pointed out that they normally have a woman’s automated voice for routine information and a man’s automated voice to warn you about things, like minding the gap and standing clear of the closing doors please. The woman’s voice says all the syllables clearly and distinctly, as if Nanuet is the final answer in a multiple-choice question that my teacher is reading aloud.
In 1863, the Civil War battle with the largest number of casualties was fought at which location:
a. Appamatox
b. Gettysburg
c. Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom
d. Nanuet
I grab my bag and wait by the exit, steadying myself with the tops of the high backed seats. The tan vinyl on one of the seats has been slashed and someone has fixed it by stitching it back together in a zipper pattern with light pink thread, the inch-long ends hanging frayed from either side. It looks like my knee after that time I slashed it open playing freeze tag on the blacktop and the doctor sewed it sweetly back together-close, even stitches as if he were hemming a skirt. The train pulls to a full stop and the man in his cylindrical, visored conductor’s hat says, “watch the ice” and nods and I walk down the steep train stairs to the sidewalk of the station, looking for my mother’s car. She honks and I see her and run toward the car, getting in quickly because it is freezing outside, and she says, “Hello, I love you, you can put my purse in the back if it’s in your way.” And I buckle myself in and tell her the purse is fine. The light gray interior of her car is uncluttered and calm. My mother is wearing a charcoal gray wool coat with a long, lapel, and a delicate white wool scarf that billows from her neck like an ascot. She is wearing light blue cashmere gloves, with her right hand at the top of the steering wheel, the other resting casually in it’s lower left corner.
She pulls her sunglasses from the dashboard-they are always in a small compartment in the dashboard-and puts them on and kisses me.
“It’s good to have you home,” she says. “If only for the weekend.”
“It’s good to be home.”
“Do you have a specific agenda?” she asks.
“To relax,” I tell her.
I am working at the type of office job that is inexplicably stressful and where I do not do anything that is interesting. The type of job where people say, “What do you do?” and rather than tell them what I do I tell them the name of the company I work for and they go, “Ohhhh. Aha, neat!”, as if I had answered their question. They go, “Do you like it there?” and I go, “It’s great,” and they smile and leave.
“But what DO you actually do?” a friend asked once.
“I’m not sure,” I said. Whatever it is that I do involves papers sometimes being left on my desk with dates on them, and I try, quickly, like I am playing hot potato, to finish them and get them to another person’s desk so that I do not still have them when the buzzer goes off. Whatever it is I do necessitates having a computer, I assume, since they have probably not given me one solely to check my e-mail and read the entirety of Wikipedia. I sit in my good chair with my bad posture, the gray waist-high walls encircling me like a playpen. To keep me occupied I have been given pushpins and binder clips to play with (don’t put them on your nose; they hurt) and a mobile of “things to get done today,” each written and dangling impossibly high above my head. As people walk by I reach up toward them, hoping they will slide their hands under my arms, scooping me up and putting me down somewhere more interesting.
“Are you an assistant?” my friend asks
“I might be,” I tell her. I knew when I interviewed for the job, what it was. I interviewed for the job wearing my office casual pants, which are something I own now. I stare at them sometimes, running my fingers over the tweed-the hidden inside button closure and the little metal hook that secures them to my waist. I own a suit also, and cannot put it on with out the urge to scribble a moustache on my upper lip with eyeliner pencil and pair it with one of my father’s ties. Sometimes the office that I work in goes, “Ok, everybody in the big room for a meeting,” but in a much more formal way-in an interoffice memo or an e-mail, and we all sit in front of a big screen and wait for presentations. Three or four of the executives will get to talk, decided amongst themselves either by a round of rock paper scissors or, more likely, by taking a vote for who is the most boring. I sit politely, crossing and uncrossing my legs, thinking of ways to make their Powerpoints more engaging and their speeches less soporific. My best idea, which I have not shared with my co-workers, is draping the people in the three front rows in plastic and putting the first quarter sales figures inside a watermelon and then smashing the watermelon. Everyone has to run around trying to pick up pieces of information and it will make the room smell like watermelon, which is a nice smell. And everyone would run home from work excited, going, “You’ll never believe what they did with the first quarter sales figures!” It was crazy!”
