Nothing Lost or Forgotten

The argument had been caused, by all things, baby clothes and a girl scout uniform circa 1963. This was during the summer, and Theodora had gone home to help her mother go through some things. Her parents were losing the house — a big, slightly crooked old thing, which sat on a small, little lake in rural Virginia. Her father had made some miscalculations, some “bad investments” and poof. 

When Theodora had arrived she was surprised to find that her father seemed completely unbothered by this frightening turn of events, especially when he was so close to retirement. Both of them were already over 60, and they’d have to sell or donate most of their things and live with her sister in North Carolina for a while. 

Her father was in the living room when she had finally made it home after the 10-plus hours of travel and the long layover in Phoenix and then again in Charlotte. The living room did not have much living room left, and Theodora had only spied him sitting there on account of his legs, which were poking out from behind a coliseum made up of boxes of varying heights and colors, and what appeared to be every National Geographic ever published since 1888. Her father was in a half-buried chair, reading an issue from 1975 — one with a pretty Andalusian cowgirl with a jaunty black hat and dark, kohl-rimmed eyes.. She kissed him on the head.

“Hello Daddy,” she said, “going through these?” He only briefly looked up. “No, just doing a bit of reading.” 

“How long have these been here?” Her father licked his thumb and turned the page. 

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometime last year your mother dug them out of the shed.” 

If you asked her, Theodora wouldn’t be able to tell you when it began. When her grandparents died they’d inherited most of their furniture and nearly all their heirlooms from Scandinavia. Within months the number of chairs in her parent’s home tripled and their dishware quadrupled. But if she thought closely, it began long before that. There had been signs. The stacks of bills and paperwork that were never filed or thrown away, but somehow seemed to travel, from room to room. Broken things: unravelling baskets, cracked glasses, and old jeans with a zipper or button that no longer closed began to pile up, but all bearing a tidy little note in her mother’s perfect handwriting: For mending.

The freezers were like this too (all three of them), filled with mounds and mounds of leftovers, some which had been in there for years, unidentifiable except for a label and date written carefully in sharpie. Lamb chops, 2 lbs., 8/15/01. Pork shoulder, ½ lb., 12/07/14. 

 Theodora couldn’t remember exactly when she realized that people were never invited over. Her parents didn’t throw dinner parties or have friends over for tea.

The last time they’d hosted Christmas seemed to be ages ago. Her mother’s sister and family were driving down from Connecticut for the holiday that year. 

Theodora must have been 14 or 15, and she remembered that time as if her and her sister, Chloe, were preparing for a hurricane — the “battening of the hatches” as they were instructed to dust and vacuum, which they did in a frenzied, panicked way as they navigated around the piles of books and papers, the handful of wheeled plastic cabinets filled with highlighters and paper clips and manilla folders, and of course, the ever present fixture in the family room: a geriatric ironing board her father had owned since college straining under the weight of a load of forgotten towels, which were all ultimately tossed in a closet along with the stacks of bills that had taken residence on the dining table. 

Theodora had one other memory from that last holiday too. It was late on Christmas Eve, and most everyone was asleep. Theodora heard her mother in the kitchen and slipped out of bed to spend some time alone with her. From the doorway she could see her mother was making Swedish meatballs in her grandmother’s heavy cast iron pan. She was standing over the stove in a strange crumpled way, the steam rising around a fork frozen in mid-air as she sobbed silently. 

This trip, when Theodora found her mother, she was upstairs in the spare bedroom, which was a hidden little space Theodora always loved as a child. It was a Narnia-like room that you could only access through an adjoining bedroom’s closet, and it was at the back of the house with two big windows that looked out over the lake. It was where she had liked to read and write in her journal about all her unrequited crushes, and it was where she’d finally lost her virginity. Both the windows were open. There was a warm breeze and you could hear the summer’s cicadas chirping. Her mother was sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by little mountains of garment bags. Theodora couldn’t help but think that this made her mother look a bit like she was drowning, lost in a sea of floating clothes, frozen in dozens of plastic icebergs.

