Hoarder

My father found solace in whiskey and rotating girlfriends and Tara found it in shiny things, I think, as she inspects her flagrant cubic zirconium, a promise from her boyfriend Trent.

“You think too much,” Tara tells me, even though I haven’t asked her. She’s perched by the window, ring-heavy hand gesturing towards me. “That’s you’re problem.”

Her plump body is squeezed onto the space meant to hold nothing but a decorative pumpkin hued pillow (now on the floor) and a small baby aloe plant in an earth-colored pot. The window is open and she ashes into a Dixie cup with water. Plumes of smoke drift out of her magenta painted mouth.

You smoke too much, that’s YOUR problem, I think, my quiet rage a simmering pot that will never boil. She shifts, her massive bottom hitting the plant, and I leap forward to catch it before it joins the pillow on the floor. Flecks of ash are on the windowsill.

The plants: they are what bring me comfort. Unlike whiskey and fake jewels, they are living, breathing forms of life.

Tara grins, snarky. “More where that came from,” she scoffs, her laughter like her: cheap, but meant to appear sophisticated.

“Can you blow the smoke out the window?” I say, hating the meek, kitten-like quality of my voice. Tara gives me a withering look. Pointedly, she exhales a hard white stream through the screen.

“Are we saving these too?” she says, holding the Dixie cup towards me.

We are not saving the Dixie cups, although I sort of want to. I understand, now, what these things meant to Nana, these things that caused everyone else to label her a hoarder and stay away.

For Nana, it wasn’t booze or sex or a shopping problem or even just the plants she needed for comfort. It was everything.

“I’m donating them,” I tell Tara, carefully setting the plant on the counter. I walk out of the kitchen—I need a moment away from her to breathe. “Can you put them in the box by the back door?” Unable to stop myself, I add, “Please.”

We're packing up the last remnants of Nana, the things I’m not keeping, and Tara has volunteered to help even though, like her opinion of the quantity of my thoughts, I haven’t asked her. That’s the thing about Tara—quantity over quality, always, at least until it reaches hoarder status.

I’ve already organized Nana’s bedroom, storing the most important of her possessions in labeled containers with color-coded lids in the giant armoire drawers. Tara is right, there are more plants where the baby aloe came from--most of them in Nana’s room. I had to get rid of a lot, but the plants are different. The plants are not in the same category as the butler’s pantry full of paper products or the attic with all of Grandpa’s clothing—even his socks and tighty-whities.

The aloe plants made her seem like a horticulturist instead of a hoarder. They ranged in size from the mother of all of them—the one with fleshy, arm-sized leaves—to the newest baby, the one Tara had so carelessly butted. I haven’t downsized them at all, but I have arranged the ones in Nana's room by size. The little ones line the windowsill. The medium ones are on top of the cherry colored armoire, their spear-shaped leaves creating aesthetic shadows. In the afternoon sunlight, they appear to be dancing in their terra-cotta pots.

I can hear Tara banging in the kitchen, where there was nothing left to be done except put the overabundance of Dixie cups into the box. I breathe in the plant-rich air, and I straighten Nana’s already straight quilt, feeling quite sorrowful that she is no longer under it, no longer swathed in the cranberry and lemon-yellow and bright, songbird-blue squares. Rage and sorrow are buddies, lately, but the plants calm me.

Tara is pissed that Nana left the house, and its contents, to me. Mostly because the contents included her bank accounts, and Tara is green with envy. But what can she say? She didn't offer to move in when Nana needed help. No one else was willing to wade through trash (my father’s words) or live in filth (Tara’s words). So they couldn't say anything when she died, because none of them had even been to visit in months.

“She’s a hoarder,” Tara had moaned over the phone, when I’d called her to let her know that Nana was officially on hospice. “I can’t, I just can’t come into that house.”

“I’ve been working on it,” I’d said to her, that horrid pleading cadence in my voice, as always. I don’t even know why I begged, except that Nana had asked for Tara. She’d asked for her son, too, but I knew my father wouldn’t make the effort. Sometimes, the painkillers caused forgetfulness, and Nana forgot that her sweet little boy had changed into a hard and bitter man.

“Oh, so what, you alphabetized the cleaning supplies?” Tara’s donkey laugh hurt me, turned up the boiling point, but why? She was making fun of my organizational skills, so what? She was the pathetic one, I reminded myself. I almost told her that I had dropped my master’s classes, just for that semester, to take care of Nana. I wanted her to feel shamed. She wasn’t giving up any of her life, her life of shopping at Big Lots and making crockpot meals for Trent, to help Nana ease into death.

