The Hobbyist's Graveyard

All things considered, the home of Angela Patterson was a very fine one, save for the middle bedroom. She took some pride in keeping the little bungalow tidy and kept up, almost never missing her designated Tuesday Night Cleaning which involved an elaborate routine of vacuuming, wet mopping, stacking and restacking books on shelves, and scrubbing down surfaces with as much aggression and bleach as she could endure without passing out. The middle bedroom, though, remained untouched during these Tuesday rituals.

She’d come to privately refer to it as “The Graveyard,’ filled as it was with the bones and the ghosts of so many hobbies past. She avoided the room, as a rule, but could mentally catalog everything that was in there: along the back wall, the large aquarium, and a cardboard box filled with tropical fish related accessories. Next to it, a personal trampoline, several sets of weights, and a few stacked DVDS, all featuring a Jane Fonda look alike. (Imitation Jane Fonda was on sale at the time, while real Jane Fonda had been full price.) Continuing on, a ukulele, music stand, a few books on songwriting, an easel with a half completed painting of a sunset, and a box full of paints and brushes. That was the back wall, representative of roughly 5 years of her life.

If she dared continue thinking through the Graveyard’s contents, she would recall the weaving loom, the knitting needles, the bags and bags of colorful yarn, the yoga mat and ball, the uncracked books with the word “Zen” in their titles, and who could forget the poorly assembled telescope (so poorly assembled, in fact, that it had turned out to be more effective to look at the stars with the naked eye than to look through it.) 

She’d only ever let two friends see the inside of the room, and both had been too polite to inquire or comment much. On both occasions, she had felt something akin to relief, a deranged pleasure, even, mingled with her embarrassment: they had to know, after seeing the Graveyard, that she was not, in fact, as terribly pulled together as she pretended to be. Neither relationship had stayed quite what it had been, following the Graveyard revelation. 

Angela didn’t actively think about the room much, as she went about her other routines: data entry for a pharmaceutical company, volunteering at the Our Lady of Mercy rescue mission a few blocks away, her Tuesday Night Cleanings, the occasional first date that never led to a second one. Something of the Graveyard was always there, though, floating in her hippocampus, or perhaps the gray matter. (Neuroscience had never made it to the list of avocational pursuits.)

She knew, theoretically, that she could resurrect everything out of the graveyard, selling it to other hopeful hobbyists, throwing the rest away to a permanent landfill resting place. She could entirely repurpose the room, into something bright and cheerful--friends could, theoretically, stay over in it. She also knew that the likelihood of her resuming any of the hobbies now represented by their sad remnants was very close to zero. Despite knowing all this, she left the room as it was, month after month, year after year, though the past year had seen fewer new additions than years prior. 

One of the friends to whom she’d shown the Graveyard had asked, very gently, some weeks after the incident, if Angela might like some help sorting through it, getting rid of some things. Her unadorned “No, thank you,” had been enough to quickly put the conversation to rest, and the matter had never come up again. 

It wasn’t fear that kept the graveyard as it was, permanently overtaking the middle bedroom and a portion of her hippocampus (or gray matter.) She’d considered that, after a bout of morbid curiosity had spurred her on to watching one those cable TV shows featuring British citizens with compulsive hoarding issues. The subjects would always get panicky and weepy, convinced that something terrible would befall them if they ever got rid of their boxes and boxes of Better Homes and Gardens magazines dating back to the 1970’s, or their grotesque porcelain doll collections. Some nonspecific sentimental music would start to play, and an altogether too reasonable therapist would swoop in and work through their fears with them, all in the span of a 30-minute episode. They’d be left with an immaculate home and a new lease on life, though one had to wonder how long such things would last. Even with her own graveyard still sitting there, as far from immaculate as a room could be, Angela always felt a sense of relief at the end of those 30 minutes: she knew perfectly well that nothing bad would happen if she cleared out the graveyard. She just didn’t want to. 