“When we get home will you help me get the groceries out of the trunk?” my mother asks.
“Sure.”
“You don’t have to start putting it away. Just bring the bags upstairs and I’ll go through them.”
My mother hits the button on the garage door opener, pulling in until she hits the tennis ball that is suspended from the garage ceiling by a piece of twine. If she goes past the tennis ball the car will smash into the boxes of whatever it is that we have stored in the garage. She puts her sunglasses back into the compartment in the dashboard.
“Pop the trunk,” I say, hoping she can hear me through the windows.
She pops the trunk and I start unloading; pulling out as much as I can carry so that I can make the fewest number of trips.
“Don’t hurt your back,” she says.
“I won’t.”
“Those soda boxes are heavy. Don’t carry so many of them.”
I nod solemnly and then proceed to pick up what is probably too many soda boxes, bending my knees and keeping my back straight. I walk back and forth between the kitchen and the garage, carrying double-bagged groceries and leaving them at the foot of the island. Milk, I put in the fridge.
“God, this room,” my mother says. Her kitchen is a pastel chapel of clutter, the bright sun through the skylight illuminating uneven stacks of plastic vitamin containers and cords and recipes that she has torn out of the newspaper that someday she wants to try because ‘Look, Kelly! Pesto and Eggplant!’ but that she will inevitably stuff into a Lord and Taylor bag and forget about. The kitchen table is littered with three pairs of scissors and a stapler, a mosaic of coupons where my mother anticipates saving a dollar on an Oral B toothbrush and 75 cents on a box of Reynold’s Wrap. I clear out a downed forest of nail files and place additional grocery bags on the counter.
The bags are heavy. Olives, kidney beans, rice, garbanzos. Progresso canned soups. One bag is filled entirely with 4-packs of Chicken of the Sea, solid albacore tuna in water.
“Tuna was on sale,” she says.
“Apparently,” I say. “And toilet paper and olive oil.” I pull out seven bottles of Tide, placing them labels out, in a row on the counter. “And detergent.”
“I had coupons.”
“And canned tomatoes,” I say, assessing. “And Brillo. And ten-packs of 100 Grand bars.”
“Each of those was only a dollar,” my mother says. She holds the long, thin package aloft, as if she were the statue of liberty, her other hand clenching a box of Low-Sodium Triscuits. “A dollar!”
A dollar is a good deal. I would buy the ten pack candy bars for my office sometimes. Or cookies. A lot of days I would run next door to Duane Reade and buy a pack of ten molasses cookies for a dollar and everyone walking by my desk would go, “Cookies!” and get really excited, like I had given them the rest of the day off or their supervisor had announced that it was a beautiful day and we would be having work “outside,” sending faxes from the park and signing memos under the trees. And someone from another department would take one of our cookies and would hand me a small-fonted form covered in lines of black text and suddenly the cookie would feel like gravel in my mouth, as if the paper were emblazoned with news of apocalyptic proportions.
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
Actually it will end in W-4 forms and copyright infringement lawsuits.
Please sign here to indicate that you have read and understood this poem and agree to its terms and conditions.
Signature ____________________________________
Print name____________________________________
“A little dramatic, are we?” my mother says. “No one likes forms.”
“I’m not being dramatic. I hate them. They make my throat close up.”
“Thank you Sarah Bernhardt,” my mother says.
I do try. I always try to read the forms but I can’t. In grammar school our librarian taught us the five-word rule, which means if you read the first page of something and there are more than five words you don’t understand, it might be a little bit above your reading level. There is no rule for when you understand all of the words on the page-contractual, stipulate, aforementioned, equity-and continue to sit silently, your head spinning, as if you are a five year-old who has been asked to write a summation of a James Joyce novel. “Your homework,” the teacher says, “is to read and summarize the first 14 chapters of Portrait of an artist as a young, young, young, sad, confused man who doesn’t like reading profit and loss statements and wishes he had a different job.”
There are thirteen brown paper bags lining the kitchen, as if someone has packed lunches for a family of giants.