In the end, I said nothing. Tara didn’t come, and twenty-two days after that call Nana finally slipped away. Now, the house was mine.

I hadn’t lied to Tara, part of my mission of moving in was to clean it up for Nana. She was probably, technically, a hoarder, but it wasn’t filth and trash like the family claimed. It wasn’t dirty, it was just…stuff. A lot of it. She didn’t just buy in bulk when things went on sale, or when it was something she used frequently. She bought in bulk, always, because she could. The butler’s pantry, the spacious room off the kitchen that I had loved to play in as a child, was full of this buying-in-bulk phenomenon.

When I was little, my father shipped me to Nana’s most weekends. Mom had been dead for a while, and Tara was a teenager. It was easy for her to stay with friends when our dad went to Atlantic City for the weekend with whoever his paramour of the month was. She would sneak back to the parent-free house to throw keggers with her hard-partying crowd, and meanwhile, I was nestled safe at Nana’s, amongst her stuff.

Back then, it hadn’t been as overwhelming. The living room had a coffee table piled high with magazines that I loved to flip through, feeling very grown up as Nana and I watched General Hospital (she recorded it all week and watched it over the weekends, a true binge-watcher before it became a thing). She had Good Housekeeping and Newsweek and my favorite, People.

We could eat whatever I wanted for supper, because she had the ingredients for everything—in her deep chest freezer and in that butler’s pantry, its black and white parquet floor still visible then. By the time I moved in as a graduate student, there was only a small path through the middle. The deep shelves, lined with packages of everything (paper towels and 500-count boxes of toothpicks and industrial size bottles of dish soap and canned soup stacked tall and boxes of pasta—so much pasta) had long since taken over the floor.

After dinner, I would dig in the linen closet, rooting through bottles of lavender soap and rose-scented bath salts to pick the flavor of my evening bubble bath. Nana always picked up extra clothes for me so I wouldn’t need to pack a bag, and I’d open the bottom drawer of her red armoire, excited to find a two-pack of pink flannel nightgowns.

“Nana, why do you have so much food?” I asked her once, pouring Frosted Flakes from a box that was clearly expired, seven other identical boxes still in the butler’s pantry. “When its just you?” This was the innocent question of a child, not the judgmental observation Tara had made a few years back, scoffing at the number of cans of SpaghettiOs towering on top of the fridge.

Nana had eased herself into the chair across from me, sliding piles of junk mail aside to make room for her doughy arms.

“Oh, I don’t know. Because I can? When I was a child, you see, we had nothing. And Grandpa and I—bless him—we struggled for a long time before we were comfortable.” She shrugged, her kind, calf-brown eyes turning up when she smiled.

“I don’t ever want to feel like that again,” she'd concluded. “So, you know. I save. And I stock up. You just never know, right?”

“Right,” I'd answered, slurping my stale cereal, even though I had no idea what she meant. I only knew that the never-ending flow of pajamas and spa-like baths and weekly celebrity gossip filled me up just as much as her love did.

I hear another bang from the kitchen, and my rage comes back to life. I envision the nearly born anger-bubbles going back under the water, quietly. I breathe out to the plants—quietly. I go back to the kitchen, walking quietly, as if to show Tara you don’t have to make so much fucking noise! Even my rage is organized, reserved.

She’s in the butler’s pantry, and the crash I heard was her moving the pots and pans around. I haven’t fully organized the kitchen, and I want to line the cupboards with the huge package of floral contact paper I found in the basement. I’ve temporarily stored the cast iron pan, Nana’s Dutch oven, and an oversized wok on the lowest shelf, where Tara has apparently been looking for…something.

“What are you doing?” I ask her, my voice as quiet as my steps, startling her.

“I’m just seeing what’s in here,” she barks back. “I’m surprised you have pots and pans with food items.” An eye roll to accentuate her distaste for my normally logical storage methods. I snatch the cast iron frying pan from the floor and place it back on the shelf, a brief flash of accidentally dropping it on her foot flaming up in my mind.

“I’m painting the kitchen first,” I tell her. I don’t know why I lie, except that if I told her I’m lining the cabinets with contact paper, something that is so very out-of-date but also, so very Nana, she’ll probably make fun of me for it.

“If it was me, I’d sell this place,” Tara said. “I’d take the money and buy a nice house in the Larklands.”

The Larklands. The dingy suburban neighborhood with cheap-construction, cookie-cutter houses, each one so alike you have to take note of the car in the driveway to tell them apart. That would be Tara’s up-and-coming place of residence. Her current house was a rented split-level in a questionable part of town which always looked unkempt because she relied on Trent to mow the grass.

