I lifted the first plate out of its tissue the way I used to lift baby birds that had fallen into the yard - both hands, barely breathing. The paper had gone the color of old teeth. Underneath it the plate was so white it looked cold, the kind of white that has never once had food on it, and around the rim someone had painted a thin line of gold that had never been dulled by a single knife. Eleven more waited behind it in the rose-printed box, each one wrapped in its original shroud - and at the very bottom, still rubber-banded together, were the cards from the wedding gifts, the ink faded to the color of a bruise.
She ran the cloth in the same circle she always did, the worn spot in the center of each plate smooth as a stone from a riverbed. The Corelle was the color of a winter sky two days after the snow. Above the stove the cabinet with the glass front stayed shut - the gold rims inside just visible through the smudge of old steam. She set the forks down tines-up, the way her own mother had, then she straightened the paper napkins into a fan and stepped back to look at the table like she was checking a math problem.
The box had moved to the top shelf sometime in November, pushed back behind the gravy boat she'd never used either, and it sat there while we ate the Campbell's she'd heated twice because nobody noticed the first time it went cold. My father held his spoon the way he'd started holding everything - carefully - like he was being graded on it. The fluorescent light above the sink had been flickering for three weeks and nobody had changed the bulb. I watched a noodle slide off his spoon and back into the bowl and he didn't try again for a long time.
The Cabinet Nobody Opened
The box left a pale square in the shelf dust when I lifted it down. I set it on the table where the Campbell's bowls had been and pulled the ribbon loose and the tissue came up in my hands in long slow sheets, pooling around my feet like something being shed. My mother stood in the doorway in her black dress with the buttons she'd done wrong, one hand on the frame, and she watched me the way you watch a thing you can't decide whether to stop. The plates were still cold. On the counter behind her, someone had left a casserole dish covered in foil - and next to it a card with a lily on it, and next to that, nothing.
The glasses were behind the pint tumblers, pushed so far back my fingers found them by touch before my eyes did, cool and stemmed and slightly sticky with two years of not being chosen. I set both of them on the table even though I was eating alone - the way I sometimes set two coffee cups out in the morning before I remember. The pasta had gone a little stiff in the reheating and I ate it standing up first, then decided that was wrong, and sat down. Tap water in a crystal bowl makes a sound like something being announced. I looked at the glass for a long time before I drank from it, the kitchen light bending in the stem into a small gold line, thin as paint - thin as the edge of something I was finally done being careful of.
The tissue is the color of old roses, which is different from pink the way that tired is different from sad. I've moved the rubber band three times, moved the batteries into a soup can I labeled and then lost the label for, moved a birthday candle stub and a thumb drive I don't recognize and a key whose lock I can't remember, and every time my hand finds the tissue first and goes still. The drawer smells of cedar and something sweet that has no source I can identify - and I've stopped trying. Once I almost used it to wrap a glass I was sending to a friend, got as far as smoothing it flat on the counter before I folded it back into its square and returned it to the dark, and then wrapped the glass in newspaper like a person who has never owned a thing worth wrapping. It sits there now between the dead batteries and nothing, folded to the size of a playing card, and I don't move it because I don't know yet what moving it would mean.
Tissue Paper on the Floor
The good tablecloth is in the cedar chest under the window - folded into thirds the way my mother folded it, and when I lift the lid the smell that comes up is so specific and so her that I've to put both hands on the chest rim for a moment and breathe through my mouth. Underneath it, wrapped in the same brown paper as the day she bought it, is a set of linen napkins she ordered from a catalog in 1987, still creased from the original folding - white as the plates, never once touched by a mouth. Last Tuesday I got as far as unfolding one before I noticed it had a small embroidered initial in the corner, her initial, not mine, and I stood there with it draped across my palm until the pasta water boiled over. I folded it back. The lid of the chest makes a soft sound when it closes - nothing dramatic, just wood finding wood, and I go back to the paper towels.
The wine has been in the rack since before I moved in, a bottle someone brought to a party that never happened, and the label has gone soft at the corners from two winters of damp. I've looked up the vintage twice on my phone - standing in the kitchen in my socks, and both times closed the browser before the page finished loading. Last Thursday I set it on the counter next to the pasta pot with something like intention, then moved it back when I couldn't find a reason good enough, some occasion with enough weight to justify the opening. The cork is probably fine. The rack holds twelve and has always held one.
The dress has been in the dry-cleaning bag since the year I turned thirty-two, still on its wire hanger - the plastic clouded now to the color of old ice. I know the zipper still works because I checked it once in the dark of the closet, just my hand reaching in, and felt the pull of it and then let it go. Last April I had nowhere to be and I put it on anyway, standing in the kitchen in bare feet, and I set the table with two glasses and the cold white plates and lit the candle I'd been saving for the power going out. I ate the eggs I'd made because there was nothing else - and the candle smelled like fig, which isn't a smell for emergencies. When I blew it out I wrote the date on the bottom with a marker, so I'd know.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional, financial, medical - or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
