Kinsey and Me (24 page)

the closet

T
HIS IS A STORY
about the contents of a closet. It’s the only story of its kind and it will only
be told once, so listen carefully.

There was a woman who died when she was fifty-one and after the funeral, it was necessary
to clean out her closet, to dispose of her belongings. In her bedroom, there was a
picture of her, taken when she was thirty-one or thirty-two. She had a round face,
rather a pretty face, with light brown hair in two gleaming braids coiled around her
head, a pleasant smile showing nice teeth, and eyes that must have been hazel or blue
though the picture is in black and white. She’s wearing a summer cotton, dotted swiss,
and a necklace of white plastic beads—not beads, but buttons strung together in a
double row, the sort of necklace children noticed when she held them.

The furniture in her bedroom hadn’t changed since 1940, twenty years ago: a bed, a
dressing table with a stool, a chest of drawers, all done in a wood veneer. It’s the
sort of furniture you see now at the Salvation Army stores. You could cut off the
legs and antique the dresser but it would still be unattractive, spindly and cheap.
The wallpaper was patterned with gloomy bouquets, gray and dusky rose, and the ceiling
fixture was shaped like a shell in a shallow pool of light. She had rearranged the
room only twice in all those years.

The closet door usually stood open and on it hung a shoe bag filled with her shoes.
Most were size five, the last pair probably purchased in 1948; wedgies, white canvas
wedgies with a strap that buckled behind the heel, toeless, not terribly worn; several
pairs of slippers. There were two pairs of black leather shoes, toeless, with low
square heels and black laces.

The clothes hung on a wooden rod to the left of the walk-in closet (the only closet
in that massive house and hers, the only bedroom without a gas fireplace). Above the
rod, on a shelf that never got much light, was a gray-and-white-striped hat box and
an old water heater, looking ominous and out of place, dusty and ineffectual. On the
right, six drawers and about as many shelves, containing very little—a few old hats,
musty black straw hats with crumpled veils, a red felt hat with a big rhinestone buckle.
In the drawers, she kept her stockings, some cotton slips, two empty fifths of Old
Crow and half a fifth of King, a red patent leather purse made to look like a bound
leather volume, another purse, black cloth with an old handkerchief wadded up in it,
a diaphragm looking as ancient as a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. She didn’t have
many clothes. Some of the dresses, like the black knit, were as dated as the shoes,
and strangely cut, with plump shoulder pads, the fabric faintly powdered with dust.
There was a gold satin blouse—somewhere there’s a photograph taken of her in that
blouse, at a party, maybe 1946—beside the blouse a black gabardine suit with black
braid buttons and next to that, a gathered cotton skirt in a pastel blue, a red-and-white-checked
blouse with long sleeves, and a white blouse with a lacy trim. She was buried in a
blue wool suit, which was bought for her, as were the newer outfits, by her daughter
Kit.

On the dressing table, there were boxes of loose powder in a ruddy hue, nail files
and hairpins, bobby pins, astringent lotion, tortoiseshell combs which she fixed together
with rubber bands to form the waves in her hair, some dark red lipsticks worn down
at a slant, a brush with a wooden handle and a tangle of fine brown hair in the bristles.
In the drawers, a jumble of junky costume jewelry: pins, earrings, and a necklace
of white plastic buttons.

From this, you might draw a few conclusions about her. She was not a woman who cared
much for her surroundings. She did not care for clothes. She cared for bourbon, Old
Crow and King, and she wore wedgies once upon a time. She didn’t go out much and her
needs were few. She cared so little about most things she didn’t even bother to throw
them away, or maybe she simply preferred old things to emptiness. Someone bought a
few things for her. Someone sorted through them when she died and piled them all up
on the bed: shoes and stockings, hats, junky jewelry, and the clothes still on the
hangers, dusty-smelling, out of style. Somehow, at some point, and for reasons unknown,
the woman in the photograph, looking fresh and pleased with herself at thirty-two,
became no more than a pile of rags on a dark green spread.

