Stuff and Things

mallory torres

            Grandma flipped between her usual television channels.

            “What about these,” Rachel asks.

            Her tired eyes move to her granddaughter standing in the hallway, holding a storage box full of souvenir cups from various theme parks. Their once bright neon colors now muted.

            “I need those,” she says, quickly turning her head to back to the screen.

            “Come on, Grandma. The dust even looks old.”

            The old woman reclines in her lazy boy and continues to fiddle with the remote. “Ooh, míralo! Sunset Boulevard at seven thirty.”

            Rachel sighs and sets the box down next to entertainment center. She heads down the hallway, patting her shirt clean. At the threshold of the last room, she stops and stares at the maze of large black storage containers stacked to the ceiling. They stretch from corner to corner creating a black wall in front of the windows, blocking out the sunlight that tries to swim through. Rachel scans the room for where she can stand freely when her eyes fall on the shelf with outdated knick-knacks. Behind a collection of opaque vintage Coca-Cola bottles, she notices a small stuffed bear still wrapped in cellophane—the only indicator that this back room is where her mom had grown up.

            Rachel tries to imagine it, her mother’s childhood room. There was probably a bed with a purple duvet cover and extra fluffy pillows that cradled her head every night. The same way she held Rachel’s tiny head as a baby. Maybe some magazine cut-outs plastered all over the walls of teenage 90’s heartthrobs that she would say goodnight to before she went to sleep. And of course, pictures of her with friends and of 6lb 5oz Rachel wrapped in a pink hospital blanket cluttering the nightstand, so that she would be reminded of how loved she was every morning. There would’ve been an orange tint from the West Texas sun sneaking in through the shutters every evening, melting her essence into the walls of the room.

            Rachel inhales deeply, still standing at the entrance. The hot plastic from the containers circulates with the stale air and suffocates her mother’s scent out of her nose. The room darkens a little bit more. Now, the only occupants between these walls, she thought, are the things belonging nowhere. Stuffed into boxes.

            Rachel rubs her hands together and decides to start with the first box by her feet. She gives it a little nudge to determine how much stuff was in there and then grabs a rag to wipe the lid before opening it. She takes out the first thing she sees and laughs.

            “Oh God, you have to be kidding me.”

            She tilts the paper towards the light and squints her eyes to read the fading letters. “Monkey See, Monkey Do, a story by Rachel M.”

            She flips through the pages and tries to make sense of her words she wrote as a kindergartener. The poorly drawn pictures of monkeys with curly tails and oversized ears make her laugh even harder.  She returns to the box and pulls out more memorabilia from her grade school days. She finds old class photos, yearbooks, and even a whole folder with all her junior high report cards. She closes the box and moves onto the one sitting next to it. She digs through piles of worn-out baby clothes and untied shoes, striking her memory once again.

            “Why is she keeping all of this?”

            As early as Rachel could remember, her grandmother always had hoarding tendencies. She kept receipts from every purchase, saved every bill statement over the years, even had batteries that were crusted with acid because she thought she would’ve needed them back then. But she also remembered that she was very well organized, too, as it carried into this room with things neatly packed into boxes which were stacked in a very specific way. In any case, Rachel decided that her grandmother didn’t have a say in what was valuable or trash anymore because this was a still a whole room buried with boxes full of stuff and things.

            “When are you going to go through all that crap,” she asked her grandmother today at breakfast.

            “There’s no time for it.”

            She wished her grandma would make more time to help her clear out the room as much as she gave to her T.V. programs, not missing a showing for anything in the world.

            “What happens if, God forbid, something happens to you, and…” her thoughts were interrupted by the clinking of the metal spoon in her grandma’s mug, “and I’m stuck with it. All of it.”

            “You and that room, Raquel,” Grandma said, shaking her head. “I’ve made arrangements in case something-”

            “But wouldn’t you like to find the things you’ve lost?” Rachel said back.

            She took another spoonful of sugar and dropped it into the whirlpool. “They’re not lost if I know where to find them.”