“Where do these go?”
I am holding up three cans of kidney beans-holding two in one hand and one in the other, and there are 14 additional cans of kidney beans on the table.
“I don’t know,” my mother says. “Just put them anywhere for now and I’ll figure it out later.”
“Where do you have your other canned stuff?”
“I just sort of put it where it fits.” My mother is taking off her long overcoat and untucking her scarf to reveal a neatly ironed shirt she bought at Boscovs and wool pants that have a crease down the center of each leg. She is wearing a sweater but takes it off because she is always hot in the house.
“Is it hot in here or is it hot in here?” she’ll ask, fanning herself with her hand or a sheaf of papers from the counter. My mother used to say “Is it hot in here or is it me?” but stopped because Pam would always reply, “It’s you.”
“It’s me?” she’d ask, incredulous.
“It’s you,” Pam will reply dryly. “You’re going through menopause. Also,” she adds, “you’re crazy.”
“You’re not hot?” My mother would fan her face at close range, adjusting the thermostat.
“We’re freezing,” Pam would say. “Look at dad. He’s using a down comforter for his legs.”
My mother leaves to lay her sweater on the bed and then returns to the kitchen, biting her thumbnail, standing next to me. We stare at the clutter and she asks if there is anything I can do, as if her kitchen is an inoperable tumor and I am her last hope. I open the pantry doors by their brass knobs, each of us peering into a confused Narnia of dry goods and lost items. Peroxi-care toothpaste stares shyly from a nest of condensed milk.
“It’s overwhelming,” my mother says, smoothing out her shirt with her hands. Her nails are carefully shaped and buffed and painted clear.
“I know,” I say. “Everything is overwhelming.”
I am the person at my office who organizes the supply closet. It is one of the few parts of my job that I enjoy and that I am really good at.
“At which you are really good. Or, at which you excel,” my mother says. “It is one of the few parts of your job at which you excel.”
Here are my cardinal rules for organizing a work space:
1. If you use things a lot, have them easily accessible.
2. Keep pushpins near the bulletin board
3. Do not put things in containers with lids, because you are too lazy to unscrew a lid, take out a paperclip, and then put a lid back on.
“I don’t think I’m that lazy,” my mother says.
4. A lot of times you will think you are not that lazy, but you are.
5. Avoid junk drawers. They enable you to keep things you don’t need.
“I’m just-” she says. “I’m still stuck on the jars with lids thing. I don’t like that you’re using the word ‘lazy.’ It sounds like I’m intentionally slacking off.”
“Mom, I’m trying to do a bullet point list.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll stop. Finish your list.”
6. Keep a pad and pen by the phone, fastened to the desk if possible.
7. Have a large desk area clear for working.
8. Everything should have a place. If having a label maker helps you remember what goes where, buy one.
9. If something does not have a place and you do not need it enough to create a place for it, throw it out.
10. If things are still unorganized, adjust and adapt your workspace to the ways you discover you work. The definition of crazy is to do the exact same thing, expecting a different result. Be open to change.
“Let’s start,” I say, “with things that have no business being in a pantry.”
“Ok.”
“These,” I say, handing my mother a bag of deflated beach balls. “Why do you have these?”
“We got them at work,” she says.
“Why are you keeping them?”
My mother looks at me, smiling. To the questions of why she is keeping innumerable unused items, including (but not limited to) the beach balls, the candle shaped like an Irish Setter, the Fisher Price paintbrush, the ceramic jelly bean container, the used marbles, the broken wind chimes, and the sandwich bags full of dice, she will respond with one of the following:
• “For if I have grandkids someday.”
• “I like it.”
• “You don’t think it’s cute?”
• “I thought maybe someone would want it.”
• “It was a gift.”
• “You don’t think it’s cute?” (pause) “Really?”
• “Oh this? This I use sometimes.”
“When?”
“Sometimes,” she says, putting it back on the shelf.
I sigh, tugging on the pulls of my hooded sweatshirt. I walk toward the kitchen island-a light blue slab whose beaches are littered with thumbtacks and Reader’s Digests and photos that my mother prints out onto 8 ½ x11 computer paper. I grab a small garbage can and hoist it toward the counter.
