Stuff

(page 3 of 5)

I've begun to think that there must be some sort of syndrome behind our cluttered lifestyle, something worthy, perhaps, of the Rikki Lake show. There are others like us, I know. Tolstoy said every family is unhappy in its own unique way, but I think this is only partially true. I think there must be categories of unhappiness, a set number of family types, like signs of the Zodiac. I have a friend in Massachussetts who, for many years, refused to let me visit his home, and I knew he must be one of us. But gradually, as I shared the shameful secrets of my own family, he opened his doors to me. I was right of course; no need to describe his house: I've already described mine. He is also living at home, and we call each other up to swap war stories — a kind of group therapy in miniature—and already I have begun to detect certain patterns, certain recurring motifs. Maybe I'm on to something. Maybe this is the great purpose in life that has eluded me for so many years: I was born to describe, dissect, and analyse the psychology of stuff.

We tend to take our family members for granted — especially once we escape them — but lately I've been taking a closer look at mine.

Perhaps to make up for her general suspicion and distrust of other human beings, my mother is sentimental about objects. She feels pity for objects. She feels that they can be betrayed. I remember when I was a kid I had cut out some pictures of raccoons and such from my issue of Ranger Rick's Nature Magazine to put on the wall. When I proudly showed my mother what I had done, she sadly pointed to the remainder of the magazine and said, “But now you can't look at the pictures on the other side of the pages.” I tried to tape them back in but it wasn't the same. I'd hurt the magazine and there was nothing I could do about it.

My mother's sentimentality makes her a saver. Once an object has visited our home for a little while, it seems to her cruel to send it back out onto the streets. So we must live with the Fisher-Price wooden giraffe with wheels that I sat on at the age of three. She will not part with the cracked plastic jack-o-lantern that the kittens used to play in. (Have I mentioned the cats? We have thirteen of them. Do you begin to see the pattern here?) The plastic mice that came with some Carvell's ice cream cake in the late Seventies. Christmas cards, written in italicized verse by a Hallmark computer personalized only with the scrawled signature of someone she has not seen in years and cares about not a whit. The notes scribbled in haste from us to her: Mom Im going to a party at Wiggies, P.S. I took your car. The days of the present are crowded with the minutiae of the past.

There are things she doesn't want, but these too must be saved. Remember? Someone can use this. God gave us all this stuff and none of it must be wasted. This is not as frugal as it sounds. I don't want to give the impression that my mother lives in harmony with the earth: the paper consumption in our house easily puts to rest any notions of environmentally sound living.

And, of course, there are the things she doesn't want now, but she may find a use for someday. Buckets of screws, trinkets, buttons, bits of plastic and string. Stacks of newspapers and magazines, still unread, ready to kill us all should a fire ever break out.

Her mother — that is, my grandmother — was more or less the same, except that she lived in a house in western Maryland 400 miles away, and her stuff is a lot older than my mother's. I say “is” because we still have it all. My grandmother was also fond of saving cans of food, sometimes for decades, even as they menacingly bulged from the shelves with botchulism. My mother spent the whole summer and part of the fall attempting to empty out my grandmother's house so that it could be rented. “My God!” she told me over the phone. “Grandma saved everything.”

My mother did not manage to clean out the entire house, but managed instead to get very sick with the dust, the heat, and the effort of it all. I feared for her health and demanded she return, but she insisted on coughing her way through September, held hostage by her mother's stuff.