Fourth Comings (9 page)

twenty-three

I
’m reminded of the story that occurred fresh off your last stint in rehab, in tenth grade, when you were doing your mandatory community-service hours at Silver Meadows Assisted Living Facility. The Turtle Lady Story.

A never-married woman (Hester?) died in her sleep at the age of eighty-seven. She (Esther?) was not a beloved figure around Silver Meadows. If she (Martha?) and my grandmother had been around at the same time, I’m sure Gladdie would have called her “one of those cranks just waiting to die.” She (I give up—it was some old-lady name) griped loudly and often about everything. A bowl of chicken noodle soup could be too hot, too cold, too bland, too spicy, too chickeny, too noodle-y, too goddamn soupy. And as that vaudeville chestnut goes, those no-talent bastards who call themselves cooks never gave her enough of it.

Her tiny apartment was filled with nearly nine decades’ worth of possessions, most notably her spectacularly useless collection of turtles. Ceramic turtles. Stuffed turtles. Turtles on mugs, sweatshirts, salt and pepper shakers, throw pillows, calendars, and latch-hook decorative wall hangings. Turtles in every conceivable form but the original, breathing kind, as pets are not allowed in Silver Meadows. Everyone referred to her as the Turtle Lady, even to her face, which is why I can’t remember her real name. She held this title with great pride, as if it were an honor bestowed by the Queen of England in a scepter-tapping ceremony in Buckingham Palace.

One afternoon, you asked the obvious: “Why turtles?”

“Why turtles?”
The Turtle Lady had replied to your query with genuine surprise, as if no one had bothered to ask this question before. This surely could not have been the case. But perhaps you were the first to ask in a very long time, the only person in recent memory to take any interest in her obsession. Her extended family was scattered around the country, you had told me, so she rarely received visitors. Only the occasional do-gooder Girl Scout trying to earn her merit badge in Geezer Appreciation. Or reformed ne’er-do-wells like yourself.

“Yes,” you pressed. “Why turtles over a more cuddly animal?”

“I’m
not cuddly,” she said. “What, you think old spinsters like me have to love cats? Is that it? Are you disappointed that I’m not the crazy cat lady?”

“Okaaaaaay,” you said. “Snakes aren’t cuddly. Porcupines aren’t cuddly. Why turtles?”

“A turtle is never far from home.”

You didn’t understand. “Because it moves so slowly?”

“It carries its home on its back, ya big dope!”

You had recounted this story for me about a year later, your response when I questioned your sanity for voluntarily spending time with little old ladies like my grandmother when you had already completed your court-mandated community service. And when you delivered that line to me, you boxed your left ear with your palm, as she had when she said it herself. Despite your repeated attempts to get to know the Turtle Lady better, that conversation did not usher in a whole new era of cross-generational friendship between the misunderstood teen and the geriatric, the kind of heartwarming tale that has kept the
Chicken Soup for the Soul
series in print. No, it turned out to be the longest exchange you ever had.

After the Turtle Lady died, there were no local family members or Scouts to be found. This left you—a seventeen-year-old substance abuser repaying his debt to society—in charge of throwing away this woman’s entire life. A woman whom you had only met a half-dozen times.

You were told to divide her possessions into two piles:
DONATE
and
DISCARD.
Most of her belongings clearly qualified for the latter category. But you pled your case for the turtles.

“Maybe they could be donated….”

“To where?” replied the head of building management by phone because he couldn’t be bothered to show up in person. “The Museum of Useless Crap?” He chuckled at his own unfunny joke. “Look, kid, people die around here every day. And they leave a lot of junk behind. It’s my job to get rid of it.” In my imagined version of these events, I cast this character as thin and weaselly and in his late forties. He blinks too much and stinks of stale cigars.

“She didn’t leave a will?”

“Not for this stuff she didn’t,” he said. “All the valuable stuff was divvied up when she left her last place.”

Over the next few shifts, you counted, and threw away, 412 turtles or turtle-themed knickknacks. But you also found evidence that she hadn’t always been the Turtle Lady. You discovered her old yearbooks, in which you found out that this somber, pursed-lipped old woman had once been voted Class Clown. Loose photos captured her as a stylish dame with a fur around her neck, kissing a man with a champagne glass in his hand. There were faded 4-H ribbons. A
NURSES DO IT WITH PATIENCE
! bumper sticker. Decades of birthday cards, Christmas cards, “just because” cards from friends in far-off places.

And so much more. All thrown away.

You discovered then disposed of all this evidence of a full life lived well. How did that vibrant young woman turn into the bitter Turtle Lady? Who were the classmates who had laughed at her jokes? Where was the man with the champagne glass? What had she done to win the ribbons? Why did she keep that bumper sticker? Where were all the writers of those cards? Had they all gone before her? Had she outlasted everyone she loved? Wouldn’t that make anyone bitter?

Many questions, with no one to answer them.

In the end, you threw almost everything away. You couldn’t help but swipe a momento from that woman’s room, because you didn’t want her forgotten by the world. To this day, that tiny
I
TURTLES
pin is still stuck to the underside lapel of your peacoat, where only you can see it, when you want to see it, when you want to honor this woman you never really knew when she was alive.

And as I sit on the floor right now, surrounded by Jessie’s Junk, I’m not seeing myself as an eighty-seven-year-old spinster, the cliché of the never-married aunt, the shriveled-up presence at Marin’s holiday gatherings whom no one wants to sit next to because I spit and mumble and smell like urine-soaked mothballs. (Though that would have been a good guess as to how I might have taken that story to heart.)