“Don’t throw out the coupons!” she says, and she scuttles over toward me, her shirt coming slightly untucked. She is holding a green M&M dispenser to her chest like a baby.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, through my nose. I never remember if you are supposed to let the breath out through your nose or if you take the deep breath through just your nose and then let it out regularly. I walk into the living room and sit down in my father’s chair, pulling the down comforter up over my legs.
“I’m sorry,” my mother says from the doorframe.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“No it’s not,” she says. “We don’t get to see you that often. You came home to relax, not clean the kitchen.”
“ I am relaxing,” I tell her. “Being away from the city is relaxing.”
“Ok,” she says. “In your e-mails you sounded like your job was stressing you out. I just want you to have a place to unwind. I don’t want coming home to feel like work.”
“Coming home never feels like work,” I tell her.
“Or if you hate your job that much, you should find a new one. Look on Craigslist, or Monster-I always see these commercials at night for job websites.”
“I might,” I say.
It would be nice, I think, to have a new job that is not in an office and does not have gray walls and fluorescent lighting. It would be nice not to have to wear business casual brown pants and not to own nylons. It would be nice to have a room with a window, where I could see the people walking around on the sidewalks and I would know if the sun was shining. I think briefly of the dumpster overflowing with windows at the Pearl River station and debate mentioning it to my mother.
“What do you need them for?” Pam asks later in the evening, sitting upright in our father’s chair with the down comforter over her legs. “What are you going to make out of used windows?”
“I don’t know what I’m making,” I said. “I’ll build a house across the street from mom and dad’s house and I’ll live in it.”
“I mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t take a few,” she says. “I just didn’t know if you had something specific you wanted them for.”
“I don’t know yet,” I say, “I just thought they were beautiful. Maybe I’ll go back tomorrow to see if they’re still there.”
“If you girls are going somewhere,” my mother offers, “take my car. I moved it to the driveway so your father can use the garage.”
I walk downstairs to my father’s tool bench, which is organized very efficiently-tools arranged on a pegboard, the most frequently used within easy reach. I wrap my wide hand around a hammer but then re-think the order in which I will need the tools and pull the saw from its perch.
I will live, maybe, in a house made of windows down the street from my parents, where it is always warm and beautiful and I am always in a good mood. The house will be very organized and well-stocked with cookies and ten packs of 100 Grand bars and people will go there to relax and work through their problems.
“If you make the whole thing out of windows there’s going to be a lot of glare,” my mother warns.
“I don’t mind the glare.”
“You don’t think you will, but it can get bad,” my mother says. “And when it snows and the glare reflects off the snow? Hold on.” And putting on her overcoat and white scarf even though she is only walking outside for a second, she grabs her keys and hits the button that beeps and makes the lights flash and unlocks the car. Opening the car door she reaches for her sunglasses, which are always in a compartment in the dashboard.
“Wear these,” she says, “When the glare gets really bad, these will help.”
I thank her and put on the sunglasses. I will wear these to work on Monday, I think. I will saunter in to the office in my mother’s sunglasses, holding an idyllic wood-framed window, which I will set on the wall of my cubicle, propped against a bookcase. I will leave it open-it is nice to have windows, but it is nicer, sometimes, to have open windows; to feel a little bit of air on your face.
I will leave the window open and the wind will rush through. It will blow the smell of cookies back into the far corners of the office, where people on other floors will suddenly realize that they are hungry, and it will blow the papers from my inbox-shooting them out in sheaves out onto 49th street, leaving the air hung with forms-white and blinding and precipitating like snow.
“Why?” Pam asks later.
“I don’t know. To make something.”
“What are you going to make out of used windows?”
I have no idea what I am going to make out of used windows. Greenhouses, maybe, even though I do not know how to build greenhouses. I have only a beginner’s carpentry set that has been used mainly to hammer nails into the walls and assemble shelving. But I could come up with something, I think. There is a full dumpster of rustic, faded-white windows that I could use for something but at this point the train is starting to move and I am watching the windows recede into the past but am still thinking, “I know where they are. When I get to my parents’ house I can borrow the car and then drive back here for them.” I press my face longingly to the train’s own window, watching the dumpster as though it were a relative I am sad to be leaving.
