Hold On

It's time. Time to do what must be done. Time to go where she has been trying not to go. There is really no reason any more to avoid it. Nothing is going to go away if she doesn't do something about it, but it's still not easy. It will be like removing a part of her own body and disposing of it, like tearing off a part of her, wounding her and knowing she will be all alone afterward to bleed out, as they say in the crime shows. If she doesn't do it, nobody else will, and she knows it.

For a while now she's clung to the hope that somebody else would do this for her, walk in and go downstairs to claim or toss what belongs to her. Not to the woman who has been protecting the items packed away years ago, folded carefully after their final washing, swaddled in the darkness of the corner where they are safe from everything but memory. Her memory, the one that hurts. The mother - for the woman with stored-up memories is a mother - takes a deep, measured breath and faces the door. Not one leading outside, but the one that leads down to that place. She breathes again, knowing there is nobody to hear her, and walks.

It takes days, maybe centuries, to reach the door to the basement. She has been hopipng against hope that it is locked, that somebody has perhaps boarded it up and thrown away the hammer, that the door has disappeared, even. No, it is still there. The door has not gone away, although hope has been relocated somewhere called limbo. Exactly the reason why she must do what must be done. What nobody will know about and even if they find out, it won't matter.

Down the stairs she goes, an inch at a time, to the place where dust accumulates overnight but doesn’t matter. The dust is a natural feature of places below ground level, after all. It doesn’t hurt anybody and can be removed easily enough. Somebody should invent an air purifier designed specifically for basements so people wouldn't have to go into them ever. Store things in them and never look back.

Ecept that if you put things in a basement, they grow memories along with the dust. You look at what you have put away and you are forced to look at your own mortality. It all stares back at you, thinks the woman, and her shoulders sag. 

It is the basement floor, however, that presents a stiffer challenge as far as dust is concerned. Concrete is a bear to clean, because if you use water and a bit of soap to spruce it up a bit or freshen the smell, you end up with mud and mustiness. The floor is even harder to sweep. It needs attention, though, just like every lonely place does. The woman thinks she might give it a quick once-over with the broom she keeps there, just to pretend she's paying attention. After all, the basement is not small; it runs beneath the entire house. Always there, lurking, or waiting, which might be the same thing.

She makes her way to the furthest back corner where the walls were never painted and there's an old fuse box. Her breath is still with her, but now she sucks it in with a hitch, as if startled. There's nothing there, of course. Nothing to be afraid of. Then she becomes the mother who is boxing up up baby clothes, early childhood clothes, clothes from grade school. 

There are so many of them. She’s been holding on to the hope that her daughter will return to claim them, that she will some day want them. She never has. She obviously does not need them. (The mother chooses the word carefully: need. She doesn't like the idea that the daughter, her daughter, will never want them.) 

The clothes have definitely been taking up a lot of space in the basement. And in the mother's heart, of course. One thing nobody should have to do is to dispose of baby clothes, and certainly no mother should be allowed to do it because the damage can be irreparable. Giving away a christening blanket or a tiny snowsuit is like ripping the placenta out of the mother's body again. That may sound overly dramatic, but it's not. Ask any woman what it feels like and if she doesn't get tears in her eyes she's not normal.

It is time, though. The woman knows it is time to offer the articles of clothing as well as the bulky stuffed animals, the rattles, the pacifiers and other paraphernalia to somebody who can use them. Time to give them to somebody who won’t know how weighted down they are with tears and hurt and anger. Who will just use things in the same manner as they were needed and used before, years ago, until they were forgotten. 

The mother does not box up her own little girl clothes, some of which are also in the basement. She still needs to hold on to that other little girl, the one she remembers as the little child who still knew the meanings of hope and things that could come true. The one who lived in a big house, a big town of four thousand people, the center of the universe. The girl who had yet to discover the meaning of traitor. Had yet to meet one. Who knew of a future. Who had everything she needed.

The boxing up is done and the woman's strength has not allowed her to go deeper into the store of garments and toys. She already has a lump in her throat and another where her heart should be. She cannot force her eyes to look any longer; they are reddened and swollen, but oddly dry. They see only mist now, but not the mist created by the basement dust. No amount of sweeping or mopping will ever remove that haze created by years of oblivion and distance. Not hers. Her daughter's.

The mother is surprised at how few boxes she has to take upstairs and how heavy they are. The weight of thinking and waiting. Empty weight, tired of cowering in a corner, surrounded by holiday decorations, books that should never have been bought, paper waiting to be shredded before nobody can discover it and its secrets. Her shoulders ache. Luckily, her car is parked close to the house and she doesn't need to carry the boxes very far.

It feels like there are a hundred of them, but that's absurd because her car is small.

The drive to the thrift shop only takes ten minutes, but the woman almost changes her mind a dozen times before she pulls into the parking lot behind the store. She keeps thinking she's dropping off a corpse dressed in dozens of garments. Bright colors, nicely made, none of them showing signs of wear. She asks herself if the articles of clothing were ever worn. They could have been bought for a girl who never saw them. Maybe the girl is only a figment of her imagination, a child of her dreams, not her reality. 

