a penchant for pretty words

In the weeks following my father's return I accompanied him on regular trips to Lowe’s and Sam’s Club--covert missions for pink bundles of insulation and ten pound bags of mesquite chicken precooked for convenience. We settled into an easy routine of attic insulation work in the morning before temperatures rose to blistering and repainting doors to the house in the afternoon--scattered with intermittent trips to the office to submit job applications.

We stuffed the attic with insulation from second floor closets--rigging batt-sandwiches of wooden slats and clamps even MacGyver would envy--and satisfied our mutual thirst for company over dinner in the pink retro fabulous kitchen that had escaped recent renovation attempts.

Tacked to Dad’s refrigerator was a typed list of “Short-Term and Long-Term House Projects”, each with their own specific date range for completion. This list bore additional tick marks as the weeks passed and I added further tasks to their ranks, desperate for something to do.

Each day I unpacked an article from the heap of silk-screens, packages of prints, and inescapable remnants of life I’d amassed in the corner of the basement. I only unpacked impersonal things, the first a red mosaic mirror--purchased from several years ago from IKEA and rarely used in the dim pull-lights. I had never cared very much for it after our shopping trip to Elizabeth, but I had hung it on the wall in my childhood room as a testament to my developing taste in home-decorating trends.

This past January, I watched my boyfriend wrap the mirror in bubble wrap, on what would be my last trip to New Jersey. Sea foam green bubble wrap. I’d always been told it was ugly, but I had watched him carefully wrap, fold, and tape the bubble wrap around its edges with an intensity of care and concern for its protection that I’d wished he had shown me. Hired men entered the room bowing their heads apologetically, removing a single dresser on my mother’s command from the door way. I had confronted her on the landing, hands clasped to my tear-streaked face, and I asked to be allowed the courtesy of packaging and removing my own things from the house. It wasn’t as much asking as it was shamelessly begging through choked pathetic sobs to be acknowledged. Her eyes carefully lowered she stepped right, left, right again to move down the stairs, escaping our little dance and my plea for dignity.

It wasn’t the act of being forcibly removed from the house by a parental tour-de-force who avoided all eye contact I found merciless--but that it was in front of an audience and at the hands of strange men who patted me on the shoulder and told me that it “had to happen today”. She’d only paid them for a few hours that morning and though I’d also expressed an interest in keeping the white Ikea chair and burgundy foot stool that sat in the corner beneath the matching mirror; they extracted only the dresser from my Tetris floor of cardboard boxes and left the room. I hardly saw them.

Tommy, handed me the mirror, now coated in a solid shell of clear packing tape with a smile. “Here,” he said “this should be safe now, don’t you think?”

We’d intended to stay the night, pack in the morning and move everything into a storage facility a few towns away. It had been a simple plan. I swept the hardwood floor. I comforted myself with the sense of decency I showed in the manner in which my room was left. I may have been kicked out but the floors were swept and unwanted knickknacks dug from closet depths deposited in cardboard boxes in the center of the room--the weight and contents of each deemed easily disposable.

Everyone had left--my sister and her boyfriend Waldy escorted by the police my mother called citing domestic threats of violence, my Aunt Ginny desperate about the fragile nature of my mother’s health who had driven two hours to come to her rescue, and our family friend Chris who’d acted as a mediator of sorts and removed my mother from the house while I pulled myself together on the upstairs bathroom floor. My mother didn’t return to the house until we’d hit the Garden State Parkway on ramp heading north. The mirror survived the snowy drive back to campus in the trunk of Tommy’s ‘85 Oldsmobile though many more valuable things did not.


I extracted the mirror from the bubble wrap and placed it next to the pictures of graduation Tina had sent me on an antique sideboard I tentatively claimed as a dresser. I opened my suitcase at its foot and arranged a pair of black pumps on the single shelf. These small gestures of settling in were almost too much for my father, who deemed the archaic oak as being far too fragile and valuable to bear my jars of powder make up and contact lens case. “Please don’t let anything mar the surface”, he said. I stashed my eye drops back into my red suitcase and told him I’d keep that in mind.

We constructed a closet from a scrapped pipe and white closet organizers that hung from the rafters in the basement 8 inches higher than useful--Dad called it “Appalachian Ingenuity”. At night I compulsively checked the doors, mistaking the dangling forms for misshapen ghosts who’d taken their grave situation into their own hands. Post-mortem suicide didn’t seem like viable option for anything other than my interview suit and college party dresses that lacked company and occasion worth celebrating, but I began to hang my day dreams of home among them.