Linear B by Jane Gillette
Twenty years later, when she was cleaning out a bookcase in a third-floor bedroom, Judith came across the black notebook, and it carried her back to an experience many of us will undergo, an experience that should be meaningful even if painful, but which may well be – as Judith remembered it – simply boring. She flipped through the pages of the old black notebook from the Land of Plenty and found one drawing of a row of chickens and six lists of stuff, and as she looked at them an association erupted in her mind and she hurried to her computer to google Linear B: Derived from the Minoan Linear A (still undeciphered), Linear B was the script used for writing the language of the Mycenaeans, who disappeared during the Bronze Age, maybe due to an earthquake. She skimmed over accounts of how Linear B was discovered at Knossos by Arthur Evans at the end of the nineteenth century and was finally deciphered in the early 1950s by architect Michael Ventris – after a close call by Brooklyn-based scholar Alice Kober – tales far more exotic than Linear B itself, a script consisting of some 87 syllabic signs and more than 100 ideographs (symbolizing objects or, more specifically, commodities) and apparently only used in administrative contexts by a guild of professional scribes for what were primarily accounting purposes.
All of this she knew vaguely and that was why Linear B had sprung to mind when she looked at that notebook from the summer she responded to the emergency call from the hospital in Muncie, Indiana, and drove back to find both parents in states of dementia, states they had managed to conceal on her weekly telephone calls from D.C. Once, long ago, her father had been an accountant, her mother a public-school administrator, and a vague memory of Linear B rose up from the sad little notebook and a cloud of ghostly facts erupted in Judith’s head like a swarm of mosquitoes.
Trip after trip to the bank and the lawyer and the nursing home, and finally her parents are all settled in and she returns to the house, where she stumbles around the living room, switching on one lamp after another only to discover that all the bulbs have burned out. Looming pieces of furniture obstruct her passage as she gropes along the walls to her mother’s room, where a bulb has survived in a bedside lamp and casts a circle of dim light on a cluster of dust-coated bottles: calcium tablets, aspirin, Metamucil, milk of magnesia, and five empty bottles of cough medicine. Beside the bottle sit two notebooks. One is labeled Bowel Movements. The other records something taken every two hours. Judith fumbles in her purse for a list scribbled on a torn corner of newspaper and deliberately crosses off today’s accomplishments,
• D’s PA
• M’s PA
for Daddy’s Power of Attorney and Mother’s Power of Attorney, and adds
• P
• S
• N
for Purse, Sweatshirt, and Nightgown (her mother’s demands of the day). And since she can’t bear to look very closely at her mother’s bed or the mud-streaked rug or the three walls of landscape paintings, she focuses on the fourth wall where hang three walnut-framed sepia-toned photographs of Judith, aged three, five, and eight, looking first fat and next apprehensive and then remarkably like her father, who is represented twice, in a small metal-framed snapshot wearing a World War II uniform and in a large oil-tinted photograph bordered in carved and gilded wood, a frame as weighty and solemn as the framed, and matched by an oil-tinted, also elaborately framed photograph of Judith, aged twenty, looking uneasy but still full of possibilities. The wall is dominated by portraits of her mother, and Judith records them on her brain, one by one, like items on the list she holds in her hand:
• 1 photograph of a thin Roman-nosed teenager
• 4 photographs of a beauty in the 1920s and 1930s
•
1 photograph of a radiant mother holding together the globby folds of a reluctant, scowling infant
• 2 silhouettes emphasizing that beautiful profile
• 1 oil portrait of a dignified and aristocratic lady
more appropriately hung above an ancestral fireplace than on a light green wall in this low-ceilinged filthy room. Shifting her gaze from the portraits of her mother, Judith is shocked to come upon her own reflection in the mirror of a heavily-carved dresser. She examines her face and decides it cannot really be said that she herself is without beauty. At last she considers the four-poster bed, which was in her room when she was growing up, just an old bed back then, now transformed into an antique because only the very best things have been admitted to this room. The sheets are disgusting. How did things get to be this way? This hopeless way? Only a week ago her parents lived in this house while she lived far away, blissfully ignorant of the week to come. A tingling sensation seizes her wrists, and she resorts to the remedy she discovered as a child, pulling from her bag one of the six books she bought before she left Washington. She ignores the sheets and climbs onto the bed and, propped up against the filthy pillows, at peace with the world, reads an Anita Brookner novel about a depressed woman living in Chelsea. The childhood feeling in her wrists subsides, and she slips into a deep and peaceful sleep.