Now that her daughter is getting older, nearing thirty-two herself, she does not see
in it sadness as she once did, or tragedy or waste or ruin. She sees a kind of dignity,
a kind of pride, something fierce and stubborn, something free. And even though the
face is gone, and even though the house has been destroyed, some things remain the
same. Life is as veiled, as elusive as death and there is no way to separate one from
the other.

maple hill

K
IT WALKED THROUGH
the empty house, listening to her footsteps resounding against the pale dead floors.
The strips of blue carpeting had been taken up from the hallway, ripped away from
the stairs so that the sound of her walking was unfamiliar to her—she who had walked
in that house for twenty years. Now the windows stood open to the summer heat and
a wind that smelled of lilacs touched at the screens. From her bedroom, she could
look out into the side yard, where the cherry tree had blossomed every April since
time began, and beyond to the part of the yard they had always called the jungle,
to the walnut tree, the lilac arbor, the maples which had shaded the front of the
lot and drawn away the moisture so that no grass ever grew there by the front walk.
She could remember climbing out onto the red tin roof outside her bedroom windows,
watching her mother rake the maple leaves into two enormous piles. She and her sister,
Del, had tumbled in that rustling ocean of dry brown year after year, had watched
later while the leaves were burned, leaving two black circles like burial mounds on
which the passing seasons were laid.

Between her room and Del’s was a narrow room where the maid had slept early in their
lives, a withered old colored woman named Pee Wee who later took care of Teddy Roosevelt
the Fourth, she was told. All she could remember of Pee Wee was that she had no teeth.
When Pee Wee left, she and Del had begun to use the little room for a playroom, an
office, a grocery store where empty tins were bought and sold for a cardboard coin
or two.

Kit crossed the hall to Del’s room, marveling as she always did at how clearly the
differences between them were spelled out. Both rooms had the same high ceilings,
the same narrow windows, the same fireplaces which had been converted to gas and later
stuffed with newspapers to keep bats and stray birds from flying down the chimneys.
Both rooms had the same shallow shell fixture in the ceiling, throwing light down
like some pale echo of the sea, far away, far away. The wallpaper in Kit’s room was
dark green sprinkled with pink rosebuds on a curving stem and the curtains had been
frothy white from ceiling to floor, the rug a dusty pink, the bedspreads white. In
Del’s room the wallpaper had no pattern at all and the deep rose hue seemed stark
and plain. Instead of curtains, Del had pasted Chinese rice paper on the glass, leaving
the windows bare of ornament. The picture frames she had chosen were no more than
two sheets of glass between which she had pressed magazine illustrations, all of it
held in place by two metal clamps and a wire affixed to the strip of molding near
the ceiling. The one picture Kit remembered was of a young man who sat squarely facing
the camera. One hand rested on a table in front of him, fingers tucked out of sight,
and near him was a single rose in a Coke bottle. Kit had never understood why her
sister would select such a picture, all in black-and-white and tones of gray. Del
had never kept a china figurine, had never collected dolls or stamps or shells or
party invitations. Del was three years older than Kit and Del had collected books.
It was one of the great frustrations in Kit’s life that no matter how many books she
read or how fast she read them or in what order, Del was always three years ahead
of her. Del was ahead of her in everything. She heard all of the beautiful music first,
knew Botticelli, Titian, and Renoir before Kit had given away her dolls.

And now the house was being sold and the land, their mother was dead, their father
remarried: all of life, everything was breaking apart, breaking down, being leveled,
destroyed, razed, rendered obsolete, that childhood, that life, that family as odd
and unhappy as it had been.

Kit wandered down the hallway to her mother’s room, bleak relic from the thirties
with its grim bouquets of roses marching across the walls, its dark woodwork, the
shades lowered, radiator peeling cream-colored paint. Gone was the dresser with its
splintered veneer, gone was the dark plush dressing-table stool, the chest of drawers,
the bed with its dark chenille spread. The closet drawers were empty now of the whiskey
bottles which Kit had raided time after time, pouring five-dollar bourbon down the
bathroom sink in some misguided attempt to save her mother from the doom of secret
drinking. At some point in her life, Kit’s mother had come in from raking leaves and
had taken instead to the quiet life of an alcoholic. Kit thought of her mother always,
stretched out in the cool of the living room on the couch, a cigarette burning in
her fingers, a paperback novel laid facedown across her chest. Kit’s mother had read
Shell Scott, had smoked, had tottered out to the pantry for a jigger of Early Times,
had tottered up to her bedroom for Old Crow and King. Kit’s mother had been hauled
off to the hospital several times a year suffering malnutrition, pneumonia, and broken
bones. Kit’s mother had been hauled off, toward the last, with cancer of the throat
and finally suicide. After the funeral, Kit had slept in her mother’s bed, wondering
how her mother had felt on the last night of her life with a hundred phenobarbital
burning in her belly. Ruined woman, wreck of a life. Her mother had been razed and
the rest of them now followed, one by one, an oddly self-destructive lot, having learned
that from the cradle.