            Rachel took another box down from a stack, revealing one of the real walls of the room. She notices a cardboard box with a blossoming lid tucked away in the corner with pieces of cream-colored fur peeking out of the folds. She hauls it out of its nook and searches for any labels, but the box was nameless. She carefully pops open the lid and pulls out the strange fabric, holding it up to view in its entirety. It rolls down like a scroll, or something sacred—the fur trimmings tickling the tops of her feet when it reaches the floor. It was a long cream silk dress with faded splotches of deep red on the chest and abdomen area. Rachel’s hands suddenly run cold, and she drops the dress. She turns back to the box and finds a handful of newspaper clippings from January of 1996. The headlines all have the same words, but in different variations. Rachel reads through each of them with her heart beating in her throat.

            “Drunk driver kills 20-year-old and injures two more,”

            “Fatal crash kills young mother,”

            The last title sinks into her stomach. She can feel the words burning through her insides. She tries to remember the last memory she had of her mother, but only remembers the reason her grandma always repeated on why she had to go to heaven so soon.

            “Because God was running out of angels up there, mija.”

            Still digging for answers, Rachel’s sight becomes blurry with tears and then rage when she lands on the name of the man responsible for her questions. The stinging fire from her insides instantly rushes up to her face. She feels a ball of tears, or maybe vomit, in her throat.

            “I know how much you miss her,” a voice says from behind.

            Rachel turns around to see her grandmother standing in the doorway. She slowly walks towards her.

            “I think there are some pictures of her in there, at the bottom.”

            She digs further into the box and finds a few polaroids of a woman with long brown hair and smiling eyes. There was some of her with friends, posing at parties or backyard cookouts, but there was only one of just her.

            “That’s my favorite,” her grandma says, pointing at the picture.

            Her mother’s sepia smile was wide open, and her eyes closed just enough to see the shadow of her eyelashes on her cheeks. She was lying on her back in the grass with her hair splayed out around her head. There were small budding flowers poking through as if they grew in between the strands.

            A tear falls from Rachel’s eye and lands on the polaroid. She feels her grandma squeeze her shoulders before pulling her into her arms. She pushes her sobs into her grandmother’s apron and remembers the times when she was afraid to say what had happened to her mother at school because she didn’t want the pity or that she never knew who her father was because it was tragic enough that her mother was dead. She thought of the times when she grew angry with her grandmother for being overbearing and not allowing her to go to parties in high school, saying cruel things like wishing that she had died instead of her mother. She winces at the memory of slamming the door in her grandma’s face.

            The embrace releases and Rachel looks into her grandmother’s eyes. She sees the same ones that are in the polaroids—soft and forgiving. She wonders if her own eyes have this trait, too.

            “Why am I barely seeing all this,” Rachel asks.

            “I wasn’t sure if you even wanted to,” she says still holding Rachel’s arms.

            “But why keep it all,” she stares at the stained dress on the floor.

            “Even the worst parts should be remembered, Raquel.”

            Rachel looks around at the other boxes and then back to her mother’s picture. “I just… wish I knew her.”

            “You didn’t have to know her,” her grandmother says, “because you become her every day. I see it. Believe me.” She tilts her granddaughter’s face towards her own, her old eyes well up again. “I haven’t lost her because I have you.”

            She wipes Rachel’s tears from cheeks and looks down at the silk dress at their feet.

            “Marina wore that damn thing almost every time she went out dancing,” she laughs. “I even had to sew the fur back on a couple of times.”

            Rachel slowly rolls the syllables on her tongue as to not forget it. She feels it sink into her blood becoming a forever part of her.

            “Maybe this we can keep,” she says to her grandma, wiping an empty space on the Coca-Cola shelf with the dust rag. She positions her mother’s polaroid next to the stuffed bear. The cloudy cellophane enhances the exposure of the photo and Rachel sees her mother’s smile brighten in real time. The women stand back and admire the makeshift memorial before exiting—leaving the backroom for another day.