Night Picnics

Night Picnics

by Ashly Callaway

Nora’s Sister

Once a week, Nora goes on night picnics. She walks our neighborhood on the nights before recycling pickup and says you can tell a lot about a family by what they’re consuming. In bare feet she stoops over each plastic recycling bin and shops for the things that make her feel better: Prego spaghetti sauce jars, empty skim milk jugs, Orange Crush cans, Coors Light cans, sometimes a lovely but empty bottle of wine, sharp opened tins of sardines, a folded cardboard box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. But she can’t pick up just any of the items to bring home – they need to be a certain size. When she selects each one, she lines them up on the street small-to-large, before quietly placing them in her canvas tote. The one with her initials from L.L. Bean. 

Mom doesn’t tolerate messes – raisins stuck to highchairs or chocolate pudding fingerprints or soggy dish towels or anything else that’s out of its designated spot – so my sister hides the trash in her closet. Part of me thinks Mom knows about Nora’s habit, though; a minty-fresh coolness surrounds her when Nora’s in her orbit. My sister needs to be careful – if she gets too close, she might get freezer burn.

Mom

Thursday is garbage day, so Wednesday nights are for sneaking out and prowling the neighborhood streets. Everyone's got their Oscar-the-Grouch trash cans lined up, bloated tin soldiers waiting to be emptied and refilled, emptied and refilled, again and again and again. 

On these nights, I emerge from my silent-noisy house into a dewy and cool mise-en-scène featuring rows of sleepy houses, glowing sidewalks, artificial moonlight dripping from the streetlamps like warm honey; the darkness holds the weight of risk that’s not there during the day. And if air can feel lonely, then that’s what it feels like, and there’s an absence of sound that can only be described as spectral.

I get back home around 10 p.m. with my sagging plastic grocery bag. It contains: one banana peel with a sticker still attached, an empty packet of pretzels, coarse salt shake-shake-shaking at the bottom, three pellets of Hershey’s Kiss foil, a sticky can of Lipton iced tea, a lidless bottle of vanilla extract (I like the way it smells), and a wet coffee filter (I like the way it smells, too). Natalie is asleep on my trundle bed tonight – the seizure medicine gives her headaches – so my bare feet must avoid the floor’s squeaky spots. 

Before I go to sleep, though, there’s one thing I need to do; it’s what I’ve always done: I need to position my finds in rows based on material (tin, paper, aluminum, glass, plastic), count each group left to right, then right to left (just to make sure), conceal them in a quiet lineup behind my collection of cassette tapes, and blow on my hands for twenty seconds. In this hiding spot, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson keep secret the refuse that Mother would be incensed to find.

Nora’s Sister

When Mom was a child, she held her baby sister for the first time so someone could take a photograph. Mom was heavy for her age, and maybe her belly protruded a bit too far so as to make her lap smaller, or Mom was simply inexperienced with the handling of infants. When she moved Natalie from her shoulder to her lap, the baby slid off Mom’s slick nylon parachute pants, and her head hit the floor with a sickening whump. Natalie was rushed to the hospital where they determined she was fine. But when Natalie turned seven, she began having seizures. 

Mom 

Angering Mother was an oncoming train. You knew it was approaching, slowly chugging from a distance and then screaming in your face. It’s unstoppable. Mother has said Natalie is sick because of me. Mother has said she wished my and Natalie’s roles were reversed. Mother has said Natalie had so much potential. Mother has said if I hadn’t been so fat, Natalie wouldn’t have so many health problems. I begin sneaking out on Wednesday nights. 

Nora’s Sister

The trophies from my sister’s night picnics get more difficult to conceal. If Mom steps into Nora’s closet, she’ll smell what the recycling used to hold: Sour orange juice thickening at the bottom of its jug; a carton with one triangle of eggshell stuck by yolk to the inside; an old phone book, pages wrinkly and wet from absorbing the dregs of the other containers. Our mom did not (or could not?) tolerate a solitary stink bug clinging to a curtain or Christmas cookie nonpareils littering the counter or a mildewed kitchen sponge lazing in the sink or junk mail scattered on the foyer table or straight-A report cards plastered to the fridge. Everything, to her, is destined for the garbage can. We will never have a dog.

The electric rage my mother unleashes on us for making messes cannot be overstated.

Mom

When Natalie dies, I stay in bed on Wednesday nights, no longer gaining comfort from stealing worthless things. I clear out the area behind my cassette tapes, which have now morphed into Depeche Mode and The Cure. They, too, were effective guards, but now I have no use for these objects. Night picnics are no longer on my schedule.

Nora’s Sister

I keep telling Nora I smell something from her closet and warn her Mom’s going to discover her collection. She says she doesn’t care, but I know better. The baseboards around our bedrooms are blinding white, no square of toilet paper is haphazardly torn from its perforation, in the cabinets under the sinks, there are tidy cliques of cleaning supplies waiting to be used every day. Mom will be apoplectic.

Mom

It would be Natalie’s 35th birthday today. I honor her by cleaning the house extra well; she would have appreciated my conscientiousness. After cleaning the cleaning supplies – wiping them down with Lysol and unclogging their spray valves – I collect the items for recycling. Cardboard paper towel rolls, empty gallon containers of bleach, filtered water, and white vinegar, a box of Borax.

As I dust and mop and sweep my way up to Nora’s room, I smell it. A familiar odor, like a bar with fruit flies, a treacly, deceptive landfill sweetness, the scent of intruders brought in from curbs – I recognize it immediately. 

Nora’s Sister

When I walk into Nora’s bedroom, I hear Mom before I see her. She’s bending over in the back of Nora’s closet, clanking and rummaging. There is a rustling of a plastic bag. She says things like What the fuck? and I can’t believe this. Her disposals become louder and more urgent, as if she’s continuing to discover layers of pointless objects. 

I hear her breathing from behind the mask she’s wearing to keep out the smell. This is not right, she says to herself. How did this happen? What is wrong with her? What is wrong with me? The questions get louder. Then I hear what sounds like something being thrashed – think rabid raccoons – but it’s Mom, puny squeals of anguish leaking from her lips, then a sob, then another thrash. I can hear glass and cardboard mingling violently. Now she is screaming – thumbtacks and battery acid are flying from her mouth as my sister’s things are thrust harder into a receptacle. 

Mom

When we moved to this house, the first thing I loved about it was the understairs. No one else noticed it: A triangular space under the basement steps covered by two cabinet doors, a cozy and clandestine repository for the things that make me feel better. 

I drag the black trash bag closer to the understairs where I carefully sort the items into their right places: tin, paper, aluminum, glass, plastic. Left to right I count them, then right to left. I begin to blow on my palms and count to twenty.