Her Room
by M.C. Schmidt
When our daughter left for college, David and I finally split up. We’d made the plan when she was in the eighth grade—that we would stay together, be civil to one another, until she was grown and off to school. We sometimes struggled with the civility, but otherwise we made it, defied the odds: we raised that unicorn kid whose parents were still married on the day of her high school graduation.
She chose a school out west, as far from me as she could get within the contiguous United States. That was a fact, whether she intended it or not. There, I assumed, she would meet rich, coastal kids with beach bungalows or whatever, and she would call with apologies a few weeks before every holiday break to explain why it would make sense for her to stay with those families rather than coming home. It would be cheaper, maybe, a good networking opportunity, so much less complicated. David knew it too, that she’d gone so far just to get away from us, and he used it in his pitch when he convinced me to sell the house.
We did, and it sold quickly.
He’d taken little with him when he moved out—his clothes and books and vinyl, assorted other trinkets and trophies that he’d brought into the marriage. That left me with two stories of accumulated junk to deal with on my own, relics from the lives of three people totaling a collective fifty-eight years. I was off work for the summer break, so I had the time. Still, it seemed unfair that I should have to handle it all on my own. Typical, though.
My only real concern was for her things. I imagined a phone call ten years in the future— me demanding to know why she refuses to let me see my grandchildren, she admitting that it’s because I’d pitched a lucky hair scrunchie that she wore in the fourth-grade spelling bee and so doomed her to a life of misery and misfortune.
No thank you.
“Hey, honey,” I said in the voicemail that I left for her. “It’s Mom. I know you’re busy settling in, but I have a question for you, something to talk to you about. Call me when you can.”
***
I walked from room to room on the ground floor trying to see our things as a stranger might. What do I find lovely in this living room, this half-bath, this closet? What would I like to take with me on this exciting new stage of life? The answer, largely, was nothing. The things in those rooms weren’t mine, not really. They belonged to some unhappy wife, some stern mother. I’d just gotten swept up into her life somehow, and now I’d been spit back out again, older and time worn. I saw no reason to hang onto the detritus that had washed ashore alongside me.
I decided to drive to the craft store for poster board and wooden dowels. Estate Sale, I wrote above our address on the signs that I staked throughout our neighborhood, Fri–Sun, 8am–4pm.
On Friday, I locked her bedroom door and mine, and then I took a seat on the front porch with a cooler full of canned vodka spritzers. Less than a dozen people showed up that first day. Several were confused that there was no auctioneer.
“Then how does it work?” one man asked. He was a neighbor I recognized from two
houses down. I wasn’t sure of his name.
“You go inside,” I said, pointing at the door in case this too had stumped him, “and you
find something you want. Then you come out here and offer me money for it.”
“And then what?”
“And then I accept your offer. You give me the money, and you take home what you bought. Or you can go back in for something else. There are no limits. Take as much as you want. Except for the appliances. Those stay for the new owner.”
The next two days made up for that initial poor showing. I had a constant stream of people coming and going, some of them making repeat trips, others arriving with wagons that they pulled behind them or with trailers attached to the backs of their vehicles. Apparently, word travelled quickly that the hysterical woman who used to get into screaming matches with her husband on their front lawn was selling everything she owned and accepting all offers.
It was an odd experience, watching them carry off our things. When they were collected under one roof, those things told a story—the tastes and experiences, joys and losses and economic status of an actual family—but when the collection was disassembled and scattered, the lives they represented vanished. We were like that intricate sand art that monks toil over only to let it blow away in the wind. I’m sure there was something profound for the monks in that last part, the blowing away of their work, but I wasn’t sure what it was. All I could think of were our forks and spoons becoming orphaned in other people’s drawers.
