The Wrong Stuff (2 page)

Two voices in the study? Maybe Charley had invited a graduate student for lunch. She hoped not. She was still a bit streaky with dirt and still hopped up on rummage sale adrenaline, which was underappreciated by geology graduate students. Now if she had been an antique bottle collector, fresh from some old dump site, they might have gotten excited. Diggers appreciated other diggers. Jane was often confounded by the fact that people's passions for their “stuff” did not always translate into an appreciation for the “stuff” of others. She loved to see Charley all sweaty and excited over a bunch of rocks that he told her were actually the teeth of some extraordinary crustaceous creature. On the other hand, neither he nor his colleagues or graduate assistants seemed to share her excitement over the discovery of a Bakelite needle case with a carved acorn-shaped cap found at the bottom of a moldy sewing box. Go figure.

Besides, she had no lunch to offer. She'd thought she'd have time to wash up and run over to Foodstuffs and buy a few sandwiches and fancy chips, cut up an apple, and pare the mold off the cheddar in the back of the fridge. No, she had already scraped that to pack for Nick in his lunch. When had she last made a trip to the grocery store? It was always tough to keep up with groceries and chores in the fall when every rummage sale, estate sale, and garage sale sounded better than the next. In November, things usually slowed down. They could eat next month. She would make all of Charley and Nick's favorite meals: pot roast and vegetable soup and chicken marsala. Yes, in November she would put on an apron and turn into June Cleaver or Alice from
The Brady Bunch
or whomever they wanted as chief cook and bottle washer….

“Jane? Is that you?” Charley's voice was even, but it had that serious tremor that caught Jane up short. She wiped her hands and walked quickly to the study.

Sitting on the ottoman of Charley's reading chair, red-eyed and tight-lipped, was the last person Jane expected to see there. “What are you doing home, Nick? Are you sick?”

Jane headed for her son, palm outstretched toward his brow, but he shook his head and turned away from her, swallowing hard.

“Nick tried to call, but you didn't answer,” Charley said, “and then he…”

As Jane listened to Charley explain, she took her cell phone out of her back pocket and read the
THREE CALLS MISSED
message scrolled across the tiny screen. In the noise and hustle and bustle of St. Perpetua's, she hadn't heard the ring. She hadn't kept the promise she had made to Nick that she would always answer the phone, no matter what. When she and Charley had separated for some months last year, she had promised her son—it had been their deal—that even if she were about to make the best purchase of her life at the most incredible sale she had ever attended, she would always answer her phone.

Jane was so upset about the fact that she had broken her promise, she realized she wasn't completely listening to Charley's explanation of Nick's presence at home when he should have been at school on a Friday afternoon, especially this Friday afternoon when his favorite teacher was taking his class on a field trip that Nick had been talking about for weeks. Nick wouldn't have missed this Chicago museum visit for anything. In fact, as Jane was trying to listen to Charley, her mind flitted ridiculously to the terrible lunch she had thrown together—those wedges of cheese and the bruised apple—and remembered that the class was stopping for lunch at the Rock 'n' Roll McDonald's. Jane felt foolishly relieved that Nick wouldn't need to open that lunch bag.

“I'm still not understanding. I'm sorry, but…,” Jane began, and Nick interrupted.

“They said it was because of insurance. If they didn't have the signed permission slip, they couldn't…” Nick stopped and looked away again.

Jane's thoughts cleared immediately. The permission slip. Nick had brought it to her two weeks ago and asked that she sign it immediately so that he could put it right into his backpack. Jane had been filing her sale notes from the last month and couldn't find a working pen. Hundreds of vintage advertising mechanical pencils in a basket on her desk, but not one working Bic. She told Nick to put the slip on the kitchen counter. He reminded her at dinner and she had nodded, seeing the light blue slip under a bag of vintage picture books she had picked up that day at a thrift store. She noticed it again after dinner, but her hands were wet from washing the pans and she asked Nick to move it into the dining room so it wouldn't get anything spilled on it. When she carried in a box of heavy, restaurant-style Buffalo China from the garage to look for a particular size platter that Miriam had called about, she had dropped the heavy carton down on the dining room table and noticed that the slip was now partially covered by the box. She wrote herself a note on a yellow Post-it and stuck it on her purse to remind herself to sign the slip and write a check and give it to Nick. The next day, when Nick saw and asked about the Post-it note, now floating on top of her purse when she dropped him off at school, she promised to go home and get it and bring it back—right after she stopped at the post office and mailed packages to Ohio.

