Napkins

My father was angry that we had to leave all his napkins behind.

Two miles past Quincy with half a tank and no money to get us any further than Burlington, his most pressing concern was going to be what happened to all the napkins he left in the cupboard above the kitchen sink. All hoarders have a worthless item they prefer above all other items--worthless or otherwise. My father’s favorite was a napkin. Any kind of napkin. He collected them the way kids my age at the time collected Pokemon cards. The strange thing about a fixation like this--among other strange things that gradually become a life living with someone like my father--was that we were not allowed to use the napkins. We could use paper towels. We could use rags. We could use toilet paper. We were never to go in the cupboards and take out the napkins. They were for an emergency. I suspected my father thought that at some point there would be an oil spill off the Eastern shore that could only be cleaned up with napkins, and when that day came, he’d be ready.

Some families had fine china that went unused. We had napkins.

“You can sit there quiet all you want,” he said, as we passed another Dunkin without stopping, despite him promising him an egg and cheese sandwich since it was nearly two and I hadn’t eaten, “But you know you were wrong for making me leave the napkins.”

I hadn’t made him leave anything. The landlord had evicted us after he showed up with the authorities to inspect the property and found piles of debris in every room. Plastic bags filled with half-eaten sandwiches. Clothes with the tags still on them. We never had pets, but eventually, we had vermin. I’d hear the mice rummaging through the hilltops of my father’s collections every night as though they were visitors at a yardsale.

“It’s the women mice that are the problem,” he would say, eating his tv dinner on a stack of stained magazines in what at one time had been our living room, while I tried to do my homework, “The male mice don’t come inside. The so-called ‘experts’ won’t admit to that, but it’s true. If we could wipe out every female mouse, we’d never have infestation. It would be a thing of the past.”

For a man so sure of his own intellect, my father refused to play Jeopardy with me when it was on, because I usually beat him handily.

“If you ever want to impress girls,” he’d say, “Don’t let them know you like trivia. Trivia is trivial. It’s right there in the name. Women want to know that you know about important things. You see how I know what has value? What things to keep? That’s an important thing to know. That shows a woman you know how to build a home. A life. Nobody gives a shit if you know who invaded Sweden in the 1800’s. That doesn’t matter. Being able to pick up a pair of gloves at a store and see that the store owner is so dumb he’s selling them for twenty bucks when he could get forty? That’s what a man is supposed to know. Because a man can turn around and resell those same gloves and make a profit. Nothing trivial about that.”

My father never resold anything he bought. According to him, he didn’t just have a system. Hoarders had systems. That’s why he knew he wasn’t a hoarder, no matter what the landlord and the social worker told him when they were finished inspecting the house.

No, no, my father didn’t just have a system. He had three systems. When to hold, when to sell, and when to accumulate. According to him, some things couldn’t be sold singularly. You had to sell them in bulk. That’s what the box stores did, and my father believed we could do the same, but with more treasured items. In addition to these systems, he had a timeline. That’s what all the crazy people we saw on tv who had homes that looked like ours didn’t have.

A timeline.

“Don’t ever let anyone rush you,” I was told a few days after the toilet in our bathroom stopped working, “You’re going to get married one day, and when you do, your wife is going to try and rush you to do certain things, but don’t you let her. You figure out when things need to be done, and you don’t do them a moment sooner. Some people--your wife--might say that it’s better to get things done ahead of time, but each activity has a built-in moment when it has to happen. You know how your mother was always telling me I needed to clean up? What she didn’t realize was that an object knows when it needs to be thrown away, and until that time, it’s still worth something. Why would you throw something away when it still has value? Answer me that.”

My mother had a compromised immune system, and when I was six or seven (hard to remember, we stopped having birthdays for me when we were too embarrassed to have anyone come over the house), she caught an infection, and went into the hospital. The infection got worse, and my father visited her, but didn’t take me with him, because he believed that people only got sicker when they went into the hospital, and he thought children, especially, were prone to get a virus or a disease from going anywhere that housed sick people. That was how my mother died without me ever getting to say goodbye to her. When he came home to tell me the news, he brought with him a plastic bag full of toys to try and make me feel better about the whole thing. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to touch them, because then they would lose their value. I could look at them, and if looking at them didn’t make me feel better, well then, why would playing with them be any different?

That was my father’s logic. It was inarguable, because if you argued with him, he forgot to feed you for a few days and he didn’t let you watch what you wanted to watch on the television and he wouldn’t walk with you to the gas station down the street so you could use the bathroom. Instead, he made you walk alone, even if it was at night.