The train slows and the woman’s automated voice says, “This station stop is: Nanuet.” My friend pointed out that they normally have a woman’s automated voice for routine information and a man’s automated voice to warn you about things, like minding the gap and standing clear of the closing doors please. The woman’s voice says all the syllables clearly and distinctly, as if Nanuet is the final answer in a multiple-choice question that my teacher is reading aloud.
In 1863, the Civil War battle with the largest number of casualties was fought at which location:
a. Appamatox
b. Gettysburg
c. Dorney Park and Wildwater Kingdom
d. Nanuet
I grab my bag and wait by the exit, steadying myself with the tops of the high backed seats. The tan vinyl on one of the seats has been slashed and someone has fixed it by stitching it back together in a zipper pattern with light pink thread, the inch-long ends hanging frayed from either side. It looks like my knee after that time I slashed it open playing freeze tag on the blacktop and the doctor sewed it sweetly back together-close, even stitches as if he were hemming a skirt. The train pulls to a full stop and the man in his cylindrical, visored conductor’s hat says, “watch the ice” and nods and I walk down the steep train stairs to the sidewalk of the station, looking for my mother’s car. She honks and I see her and run toward the car, getting in quickly because it is freezing outside, and she says, “Hello, I love you, you can put my purse in the back if it’s in your way.” And I buckle myself in and tell her the purse is fine. The light gray interior of her car is uncluttered and calm. My mother is wearing a charcoal gray wool coat with a long, lapel, and a delicate white wool scarf that billows from her neck like an ascot. She is wearing light blue cashmere gloves, with her right hand at the top of the steering wheel, the other resting casually in it’s lower left corner.
She pulls her sunglasses from the dashboard-they are always in a small compartment in the dashboard-and puts them on and kisses me.
“It’s good to have you home,” she says. “If only for the weekend.”
“It’s good to be home.”
“Do you have a specific agenda?” she asks.
“To relax,” I tell her.
I am working at the type of office job that is inexplicably stressful and where I do not do anything that is interesting. The type of job where people say, “What do you do?” and rather than tell them what I do I tell them the name of the company I work for and they go, “Ohhhh. Aha, neat!”, as if I had answered their question. They go, “Do you like it there?” and I go, “It’s great,” and they smile and leave.
“But what DO you actually do?” a friend asked once.
“I’m not sure,” I said. Whatever it is that I do involves papers sometimes being left on my desk with dates on them, and I try, quickly, like I am playing hot potato, to finish them and get them to another person’s desk so that I do not still have them when the buzzer goes off. Whatever it is I do necessitates having a computer, I assume, since they have probably not given me one solely to check my e-mail and read the entirety of Wikipedia. I sit in my good chair with my bad posture, the gray waist-high walls encircling me like a playpen. To keep me occupied I have been given pushpins and binder clips to play with (don’t put them on your nose; they hurt) and a mobile of “things to get done today,” each written and dangling impossibly high above my head. As people walk by I reach up toward them, hoping they will slide their hands under my arms, scooping me up and putting me down somewhere more interesting.
“Are you an assistant?” my friend asks
“I might be,” I tell her. I knew when I interviewed for the job, what it was. I interviewed for the job wearing my office casual pants, which are something I own now. I stare at them sometimes, running my fingers over the tweed-the hidden inside button closure and the little metal hook that secures them to my waist. I own a suit also, and cannot put it on with out the urge to scribble a moustache on my upper lip with eyeliner pencil and pair it with one of my father’s ties. Sometimes the office that I work in goes, “Ok, everybody in the big room for a meeting,” but in a much more formal way-in an interoffice memo or an e-mail, and we all sit in front of a big screen and wait for presentations. Three or four of the executives will get to talk, decided amongst themselves either by a round of rock paper scissors or, more likely, by taking a vote for who is the most boring. I sit politely, crossing and uncrossing my legs, thinking of ways to make their Powerpoints more engaging and their speeches less soporific. My best idea, which I have not shared with my co-workers, is draping the people in the three front rows in plastic and putting the first quarter sales figures inside a watermelon and then smashing the watermelon. Everyone has to run around trying to pick up pieces of information and it will make the room smell like watermelon, which is a nice smell. And everyone would run home from work excited, going, “You’ll never believe what they did with the first quarter sales figures!” It was crazy!”