The next day on her way back from the nursing home Judith stops at a drugstore and buys light bulbs as well as an eight-by-eleven-inch spiral notebook with a dull black waterproof cover. Each of its pages is big enough for a long list and you can easily tear out any page with a mistake on it and start over again. Lifeproof as well as waterproof. Back in the house she opens the brown drapes and pulls up the venetian blinds to reveal an interior coated with dust. She doesn’t know where to begin. She sits down on the old brown couch, then after a while gets up and walks through every room, looking at the furniture and wondering what to do with it. She has gotten the general drift of the lawyer’s warning: If her parents die, everything must go through probate, a terrible inconvenience, and so all these things must disappear. But where can they go? Some of the things are real junk and can be auctioned off with the cars. All the other things can go to Washington to be kept or sold at her leisure. But why pay to ship them all the way to Washington and then get rid of them? The lawyer has told her that Mayflower runs a good storage facility over in Indianapolis. Maybe she should just send everything over there? And so she calls the auctioneer recommended by the lawyer, and Don says he’ll drop by next week. Don’t worry about cleaning things up. He’ll do it. He does it all the time. The places are always stuffed with junk – and filthy. Don’t worry. That’s his business. He does not auction off clothes, but if she carefully makes a list of each and every item, along with its estimated value, Goodwill will give her parents a tax deduction. She has to sell the house by Labor Day in order to get a good deal. And be sure to pick up and shake every book you come across because they always hide money between the pages. Next Judith calls Mayflower in Indianapolis, and Richard says he can come in two weeks. He’ll pack up all the stuff and take it wherever she wants it to go. Indianapolis, Washington, the dump. Just let him know. Mayflower does, however, require empty drawers for safety’s sake.
Two weeks. That is plenty of time to empty the drawers and clean out all the closets and take the clothes to Goodwill and find the documents for the lawyer and the bank. Well, no. Two weeks is not enough time. Two weeks is barely enough time to get started. Judith plops down on the brown couch and scribbles a row of pine trees in the middle of a notebook page. Then she adds beaks along the top and claw feet along the bottom, changing the pine trees into a row of chickens. She calms down. In order to sell the house by Labor Day she will clean out the closets for Goodwill while saving some worthless things for Don’s auction. Everything else can go into storage over in Indianapolis and sometime in the future she’ll go through it all and decide what to keep. But is Indianapolis safe from probate? Won’t the probate detective simply look at the storage manifest and do whatever it is that probate does? Tax? Fine? Take away money she needs to keep her parents in the nursing home? Maybe it’s better to move everything to Washington where it can pass as her own, at least to someone who doesn’t know her very well. But then she will be paying to ship all these things halfway across the country, and she is back to square one. She sits there for a while, and slowly, slowly it occurs to her that her parents are safely disposed of and she can dispose of everything else in any way she sees fit because they cannot blame her for mistakes, for these mistakes at any rate. The sun sinks ever lower behind the cloudy sky, and she sees everything clearly. She will leave the awful things for Don to auction off. She will put the things she is unsure about in Mayflower storage. She will send the best things to Washington.
And immediately a thought occurs to her, a thought she knows it is not wise to think: Since she knows the value of nothing, she will inevitably toss away the diamonds and pearls and cling to the toads and the frogs. So many times she has listened to her parents sneering over some treasure Mrs. Dimwit was stupid enough to sell, howling with laughter inspired by some piece of shit Mr. Asshole keeps in his living room under the delusion that it’s the real thing. She remembers story after story about addictions and obsessions, all symptoms of the fatal lack of character that makes people sell their belongings in order to live off the proceeds and buy junk they think is priceless in order to impress their stupid friends. Told over and over again, those stories made her parents laugh and laugh, all those disgusting stories that stick to every object in this house: This is the origin of things, and how is she to look behind the gummed‑up human provenance to discover what they really are? Before the arrival of the Mayflower? Before Don’s Labor Day auction? Or ever? Maybe she should just send everything to storage and risk probate. But what if everything is valuable? Must she pay the price of ignorance? Maybe she should just send everything to Washington. But what if everything is worthless?