Jane was still standing in the doorway to Charley's study, and she turned and looked at the dining room table. The box of china was still there. She had also put down two more boxes—linens for later sorting. Even with the entire table almost covered, however, she could still see the corner of the blue slip peeking out from under the heavy cardboard carton of dishes.

Jane badly wanted to wake up, to have this whole scene part of an anxious mother's nightmare. She longed to swoon, to pass out and come to and realize it had all been a terrible hallucination. But there is something in the turned head of a child you love so fiercely and whom you have disappointed so thoroughly that doesn't allow you more than a moment of self-saving fantasy.

“I am so sorry, Nick,” she managed to say. She was crying, tears were falling, but she managed to keep her voice steady. She knew that it would be unfair to claim any pity, any sorrow. The anger and frustration and disappointment and embarrassment that crowded the airspace in this study belonged to Nick. They were rightfully his, and Jane did not deserve a tearful catharsis right now.

Her own mother, Nellie, a maniacally clean and meticulous little woman who had never found a dirty floor she could not polish, a burned-out pan she could not scour, or a filthy load of laundry she could not whiten, had perpetrated evil in Jane's young life. She had forced Jane to discard her favorite stuffed bear, Mortimer, because it had become torn and dusty. She had failed to attend the second-grade dental hygiene play when Jane played the lead role of the “tooth” and her friend Tim had played “floss.” She had told Jane that she looked fat in her prom dress. All horrible maternal crimes, to be sure, but Nellie had never lost one slip of paper, never allowed one homework assignment to remain on the floor, nor had she ever allowed a wedge of cheese under her care to grow mold. Not on Nellie's watch. And now Jane, struggling daily to not be Nellie, to not give Nick any of the hang-ups, fears, phobias, and neuroses that Nellie had so carefully planted and watered in Jane's particular little brain garden, had lost the battle. No, she hadn't become her failed mother, Nellie. So much the worse, she had become Nick's failed mother, Jane.

“Is there anything I can do?” Jane asked. “I could drive you…”

Nick shook his head.

Charley, speaking softly, explained to Jane that Nick had also called him at his office, and the department secretary had tracked him down at a meeting. By then it was too late. The buses had to leave and they couldn't make an exception for Nick without the permission slip. The vice principal had been most apologetic.

“I don't know how I'll ever make this up to you, Nick, but I swear I will spend the rest of my…”

“It's okay,” Nick said, shrugging.

“Of course it's not. I understand,” Jane said.

“No, it is okay, it's just…” Nick started then stopped. Jane waited.

“There're always kids, you know, who forget or don't remember the money or, you know, don't care anyway, and…” Nick hesitated again. “I just don't want to be one of those kids.” He looked at his mother dead on for the first time, and she felt her heart crack.

“I know,” Jane said. Her mother had cut Jane's long, beautiful hair into a choppy-looking bowl cut when Jane was in the second grade because Nellie didn't have the time to brush it every morning. There were other cropped heads in her class, and Jane recognized them as kindred spirits of a sort. Their mothers worked, too, or had so many other children at home that a braid or ponytail every morning was an impossible task. Yeah, Jane knew they should commiserate in some seven-year-old version of group therapy, like jumping rope to some mother-bashing rhyme, but instead, Jane avoided them. She knew exactly what Nick meant. No, she hadn't wanted to be one of
those kids
. Instead, for her best friend, she sought out Tim, whose mother cut his sandwiches into animal shapes and made homemade treats for the class on his birthday. She became Tim's shadow, and when her hair grew long enough, he taught her how to braid it herself.

“You're not one of those kids, Nick,” Jane said. “I'm just one of those moms.”