“When we get home will you help me get the groceries out of the trunk?” my mother asks.
“Sure.”
“You don’t have to start putting it away. Just bring the bags upstairs and I’ll go through them.”
My mother hits the button on the garage door opener, pulling in until she hits the tennis ball that is suspended from the garage ceiling by a piece of twine. If she goes past the tennis ball the car will smash into the boxes of whatever it is that we have stored in the garage. She puts her sunglasses back into the compartment in the dashboard.
“Pop the trunk,” I say, hoping she can hear me through the windows.
She pops the trunk and I start unloading; pulling out as much as I can carry so that I can make the fewest number of trips.
“Don’t hurt your back,” she says.
“I won’t.”
“Those soda boxes are heavy. Don’t carry so many of them.”
I nod solemnly and then proceed to pick up what is probably too many soda boxes, bending my knees and keeping my back straight. I walk back and forth between the kitchen and the garage, carrying double-bagged groceries and leaving them at the foot of the island. Milk, I put in the fridge.
“God, this room,” my mother says. Her kitchen is a pastel chapel of clutter, the bright sun through the skylight illuminating uneven stacks of plastic vitamin containers and cords and recipes that she has torn out of the newspaper that someday she wants to try because ‘Look, Kelly! Pesto and Eggplant!’ but that she will inevitably stuff into a Lord and Taylor bag and forget about. The kitchen table is littered with three pairs of scissors and a stapler, a mosaic of coupons where my mother anticipates saving a dollar on an Oral B toothbrush and 75 cents on a box of Reynold’s Wrap. I clear out a downed forest of nail files and place additional grocery bags on the counter.
The bags are heavy. Olives, kidney beans, rice, garbanzos. Progresso canned soups. One bag is filled entirely with 4-packs of Chicken of the Sea, solid albacore tuna in water.
“Tuna was on sale,” she says.
“Apparently,” I say. “And toilet paper and olive oil.” I pull out seven bottles of Tide, placing them labels out, in a row on the counter. “And detergent.”
“I had coupons.”
“And canned tomatoes,” I say, assessing. “And Brillo. And ten-packs of 100 Grand bars.”
“Each of those was only a dollar,” my mother says. She holds the long, thin package aloft, as if she were the statue of liberty, her other hand clenching a box of Low-Sodium Triscuits. “A dollar!”
A dollar is a good deal. I would buy the ten pack candy bars for my office sometimes. Or cookies. A lot of days I would run next door to Duane Reade and buy a pack of ten molasses cookies for a dollar and everyone walking by my desk would go, “Cookies!” and get really excited, like I had given them the rest of the day off or their supervisor had announced that it was a beautiful day and we would be having work “outside,” sending faxes from the park and signing memos under the trees. And someone from another department would take one of our cookies and would hand me a small-fonted form covered in lines of black text and suddenly the cookie would feel like gravel in my mouth, as if the paper were emblazoned with news of apocalyptic proportions.
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in ice.
Actually it will end in W-4 forms and copyright infringement lawsuits.
Please sign here to indicate that you have read and understood this poem and agree to its terms and conditions.
Signature ____________________________________
Print name____________________________________
“A little dramatic, are we?” my mother says. “No one likes forms.”
“I’m not being dramatic. I hate them. They make my throat close up.”
“Thank you Sarah Bernhardt,” my mother says.