And how can she tell? Certainly not from their immediate origin, a greasy spoon where you could get a whole bag of burgers for a buck, a greasy spoon that morphed into an antiques shop in name alone, the place where her parents acquired these treasures with their patina of dubious fantasies and mocked ambitions, The Blue Dipper, where her mother in her best Princess Anastasia manner and her father, read‑up and determined not to get cheated, spent all their free time in their seventies and eighties, The Blue Dipper, where junk festered in every corner and Shelley and her girlfriend Vernice sat on one side of a surviving booth with four glasses and a bottle of scotch and a high pile of dog-eared books and her parents sat on the other side of the booth and bargained. No, really it was Shelley and her father who bargained. They were the ones with a passion for things. Her mother and Vernice just came along for the ride. On the two occasions Judith ventured inside The Blue Dipper she found it difficult to keep her eyes open, just as now she can only sit on the brown couch and, eyes closed, hold her head in her hands. And then Shelley and Vernice, all relatives safely dead, moved back to their small hometown in the neighboring county, abandoning The Blue Dipper, which now houses a Shed Town family, a shelter with broken windows and lost shingles, mismatched paint, and strange holes where something not too necessary has been removed. Yesterday Judith drove past just to make sure she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. What happened to the inventory of The Blue Dipper? Did her parents buy every single unsold item?
She forces herself to get up. No matter where it all goes she has to have a record of it, and she may as well begin in her mother’s bedroom. Judith turns to a clean page in her new notebook and makes a list:
• 6 chairs
• bookshelf
• 2 big chests
• 4 chests of drawers
• big rug
• 2 small chests with lots of china on top
• 2 yellow lions
• spinning wheel
• 4‑poster bed
• big dresser with mirror
that catches her image once again, a fool who knows nothing about these things, a fool who knows nothing about herself, and she decides not to go to bed until she has come to terms with the things. Herself she will come to terms with on some other occasion.
It’s getting dark when Judith drives back to the drugstore and buys five packets of Post-Its and ten boxes of extra-large trash bags. Back home, she walks through every room and without thinking about value, without fretting about ignorance, decides what to store in Indianapolis (yellow Post-It), what to send to Washington (green Post-It), and what to auction off (no Post-It). Although she knows the worth of nothing, she is able to envision each piece in its proper setting: dark room (storage), house (Washington), nowhere (auction). As for the Washington pieces, once they get to town they will arrange themselves attractively. Bonnie, her best friend from work, will admire them, as will her ex‑mother-in‑law, should she ever drop by. Even her boss, Sylvia, and her other co‑workers at the magazine will appreciate their beauty. Maybe she will give a dinner party where everybody can admire her new old furniture. At this point she again inches her way through every room and admires the things that will go to Washington, the things she wants. It is no longer a matter of value, but of desire. What she wants is what she’ll take. Then she passes through again and she would make a list, but she can’t because she doesn’t know what the things really are, only that they should be hers. All the pictures (muddy oils of pastoral scenes) must go into storage. They may be valuable because they are art, but she can’t cope with them right now.
That settled, she moves on to the garage, which is completely lined with bookshelves filled with dusty books. Head tilted to the side she stares at the titles, which make her so dizzy she can only read a few:
• Cox’s Book of Pottery and Porcelain
• Hinckley’s Directory of Antique Furniture
• Chaffers’ Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain
• Rice’s Illustrated Guide to Rockingham Pottery and Porcelain
• Larsen’s American Historical Views on Staffordshire China
• Middlemas’ Antique Glass in Color
• Peck’s Book of Rookwood Pottery
• Hammond’s Confusing Collectibles: A Guide to the Identification of Reproductions
• Caring for Your Collections,
anonymously authored and obviously ignored. She lifts a few volumes from the shelf and shakes them. Out flutter hundreds of twenty-dollar bills. She decides to deal with the books later, and then she discovers her parents’ shoes. No matter how worn, each pair is neatly placed in the box it came in, boxes now stacked at the bottom of a bookcase-lined wall along with rows of other boxes, boxes once filled with five pounds of candy from Lowery’s, a Muncie institution specializing in chocolates with thick, waxy skins, boxes now filled with carefully sorted
• safety pins
• rubber bands
• coffee-can scoops
• paper clips
• balls of twine
• twists from bread packages
• used emery boards
• tops of toothpaste tubes,
things you really can’t do without. To avoid thinking Judith leaves the garage and edges through the rooms again, and again the things she wants catch her eye. It’s not that she knows anything about them, but she can always look them up in the books, which she will take back to Washington:
• 6 chairs
• big drop-leaf table
• tilt-top table
• dining-room table with 4 leaves
• 2 game tables
• 2 small tables
• corner cupboard
• 2 chests with front panels made of punched metal
• 2 little drop-leaf tables
• spool-post bed
• tall cupboard
• 8 marble-topped bureaus
• glass-fronted bookcase with lions carved into the corner posts,
lions who will travel back to Washington, along with some small mysterious objects just to play it safe, objects that she will eventually learn are conceivably even useful,
• butter firkins
• brass jelly pots
• humidors
• spice chests
• tea caddies,
along with more recognizable things like
• churns
• kerosene lamps
• coffee grinders
as well as the dusty little assemblages of toys her mother has set up here and there:
• 6 wax dolls with tin heads encircling a glass vase of paper roses
• 16 dollhouse chairs carefully arranged in 4 rows facing nothing
• 4 little plastic sheep staring at 3 miniature tractors given out as promotional enticements by International Harvester,
which probably sold lots of tractors out here in the old days, and Judith sidles through the rooms again to check her choices: Auction, Indianapolis, Washington. Sell, store, keep, store, keep, sell, keep, sell, store. She only grows discouraged when she pulls out a few drawers and discovers that every one of them is stuffed to the brim with things, the drawers in her mother’s room with clothes, ditto the drawers in her father’s room.