“You’re here! How was your trip, honey —” her mother cried, “would you just look at this.” She held up a faded yellow onesie dotted with something vaguely blue. Theodora looked closer: nubby, little Humpback whales. “This is what I brought you home from the hospital. I honestly can’t believe that was almost thirty-three years ago.” Her mom held the onesie in her lap, massaging the fabric between her fingers. 

“The trip was fine,” Theodora said, clearing a space to sit down next to her mother. “How’s it going?” Her mother put a hand on Theodora’s wrist. “It’s very emotional,” she said, “— there’s just so much.” Theodora nodded, patting her arm. This was something her mother said a lot. 

“I feel very responsible,” she said, “ This is our legacy, your grandparent’s legacy, I mean really, they came here with nothing. I just can’t toss it all out without asking permission.” Theodora was wondering how exactly her mother planned to ask her dead grandparents for their permission to start downsizing when her mother turned suddenly and dragged a large bag from the red, tweed reading chair — the very chair where “it” happened, late one night when her high school boyfriend had come over to watch a movie.  

“I was waiting for you to get here so I could ask you about these.” Her mother carefully unzipped the bag and produced two, very small woven booties, decorated with slightly crumpled, satin bows. “These were your first shoes,” she said, putting them in Theo’s lap. “And this —” her mother produced a minuscule pair of overalls with all kinds of primary-colored lions and tigers and monkeys, “Your godmother made you this as a surprise for your first trip to the San Diego zoo,” she sighed. “You were just so darling.” 

Then came a pair of tiny sunglasses and a sun hat and a pair of white, eyelet shorts. It was endless: t-shirts that would fit teddy bears and microscopic bathing suits. There were countless sundresses and the pumpkin costume she wore for her very first Halloween. Finally, her mother pulled out her confirmation gown, which had gone a bit yellow around the lacey edges. Theodora realized her mother was holding it up for her, expectant. 

“Well, that’s something,” Theodora said, “Looks a bit colonial, wouldn’t you say?” Her mother laughed.  

“Yes, I suppose it does seem a little outdated now — but, what do you think about all of these?”

“What do you mean, what do I think?” 

“I mean, it’s just that these were yours and it doesn’t feel right for me to make a decision to just toss them out. I mean, what if you have a little girl someday?” Theodora suddenly felt hot. 

“Mom — first of all, who knows if I’ll have a little girl or not. It doesn’t usually work like that, and secondly it’s not like I went to the store at 18 months and took myself shopping.”

“Well I know that, Theo, but you really don’t want any of it?” Theo couldn’t understand why her mother looked so shocked. 

“Where would I put these? I live in a 600-square-foot apartment. These are things you picked out over 30 ago. It all needs to go Mom. So much of all of this needs to go — I mean, how long have all those magazines been sitting in the living room?” 

“It takes time to go through things Theo, and what if there are personal items that have been left in those magazines? You can’t just throw things out without checking… and also, I think it’s important that you understand that some of these things were made especially for you.” Her mother had crumpled up into herself, her face folded into the confirmation gown as she began to cry into the yellowing fabric: Yew juice dawhnt guet ettt Teao.  

Theodora sighed and put her own head in hands. “Mom, can you look up, please. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Her mom lifted her face from the gown, which had already gone red and puffy. 

“You just don’t get it. Nobody gets it,” she said standing up and wiping her eyes as she began to fold the gown. “You’re not a mother, so you don’t understand how it feels — and trust me, they don’t stitch things now like they did in the 80s.” Her mother turned abruptly to open the room’s one, small closet. She pulled out a tidy little green and brown uniform sheathed in a clear, plastic dry cleaner’s bag. 

“Well, what about this,” she asked, holding it up.

“What am I looking at, Mom? I have no idea what that is.” 

