Not Today

“What’re you doing?”  Bill rounded the corner of the staircase clad in workout sweats to find what appeared to be an archeological dig, artifacts strewn around the coat closet below him, his wife standing in the closet door, an armful of coats in her arms.

“I said I was going to clean this closet on the first day of spring.  And that’s today.”

“You should wait - I can help you when I get back from the gym.  Why don’t you run over to the Y now, and then we can clean it together after lunch?”  Bill stood scanning the piles, hands on his hips, a look of mild concern on his face.

“No, that’s okay.  I’ve wanted to tackle this for a long time.”  

Bill nodded, knowing projects like this made his wife happy, while checking the piles quickly to see if anything he cared about was going to be tossed out.  After a couple seconds he managed to tear himself away.

“All right.  I’ll be back in a couple hours.”  Theresa watched her husband walk away and listened to hear the back door slam.  Part of the reason she needed to do this now was because she knew her husband was a hoarder; he’d never let anything go.  She glanced back into the corner of the closet to see a sprawling mess still remaining. The closet was bigger than it appeared, extending under the staircase, so now that the coats were removed, the hidden storage space was exposed.  The coat closet hadn’t been touched in the eighteen years since they had moved in, and it was stuffed with everything but the kitchen sink: books and boxes of old photo albums, coats, hats, gloves, boots, shoes, an old turntable and pile of records that Bill could never seem to discard, even though she’d never seen him set it up, a few miscellaneous boxes - who knew what else?

Theresa started by organizing everything into piles outside of the closet.  She went about matching mittens and gloves - she found a dozen good pairs and as many that were missing their match.  She had placed a big cardboard box next to the closet for all the items to donate, and she threw half of the hats and mittens into the box, remnants of the kids’ childhoods that had quietly survived other purges over the years.  Coats to keep. Coats to donate. Shoes to keep. Shoes to donate. Reusable shopping bags. Umbrellas. Baseball caps. The turntable (she rolled her eyes as she scanned the album titles). She dug out the last couple boxes, and then swept the closet.  It felt good to have it cleaned out. Then she turned her attention to the two remaining boxes.

The first was a large shoebox and she laughed out loud when she opened it.  Bill had bought a pair of cowboy boots on a whim during a trip to Wyoming and Montana, had worn them exactly once during the trip for an evening out to dinner, and had never donned them again.  Definitely donation worthy, although the kids would probably get a kick out of seeing their dad in boots. 

Theresa opened the last box.  She saw an envelope and a picture album underneath it.  She picked up the envelope and pulled out its contents - about a dozen pictures.  And when she looked, she was surprised at what she saw; there was Bill with another woman.  He was young, maybe mid-twenties, back when his hair was longer and he was about thirty pounds lighter.  He looked like a different person. She was tall and thin with dark hair in a pixie cut and dark eyes. And there they were together:  Bill and the girl grinning at a bar, Bill and the girl on a bike ride, Bill and the girl on a boat at a lake, Bill and the girl sitting on his old couch, the ugly blue plaid couch he had in his apartment when he and Theresa had started dating.  

Theresa had been kneeling and shifted to sit on the floor, back against the wall.  She looked around to make sure no one was watching and paused to listen for any movement.  All was quiet. Sophie was up in her room as usual and Abby was out running around with friends, a last spring break get-together before Bill had to take her back to college the next day.  Theresa thumbed through each of the pictures again and set them aside. She hadn’t seen this woman’s picture before, and for some reason it made her nervous. It was a long time ago, maybe before she had even met Bill, but she felt a pang of jealousy anyway.   

 She glanced around again for signs of life in the house before pulling the photo album out of the box and opening the album.  It wasn’t a large album, about eight by ten inches and thin, with a simple black cover. She looked at the first couple of pictures and felt her heart sink into her stomach; it was a wedding album.  Bill and the girl on a beach, probably somewhere in Florida. He was barefoot in light khaki pants and a white cotton shirt. She wore a casual white sundress and a little wreath of white flowers in her hair.  It was late afternoon, not quite sunset. Holding hands and walking. Laughing as they danced away from a wave. Facing each other, holding hands while a man in dress pants and a dress shirt directed the ceremony.  His parents were there, as well as his brother and then girlfriend, now Theresa’s sister-in-law. Another couple stood nearby who must have been her parents, while another couple that she didn’t recognize looked on.  Pictures at the restaurant afterwards. The final picture was of them walking away from the camera, holding hands, the sun having already set, leaving them partially silhouetted against a deep pink horizon.

Closing the book, Theresa sat, staring at the wall in front of her, trying to digest what she had just learned.  Bill had been married before! He had never said anything about it, not once. All these years, he had never told her a thing.  She could hear her heart pounding in her ears now, a pressure suddenly appearing at her temples. She thought about it some more.  And his parents knew! And Peter and Amy! None of them had ever breathed a word of it! Indignation swelled to outrage as Theresa stood up, tossing the album aside.  She paced around the house, going to the back door to see if he was home yet, knowing he wouldn’t be. She wanted to confront him without the kids around, wanted to catch him when he walked in the back door, before Abby came home or Sophie finally abandoned her room.  She wished he would come home right then.

