Writing to Share A Personal Experience
Thanksgiving September 13, 2005
Kristen K. Polster
My husband cannot stand to throw anything away. This is a habit that borders on the pathological. Our garage fills with empty soda bottles, beer cans, boxes, spray bottles, and other domestic debris once every six weeks or so, and then we spend a sweaty, angry Saturday in the mandatory cleaning process to make room for the inevitable rebirth of the pile six weeks later. We are pretty sure our house has begun generating the junk independently of our own efforts. It is a miracle of science and nature.
A related habit that emerged fairly early in our marriage was the stockpiling of bottle caps and-as soon as we could afford decent bottles of wine-wine corks in the kitchen drawer next to the refrigerator. For three or four years I would faithfully clear these abundant piles from around my measuring spoons and spatulas as soon as they began to obstruct kitchen business. I thought this was perhaps one of the most annoying habits any husband could have, and I gritted my teeth just a little each time I emptied the drawer of its happy remains. Looking back, it was such a trivial complaint, the sort of toothpaste-tube/toilet-seat-type of argument that married people are supposed to have. But at the time it really mattered.
I hated the drawer, and I wasn't sure I liked being married all that much either. My husband is from Ohio, and was suffering culture shock here in Dallas. He didn't understand my family or my friends. He couldn't relate to any of them, so he drank a little too much instead. I was too young and selfish to feel anything but embarrassment about this. He saved these scraps just like his dad always had, to try and exercise some control over his surroundings. He couldn't let anything go. I was twenty-five years old, and he was twenty-seven. We had been married for three years. We lived in an apartment five minutes from the house where I grew up. I taught English at a nearby suburban high school. I loved my husband, but did not think my life was interesting. That drawer of corks was just more domestic clutter.
My friends had done things after college. Some moved to Los Angeles; some moved to New York; some traveled to Europe and Asia. None of them got married. Only one wanted to, my childhood friend Cristy. She only wanted to get married, and felt like an old maid at twenty-four. When she married John at age twenty-five, she wanted to live a few blocks from her parents, have babies, and stay at home to raise them. I thought she was crazy. Her husband-to-be was good-looking, and he fit in perfectly with her family. He had met her father at a water-skiing tournament, and her father actually set them up. John was also rich. He was a real-estate developer from a real-estate family. They were not rolling quarters for gas like we were.
Her family was a little too proud of the perfection they saw in both of them. They were conservative, Religious Right types, and they were smug that Cristy, even at the ripe old age of 25, had found the kind of man they would have picked for her. This was the ambition that Cristy's parents had for her, and she aimed to please. I was just a little bitter about their happiness, if not hers.
She is the sort of person for whom you can still stand to be happy even when her life seems unbearably perfect. They got married in July, 1998. The other bridesmaids and I wore nauseating Pepto-pink gowns in her wedding. Only television photography could have added more weight to the bridal party. We joked about the dresses behind her back, and we called her and John "Barbie and Ken" to her face. She didn't mind. We gave her hell at the bachelorette party-the world's last virtuous woman-and it was funny. And that was that-I went home to the conventional life for which I was so ungrateful, and Cristy and John went on with theirs.
John died on Thanksgiving Day, 1999. Fifteen months after the wedding, the bridal party had to return to Houston for John's funeral. It was at the same church where they had gotten married. No pink dresses this time. No jokes. No justice in the world. So there we were, in our mid- twenties, watching a friend bury her husband. There had been an accident.
He took his brother's new motorcycle for a quick spin around the block and never came back. She held his dead body in her lap by the curb for half an hour before the ambulance arrived. We didn't know what to do for her, about this, about anything.
Cristy's birthday is almost always the week of Thanksgiving, and this year it had been the day before. The flowers John gave her for her birthday were still alive almost a week after the funeral. She couldn't bear to throw them away. She couldn't erase his voice from the answering machine, or empty his trash, or throw away the rotting groceries from the last trip they had made to the store. She sought to preserve everything- particularly the things that had already begun to drive her nuts so early in the marriage-the disorganized piles of papers in his office, the unbalanced checkbooks from three different business accounts, the unpaid speeding tickets on the floorboard of his car.