I do try. I always try to read the forms but I can’t. In grammar school our librarian taught us the five-word rule, which means if you read the first page of something and there are more than five words you don’t understand, it might be a little bit above your reading level. There is no rule for when you understand all of the words on the page-contractual, stipulate, aforementioned, equity-and continue to sit silently, your head spinning, as if you are a five year-old who has been asked to write a summation of a James Joyce novel. “Your homework,” the teacher says, “is to read and summarize the first 14 chapters of Portrait of an artist as a young, young, young, sad, confused man who doesn’t like reading profit and loss statements and wishes he had a different job.”
There are thirteen brown paper bags lining the kitchen, as if someone has packed lunches for a family of giants.
“Where do these go?”
I am holding up three cans of kidney beans-holding two in one hand and one in the other, and there are 14 additional cans of kidney beans on the table.
“I don’t know,” my mother says. “Just put them anywhere for now and I’ll figure it out later.”
“Where do you have your other canned stuff?”
“I just sort of put it where it fits.” My mother is taking off her long overcoat and untucking her scarf to reveal a neatly ironed shirt she bought at Boscovs and wool pants that have a crease down the center of each leg. She is wearing a sweater but takes it off because she is always hot in the house.
“Is it hot in here or is it hot in here?” she’ll ask, fanning herself with her hand or a sheaf of papers from the counter. My mother used to say “Is it hot in here or is it me?” but stopped because Pam would always reply, “It’s you.”
“It’s me?” she’d ask, incredulous.
“It’s you,” Pam will reply dryly. “You’re going through menopause. Also,” she adds, “you’re crazy.”
“You’re not hot?” My mother would fan her face at close range, adjusting the thermostat.
“We’re freezing,” Pam would say. “Look at dad. He’s using a down comforter for his legs.”
My mother leaves to lay her sweater on the bed and then returns to the kitchen, biting her thumbnail, standing next to me. We stare at the clutter and she asks if there is anything I can do, as if her kitchen is an inoperable tumor and I am her last hope. I open the pantry doors by their brass knobs, each of us peering into a confused Narnia of dry goods and lost items. Peroxi-care toothpaste stares shyly from a nest of condensed milk.
“It’s overwhelming,” my mother says, smoothing out her shirt with her hands. Her nails are carefully shaped and buffed and painted clear.
“I know,” I say. “Everything is overwhelming.”
I am the person at my office who organizes the supply closet. It is one of the few parts of my job that I enjoy and that I am really good at.
“At which you are really good. Or, at which you excel,” my mother says. “It is one of the few parts of your job at which you excel.”
Here are my cardinal rules for organizing a work space:
1. If you use things a lot, have them easily accessible.
2. Keep pushpins near the bulletin board
3. Do not put things in containers with lids, because you are too lazy to unscrew a lid, take out a paperclip, and then put a lid back on.
“I don’t think I’m that lazy,” my mother says.
4. A lot of times you will think you are not that lazy, but you are.
5. Avoid junk drawers. They enable you to keep things you don’t need.
“I’m just-” she says. “I’m still stuck on the jars with lids thing. I don’t like that you’re using the word ‘lazy.’ It sounds like I’m intentionally slacking off.”
“Mom, I’m trying to do a bullet point list.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll stop. Finish your list.”
6. Keep a pad and pen by the phone, fastened to the desk if possible.
7. Have a large desk area clear for working.
8. Everything should have a place. If having a label maker helps you remember what goes where, buy one.
9. If something does not have a place and you do not need it enough to create a place for it, throw it out.
10. If things are still unorganized, adjust and adapt your workspace to the ways you discover you work. The definition of crazy is to do the exact same thing, expecting a different result. Be open to change.
“Let’s start,” I say, “with things that have no business being in a pantry.”
“Ok.”
“These,” I say, handing my mother a bag of deflated beach balls. “Why do you have these?”
“We got them at work,” she says.
“Why are you keeping them?”
My mother looks at me, smiling. To the questions of why she is keeping innumerable unused items, including (but not limited to) the beach balls, the candle shaped like an Irish Setter, the Fisher Price paintbrush, the ceramic jelly bean container, the used marbles, the broken wind chimes, and the sandwich bags full of dice, she will respond with one of the following:
• “For if I have grandkids someday.”
• “I like it.”
• “You don’t think it’s cute?”