Off her mother’s room was the sleeping porch, screened-in, where she and Del had slept
every summer, lulled by the tapping of green slatted shades which could be rolled
down against the morning sun, rolled up at night to let in the sound of chill summer
rain and the smell of drenched lilacs. Every spring there had been the ritual of the
cleaning of that porch when the yard man, James or a black George Washington, would
hose down the screens, scrub down the winter dirt, black soot and dust which collected
with the snow. The rollaway beds were moved out onto the porch then and made up with
fresh sheets, with cotton spreads which were pale brown and patterned with Navajo
designs. There was a trap in the porch ceiling which led up to the attic. Kit had
been told that the roof of the original farmhouse was still there, bent down, the
new roof built over it after the first house had burned. Somehow she had always had
a horror of that, of the old roof still intact and that part of the brick wall which
remained. The farmland itself had been eaten away so that now there was only this
one acre left like an island out of the past, floating among present houses and present
neighborhoods. Even that last acre had been sold (thirty-five thousand dollars she’d
heard) and once the house was torn down there’d be two or three apartment buildings
instead.

Downstairs, she passed through the dining room to the tiny room where her father had
slept for the last ten years on an old maroon daybed. The room had apparently been
intended for the raising of house plants. The floor was of cold tile, smooth dark
red stone with a drain in the middle and a faucet which no longer functioned. There
were windows on two sides of the room and hooks in the ceiling for hanging pots. The
room was scarcely large enough for the three pieces of old maple furniture which had
been moved in: the daybed, a small coffee table, and a maple armchair. There was also
a revolving drugstore rack that had been filled with the paperback books they bought
and read. Kit’s mother had marked each in pencil when she finished it—“dull” or “dirty”
or “good”—so that Kit had at her disposal an endless supply of Mickey Spillane in
that monk’s cell where her father slept, without sheets, with his shoes on, covered
by an ancient varicolored afghan which her mother had crocheted during pregnancy.
How could she have known, that woman, that her needlework would only eventually warm
his celibacy in the winter of their life? It was gone now, of course, maple furniture
and dirty books, man and wife.

The living room looked the same to her, somewhat smaller with the furniture removed,
somewhat colder with the rug taken out. The mirror had been taken down from its place
above the mantel, leaving a dead blank space where once the hallway had been reflected.
There was still on the pale green paper, the ghostly imprint of the lath and plaster
behind it, shadowy ribs of the house showing through. In the hall where the upright
piano had been, there was now a clean square of wallpaper, rimmed with fingerprints.
All those years of piano lessons, what had they been for? Her parents had once had
friends who came to the house and played during parties, George Gershwin tunes and
Irving Berlin, and the neighbors up and down the block would remark the next morning
how lovely it had been. Kit could hardly imagine such a thing. Kit’s last recollection
of the house was the wild summer after her father had remarried and moved out. She
had lived there by herself with her infant son and the cook who came in days and the
men who came in nights. There had been two men that summer and one of them she had
now married. The neighbors had watched his sports car come and go and in the mornings,
they made no remarks at all. Poor dears. The man across the street had shot himself
one day; the two sisters down the block were dying. The big houses all around them
were being converted into apartments. There was a pattern of death and decay and destruction,
the old swallowed up by the new, bent down, built over, layers and layers of wallpaper
in an empty room. Even the walls came down eventually when they could hold no more;
even a life could tumble when its burden was past bearing.

She left the front door open, thinking surely there was nothing more to be locked
in or out of that house. To the right of it, on the border of the yard above the alley,
there was an old stone hitching post. She had watched it, through her life, being
slowly engulfed by the trunk of a tree growing near it. That suffocation would be
stopped at least when the bulldozers came; stone post and tree would go down together.
In certain moments there were no distinctions made between host and parasite, begetter,
begotten. In time, both fell prey to the passing of years, some new order which wiped
away love and hate as though they were the same. They had struggled as a family and
now it was done and whatever it meant, whatever it had done to them or they to each
other simply had no meaning anymore. She could walk away from that house and still
be haunted by it. Whatever time and distance she set between herself and the house
and all that it had been to her, she would never be free of it. Those twenty years
would be imprinted on her heart like the shadows of that lath and plaster in the wall,
and she would act them all out over and over again, bending down, building over, house
upon house, heart upon heart. She was a walking blueprint of those years, mind and
memory, a habit of that world, repeating in every relationship the wrongs she had
learned in that house. There was nothing more to be locked in or out of her. There
was only summer and the smell of lilacs and a house called Maple Hill, and as she
drove away, she knew how thoroughly the lessons of her life had all been learned.