But now she had to wait.  She sat at the kitchen table, looking out the window at their back yard but not really seeing anything.  She sat for a few minutes trying to think through this. Why had he lied to her? She still couldn’t believe he had lived this lie for their twenty-two years together.  And his parents? And Peter and Amy? All of them conspiring to hide this from her. It made her sick. She found that her fingers had balled into a fist and she unclenched them and wrung her hands together.  She felt so tense! Theresa peeked at the clock and knew that Bill wouldn’t be home for another twenty minutes. She got up and paced around again, finally making her way back to the closet, back to the box she had abandoned, and picked up the envelope again.  In some respects she wanted to keep the pain alive, to see the pictures again in order to sear them into her brain and steel her for a confrontation with Bill.  

She flipped through the pictures again one more time and took another look in the box.  There was a manilla folder at the bottom that she hadn’t noticed, and she pulled it out and opened it, pulling out a stapled legal document.  The divorce decree.

Her name was Jackie, and she was a year younger than Bill.  From what she could tell, their divorce was finalized a year before Bill had met Theresa.  It must have been short-lived. And it appeared they really had nothing of value - there was little in the way of assets mentioned in the document.

Theresa read through the entire document and leaned back against the wall to think.  They had been young and in love, or at least thought they were. But it turned out to be different than they imagined it would be.  Or else something happened that caused their young love to implode. Could he have cheated on her? But even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew it wasn’t true.  Not Bill, anyway. She knew that wasn’t in him. She reached for the envelope again, now looking for answers. Bill looked genuinely happy in pretty much every picture, but on closer inspection, she wasn’t sure that Jackie did.  In some of the pictures she certainly beamed, but on others, the smile seemed a little forced; Jackie’s eyes belied the truth of the matter. And in the picture of them on bicycles, Bill looked almost ecstatic, he loved biking, but Jackie looked like she was just tolerating the day.

Did Jackie leave Bill?  It was tough to say, impossible to know unless she asked Bill.  And suddenly, she felt sorry for Bill. He had been in love, and likely had his heart broken, and it was probably embarrassing.  They had never talked about any of their relationships from before they were married. They met in their late twenties, and they both knew there had been others before them, boyfriends or girlfriends for a while, but it didn’t seem important to talk about them - in fact, it had seemed best to leave the past alone, and it had never bothered either of them.  She had never talked about previous lovers with him and didn’t really want to. She remembered Bill being a little surprised once or twice on vacations to learn that she had been to most of the city’s tourist sites before, but he never pressed it, and she never talked about traveling there previously with her boyfriend. And now she maybe understood his aversion to Florida.  Bill had always disliked Florida and never wanted to travel there, and they never had, not once for a family vacation, despite the girls pleading about visiting Disney World when they were tweens.

She thought about Bill’s parents and his brother and sister in-law.  They had never said anything, but why would they? Why would anyone from the family bring up your old lovers in front of your new bride?  Of course they wouldn’t. They weren’t hiding anything, it just wasn’t theirs to talk about.  

Theresa took a big sigh.  But why wouldn’t Bill ever say anything?  Again, it was impossible to know without asking him.  Maybe he was embarrassed, embarrassed and sad, and would just rather not talk about it.  She thought about the things in her past that she was embarrassed about, that she didn’t want to talk about, and cringed a little.  She found herself starting to cry, and rubbed her cheeks, wiping away the tears.

The sound of the back door slamming caused Theresa to jump.  Her eyes grew wild and she quickly picked up the envelope of pictures and the album and threw them in the box, stuffed the document into the manila folder and threw it into the box, and put the lid on.  She carried it into the far corner in the back of the closet and then looked about, spied the boots and grabbed them, shoving the boot box on top. Then she sat down in front of the closet door among her piles of treasures and waited for Bill, who appeared a second later, t-shirt drenched in sweat, holding a protein drink in hand.

“Wow.  You’ve got a project on your hands,” he said, already digging through the donations box, looking to see if anything needed rescuing.  He pulled out an old blue pea-coat of Theresa’s and held it up.

“I always thought this was cute,” he said, wistfully.

“It was.  Fifteen years ago,” answered Theresa flatly.  Bill looked at her and cocked his head.

“You okay?”  Theresa forced a smile.

“Um, yeah.  Yeah, just a little tired, I think.”

“Well, I can help now.  Let me go change.”

“No, no.  You go do your thing.  I’ve got this under control.”

“You sure?”

“Yep,” answered Theresa, a brave, half smile on her face.  Bill put the coat back in the box and headed up the stairs.

“All right.  I’m going to take a shower and then see if I can fix that bathroom light fixture that’s been bugging me.”

Theresa watched him go and kept looking up the stairs after him for another minute, thinking about what to do.  But she already knew that she didn’t want to bring this up with him today. Maybe one day she would ‘accidentally’ find the box again and, more calmly, more empathetically, ask him about it.  Or maybe one day she’d arrange for him to find it, and let him dispose of it if he wants to - he had obviously forgotten about it, and it hadn’t moved in eighteen years. But not today. Today was about spring cleaning.  And she was glad for it.