If she was feeling particularly introspective and insightful, she would walk herself through the “Why don’t you want to?” line of questioning, delegating one part of her brain to play the too reasonable therapist role, providing more than adequate benefits of clearing out the room. To that, though, she would simply answer: That doesn’t sound so great at all. A cheerful room for friends I don’t particularly like to uncomfortably stay in for one night, followed by an awkward oatmeal breakfast in the morning. A loss of the useless things--the scars, really--that had come to define her. 

Perhaps that was the real rub: the hobby remnants, the skeletons, were scars as much as anything else, etched permanently now into her heart. As clearly as she could catalog each item itself, she could recall what preceded its purchase and accompanying rush of avocational verve or desperation. Jane Fonda and the trampoline had entered while she was still with Dave, who had the habit of always looking just past her when they were out in public, at other women who more closely resembled Ms. Fonda. It had made perfect sense at the time. 

The aquarium, fish accessories, and telescope had all been within the same six month span, some time after her sister Jeanie’s then 7-year-old daughter had come to visit her for a weekend. She and Jeanie weren’t close, nor had they ever been, but Jeanie was in a bind at the time, and the idea to send Anastasia to stay with her aunt had emerged. They’d gone to both the zoo and the planetarium, had ice cream suppers, and made a serious dent in the Barbie aisle at FAO Schwartz, both enthralled the entire time. The little girl had then gone back to her real life, on the opposite side of the country and hadn’t visited again since. She was probably 13 now, sullen and thin in her most recent school picture. 

Music lessons, the ukulele, the songwriting books, had all seemed like a wonderful outlet after Margaret from church had died. They’d sat next to each other for years during mind numbing choir rehearsals, enduring hours of tedium just for the pleasure of the rare beautiful anthem on a Sunday morning. She thought she’d write songs to honor Margaret’s memory, somehow, but had never gotten around to it, and didn’t have the rhythm required to make anything good come out of the ukulele. 

The yoga zen phase was the second-worst corner of the room. That was before and after she’d lost him. The baby. Isaac. She was the only one who knew he’d had a name, and she could barely bring herself to think it. It had been in July that she’d seen the blood; his birthday had been scheduled for November. Hardly anyone had even known about him; it had all happened so suddenly and under such strange circumstances. After Dave, Theo. He was going to marry her, he’d said, and she’d believed him. He was going to set things right, his wife was leaving him soon. She’d believed every word. 

The Graveyard had still resembled a guestroom at that point in time. They’d made love in there, along with every other room in the small house. What a thrilling and disastrous season it had been. She somehow thought he’d be happy when she showed him the little stick with the plus sign on it, that it would really catapult them into the future: he’d finally come through on all those promises he’d made. She’d never forget the look on his face, though, when he’d registered what he was seeing. The color blanched from him, his eyes widened in something like horror, before they grew cold. “I can’t do this anymore. You’re on your own on this one. Do what you want.”

That was the last thing he’d ever said to her. Over the following months, as she tried to plan and conceal her growing stomach, she pieced together through neighborhood gossip that he and his wife had worked things out; they were moving to Phoenix. She tried not to reel, to focus on the baby, to forget her stupidity, his cruelty. Then there was the blood. She’d told two co-workers that she was pregnant, no one else, though she had planned to, thinking through it just the night prior to the blood. 

She told a few people after, so numb that she barely registered what she was saying. She couldn’t remember who’d suggested yoga, but she tried it, knowing it couldn’t go anywhere near her pain, but desperate for any attempt at relief, however obviously ridiculous.

That was where she usually ended her thought experiment of “Why not clear out the Graveyard?” She understood that the things, useless though they were to her, taking up space that could be better used for other purposes, were each little icons of pain that no guest in the guest room could understand, scars that belonged solely to her. 

Sometimes at that point, as she swallowed back the hot tears that invariably pricked at the corner of her eyes, she’d visit the worst part of the room: the old fashioned cradle shut into the closet, the white christening gown, the little plush elephant she’d bought on a whim at the same FAO Schwartz where she and her niece had gone. 

The ghosts of so many hobbies past, the Graveyard, would stay in her fine little home, of that she was certain: not because any of them held any real purpose, but, rather, because they were more than the ghosts of just her hobbies. Indeed, they were the ghosts of her.