For about a month, I talked to Cristy every day. We spent a weekend in Galveston watching happy movies, drinking margaritas. We discovered that films without weddings or funerals are hard to find. For about a month, I woke up in the middle of the night and checked to make sure my (perfectly healthy) husband was still breathing. For about a month, I forgot about everything in the garage and everyone in more exciting places. Then, as tends to happen, everything fell back into its old patterns. Our garage is cluttered again. The cork drawer (that's all it is now-no room for anything else) in our kitchen has overflowed into the cabinets of pots and pans beneath the stove, and every time I try to close it, I hear a small avalanche pelting the dusty wok and unused fondue pot we got as wedding gifts over a decade ago. I used to pretend I was going to make a bulletin board out of those corks, but now I just save them because I know who put them there. And I'm glad.
Naïve Trust
Kristie Riley
The long awaited day arrived at last; I was finally moving out of my mother's house and into a dorm room. For years I yearned to be out of my overprotective mother's reach, and at last my independence day had come. My room was being converted into a study, and everything I was not taking to the university had to be pared down and relocated. After working together all week, my mom asked me to sort through my crowded closet and move anything that I wanted to the attic; I was more than happy to oblige her final request.
My room is the perfect shade of sky, painted that beautiful color as a present for my fifteenth birthday. The walls look odd and lonely without their familiar pictures and posters. The carpet is dingy and brown, obviously cleaner in the square my bed covered just days ago. A sigh escapes my lips as I face the jam-packed closet; digging through my childhood will be no easy task. Stuffed creatures long forgotten smile their yarny smiles at me, begging to be saved from the Salvation Army box. Jenga and Guess Who have missing pieces and therefore must go. Carnival bears and quarter machine toys join the dilapidated games. Eager to be finished, my furious pace spares few relics. Finally, I pull the last trash bag of toys from the closet. Ten pounds of cotton and plastic are all that stand between me and a fun night out with my boyfriend. I tear open the dust-covered bag and stop: stop moving, stop blinking, stop breathing. My mind melts, and I am no longer a confident and independent woman; I am a little girl of six, and this is my best friend Cindy Sparkles.
The phone rings. Through my room's thin white walls, I hear my mother come out of the bathroom to answer it. My mouth tastes of mint and my Cabbage Patch nightgown smells like clean laundry. The house is chilly, and I am eager to climb into my bed. As I pull back the Strawberry Shortcake comforter, my mom's voice calls me into her room. Her hands are shaking a little, and her eyes are full of tears. "There is someone on the phone who wants to talk to you," she says with a trembling voice.
The receiver is heavy in my small hand.
"Hello?"
"Hi Kristie. Do you know who this is?" The man's voice is unfamiliar
to me. "This is your Daddy."
"Hi!" I immediately exclaim. Excitedly, a flurry of questions spill from my lips. "Where are you? What are you doing? Are you coming to see me? Guess what? We went to Grandma's today and I helped make eggs!"
"So...it sounds like you had a good Thanksgiving. Christmas is coming soon, you know. Are you excited about Christmas?"
"I can't wait!" Turning to my mother I ask "Mommy, how many days until Christmas?" She did not answer my question; tears still lingered in her eyes.
"Well, Kristie, I can't be there to see you on Christmas, but I'm going to send you a present. What would you like more than anything else this year?"
"Oh, Daddy! I want a Cindy Sparkles doll. She's so pretty. She has glitter in her hair and her dress is pink and she lights up! And she..."
"She sounds real nice. I'll find one and mail it out just for you. Now let me talk to your mom."
"Ok, Daddy. Bye!" I hand the phone to my mom and skip to my room, repeating merrily in my head "I'm getting Cindy Sparkles...I'm getting Cindy Sparkles." My mother is there soon after to bring me back to reality.
"Kristie, that man on the phone was your Daddy. Do you remember him?" Her voice is quiet and her eyes are serious.
