The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(16)

It wasn’t her.

It was.

The gray eyes weren’t looking at us, weren’t looking at anyone or anything in particular, it seemed. They stared off blankly.

*

That’s all I could think about that night, those eyes, whose eyes?, as Davy, Sam, and I drove back from the hospital to the house. This house that she had spent twenty-two years living inside and fixing up with her bright, bright green eyes, the house that was now filled entirely by boxes. They’d bought it all those years ago for so little, spent year after year digging away chunks of the hillside on which it was precariously perched to make a garden, putting in new windows, saving a year or two at a time for a new appliance. But the rest of the Bay Area housing market boomed and it was too hard to keep up.

The house was filled with boxes of dye and hand-painted fabric from the business my mom had finally had to close a few years before. She’d sold off her painting tables, fabric steamer, washer. Had let go of the small studio/office, already a much smaller space than the previous studio/office, downsizing and downgrading until all that was left were a few mouse-chewed boxes in the dirt basement. Davy hadn’t been able to find work after his layoff a few years before. There was no more money to be borrowed, shuffled. Everything was getting sorted and boxed. The house was gone. Sold. There was an empty storage unit waiting for all these boxes and a plan to come up with a good plan.

The move-out date was two weeks after her stroke.

*

Our neighbors went to work in the kitchen. They stuffed garbage bags full of open baking soda, warped Tupperware lids, packages of stuffing, chicken marinating in the fridge, ceramic spoon-holders my brother and I had molded as Mother’s Day gifts when we were small.

I came into the kitchen where women with large curly hair and turquoise earrings were sorting. The neighbor women volunteered to help, but my mom was the one with the packing plan and so now nobody really knew what to do with anything. Everyone had their own plan. One opened a jar of berbere, Ethiopian spices my parents ground by hand with the mortar and pestle they kept under the tea boxes, beside the jars of flour and sugar. The neighbor smelled the spice. “What on earth is this?” she asked the room.

“Berbere,” I wanted to say. I wanted to say that since my parents could barely afford to pay the electric bill month after month, my mother traveled the world through the kitchen. But I was still trying to synthesize memory into a sentence when the woman with the berbere shrugged and tossed it into the garbage bag. Other people’s hands squeezed boxes of decorative toothpicks and released them into the bag. Other hands disposed of kimchi.

There was nothing I could do in there, wordless as I was. What arguments were there for keeping a jar with four cloves? Some. I just couldn’t find them. I walked quickly down the hallway, heat rising and piling on my face. A few other neighbors were hovering in the doorframe, discussing the best way to tackle the bedroom. Her underwear. Dirty T-shirts. Satin slips. The slips were rolled into tight logs like cakes and lined up next to one another in a drawer, pale pinks and ivory and black, tucked beside a few belts and a Ziploc bag of pantyhose. I didn’t want these neighbors to touch the last things that she had touched. The very idea made my lip snarl. I needed the items all to myself.

The details are what drive you mad with grief. Socks that didn’t match but that she counted as a pair anyway.

“I’m sure she’ll want turtlenecks soon,” one of the women in the doorframe said as she reached for a hanging turtleneck.

“I’ll do the bedroom,” I said, smiling and pushing between them.

“We’ll help,” the women said, not budging.

“No thanks,” I said. “Thank you, though,” I remembered to say, smiled, and then shut the door right up against their faces. I hated them there. I knew this was rude. Picking up dirty cups and feeling superior—were they feeling superior? were they overwhelmed by pity?—because these weren’t the dirty cups of their own beautiful California homes, which they weren’t losing. We needed them. There is no question: they saved the day. Because of their help the house was being packed. Our family would move everything into a storage unit in time and no police would be called to escort us off the land with shotguns, nobody would be bleeding except for our dumb swollen hearts and my mother’s head, still spilling, at the hospital.

It wouldn’t stop, the bleeding. They tried different drugs, tubes, suctions. It just wanted to give and give and give.

I pulled flattened cardboard into boxes. Taped. Made new containers for the bedroom stuff to live in. Bracelets. Bras. Potpourri sachets. One of my mother’s two sisters came in as I started on the sock drawer. I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to be crying, if I shouldn’t cry. Somebody in the family needed to be the general here to get things done. It was clear this would be me. I’m the heavy lifter. My brother was back at college. Davy was off somewhere, his heart falling apart in huge sloughs. We needed someone around to sign paperwork.

I started filling a box with handfuls of socks. My aunt was doing the underwear drawer beside it. It was okay that she was here. Good, even. A few handfuls in, I touched something hard instead of soft. I pulled it out. In my hand was a huge, multibuttoned vibrator. On its side, it said The Rabbit. I blushed quickly and held it by two fingers like it was a dirty diaper. It was heavy, and used by a live body with desire and a whole life far, far apart from me, the life children often forget about their parents having, the life I usually wanted to forget about my parents having. But now it meant something else. It already indicated a former self. My aunt, perceptive and kind, saw the momentary horror on my face, the complicated sadness of what was in my hands, my embarrassment.