“It’s a girl scout uniform, Theo,” she said. 

“But I was never in the girl scouts,” Theodora said.

“I know — I was. Remember how I told you I got this Senior Adventurer badge the summer of 1963… or was it 1964? I can’t remember, but it was when I went on that white water rafting trip in the Adirondacks,” Her mother pointed to a blue and orange patch featuring a tattered, unraveling canoe which was fastened to a brown sash draped across the front of the uniform. Later, Theodora would remember what happened afterwards much like one would after waking up from a night of binge drinking: with shame and spotty recollection of how one got from one place to another.  

Her mother, on the other hand, remembered the event with the utmost clarity: It had first begun as a strangled kind of whimper which bloomed into what her mother could only describe as something akin to a war cry. One that was full-throated and primal, and filled her with nothing short of terror as her daughter leapt from the floor and ripped the uniform from her hands. At first it seemed as if her daughter was trying to tear the thing in half, but then, realizing a limitation in her strength, proceeded to throw it, and everything else with arm’s reach, out the window and into the balmy, summer air, where some of it plummeted and some of it floated onto the big, green lawn and the gray-green water. 

Luckily, they managed to salvage the rest of the visit. Theodora had felt very badly about what happened and tried hard to make it up to her mother. She patiently took photos of each and every one of her sister’s gymnastic trophies, from elementary school through senior year, even though Chloe had pointedly told her she didn’t want them or need pictures of them (“She might change her mind, Theo and then she’ll be glad we did it for her"). 

Theodora and her mother were also able to take a trunkful of boxes to the Salvation Army and schedule a pick up of some pieces of furniture Theodora was able to convince her mother to part with (the red, tweed chair, for one). She dutifully went through all of their childhood picture books and the boxes of Disney VHS tapes, making neat piles for her mother, each with clearly printed labels: Donate, Keep, Toss.

 When it was time for her to leave her mother held her tightly. “I wish you didn’t have to leave,” her mother said softly into her hair. 

It was a little less than three months since the trip when Theodora’s father called and told her she needed to come home as soon as possible. “What happened?” she asked, but all he would say over and over is, “It’s a goddamn mess Theo.” 

When she arrived at her parent’s house, it was almost dusk, and the sky was a dusky pink. She didn’t even have a chance to bring her bags inside because her father was outside waiting when her car arrived. 

“She’s lost it, Theo,” he said, leading her by the arm to the back of the house. The lake had gone pink too and a flock of geese flew over the yard and across the water. 

“Look,” he said, gesturing to the grass “just look.” The yard looked as if it had suffered a bad infestation of abnormally large gophers. There were big mounds of dirt every foot or two, spanning the entire yard — from the water’s edge to the bushes that lined the back deck. Her father had grabbed a shovel and poked at something in an open hole. 

“She’s burying boxes,” he said, “ — hundreds of them.” Theodora knelt beside the hole and brushed the dirt and grass from the top of the box. In her mother’s neat handwriting was written 1980-1990, Chloe, Gymnastics. There were a few others that her father had also dug up: 1970-1980, France and 1960s, Girl scouts. 

  “We have to be out of her in 30 days and the yard looks like a goddamn pet cemetery, Theo.” Her father was kneeling in the grass now, clutching the shovel with one hand and holding his face in the other. Unsure of what to do, Theo had begun trying to count the number of mounds.

“They’re time capsules,” her mother called out, from the deck. Her mother was wearing a terry cloth robe and was grasping the railing in this delicate, almost poised way that made Theodora feel like she might sprout wings and fly up and away, like some kind of sad, earth-fallen angel who was finally ready to go home. “Remember Theo, when you were in fifth grade — your whole class made that time capsule and each of you put in something to be remembered by?”

 Her mothers eyes were shining, but not from tears. She looked radiant; truly happy. “This way nothing’s lost, or forgotten. It all lives on.”