Clothes also fill five of the seven closets in the house. The other two contain shelves and shelves of china plates, wine glasses, and doo-dads of every description, including lots of little glass animals, mixed-race porcelain shepherdesses, and vegetable-shaped teapots marked Nippon on the bottom. There seems to be nothing that can actually be used. Where are the sheets, the pillowcases, the towels? Judith decides she will empty every chest drawer by drawer and stuff everything into the plastic trash bags. She will not examine the contents too closely, although she can’t help but notice that the clothes are old, worn, dirty. She will also unload the closet shelves and stack the spoils on tables in the living room so she can get a clear idea of how much stuff she has to deal with. Almost immediately she decides to have Mayflower pack everything and ship it all to Washington where she can go through it at her leisure over the next two decades. For comic relief she opens the drawers in a spate of little tables lined up against a living room wall. These contain:
• hundreds of pairs of scissors
• thousands of yellow #2 pencils
• pack upon pack of cards decorated with flowers, kittens, and palm trees
as well as a flaking layer of lined notepaper filled with multiplication problems worked in her father’s shaky hand. He must have thought he was still okay as long as he could multiply five-digit numbers by five-digit numbers. The problems are filled with mistakes. She comes upon a drawer of obituaries neatly cut from The Muncie Star-Press. Every morning her mother must have gotten out her scissors and set to work at the not only necessary but really very important task of saving information of interest to someone, and when she got to the obituary pages – in Muncie a multiplicity of short items since there is very little you can say in print – she must have felt like God regarding the sparrows. Playing no favorites she clipped them all. For a change of scene Judith moves once again to her mother’s room and addresses a bookcase filled with books about the royal family. In a nearby drawer she finds a sheaf of clippings about Princess Diana, her mother’s favorite – by blood the most aristocratic of the royals but a rebel all the same, much like herself, better than most but also a revolutionary who always took the trouble to tell Negroes to do their best, occasions Judith remembers all too well. To help forget she opens, looks at, and closes three drawers filled with costume jewelry:
• pins representing ballerinas, ducks, fans, daisies, umbrellas, teepees, Scotties, pussy cats, sunflowers, and clowns in fake gold, gaudy enamel, and dubious stones
• heavy parures of artificial pearls and diamonds
• necklaces of big round red, yellow, blue, green plastic beads
• chain after chain after chain of goldlike metal interspersed with plastic corals, glass crystals, rhinestone diamonds
• a vast array of clip‑on earrings made of fur, plastic, and what looks like chewed‑up paper,
one of which falls from Judith’s hand and rolls into a closet, and, as she retrieves it, she comes across her mother’s “good” jewelry: gold bracelets galore and a tangle of necklaces composed of strand upon strand of real pearls, green jade, red coral, blue lapis, black jet, and orange amber, the real jewelry of a woman too clever to keep it in the drawers with her costume adornments where any thief could easily sift the gold from the dross. Finding the real stuff inspires Judith to a cautious groping around the other closets. In her father’s she finds a shotgun, and while she is down on her knees, her eye is drawn to a sheaf of papers fanned out under his bed. She retrieves them, along with a lot of dust balls, but instead of the documents she needs for the lawyer and the bank, they are just some old newspapers – interleafed, she discovers, with $145,000 of yellowing General Motors stock certificates, so risky a gamble it had to be hidden from scornful eyes. There is also a box of receipts tucked off in a closet corner, documents that always include a description (written in pencil in her father’s hand) of objects purchased one at a time over decades and not all that expensive considered one by one. Each attribution includes some dates frequently followed by a question mark in parentheses: 1650–1900 (?). From these Judith knows she will eventually identify much of the furniture. It is now almost four in the morning so she carries out six modest bags of trash and leaves them at the curb. She crawls onto the four-poster in her mother’s room. It is going to Washington, the four-poster, which she is beginning to think of, once again, as her own.