No, I’m wondering if the contents of the
MOM AND DAD
box will be preserved and protected by whoever is put in charge of throwing my life away. Or will it all be considered as worthless as 412 turtles?

Correction: 411.

twenty-four

A
ck. I needed to get out of my room and take a break from all that reminiscing. It seemed like a good opportunity to check in with what was going on, so I got up off the floor, headed to the kitchen table, and randomly picked up one of the Sunday
Times
sections scattered across the table. And the Sunday
Times
pissed me off.

This is not at all unusual, because being pissed off by the
New York Times
is an important part of my whole
NYT-
reading experience. As you know, my rage is usually directed at the Sunday Styles section. (No! You will not try to make me feel bad because I don’t own a belted funnel-neck sweater dress! No! You will not make me feel unworthy because I have never heard of Club Kashmir, where the eponymous cocktail is one part Cristal and two parts pashmina goat piss. No! You will not make me feel inadequate because I can’t afford to buy a Slavic orphan baby, implant a tissue expander in her tender flesh, and harvest her pale, flawless skin to rejuvenate my tired complexion.
Noooooooooo!”
) But today it was the Travel section that got my ire up.

On the front page was a travelogue written by a woman who had visited thirty-six cities around the world. It took three months and cost less than four thousand dollars. Now, I never had any real desire to visit many of these places, some of which, like Kyrgyzstan, are countries I thought only existed within Sasha Baron Cohen’s imagination. And if I had a few thousand dollars, I would immediately use it to get that student loan bitch Sallie Mae off my back. But I hated this chick nonetheless, for having traveled so far, so safely. She treks though countries that endorse public beheadings. I spend an hour in Virginville, Pennsylvania. Which traveler loses all her possessions? Me.

Last December, I gamely accepted the offer to accompany Hope on her road trip/RISD senior thesis, “Mental States: A Cross Country Tour of My Emotions,” for which she planned to take pictures of herself next to the
WELCOME TO
signposts of our nation’s most expressively named cities. We left on New Year’s Eve—a symbolic nod to the date, six years earlier, that Hope’s family had U-Hauled ass out of New Jersey for Tennessee—and planned to return one month later. I allowed myself these thirty-one days of freewheeling liberation on the open road as a reward for saving myself another fifteen thousand dollars in student loans by busting my ass to graduate from Columbia a semester early. I didn’t have a job lined up after graduation, nor any clue where to find one that would utilize my psychology degree. But I’d worked so hard for so long that I deserved this break before having to find one or the other.

I assumed that there would be potholes and detours and wrong turns along the way to Yeehaw Junction, Florida, or Satan’s Kingdom, Rhode Island. I had always imagined that those near-disasters were what made road trips so exciting, and I kind of looked forward to them. I wanted to run out of gas on the interstate, get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, or have my credit card rejected by the sketchy motor lodge and spend the night in the rental car, just so I could return to Pineville safe and sound and regale you with the tales of all these crises averted.

I did not want to get carjacked fewer than twelve hours into our trip.

It’s only by chance that this notebook was spared. It was safe inside my messenger bag, right beside me in the booth at the Bandit (yes, har-dee-har-har on me) Diner as I tucked into a cheeseburger and fries and listened to Hope try to talk me into jumping out of a plane at a nearby skydiving center.

“It will be fun!”

My first instinct was to say, “Cheating death is not fun.” But then I remembered,
I’m on a road trip! That’s what you’re supposed to do on road trips! Cheat death! Court disaster!
Of course, Hope and I had no idea that our own mini-disaster had already played itself out, by peeling out of the parking lot with all our possessions.

I always think of the notebooks as lost, as in, “I lost your notebooks.” I implicate myself as the guilty party when, in fact, I didn’t lose your notebooks at all, they were stolen from me, along with the Barry Manilow decoupaged toilet-seat cover and Hope’s ninety-nine-cent Ambervision shades and everything else. The car was found, of course. But no object was left behind, no floor mat unturned. Everything was stolen, right down to the last loose penny and forgotten half-chewed Twizzler. Some of our clothing and personal effects were eventually recovered, but they still felt dirty after a dozen washing-machine bleachings. But the notebooks, they were long gone.

On the outside, the notebooks had all looked the same: one hundred sheets, two hundred pages, 934 × 712 in/24.7 × 19.0 cm, wide ruled. Just like all the black-and-white notebooks I’ve been writing in since high school. I didn’t peek inside before I put this one in my messenger bag and separated it from the rest of its doomed lot. I had randomly grabbed one to read when Hope left me alone at the table to call her parents or go to the bathroom. I didn’t know that this was the only one that wasn’t about you, but was intended to be all about me.

As soon as Ms. Daisy Schlemmer and Mr. Harlan Oakes, both nineteen, from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, discovered that the Death Valley Diaries, the other eleven composition notebooks left in the car, were just that, composition notebooks, and that they couldn’t use them to fund their meth lab, couldn’t use the materials to get high in another way, not from smoking the ruled paper or extracting the ink and injecting it straight into their veins, I can only presume Ms. Schlemmer hurled them out the window and into a snowy drainage ditch as Mr. Oakes slammed on the gas.

You never blamed me. And yet sometimes I feel like you punished me with silence when I returned. As if you were so committed to the economization of words that you didn’t want to squander any more by repeating what was already put to paper. And if two tweakers destroyed your notebooks, your stories, before I got to read a single word, then so be it.

What bothers me most, the regret that keeps me up at night, is knowing that your words can’t be recovered. They’re lost forever.

(
FOREVER.
)