At the Back of the Closet
By Margaret M. Keen
At the front of the closet I found clothes I recognized – why did this embarrass me? Was it because I shouldn’t be so familiar with the apparel of two people I hadn’t seen in years? (“Five whole years!” my sister Kathy would interject if she hadn’t been forced out of the room moments earlier by the depth and breadth of my resentment.) Or was I embarrassed because … I truly hadn’t seen them in five whole years? As I pulled the familiar clothes off the hangers, I remembered how I felt as a teenager, the way all teenagers feel – convinced that parents dress to humiliate offspring. There was Mom’s Branson, Missouri sweatshirt and three long-sleeved T-shirts espousing the merits of kitty cats and grandchildren – separately, of course. I tossed the hangers into a box. There were Dad’s suit jackets that never quite met in the front. I rolled my eyes then tried to remember the last time we met – not Dad, Mom, and me, but a more impersonal version: these jackets, those cats, and my rolling eyes.
I folded each item with haste, with hostility, with a flow of quick, sharp thoughts as I tossed each item into the box marked “Goodwill.” I thought about how soft my mother’s shirts were – worn, of course, not to mortify offspring, but rather to quiet the scream of her skin’s rebellion against radiation. I thought about Dad’s frayed, ill-fitted jackets – not lying in wait to assault my sense of fashion, but serving dutifully as a lifeline to a career where Dad was in these jackets, in the classroom, in his element, in charge, in demand, in. That must have been tough … quick, sharp thoughts … cancer … retirement. At the front of the closet I found kitty cats and comfort that were there for Mom and Dad in their time of need.
At the top of the closet I found Christmas supplies – boxes, bows, ribbons, wrap, scissors, tape, tissue paper. “For Kathy’s presents!” I said aloud to be hurtful without consequence. But really, it’s true! Kathy got the bike with the pretty plastic streamers in the handlebars. I remember pointing out to her that some of the streamers were missing. I was mad because Kathy looked better on her beautiful “gently used” bike than I looked – well, ever … but most especially better than I looked as I opened my microscope kit after Kathy was presented with her bike. As I dropped the Christmas supplies into a box for Kathy, I squinted and screwed up my face to help me remember that I got a microscope and slides that year because I had half yelled at Dad that I wanted to be a doctor! That was, of course, my way of saying that I did not want to be a professor. I look like you, I sound like you, but I am not you! And so they shopped that year for a Christmas gift befitting an aspiring doctor. “We support you!” they exclaimed through the microscope they really couldn’t afford. But I didn’t hear them because Kathy’s ponytails and streamers were so pretty. Before I tied the “cinch sack” handles of the Christmas supplies bag, I took the scissors to the ribbon and made curly cues the way Mom taught me and I taped them to the bag to give Kathy the streamers she didn’t get because I said I wanted to be a doctor. At the top of the closet I found reminders of sacrifice and support.
At the back of the closet I found a box – a medium-sized Amazon box taped shut. I turned on the flashlight app of my cell phone and caught the word “Precious” written in Mom’s perfect penmanship. Once upon a time, that’s what Mom and Dad called me – Precious. And I loved my nickname … until I didn’t. “Please stop!” I said once, finally, abruptly at the dinner table, fearful that my future (I had no current) best friends from, say, algebra class would hear it when they came over to gossip and try on makeup. Or, worse, that my future (I had no current) boyfriend from, say, the varsity football team would hear it when he came over to kiss me and tell me that I was prettier than Kathy. And they did! Not the girlfriends from algebra class or the varsity football team. They never came over to gossip or kiss. My parents. They did. They stopped called me “Precious”. Right then and there. Oh, I had been amply prepared to do battle – armed with (for my father) a literary argument: “’Precious’ is the insidious way Gollum refers to the evil Ring”. And I was armed with (for my mother) a personal, familial argument: “Why did you argue so strongly to name me after your mother if you never intended to call me by that name?” Admittedly, this was the weaker of the two arguments – Tolkien versus Coraline, and I do recall hoping it wouldn’t come to Coraline. And it didn’t. It didn’t even come to Tolkien. I said “Please stop!” And they did.
I felt a flash of embarrassment for thinking even for a fleeting moment that this Precious at the back of the closet was anything unrelated to their precious grandchildren. Instead of pulling the box out into the light from the back of the closet, I crawled into the dark of the back of the closet. To sit with Precious for a moment before Precious became, I was sure, tumbling piles of pictures of their grandchildren. Was I actually looking forward to the hurt I’d feel all over again that Mom and Dad allowed these children to take my place … that I allowed them take my place? Yes. I’d have evidence, hard evidence – I was a lawyer, after all, and hadn’t had such hope of a windfall of proof to back up a hunch in my entire career – that I wasn’t the apple of their eye, that I was falling further and further from the top of the heap with the birth of each grandchild, that I was not Precious. I girl could stay away for a decade with that kind of evidence.
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