The next day at the nursing home life has taken on a new pattern. At her mother’s command, her father cranks her bed up and then down and turns the thermostat up and then down. Next he goes to sleep, flat on his back like a marble prince recumbent on his tomb, while her mother complains unceasingly about the untrustworthiness of people and demands a long list of items, some of which are not permissible,
• aspirin
• cough medicine
• laxatives,
while others seem sensible,
• toothbrush
• toothpaste
• underpants.
The head nurse directs Judith to Target, where she discovers everything two sensible human beings could ever desire, and from this source she stocks her parents’ nursing home closets with enough clothes to last them forever – or until she can determine a little more accurately which, if any, of their own things can be salvaged. Her father puts on a set of new clothes and falls back to sleep, delighted. Her mother likes one bathrobe a lot, but cannot live without
• her red patent-leather pocketbook containing all her money (already discovered under a pile of clothes, empty)
• her Donna Karan flowered sweater
• her light-green Ralph Lauren sweatshirt
• all of her Grasshoppers,
every single one, and with much ado, Judith whips out her new spiral notebook and, to her mother’s great delight, makes a broad-gestured list of these demands, stopping from time to time to double-check with her mother (“All the Grasshoppers?”), cross out, underline, and star. On the way home she rips out the list, balls it up and throws it out the car window. At the drugstore, she buys some miniature neon-colored Post-Its and a bright orange Magic Marker. Tomorrow she will cross out, underline, star, X, post-it, and magic mark her mother’s desires before she throws them out the window and watches them flutter away.
Back home – which is beginning to smell of mothballs – Judith finds a green sweat suit with a Ralph Lauren logo, but not a Donna Karan sweater. In the garage she finds twenty-seven boxes of Grasshoppers in an incredible range of colors, and loads them into the trunk of the car. Then she tackles her father’s desk, where she finds
• 37 pairs of old glasses
• 105 non-working watches
and a rat’s nest of papers she will have to go through at some unspecified point in the future. Occasionally she comes across neat little rubber-banded bundles of $500 made up of twenty-dollar bills. Another drawer looks particularly promising. It turns out to be filled with documents stuck into it by habit, and as she moves down through the layers she finds almost everything the lawyer and the banker have asked for, carefully saved by her father, methodical even in decay. She also finds the name of an insurance agent and statements from four banks for accounts safely under the federally-insured $200,000 limit, and to avoid thought she sets about unpacking the cardboard boxes that fill the spaces under the beds. She wills her mind to be a cool, white unblemished sphere as she tosses the stuff out of the boxes and the closets and the drawers into the trash bags, which she drags into the room where her parents watched television sitting in recliner lounges that look like enormous Chia Pets. By the end of the day she has lugged twenty-four bags of real trash to the end of the driveway and filled the entire television room with bags full of clothes, which she promises herself she will go through in the not-too-distant future. Before she goes to bed she stands quietly in the living room gazing at the old brown couch surrounded now by stacks of books and piles of cushions and a maze of tables covered with things, both those she wants the Mayflower man to pack and those she is still uncertain about, things she will someday know by the names of
• Imari
• Gaudy Welsh
• Gaudy Dutch
• Staffordshire
• Coalport
• Derby
• Worchester
• Minton
• Mason’s Ironstone
• Toby jugs
along with
• 32 ceramic jugs
• a silver tea set
• a tall white china Bodhisattva
• 37 pairs of brass candlesticks
• 48 dull pressed-glass goblets,
named (she will eventually learn)
• Deer-and-pine-tree
• Hummingbird
• Martha’s-tears
• Tennis-racquet
• Thumbprint
• Ribbed-thumbprint
• Thumbprint-and-diamond
• Bull’s-eye-and-thumbprint
• Loop-and-dart
• Paneled-acorn-band
• Block-and-pleat
• Old-moon-and-stars
• Egyptian,
(not very logically nicknamed Parthenon).
The next day Judith sets about weaving the information from the books in the garage and her father’s notes into the list of objects in her mother’s room:
• 6 mahogany 1860s dining-room chairs with large seats and splats
• worthless bookcase
• 2 cedar chests, one with spade feet, one with ogee claws, (Pennsylvania, 18th-century?)