"Um..." Thinking back, I find one lone memory of the man who abandoned us three years prior. "Yeah, I remember. He's gonna send me Cindy Sparkles, Mommy! She's coming in the mail! When will she get here?"
"Kristie...I don't know." She sits on my bed, thinking. I don't know why she is so sad; Cindy Sparkles is coming! I hop on the bed with her and lean in close. "She's coming, Mommy," I whisper. She says nothing as she hugs me tight.
Days, then weeks, slowly go by. Every day I run to our mailbox, searching in vain for that little slip of paper telling me that Cindy Sparkles has arrived safely and is waiting for me at the post office; that important little piece of paper never comes. On Christmas Eve, I ask my mom where Cindy could be.
"Well, Kristie, you can't believe everything that people tell you. I'm sorry, but your Daddy lied. He's not a very good man." She looks away, hiding her face from my view.
Her words are confusing.
My next question is obvious: "Why? Why did he lie? Is he mad at me? Doesn't he like me?"
"I like you, Kristie. You are a very special girl, and I love you so very much. You can always trust me."
The next morning, Cindy Sparkles is waiting for me underneath the Christmas tree; her tag reads "To: Kristie, From: Mom." My excitement builds as Uncle Don scours the house for "AA" batteries. When I finally hold her in my hands and see her light up, she is everything I thought she would be. As I run from person to person proudly displaying my new friend, my weeks of disappointment fade away.
Holding the dusty doll in my hands, Cindy Sparkles becomes so much more to me than an outgrown Christmas gift; she is a lesson learned about who I can really trust in this world. I smooth down her rumpled dress and gather back her still sparkly blond hair. She smiles back at me as I gently place her in the keep box. She is one toy I will keep forever.
Rent to Own
Ash Bowen
Rent-to-Own In 1991, after two lackluster semesters of bong studies at the
University of Arkansas, my father thought I needed a gentle reminder about an agreement we'd made. During the long lecture, he made several key points, all of which he emphasized by whapping a cigarette against his gold lighter.
"See this lighter?" he began. I nodded. "They don't just give out gold lighters, you know." Whap. The management of the iron works plant where he had worked for over
20 years had given him the lighter in an informal gathering during his last shift, and over time, the lighter became a metaphor for personal responsibility--his favorite topic whose application was seemingly limitless. If I didn't take out the garbage, I got to see the gold lighter. If I wrecked the car, I got to see the gold lighter. This time the gold lighter was about my grades.
Our agreement had been that my father would fork over the dough for my college education as long as I performed to his expectations. Based on the number of times he had whipped out that lighter in my lifetime, I suspected his expectations weren't very high. But I was wrong.
That afternoon my grades had arrived, and he held my freshly delivered disappointment card and brought down his cigarette on the edge of the lighter. I jumped.
"These sure are some piss-poor grades," he said. I winced when I thought of the D's and F's I knew he was seeing.
"CVR. You did manage to get a C in that one," he muttered. He
continued to study my grades. "What kind of class is CVR anyway?"
I shrugged. "It's kind of like a P.E. class." He lowered the report card and stared at me. "You mean I dropped three grand so you could make a C in kickball?"
What could I say? The class hadn't involved kicking any balls, only
that I lift weights and walk on a treadmill, neither of which I had done. The heaviest thing I had lifted all year was the road-kill coyote I found and lugged back to my dorm where I tied one end of a rope around its neck and the other end around the doorknob of my best friend's door. With the coyote in place, I pounded on his door and shouted, "Open, up! I'm going to kick your ass!" When he yanked open the door, the coyote went sliding into his room. This went on all night, this knocking and coyote-sliding, as I, with each successive victim in tow, continued from dorm room to dorm room.
My father's whapping continued but to my surprise, he finally lighted the cigarette he'd been pounding into submission. Usually this meant the lecture was over. This time, however, things were different. He talked. He talked some more, and then he explained that he'd gotten me a job as a delivery boy/repo man for the local rent-to-own business his friend Al owned.
"If you're going to be a dumbass," he told me, "you're going to have a dumbass's job and quit wasting everyone's time and my money."