 

Jane moved all the boxes from the dining room out to the garage only to discover she was out of shelf space. She stacked the cartons into towers, scrawled contents on the sides, and went in to tackle the kitchen, where boxes were both under and on top of the kitchen table.

“I hope you don't take this the wrong way,” Charley said, putting down a small and, Jane was sure, neatly and efficiently packed duffel bag, “but I'm not sure just moving the stuff around will do it.”

“What?” Jane asked.

“What you want it to do,” Charley said.

Jane shook her head. “I'm just cleaning, that's all, just organizing.”

Nick came in and sat his equally small and, Jane was certain, neatly and efficiently packed duffel next to his father's.

“Moving stuff around again, Mom?” Nick asked.

He hadn't meant it as a dig of any kind. He was feeling better—great, in fact—and had become downright philosophical when Charley told him he would wait until after school when the field trip bus returned so Nick could collect his best friend, Parker, and the three of them would head for Rockford, where Charley would give his Saturday symposium and the boys would have a blast at the indoor water park at the resort hotel where Charley had just reserved a small suite.

Nick had even patted Jane awkwardly on the shoulder and told her it was okay, that it was probably for the best. Rockford would be better than the aquarium, and his dad's lecture would be far more interesting than any old volunteer's canned speech to middle schoolers. Charley had promised them a behind-the-scenes tour of the natural history museum and unlimited water slide passes.

Jane was delighted that Nick was happy about the weekend, although she didn't believe for a minute that she was off the hook. She knew that this gaffe wasn't so easily remedied, even though Charley had, for the moment, bailed her out. It was, she knew, one of her major problems—her refusal to be bailed out. She needed to suffer, do some penance, and be absolved in a slower and more torturous fashion. Jane was grateful to Charley, but gratitude did not untie the knots of guilt.

“Try not to put yourself in solitary for too long,” said Charley, knowing the only person who could punish Jane to her satisfaction was Jane herself. “Call Tim or something.”

“Oh, right. Tim will kill me when he hears this one,” Jane said. “He already considers himself a better mother than I am.”

When the two had left for Charley's office to pick up his lecture notes, Jane lifted a set of forties' nesting mixing bowls off the top of the small kitchen television she and Charley kept for news watching during dinner preparations. Jane knew she was depressed. Only when she felt hopelessly blue did she allow herself to wallow in daytime television. She stacked the boxes from the kitchen table onto the floor and heard a loud, officious female voice.

“Are you just moving it around? Because that won't solve the problem.”

Jane looked behind her. No one. She was alone in the kitchen. The voice she at first thought was either her mother or her conscience came from a tall, thin blonde on television who was sitting next to Oprah, holding a book in her hand.

Belinda St. Germain was the author of
Overstuffed: An Addicts Guide to Decluttering
. She had also written
Breathing Free
and
Stop Kidding Yourself—It Owns You!
Jane spent most of the next hour listening raptly as Oprah's guest described Jane's personality, Jane's house, and Jane's rapidly crumbling self-esteem.

“What's wrong with you,” St. Germain barked, “that you need stuff to validate who you are? Get rid of it today before it suffocates you, before it takes over your life.”

“Okay,” Jane whispered. Feeling slightly hypnotized by her new guru, Jane slipped on her blue jean jacket and decided she should run out and buy St. Germain's books immediately. Of course that would mean bringing in a few more things, additional objects, and the first rule was no more new things; but Jane felt pretty certain that Belinda excepted her own books from the rest of the “rubbish,” as she called it.

“What do you really, really, really need?” she asked. “How many pairs of shoes, toothbrushes, tubes of lipstick? How many cans of soup do you need to hoard in your pantries? Do you really shop less when you buy more? No, my friends, you shop more, you buy more, you store more, you are smothered by more, you can no longer breathe in your own space, can you?”

Oprah was nodding, the audience was nodding, and Jane was nodding with them.

When the phone rang, she jumped, and contemplated not answering so she would not miss any more of Belinda's wisdom, but she knew better. Not hearing, not answering the phone, was part of the behavior that had delivered her into Brenda's hands in the first place.