• 4 mahogany chests, 2 with 5 drawers, 2 with 7 drawers, 2 from around 1820 and 2 from 1880s
• 12‑by-8‑foot Antique Serapi
• 2 small Victorian marble-topped chests, from Indianapolis?
• 2 yellow early-19th-century Staffordshire lions
• spinning wheel (American? Southern? 18th-century?)
• heavily carved walnut dresser (Louisiana origin?) with mirror
• 1830s walnut four-poster bed,
the bookcase liberated from some elementary school, the Serapi rug filthy but cheerful, both Staffordshire lions sporting repaired cracks, and the bed, with its frame of unplaned logs, the creation of a country joiner from Southern Indiana, who adorned the foot- and headboards with a set of curves copied from the bonnet of an eighteenth-century English highboy. Wherever did he see an old highboy? In a drawer she finds twenty-four pieces of Edward VIII Coronation china and, remembering her mother’s opinions of Wallis Simpson, decides to keep everything in the room as well as the other items she has already decided she wants, desire now elaborated with knowledge into
• 6 Eastlake-style chairs
• 1790s 6‑leg spade-foot mahogany drop-leaf table
• mahogany tilt-top table
• mahogany dining-room table with 4 leaves
• 2 game tables, one cherry, one mahogany
• 2 small cherry Pembroke tables – 1890s? 1920s?
• tall walnut corner cupboard
• 2 pie safes
• 2 small mahogany drop-leaf tables
• 1860s spool-posted walnut bed
• tall 19th-century cherry cupboard
• 8 marble-topped late-Victorian cherry, walnut, and mahogany bureaus
• glass-fronted bookcase with carved lions,
mouths opened in a celebratory roar: Hello, Washington, D.C. The bureaus are ugly but useful for holding things.
The next day she finds a hefty sack of coins in the garage, a collection probably replicated in millions of safe-deposit boxes securely locked in heavily guarded banks all over America:
• 643 quarters, 439 from 1964, after which the silver quarter lost some silver
• 316 1938 nickels celebrating the change from Indian to Thomas Jefferson
• 40 1963 and 72 1964 half dollars noting the presence and confirming the disappearance of Ben Franklin
• ample stores of Roosevelt dimes and Indian Head pennies
• 28 silver dollars from 1921 with Miss Liberty as a close-mouthed lady wearing a laurel wreath
• 32 silver dollars from 1922 with Miss Liberty as an open-lipped babe wearing a sunburst-crown,
a cheerleader from Mount Olympus High who doesn’t know the Depression is right around the corner. While cleaning out a kitchen cabinet Judith comes across a red-plaid cardboard container filled with three-by-five index cards filed under Appetizers, Main Courses, Desserts. Most of the cards are blank, but at the front of the container rest a few recipes copied by her mother in pencil, blurred but not effaced by time:
• Bananas: Peel one banana and cut in half. Coat with mayonnaise. Top with a sprinkling of chopped nuts, a dollop of mayonnaise, and a maraschino cherry. Serves one.
• Cucumbers: Peel a cucumber, cut in half, scoop out seeds with spoon, and cut into paper-thin slices. Add the juice of one lemon and three tablespoons of mayonnaise. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Stir. Serves two.
• “Swordfish”: Thaw package of frozen fish. Coat both sides with generous layer of mayonnaise. Bake at 350 degrees or follow directions on package. Tastes like fresh swordfish. Serves two,
but along with some loaves feeds a multitude. Judith can recall eating all three dishes. Soup for nuts. Next she discovers an entire kitchen cabinet of Ball jars filled with swizzle sticks in every imaginable color of plastic and topped with all manner of devices, palm trees in particular. She tries to imagine her parents guzzling down exotic drinks in a thousand bars until it occurs to her that the swizzle sticks just turned up one day at The Blue Dipper, a bargain they couldn’t resist.