• “I thought maybe someone would want it.”
• “It was a gift.”
• “You don’t think it’s cute?” (pause) “Really?”
• “Oh this? This I use sometimes.”
“When?”
“Sometimes,” she says, putting it back on the shelf.
I sigh, tugging on the pulls of my hooded sweatshirt. I walk toward the kitchen island-a light blue slab whose beaches are littered with thumbtacks and Reader’s Digests and photos that my mother prints out onto 8 ½ x11 computer paper. I grab a small garbage can and hoist it toward the counter.
“Don’t throw out the coupons!” she says, and she scuttles over toward me, her shirt coming slightly untucked. She is holding a green M&M dispenser to her chest like a baby.
I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, through my nose. I never remember if you are supposed to let the breath out through your nose or if you take the deep breath through just your nose and then let it out regularly. I walk into the living room and sit down in my father’s chair, pulling the down comforter up over my legs.
“I’m sorry,” my mother says from the doorframe.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“No it’s not,” she says. “We don’t get to see you that often. You came home to relax, not clean the kitchen.”
“ I am relaxing,” I tell her. “Being away from the city is relaxing.”
“Ok,” she says. “In your e-mails you sounded like your job was stressing you out. I just want you to have a place to unwind. I don’t want coming home to feel like work.”
“Coming home never feels like work,” I tell her.
“Or if you hate your job that much, you should find a new one. Look on Craigslist, or Monster-I always see these commercials at night for job websites.”
“I might,” I say.
It would be nice, I think, to have a new job that is not in an office and does not have gray walls and fluorescent lighting. It would be nice not to have to wear business casual brown pants and not to own nylons. It would be nice to have a room with a window, where I could see the people walking around on the sidewalks and I would know if the sun was shining. I think briefly of the dumpster overflowing with windows at the Pearl River station and debate mentioning it to my mother.
“What do you need them for?” Pam asks later in the evening, sitting upright in our father’s chair with the down comforter over her legs. “What are you going to make out of used windows?”
“I don’t know what I’m making,” I said. “I’ll build a house across the street from mom and dad’s house and I’ll live in it.”
“I mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t take a few,” she says. “I just didn’t know if you had something specific you wanted them for.”
“I don’t know yet,” I say, “I just thought they were beautiful. Maybe I’ll go back tomorrow to see if they’re still there.”
“If you girls are going somewhere,” my mother offers, “take my car. I moved it to the driveway so your father can use the garage.”
I walk downstairs to my father’s tool bench, which is organized very efficiently-tools arranged on a pegboard, the most frequently used within easy reach. I wrap my wide hand around a hammer but then re-think the order in which I will need the tools and pull the saw from its perch.
I will live, maybe, in a house made of windows down the street from my parents, where it is always warm and beautiful and I am always in a good mood. The house will be very organized and well-stocked with cookies and ten packs of 100 Grand bars and people will go there to relax and work through their problems.
“If you make the whole thing out of windows there’s going to be a lot of glare,” my mother warns.
“I don’t mind the glare.”
“You don’t think you will, but it can get bad,” my mother says. “And when it snows and the glare reflects off the snow? Hold on.” And putting on her overcoat and white scarf even though she is only walking outside for a second, she grabs her keys and hits the button that beeps and makes the lights flash and unlocks the car. Opening the car door she reaches for her sunglasses, which are always in a compartment in the dashboard.
“Wear these,” she says, “When the glare gets really bad, these will help.”
I thank her and put on the sunglasses. I will wear these to work on Monday, I think. I will saunter in to the office in my mother’s sunglasses, holding an idyllic wood-framed window, which I will set on the wall of my cubicle, propped against a bookcase. I will leave it open-it is nice to have windows, but it is nicer, sometimes, to have open windows; to feel a little bit of air on your face.
I will leave the window open and the wind will rush through. It will blow the smell of cookies back into the far corners of the office, where people on other floors will suddenly realize that they are hungry, and it will blow the papers from my inbox-shooting them out in sheaves out onto 49th street, leaving the air hung with forms-white and blinding and precipitating like snow.