“Why are you so damn worried about somebody bothering you,” he asked me when I begged him to go with me one night after a dinner of McDonald’s french fries and fish fillets, “If someone bothers you, you don’t know what to do? You don’t know how to fight a man? You’re almost ten. You’d let somebody just take you? If that’s how you are, I don’t even know if you’re my kid. Is it my fault because I didn’t beat you? Because I didn’t beat you like my old man beat me? If I did that, would you know how to fight? Well guess what, kid? I’m not beating on you. We watch those damn action movies every night, and all they do in them is fight, and you’re telling me, you didn’t learn one damn thing from that? You need to pay attention. That’s your trouble. You just don’t pay attention.”

My father couldn’t fight the eviction, because he had no money for a lawyer. The social worker made an appointment with us to come up with a housing plan, and a plan for me. I was still in middle school, and she warned that if my father couldn’t get his hoarding under control, I would have to be removed from his care. I’m not sure he cared as much about me as he did about his napkins, but it was a point of pride that he had me. That he had a son. He was a man. A man has sons and a man doesn’t get those sons taken away from him by some woman named Shari with a bad dye job and press-on nails. That was what he told me as we drove away from the only house I’d ever lived in. The eviction notice was still on the door. The hospital bills from my mother’s stay years earlier were still buried on the kitchen table under pounds of fast food wrappers and rotting books my dad had fished out of people’s trash.

Hoarders never leave their hoard. It’s their safety. Their security. It’s usually the only place they feel comfortable even when the shame of its existence begins to weigh them down as it crushes them from all sides. I was hopeful that when the authorities got involved, my father would be arrested or committed for refusing to leave his accumulation and I would be sent to live with a nice family that might only beat me, but wouldn’t forget to feed me and would let me watch Jeopardy without calling me names for knowing the island Napoleon was exiled to. I had read up on hoarding online, and I felt certain that my father was just like the ones we saw on tv. One woman kept insisting she was going to bring all her things to some magical warehouse that clearly didn’t exist. She held onto her delusion even as the men who had purchased her house from the bank after a seizure were throwing her things into a dumpster. I was sure that would be my father as well. He’d be in the back of some police car, arrested for trespassing in the home that was no longer his, watching as his napkins were tossed into trash cans. In my fantasy, I even get to throw in the first hundred. He sees me do it, and he can’t stop me.

What hadn’t occurred to me was that my father had too much of the prospector in him to simply give up. If he had to go on the run and build another hoard somewhere else, then that was what he would do. He filled up the car with as many items as he could. I was not allowed to bring anything. Not even a pair of socks. When he saw me trying to sneak in the stuffed lion my mother had given me when I was five, he told me to leave on the sidewalk.

“You don’t need toys anymore,” he said, “You’re a man now. I need you to be a man. If we have two men in this family, we can get through this, but I can’t be carrying any deadweight with me, you understand?”

The napkins broke his heart.

It’s not that we couldn’t have shoved them in the car alongside everything else. It was that he couldn’t bring all the napkins with us. There was something all-or-nothing about it for my father. Either he could have all of the thousands of napkins he had bought and taken with him from restaurants and bars and Burger King and Wendy’s and Taco Bell and McDonald’s or he would have none of them. Part of me wondered if it made him feel like a martyr leaving them where they were. I saw a sob strangle itself in his throat when he closed the cupboard door after taking one last look.

“Let’s go,” he said, walking right past me, “I can’t be here anymore.”

We stopped for the night at a motel right on the Massachusetts line. It was still early, but my father said he was exhausted and that men know where to rest up and when to keep fighting. I hadn’t said a word for days, and now that he’d noticed, it was all he wanted to talk about.

“I won’t be punished by you,” he said, stripping the motel beds of their blankets and pillow cases, convinced we’d catch something if we slept on them, “I won’t be made to feel like I don’t do everything for this family. One day, when I get the systems back in place, and we’re back on our timeline, I’m going to be the one who pays for your wedding even though it’s supposed to be the father of the bride. I’m going to do it, because I’m not a slave to tradition, and I understand that a man needs to step up when he can. I’ll pay for your wedding and your honeymoon and your first house, and I won’t even ride you about paying me back. You can get it all back to me as slow as you want. I won’t say a word. Just like you’re not saying a word now. But boy, are you going to feel ungrateful. You are going to look back at the way you’re sitting there on the floor pouting like a little girl, and you are going to wish you could take it all back, and show your old man a little appreciation.”

Once the beds were stripped, he took off all his clothes except for the gray boxers he wore for days on end, and laid down on the bare mattress. I sat on the floor thinking about how far I would need to run to find somebody--anybody--who would take me in. Who would take pity on me. Who would tell me that it was okay not to say anything. That I’d said enough. That I never needed to speak again.

I was sure he was asleep, but what sounded like a cough was actually him clearing his throat.

“Hey,” he said, “Don’t let me forget to take a few of those napkins we saw in the lobby before we leave here tomorrow. Those are quality. I’m surprised they have quality like that at this dump. Good thing I spotted them.”

With that, he belched softly and began to snore.

I knew I wouldn’t remind him about the napkins in the lobby when we checked out the next day.

There were some things I knew he'd never forget.