The next day she begins on the clothes, carefully listing each item in her notebook and guessing at its worth so that everything can be donated to Goodwill for what will turn out to be a tax deduction of $7,262.75. In these trash bags are her father’s clothes:
• 48 pairs of trousers
• 12 t‑shirts
• 21 sports coats
• 3 overcoats
• 15 pairs of shorts
• 28 pairs of shoes
• 4 hats
• 7 bathing suits
• 5 parkas
• 102 ties
• 157 shirts
• 19 suits,
many composed of a material spun from recycled aluminum cans. In another pile of trash bags are her mother’s clothes:
• 37 pairs of slacks
• 48 skirts
• 48 dresses
• 27 hats (knitted, straw)
• 2 jogging suits from the YMCA
• 37 pairs of unworn stockings (in packages)
• 1 pair of ski pants
• 28 belts
• 90 pairs of shoes with heels
• 10 lace nightgowns
• 25 jackets and blazers
• 10 pairs of shorts
• 4 slips
that Judith throws out with the rest of her mother’s underwear,
• 8 shawls,
several knitted by Judith, who sickens at the sight,
• 32 old hats from the 1950s and 1960s
• 5 evening dresses
• 12 long wool coats,
two with mink and leopard collars that should be buried in the backyard but will eventually be donated to Civic Theatre.
• 3 short swing coats
• 1 leather jacket
• 1 velvet evening coat
• 11 raincoats
• 9 parkas
• 8 fancy bathrobes (jewels, sequins, feathers)
• 7 bathing suits
• 111 sweaters
• 175 blouses
• 59 purses
• 78 pairs of kid gloves
• 112 silk scarves
• 89 suits,
including twenty-six Chanel imitations Judith will take to the cleaners and forget all about.
After a few weeks Judith gives up and goes back to Washington. When the Mayflower van arrives a few weeks later she has the moving men cram everything into the two upstairs bedrooms. Six months later Don mails her the auction results, listed on a sheet of folded letterhead, which she sticks in the back of the notebook:
• 23 pieces of Haviland china, $155
• churns, $30, $50, $75, $110
• 1990 Cutlass Supreme, $5,000
• 1979 Buick Skylark, $1,200
• 2 crystal rabbits, $17.50 each
• toothpick holder, $22.50
• 72 wine glasses, $10 total
• copper fondue pot, $22.50
• 4 lawn chairs, $2.50 each
• swizzle sticks, $150
• ceremonial Nazi sword, $250
• antique coffee grinders, $30, $65, $45, $40, $50, $75, $80
• 12 kerosene lamps, $5 to $35
• toy tractors, $140, $45, $120
• toy iron, $40
• jar of marbles, $30
• doll with clothes, $300
• tractor/mower, $475
• edger, $27.50
• ice boxes, $85, $350
• 25 quiche dishes, $.50 each
• 3 yarn winders, $150 each
and on and on.
A few years later, Judith is trying to vacuum under one of the chests, now located in her bedroom, when a drawer slides open and out falls a .45 revolver she somehow missed. Ten years later – after the death of both parents – Judith calls Don and asks him to go over to Mayflower in Indianapolis and auction off everything for whatever he can get.
Several years later the people who bought the house ship out four big cardboard boxes just discovered in a shed behind the garage. The boxes contain an unassembled collection of ceramic items called Christmas Village. She unpacks them and admires what must be
• the Holy Name Church, always avoided by pedophiles
• the All Saints Church, sustained by large numbers of young Episcopalians
• the First Metropolitan Bank with Doric columns so everybody knows it’s a bank
• Hollydale’s, a two-story department store so successful it never has sales
• the Brighton Preparatory School for Young Women and Men on their way to the Seven Sisters and the Ivy League
• the Brokerage House, a bull on the sign announcing never-ending prosperity
• the Ivy Terrace Apartments, where aged parents reside in style and dignity
• 2 four-story brownstones – the Pickford and the Beekman – filled with successful children
• Evergreen Park with its wrought-iron gate and fence and lighted Christmas tree (although no manger)
• the Heritage Museum of Art, slightly baroque and filled with masterpieces of furniture and china donated by the local elite, who can’t think what else to do with them
• shops that sell all the necessities of life – tea, clocks, musical instruments, and men’s ties
in every color of the rainbow. Laden with calm ceramic snow, its windows glowing with painted yellow light, the village is a little uncertain in date, the teens maybe or maybe the early fifties. Inside, hospitality, warmth, security, and trusted values. Outside, clean safe streets filled with cheerful, well-dressed
• skaters
• carolers
• families (father, mother, brother, sister)
• shoppers with gaily-wrapped packages
• uniform-wearing girls holding hands on a field trip
• street musicians
• a hot-dog vendor
• a one-man band with a dancing dog
• a snowman
who never melts. It is where everybody in Muncie really wants to live, and Judith acknowledges that, had she grown up there, she would undoubtedly have learned to know herself and correctly value the world around her. She carefully examines every piece with due reverence before carefully placing Christmas Village back in its boxes and carrying it out to the trash.