He reached into this shirt pocket and tossed me a slip of paper. Written on it was my first week's schedule as an employee of Al's Al-right Rentals.
My first day on the job was like a step back in time. Al walked
around the store with an icy glass of bourbon in his hand. I followed him upstairs to his office where he introduced me to his "girls," the women who answered the phones and took care of renting the appliances and furniture.
"And back here is where you'll be working," he said as he led me into a curtained-off back room where I met Dudley, the man who was to be my supervisor.
Al made a production of introducing us, saying Dudley was his "man in the field" and clapping him on his slightly curved back.
"More like a mule in the field," Dudley said when Al breezed back through the curtains toward the showroom.
Dudley gave me the once-over. "So you that college boy Al bringing on to try and straighten out?" I shrugged and suddenly felt embarrassed. "Al says you studying P.E. up there at college." He squinted. "You
look kind of sturdy for a boy studying P.E. No offense."
"I guess," I said because I couldn't think of anything else to say. A few hours later I followed Dudley out to the white delivery van. On the side was a caricature of Al winking and holding up the okay fingers. Written underneath in bold letters was, We treat you better than all right. We treat you Al-right! As Dudley drove us around the city, he made clear my job duties, which were basically to do whatever he said and to not tell Al what we did when we left the store to deliver or repossess furniture. On occasion we collected overdue payments, and Dudley made me responsible for scribbling out the receipt when we did.
"College boy like you ought to be able to handle that," he said, handing over the giant receipt book that he kept under the driver's seat.
Over the next few days, I discovered that Dudley was a quirky man. He ate Wolf brand chili exclusively for lunch and used saltine crackers as a spoon when doing so. Every food he hated was white-eggs, mayonnaise, bread, sour cream, yogurt, popcorn-and that he was a practicing Jew even though he believed in Jesus.
"Doesn't that make you a Christian then?" I asked.
"Naw. I'm mostly an Old Testament person," he said as though he were comparing two soft drinks.
Equally interesting, I found, was that he referred to customers by what appliance they were renting. One morning he explained that the large console TV in apartment 1058 of the city's public housing complex was three weeks behind on its payments, and we needed to collect $85 from it, otherwise we had to drag it back to Al's, clean it up, and put it back in the showroom.
"And we don't want to do that," he said. "Know why?" I shrugged. "Person could break a sweat doing that. And sweat's the last thing we need in this operation here."
Once inside the housing complex, Dudley slowed the van and leaned down on the steering wheel. I looked out the window and tried to see what had Dudley's attention. I realized he was staring toward the console TV's apartment.
"Naw," he finally said and gassed the van. "Ain't nobody home right now."
We circled through the housing complex a few times before Dudley said we'd done enough for one morning.
"You hungry?" he asked a few minutes later. He gave me the once-over again. "Look at you. Sure you're hungry. No offense."
Over the next few weeks, Dudley and I collected only enough money to keep us out of the store's back room. When business was slow Al would have Dudley and I assemble pressboard entertainment centers or set off roach bombs inside refrigerators and stoves that had been repossessed by Dudley's predecessor, an apparent go-getter from the looks of the back room, which was stuffed with greasy, roach-infested stoves and refrigerators.
"Get hepatitis messing with bugs," Dudley warned one afternoon when we were, for all intents and purposes, hiding in the back room from Al. "You ever see anybody with hepatitis?"
I shook my head. "Face gets all swole up. Eyes look like they floating in piss. See
your liver poking through your skin. Goddam freak show is what it is." He shivered and screwed up his face.
Shortly after, Al charged through the curtains, gripping in his fist a wad of the yellow tickets his "girls" produced each Wednesday when they checked the books for payments in arrears.
"What are you boys doing back here?" Al asked, hitching his pants. "Killing bugs," Dudley said quickly. He slapped his hand against the top of a stove as if to prove it.
"You boys come here," Al said and walked us over to the mesh wire- covered window. He draped his arm around Dudley's neck and pointed with his scotch. "You see out there?"
Dudley nodded. "Good," Al said. "Out there is where all my stuff is that ain't none
of these people paying for." He held up the yellow slips of paper. "You boys get out there and bring it all back. Them bugs'll still be here when you get back."