By Sunday evening, I was as good as picked clean. The emptiness and echo in the house were unreal. I stood at the sink and ate cold noodles from the refrigerator with the last can of spritzer. As I ate, I emptied my purse and sorted through my weekend haul. When I’d counted it up, I’d made more than I’d expected. It said something about the neighbors, I supposed, that they’d mostly been fair even though I’d invited them to take advantage of me.
When I was done eating, I threw out the Tupperware and washed my plastic fork under the faucet. I opened the refrigerator and freezer doors, wondering if I could finish moving before I ran out of food. The thought of driving to the grocery and restocking anything in that kitchen felt like a straitjacket, like hands reaching from behind me and holding me in place. I was no expert, but it seemed to me that it would only take a couple of hours to gather what the neighbors had left and dump it in the back alley with the trash. Cleaning would take another day, maybe a day and half. That would just leave the two bedrooms to deal with. What would that be, two and a half days? Three? I could stretch the food that long, even if it meant eating ancient bags of ice-caked vegetables.
***
The upstairs hallway looked wider without the console table. It had sat against the wall for so many years that it had become more of a set piece than practical furniture, displaying books whose titles I couldn’t name and the vase that David had bought me for my first Mother’s Day. Those were all gone too. I’d decided to go to bed early so I could get started first thing in the morning. I grabbed the skeleton key from where it was hidden above my doorframe. I unlocked my room and then hers. I’d been picturing the contents of her room all weekend, mentally calculating the number of boxes I would need if I just went ahead and packed it all up. Five was my guess. I turned the knob and pushed the door open to see how my mental picture compared to reality.
The room was dark. The square of sky that I could see through her window was soft pink,
but none of that light filtered in. I flipped the switch on her wall. When nothing happened, I flipped it off again and back on, off and on. My first irrational thought was that she had done it: taken the bulbs with her to her dorm or unscrewed them as a prank. But as I stood in the doorway, I began to perceive the slightest buzzing from the light fixture on the ceiling. Was that the sound that compact florescents made when they blew? I wasn’t sure. Those things seemed to last nearly forever. When I was a girl and you blew a bulb, they would flash and pop, leaving no doubt. There was an explanation, I was sure, but I couldn’t think through it. It had been a strange and tiring weekend. Also, I was a little drunk. I closed her door. I could figure it out tomorrow in the daylight.
***
I woke up later than I’d planned. By the time I opened my eyes, it was already mid-morning. Realizing this, perversely, caused me to lay in bed even longer, reflecting on how far I was behind schedule. I fantasied about lighting a match and burning the place to the ground. Was there a valve somewhere in the basement that I could open to fill the house with gas, or would I need to make a trip to the Sonoco? I wasn’t sure. I would never get away with it if I was this dumb of a criminal. I grabbed my phone and opened my texts. Hey, kid, I wrote to her, the house sold. LMK what to do with your stuff ASAP.
Selfish. Had I been so bad, really, that I should be ignored? I’d never abused her. I’d never even yelled at her. Not seriously. Not that I could remember. Our marriage sucked, and of course that spilled over into all areas of life. So, no, it wasn’t ideal for her, and I regretted that. David did too, I’m sure. But what could we do?
Was she talking to him? I doubted it, but it was possible. They might be in touch. She and David, a new little unit that was isolating me. I could always call and ask him. I wouldn’t, though. I wouldn’t ask him for anything, not even the answer to a simple question.
***
I stood in the hallway, staring into her room. On the stretch of sidewalk that I could see through her window, an old man was walking his dog. The leaves of the giant catalpa tree in our yard were vibrant green, and if you stared long enough you could see them flutter slightly the way a mother might stare at her sleeping baby until she perceived the delicate pulse of its breathing.
The room, though, was black.
The window was a perfect square of light, like a movie screen in a dark theater. Unlike a theater screen, though, the light didn’t bleed into the room. It didn’t illuminate or cast shadows on anything within it. The window was a square of light framed by perfect blackness.
I didn’t try the light switch this time. I didn’t see the point. I just stood in the doorway for ages, afraid to step inside. Then I shut the door and went downstairs to clean.