But not the notebook, the precious notebook, which she simply stuck behind some books on a shelf in a third-floor bedroom and only discovered by accident this morning, some twenty years after that awful summer. She read it through, pondering the six lists, imagining the others, and, as she looked at the list of her father’s clothes, she remembered his oft-told story: Every summer back in Evansville his mother had given him a new pair of overalls and told him to go amuse himself. He’d spent a lot of time swimming back and forth across the Ohio River, a linear experience that no doubt prepared him to become an accountant, an obsessive task performed in an emptiness that demanded to be filled with incredibly valuable antique objects. And as she looked at the list of her mother’s clothes she thought how each of those many, many items served as the adornments of the ego that drove her mother from a little farm in the southwest corner of the state where her life was curtailed by a raft of Methodist uncles who made derogatory remarks about her mother, maybe not legally married to her father, who might have been an alcoholic, a Roman Catholic, a Klan member, or tainted with the “tar brush.” And wouldn’t she herself still be living in that village had her mother not been possessed of an ego that drove her to leave and subsequently demanded that it be luxuriously clothed forever after?
As she held the notebook in her hands, a lifetime of her own clothes sashayed down memory’s runway, not arrayed on her youthful avatars but flowing along all on their own, clothes long-vanished, potent symbols of aspirations and desires:
• the pink-and-green plaid shorts from third grade that made her look normal
• the beige silk dress she wore to the fifth-grade ice-cream social at Emerson, her first date ever, with Brian, who killed himself during college
• the pink silk dress she wore in the Civic Theatre play when she was thirteen, a week-long production in which she was nightly embraced by the child molester she was in love with
• the big, baggy black wool trousers easily removed by Joe, who’d just returned from a summer trip to what his mother coyly referred to as E.U.R.O.P.E. and, thank God, quickly left for D.E.P.A.U.W.
• the brown tweed skirt and orange sweater she got in seventh grade and was still wearing when she went away to college,
from which she’d travel home by train and, since the station was at the edge of downtown, get picked up by her parents and pulled over to Ball Stores and up to the second floor to see Lillian, who, over the intervening months, had put aside all the things she thought Judith would like, including
• a dark-green nubby wool dress
• a red mohair coat with three-quarter-length sleeves that had to be worn with long black kid gloves
• a shocking-pink spring coat
• a light-blue spring coat
• a white mohair spring coat,
floating down memory’s runway along with
• two dresses from Filene’s Basement – one of black silk, one of navy with a floating front panel
• he madras kilt from L.S. Ayers worn to some springtide event at Princeton
• the purple miniskirted suit from Paraphernalia (with epaulettes)
• the purple heels bought before her wedding
• the wedding dress and veil she gave to Goodwill immediately after the ceremony
• the crocodile flats that fell to pieces on a wet honeymoon in London
• the green and yellow Marimekko dress she wore to the party where the Senator pinched her ass
• the pink and red Marimekko dress she wore the night she fell in love with Buck
• the yellow cotton dress she wore with the purple shoes the afternoon they consummated her love
• the blue sheath dress she wore the night he broke up with her
• the brown suede coat she wore for years after she got divorced
• the gray wool dress she wore to her interview with Sylvia,
who loved her clothes even when she had to see them five days a week.
Judith stuck the notebook in a drawer of her desk, and that night the ghosts appeared:
• a lank, discouraged woman who works at the P.O. and is completely uninterested in antiques
• an intense hump-backed black-haired woman who’s inherited money from an aunt and escaped from her small hometown with the love of her life and runs an antiques store, thanks to the needs of some other ghosts, including
• the little old woman with her grandmother’s porcelain tea-set, which she has to sell in order to pay the rent
• the gay guy who wants to open a restaurant with the money from his grandmother’s silver, hundreds of utensils people used to eat with during the Middle Ages
• the banker who really, really needs to cover his gambling losses with his mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s furniture
• the lawyer’s second wife who desperately wants to get rid of all her husband’s first wife’s mother’s stuff
• the ancient carpenter who refuses to understand that what he does is art
• the teacher at the elementary school who’s never married and hears the endless reproaches uttered by her mother’s things
• the son of the owner of the little junk store several blocks away on Main Street who died in the 1950s before he could get rid of his inventory,
ghosts all, and none of them real, but ghosts who, real or not, are blessedly destined, unlike their things, to disappear forever.
Jane Gillette is the author of the short story collection The Trail of the Demon and Other Stories (Missouri Review Books). Her stories have appeared in AGNI, The Antigonish Review, The Hopkins Review, ZYZZYVA, and The Massachusetts Review.