A little girl opened the door to the washing machine's house. It was the first home I'd seen that leaned to one side. The house reminded me of an illustration of the home where an impoverished family lived in a book of nursery rhymes my father had read to me when I was a child. The girl stared at Dudley and me, blinked three times, and ran back into the house. From the creaking porch we heard her yell, "Mama, there's a white man and a regular man at the door."
The mother appeared from the dark of the house and frowned when she saw us.
"Y'all may as well come on and get it. I ain't got no twenty-five dollars."
I followed Dudley inside. I couldn't place the smell that permeated the house until I looked down. It was earth I smelled. The home's floor was dirt.
"What is this?" I whispered to Dudley.
"It like a grave turned upside down," he said, not bothering to whisper. "All the dirt's on bottom instead of up top."
The woman led us through a succession of rooms separated only by threadbare quilts someone had nailed to the door facings. Once inside the kitchen, Dudley grabbed the corner of the washing machine and yanked it away from the wall. A garden hose had been run from outside the house, through the window, and connected to the inlet valve on the back of the washer. I stuck my head through the open window. The washer's drain hose was draped over the window sill where the washer dumped its dirty water directly onto the ground below. The dirt under the washer was soft and damp from the soapy water seeping into the soil under the house. Each step we took made deep tracks in the water-softened kitchen floor.
As Dudley disconnected the hose with a crescent wrench he'd brought along, his shirt came untucked, and I noticed a large scar, round as a quarter, on his back.
When we lifted the washer into the back of the van, the woman thanked Dudley. "I know you done what you could," she said.
Although I didn't know it, I felt confident that, in the past, Dudley had driven past this woman's house, leaned down on the van's steering wheel, and said to himself, "Naw. Ain't nobody home today" and pulled away.
"God," I said when we'd pulled away from the house. "How do people live like that?"
In retrospect, I'm sure my tone was more of judgment rather than the one of wonder that I had intended to express. Dudley didn't pull the van to a dramatic or screeching halt when I said this. Instead, he kept driving but did say, "She ain't had an opportunity for a college education.
She got to make do with what she can make do with. Everybody can't study P.E. on their daddy's pension fund."
We rode in silence the rest of the way back into town. Dudley stopped at the Sack-N-Save, and though I was underage, he handed me a beer when he returned from inside the store. We drank in silence. At the time, I didn't understand exactly why we were drinking; most likely, I believed that we were drinking because we'd just driven away with a poor woman's washing machine, and we were sad about it.
By the end of the summer, my father felt my stint as a repo man had
taught me the lesson that he had intended. When I did return to school in the fall, my grades improved dramatically. To this day my father loves to boast of the summer he set me on the path to success. But in reality, my summer spent as a laborer had little impact on me in the way that my father suspects.
Three years later, just as I was preparing to receive my Bachelor's degree, I returned to my father's home for a short visit. Above the fold of the newspaper was the story of a local man named Dudley Washington who had been stabbed in the neck when he tried to repossess a man's VCR. A 12- year-old girl riding her bicycle discovered his body in a drainage ditch behind the city park. My old boss Al was quoted in the newspaper article.
He said Dudley had been shot through his kidney four years before when he tried to repossess someone's TV. "He was my man in the field," Al was quoted as saying.
In a television movie-of-the-week, Dudley's funeral would have been filled to capacity with all of the people he had helped hang on to their rent-to-own furniture and appliances for a week or two longer until they could scrape together their overdue payments. In truth, aside from three family members and an Army buddy, no one came to Dudley's funeral. He was buried in a pauper's grave administered by the state in a no-frills ceremony that lasted no longer than three minutes.
It would be disingenuous to say that I think of Dudley every day and reflect on the ineffable lesson I learned in our short three months together. But I do think of him from time to time. Usually it's whenever I see someone open a door for someone carrying an armload of books, but more often than not, it's when I see one of the ubiquitous rent-to-own delivery trucks pulling away from a home, the family gathered on the porch, blank-faced and alone.