The woman, who is actively and fervently trying to forget that she has also been a mother, removes the boxes of the daughter who will never need them and definitely will never return for them from her car. This is necessary, she thinks but does not say anything. She needs to convince herself of that. It’s been so long since they’ve spoken; longer since they’ve seen one another. It's time to finish forgetting.

There are two people whose job it is to receive all the donations people drop off. They watch to make sure nobody is leaving pure trash that should be left out for weekly pickup and hauled to the dump. The mother sees them and knows they will not reject her offerings because they are worth so much. Then she waits until both employees have turned their backs to her before kissing her fingers and moving them to the taped-up cardboard, leaving the kiss on the still surfaces that will no longer occupy her basement. She does this for each box, then leaves. Nobody notices the look on her face. Nobody notices what else is on her face. She drives home, slowly and deliberately.

Once home, the woman forces herself to go downstairs, perhaps to prove to herself that this has really happened. It has, because the basement looks cleaner and emptier. It is. Yet the woman can’t quite express what she feels about this modification. What's done is done.

A few days pass. A woman enters the thrift shop and moves without thinking to the area where children’s wear is located. She isn't a frequent visitor to the place, but there is a reason she is there. She doesn't want to attract attention, but looks around at the other customers, surreptitiously. Nobody has much much money, or they wouldn't shop there. It's not about pride, just a fact. Used clothing is cheaper, even if nobody knows where it has come from, who has worn it, how it has ended up in that place. 

These thoughts make the woman sad, but she has to watch her expenses now. Another woman, her white hair drawn back at the nape of her neck, is rummaging through a nearby rack. She sees the sad woman but does not notice her sadness. Instead, she smiles, her gaze glancing down toward the younger woman's round belly. Children cost money. They outgrow clothes very fast, too. It makes sense to get used things. They don't realize what they're wearing.

The sad woman, not far from becoming a mother, smiles back, erasing as much as possible her unfortunate expression. There are are number of items that might be useful and that are, like everything in the thrift shop, reasonably priced. Then she notices there are some items in boxes and moves closer. She turns the flaps outward. It almost feels like Christmas, except she's not much for celebrating Christmas now. She has little money and there is nobody - yet - to share it with. Maybe, she thinks, next year. Maybe she will have lights and a tree and other things.

Peering inside the first box, she sees some very nice items and wonders how anybody could have given them away. In the next moment, she realizes she is looking at her own clothing. Her first pajama with feet, white, green, and orange stripes to avoid gender stereotyping. Her own mother always avoided getting her pink clothes, and so she had worn many colors, some fluorescent, lots of red, and blue, because girls were allowed to wear blue just like boys were. Her day-glo orange leggings she would wear with a green jersey and pretend she was a carrot, because her mother told her she was one when she dressed like that. Her snowsuits, white and blue and dark blue, in increasing sizes. And more. She knows what else is there. If not in the first box, then in one of the others whose contents have yet to be dumped on the tables where buyers can see them.

She is furious.

She can only think her mother hates her enough to get rid of her smallest garments. It isn’t fair. She was a good girl, quite well-behaved, kind to animals, good in school. Yet her mother has given away all her beautiful clothing instead of keeping it for her. What if she had wanted it? What did it matter that more than three decades had gone by? What harm were the items doing in the basement where she knew they had been stored? Sure there were several boxes, but surely they hadn't been hurting anybody being in the corner. This is like an insult or worse. It was as if her mother no longer remembered her.

She purchases all the boxes, from which only a few items have been removed and inspected by other buyers, then left on the table in full view. Those items she scoops up and returns them to their cardboard containers. At the counter, the employee recognizes the boxes and remembers them. She tells the woman who was not yet a mother that there were some nice things in them and then mentions the woman who had dropped them off a few days ago.

She looked so sad. She hardly looked at me, just shoved them away from herself. She must have had a hard time letting go of these things. They must have belonged to her daughter. I wondered if maybe the daughter had died young, if something tragic had happened...

The employee talks forever. It seems like it took her a week to say everything she had to say about the woman who had donated such lovely clothing. The woman buying the boxes wonders if she should offer to pay more, given all the praise she is hearing. However, she doesn't offer, and finally leaves the store with a car full of things her own little one, soon to arrive, will be using. She has something she needs to do, should have done years ago.

It takes only five or ten minutes to reach the house. She knows how to get there by heart. She parks in the driveway, turns off the ignition, and walks to the front door. She notices a nice stone path has been added in front and that the shrubs in front are a lot taller. The boxes remain in the car.

Once at the door, she's uncertain whether to ring the bell or knock. She decides knocking is better. The woman inside hesitates before coming to the door and prudently looks out the window. Her heart almost stops.

The door opens and the women hug. The mother then asks the almost-mother: Did you bring my boxes back?

Yes, I brought our boxes back. This is where we should be.

Fortunately, there was now room in the basement for them. After the new little girl had finished wearing the clothing they contained.