“I like this house,” I shrug, racking my brain to come up with a reason for her to go, now. I know she’s skulking about, looking for something of monetary value, something she can claim she needs as a memory of Nana. I wildly scan the kitchen for anything I can give her, just to get her to leave.

“You always did love it here,” she says, as if “here” is a level of hell.

Of course I loved it here, I want to scream at her. At home, I was essentially alone. I could not remember my mother, having only been a toddler when she’d died in a car accident. I get that Tara, school-aged at the time, was traumatized. I get that my father—who Nana reports was a bold and funny child, a kind and dynamic man—was broken and became mean with grief after his wife was killed. I get, as a graduate student of psychology, that I was the forgotten child. The reminder, when my father had to soothe me back to sleep or Tara had to make my breakfast, of who was missing--the person who should be doing these maternal tasks. Unlike Tara—who resembles my father and Nana with their hefty frames and dark hair and giant doe eyes—I look like our mother. I understand that my strawberry blonde hair, to them, is a ghost of the woman who was gone.

But they made it so hard for me. Tara was angry and acted out with deviant behavior—sneaking around and lying and failing school—that my father ignored, stranded in his own deviant behavior of drinking his sorrow away. But I was little, and they were always fighting, or drunk, slamming doors. No one even saw me, except when someone would say as an afterthought, where is she? and I would appear like the ghost I felt I was, my whispery voice saying, I’m right here.

At Nana’s, my whole existence changed. Instead of trying not to take up space, there was space cleared for me, amongst the piles of clothes and plastic totes of household supplies. When I showed up and my pants were too short, again, Nana promptly took me into her room and laid out the shopping bags of clothing from the mall, multiple sizes bought just in case. Once, when I showed up with a burn on my hand, she blinked away her horror and snapped a spike off the aloe plant.

“This will help,” she said, squeezing the cool, sticky gel onto my palm. “What happened?”

I explained that I was making grilled cheese for myself. I hadn’t realized the handle of the pot would grow hot as well and I had grabbed it barehanded. In the split second before my brain realized it was scalding, my palm had burnt.

I was seven.

I suppose Nana could have said a lot of things, like why were you cooking unattended or why didn’t you tell your father you were hurt but instead she told me how aloe is good for burns, and she was right. My palm, blistering and pink, already felt better. She told me how, as a child, they didn’t have money for ointments, so they had to use aloe for burns—even sunburns! To this day she felt that it worked better than burn cream anyhow.

The next time I visited, she’d quilted tiny covers for the handle of the cast iron skillet. Six of them. “In case you lose them,” she said. She also gave me instructions for seasoning the pan, and at a very young age I learned how to make a killer grilled cheese sandwich. When I moved in with her, years later, the cast iron skillet was one of the few things I'd brought with me.

I can’t stand Tara’s fingers on it, her long, triangular, teal-colored nails clicking against the metal. My eyes land on the Kitchen-Aid mixer on the counter, something Nana had purchased a few months before she had passed, when she was still able to order things from Amazon with ease. Pearl white and chrome, it had sat unused on the counter since its arrival.

“Do you want the mixer?” I blurt out to Tara. “I know you like to bake.” I actually have no idea if that’s true, one hazy memory of her making cupcakes for our father’s birthday. I really know nothing about my sister, only that she likes things, in a different way than Nana. In a way that gives her the illusion of having a life of ease and comfort. The illusion is a nice alternative to a shitty house with a deadbeat maybe-fiancé. Its enough: a trendy manicure and designer jeans and living room décor is perfectly inspired by whatever Pinterest says is hot right now. The offer of a Kitchen-Aid mixer that she'll probably never use makes her eyes light up.

“Sure!” she says, leaving the pantry, drawn by the allure of something new. She puts her hands on the mixer and I keep her moving.

“I really can finish this up myself,” I tell her, picking up her fringe purse and putting her cigarette case in it. “Come on, I’ll walk you to the car.”

Tara smiles before she leaves, her meanness dropped for a rare second, the mixer resting carefully in the passenger seat. I think of how easy it was to appease her. Her obsession with things is not all that different from my obsession with order, from Nana's hoarding. We only want to be comforted, right?

Inside, I immediately grab a sponge and wipe the windowsill free of ashes and put the pillow and the baby plant back where they belong. I break off a stem of aloe, squeeze a tiny, odorless drop of liquid into my palm, soothing the emotional burns. I breathe it in and the memory of Nana cools the simmering inside of me.