Equal Nothings

I find great therapy tugging the thin film out of its plastic path. I don’t destroy the cassette tape like you might have seen in commercials or music videos where it looks like streamers being launched. I pull it out inch by inch, staring at its brown luster against the kitchen’s fluorescent lighting. It would be easier to fling the electromagnetic flux especially with three shoe boxes full piled next to me. But to destroy them with vigor would mean that they actually mean something to me and they don’t.

I found them in the basement at my mom’s house. She died and I am left sorting through the debris that remains of her life. This charge could have been left to one of my siblings, but my mom recognized my talents for efficiency and not giving a damn about all of the fluff. My only concern is selling the house and taking my forty percent. Fifty percent if I can have the house sold in less than ninety days from her death.

I guess I never realized the lengths of feed housed on the tape’s reel. Maybe full force destruction is the better alternative. I do not read the handwritten notes on the labels or the homemade set lists. They are mix tapes me or my siblings created back in the eighties. I do not know who the tapes belong to nor do I care. They must be destroyed and disposed along with everything else. I have been out of work for nearly eight months and the extra ten percent on a potential listing price of four-hundred eighty thousand dollars will give my bank account a cushion that it has been missing.

In four days, I have filled a full dumpster. The tapes and about twelve other boxes of items marked “mementos” are all that stand between me and the for-sale sign going up in the yard.

Her will specified the sign could not go up until

“The house is free and clear of every last item. Give the house a clean slate Johnnie.”

I had the locks changed three days after she died. 

I tried to start cleaning at seven in the morning the day after her funeral. A respectable wait time I had decided. When I arrived at the house, my brother and sister had obviously risen earlier as indicated by their empty Starbucks cups. 

I found them both wandering the house not taking things they wanted, but touching objects as if the rubbing them would teleport them back in time. They were longingly searching for memories while I was trying to regain my financial independence.

They both yelled at me when I told them the dumpster would arrive by nine.

“You have no heart, Johnnie,” my sister mumbled through a Kleenex pressed up against her nose to catch the flow of snot that naturally occurred with her tears.

“Piss off Johnnie.” My older brother’s go to line that no longer moved me to action. He might as well have said “good morning” as it would have had the same effect.

I decided to give them the living quarters of house that day and started with the garage and the shed. I was claiming my space as they did theirs.

Twenty-four hours later the entire scene replayed. They back at the house in their solemn walk, not taking any items.

“If you want something, you must take it now because I am cleaning all of this crap out,” I yelled to them as they stood in my mom’s bedroom.

“Harry would kill me if I brought any of this stuff home,” my sister declared. “I just want the memories.”

“And you need to touch the stuff to have those?” I asked with booming sarcasm.

“We are all not as cold-hearted as you, Johnnie,” my brother scolded.

I wanted to tell them that this, flinging my arms around to indicate the entire residence, was a business transaction. Their memories would not be listed as part of the house specs.

Knowing I could either raise a scene or devise a plan to solve my problem, I chose the latter. Rationalizing would get me nowhere.

“Just waiting for the word,” the real estate agent had texted.

I ushered them out the door around five with the pretense that I wanted one final dinner alone in the house. I didn’t.

The locksmith showed up at six-thirty and before nine all of the locks were changed. Only I had the key.

My brother and sister were livid the next day. I had arrived at dawn with a breakfast burrito in hand. I unlocked only the front door and then snapped the deadbolt back to closed.

As they pounded on the front door, I filled garbage bags with my mother’s clothes. They screamed and begged for one last admittance; I wedged my arm behind a row of books in the office and dominoed them onto the floor. My touch destructive, yes, but also highly productive. If my siblings had only acquired their own collection instead of wasting all of their energy on more tears, the house would be closer to empty. I don’t contemplate their inefficiencies too long. They are grieving. I did that a long time ago. The day my suitcase was left packed on the porch with winter clothes and a note.

“I have had enough.”

I returned to the house exactly three times after the suitcase. When my grandma died. Forty-five minutes. My high school swim team pictures gone. When my dad died. Another forty-five. My orb empty in the three-slot picture frame. And when my mom died. Ten minutes. She was already incoherent. I walked in, looked straight at her, and left. I had nothing to say. And no one had anything to say to me.

My brother and sister’s tirade eventually ended. They left resigned, knowing they missed their opportunity to claim stake in the items they wanted. I gave them fair warning which was more time than I was ever given.  For once, we were equal. We all had nothing.

I find joy in pulling the cassette apart at a faster pace until I manage to tangle the ribbon into its spokes. The reel no longer turns. It is jammed by a massive stoppage. I laugh at myself.

Undistracted I had cleared and decluttered over forty years’ worth of my family history without a thought about its significance to me. And yet the unravelling of the tape is my sideshow. Am I processing loss?

“I doubt it,” I mouth to myself. There is nothing left to lose when it is already gone. I fling the tape back in the pile and stack box on top of box on top of box and toss the outdated music collection over the rim of the dumpster lining the driveway. The remaining boxes in the house could easily be carted in a few more trips. 

I lean up against the frame of the open garage door and grab my phone. I text the real estate lady.

“Ready for the sign”

This is not an ending nor a new beginning. It is not bittersweet or solemn. I laugh deviously through my teeth almost sounding like a broken referee whistle where the rasps of air and spit are louder than its once piercing blast. I have not fully executed my mother’s wishes. The remaining boxes in the house cement my black sheep status.

I pull the house key from my pocket and lay it in the middle of the water and oil-stained garage floor. I press the garage door opener and sprint back towards the dumpster hurdling the laser trigger that will make me repeat the process if tripped.

I turn around and look at the house with its unmanicured boxwoods and decaying maples.  It looks sad. Exhausted. Time-consumed. If the agent has to knock ten grand off the price to get potential buyers to look past the neglect, I can live with that.