***
The neighbors had left me more to deal with than I’d realized. It took me hours to carry and drag it all to the back alley. All the while I was working, my mind was on her room. More than anything, I was stuck on the puzzle of it, this unexpected phenomenon that was occurring inside a space where I’d lived for twenty years. It was like discovering a protrusion on your own body, some unexplainable new feature that came to occupy your every thought. Yes, you were afraid that it signaled something malignant, but, also, you wondered about the properties of the protrusion itself. Was it something you’d caused with bad habits or stress? What would happen if you squeezed it? Lanced it? Pushed it with a firm thumb back into your body? Would that solve it, make it disappear? Would it hurt, burst, show up somewhere else on the landscape of your skin?
I was hesitant to reenter her room. For those hours that I was away from it, though, reentering it was all I wanted.
When the work downstairs was mostly done, I took a break, sat at the bottom of the staircase, checked my phone. No new texts. I Googled “dark room” and got pages of results about film development. “Black room” returned information on home décor, ebony furniture and the like. Nothing I saw there was helpful, though I didn’t look thoroughly. It wouldn’t have mattered even if I’d found a testimonial from someone else who’d had this happen to them. They weren’t around to help me. I was alone in the house, and that made it my problem to solve.
I sat for a few more minutes, my eyes passively tracing the divots in the wall where we’d put the baby gate when she was newly mobile to keep her from climbing the stairs and breaking her neck. Did the new owners have a baby? I couldn’t remember. I hoped they were childless. It made me sad to think of them raising their baby in our house.
***
Standing in her bedroom doorway, I thought of a black hole sucking in the world around it, crumpling matter into an ever-denser grain of sand. I thought of my body floating in the cold emptiness of space. I thought of ghost stories and science fiction stories and stories of women driven mad. I took a step forward, unsure which this was.
The room was temperate, the same as the rest of the house. Nothing was hiding inside, waiting to grab me. At least, nothing had grabbed me yet. I stood in the center of the room, waiting for my eyes to adjust. As hard as I tried, though, I couldn’t see the form of her bed, her dresser, the wooden toy box that she’d refused to part with. They were still there, though. I was sure about that. I was sure because, as a stepped deeper into the room with a hand extended and patting the air in front of me, I stumbled on a sneaker that she’d left in the middle of the floor. I reached down for it. Rubbing my fingers along the worn tread on its bottom, I could see the shoe in my mind: teal with a lace that was sullied gray from use and black toe smudges. I clutched it to my chest and took a few more steps until my knees bumped against her bare mattress.
The mattress was firmer than I realized. When it accepted my weight, it seemed not to give at all. I sat and listened to the silent room, to the sound of my own breathing. To my right was the unfamiliar view of the catalpa through her window. The sliver of hallway I could see through her open door seemed like a different world, a portal that was a thousand miles off. I’d slid my hand inside her shoe and spread my fingers and was tapping it lightly on my leg.
I realized in time that the darkness wasn’t ominous, not exactly. It wasn’t restful either. I closed my eyes to it and laid back on the bed. I tapped the shoe against her wall and then removed the shoe from my hand and felt the wall with my fingers, those long scratches she made when she laid here as a teenager, angry in a way that only these little destructions could cure. I pressed my forehead into those grooves.
I was laying like that, smiling at her as she was then—so different from me when I was a girl—when the chiming of my ringtone filled the room. I pulled the phone from my pocket and saw that it was her. She’d texted twice. I hadn’t noticed. I accepted the call and brought the phone to my ear. “Mom?” she asked. Her voice sounded stern, like she’d called to scold me for all the messages I’d left for her.
I said her name. I called her “sweetheart.” Then I listened to see if, from such a great distance away, she could still hear me.
M.C. Schmidt's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in EVENT, Southern Humanities Review, Coolest American Stories 2024, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022).