Leaving Things

by Sharon Mollerus

The first thing to leave was perhaps insignificant. It was a small milky gray elephant in glass with sharp tusks and a gold ring hooked in its lip. Pearl kept it high on the shelf from habit, but it had been decades since one of the kids might have seized and dropped it or knocked it over with a stray frisbee. Still, for some reason it was no longer on the top shelf in the hallway, the one that went to the bedrooms, hers and David Senior’s, and the children’s rooms which had long been converted into an office and a guest bedroom. Pearl couldn’t remember offhand where the object came from—a knickknack from a souvenir shop on some trip, a doodad which David gave into buying for the kids. It wasn’t a member of some theme menagerie like Pearl’s friends had—fat pandas or smiling cows or insipid pink pigs, puffy dopey creatures that sprawled over windowsills and kitchen nooks. That wasn’t Pearl’s style. Each piece in her house had an original connection to some person, place, or event, and she kept them all, although sometimes she had trouble remembering their origins. Lower on the shelves were a porcelain Victorian lady with an umbrella from her aunt, a smiling Virgin holding the Infant high on her arm, a wood carving of a Scottish terrier by her son David, a county fair blue ribbon for her pear tart, and a dusty lace-covered jar of rose petals her daughter Vicky had made in grammar school. Pearl didn’t know how long the elephant had been missing, but she could no longer walk down the hall without its loss suggesting some calamity, like a hole in the wall zapping out the heat or a broken step on the front porch waiting to catch someone with an untied sneaker. Vicky said she didn’t remember the figure. The only others to pass through would have been David Junior, his wife Julie, and their sullen teens who came out every Christmas; Mark and Melinda spent the week draped over their grandparents’ recliners with walkmans wired over their heads and gold rings flashing in their ears, noses and throats. She was certain that the glass bauble with the leering mouth was still there then and left sometime before she finished her deep cleaning for Easter.

When she asked David about the elephant, he asked if it mattered much to her. He was getting forgetful. He didn’t remember doctor’s appointments without three reminders and never knew when it was time to go to church. He had kept track of golf dates with the fellows until he stopped going. Now, he spent the afternoons at the house or park with their grandson Charlie while Vicky caught up on the housework. The pachyderm’s absence seemed to glare at her like a fixed eye, accusing her of not watching out for things. The silly piece of glass with the ornery tusks and gold loop, designed to be led by the nose, bellowed after her now that it was gone. She was losing track of various articles, like the fountain pen that moved from the den drawer to the kitchen cabinet and the salad forks that jumped the divide and joined the knives. Or there were the bills that had to be separated from the junk mail going to recycling, and she confused the piles once, setting off a flurry of late fees. Not to mention she had to watch out for David himself, because of his diabetes, which meant managing the calories and carbohydrates, ounces and units, glucose and insulin.

It was June then, the heat was already oppressive, and the neighborhood kids were just out of school. The sidewalks belonged to them in the late afternoon as the hot hours waned; they were rollerblading, skateboarding, biking or triking, and hotwheeling. Vicky brought Charlie’s bike with the training wheels, and he rode down the center of the sidewalk in his racing helmet with a fat band at his throat as the bigger kids wheeled around him, in front and back. The smaller ones sometimes fell and scraped their shins and elbows; crumpled up, they wailed, and their mothers came out to scold and slap on bandaids. But Charlie pedaled and stayed upright, proud to ride for his grandfather who watched him from the porch, sipping a glass of iced tea. Pearl saw it all as she washed the front windows from inside, the younger children and the smirky older boys and the so-cool tween girls, in their midriff blouses and short shorts with the indigo and white threads shredding at their thighs, as they pushed themselves along on their silver scooters with a foot skip and a jut of the butt.

One day, soon after the elephant went missing, Pearl had a shock: as she was dusting David’s office, she looked into the bookcase and found nothing behind the glass. His trophies, all missing. He had earned his business degree on a golf scholarship. The track cups too--he’d been a star sprinter in high school. Baseball, tennis. There had been dozens of them, golden images of David the athlete, all gone. Someone must have broken in. She called him in from the garden, worried about how to tell him.

“David, you need to see this.”

“What is it now, Pearl? I’ve got my shoes caked with mud, and I know you don’t want me to track it in. Just tell me in the doorway.” She hesitated, trembled, and raised it up to its due importance, in case it wouldn’t properly upset him.

“Take off your shoes.”

“Oh all right.” He walked into the house in his stocking feet; the toe of one had sprouted a hole. “Go ahead, what is it?”

“Look in your study. Don’t you see?” She thought he needed a new prescription since he didn’t see as well or notice things. Unless he was planting something or was with Charlie, he walked around dream-like; maybe it was a focusing problem.

“What?” he asked.

“The trophies and plaques, plates, cups, ribbons. They’re all gone. Where’d they go?”

“I gave them to Charlie because he asked for them.”

“Why? How do you expect a six-year-old to know their value?”

“What do they mean to me just sitting in here? It’s less for you to dust.”

“When did I ever say I minded dusting them? That’s hardly fair to the other kids. Won’t they be jealous?”

“Who, the baby? Alysa doesn’t know the difference. And David’s kids hardly care.”

“You’re spoiling that boy. You’d give him anything, everything. Did you give him that glass elephant?”

“No, I did not. Those trophies are just cheap little statues, and they’re still in the family. Mind if I go back to transplanting my roses?” His voice was gruff, his face flushed pink, and the long wisps of hair which would have topped his freckled bald head were now flailing over his brow.

What would Charlie understand about them, the gilded sculptures of his grandfather as a young man, flying with a foot slapping the earth over a diamond plate or swinging his club over his head to send a pocked sphere to the stars. Pearl missed them in the cupboard which was now vacant, the beveled glass shining back at her with its fine leaf-drop facets streaming like tears in front of her face.

“If I’d known it would upset you so much, I wouldn’t have given them away,” he said that night in bed after a silent supper. “But Pearl, they were mine.” She had served a homemade chicken and rice soup and weighed his portion of wheat bread smeared with a little margarine. She frowned when he left the carrots and celery at the bottom of the bowl, although he ate a little lettuce with his lo-cal dressing. She set her jaw and gave no reply. It was her house too, her organization and decoration, and he had de-faced the office. It was now just a room with a desk and chairs, his imprint erased. How many times had she paced along with him at the driving range during those first years? Those trophies were hers too, but no longer. He turned out the light, and she turned away from him, watching as the diamond pattern on the wall contracted into blinking narrowing eyes under the moonlight easing over the curtains.

David had added weight over the years, bulking at his stomach until the blood no longer reached over and down quite as it had, and so they settled for pats and rubs in the dark, and his sagging breasts flapped over his heart and rose and fell with his deep night breaths. She fussed and nagged about his food, but he still snuck ridged chips and peanut brittle, as evidenced by the silver and cellophane wrappers sparkling in with the greens clippings. She left little pamphlets around the house like “Managing Your Diabetes for Life,” but she never saw him read anything but the sports section and Golf. She shopped while he was still asleep so he wouldn’t get into the refrigerator while she was gone. She herself was shrinking in flesh as well as bone, and her skin shook loosely over her retreating frame. The slackness gathered at her elbows, and her legs jiggled a little as she walked. Her calves still held some fat where muscles had been, and they arched out as if she might sprout wings.

Other small objects started moving away from them, an accumulation of things which David transferred. She could hardly tell her daughter to give back all the trinkets that passed from David’s hands to his grandson. She suggested that baby Clarissa might mind later, but no one paid any attention. David brought out his bench knife in the leather case from his nightstand to show the boy how to carve a nice handle to open things or to pull a face from a grainy chunk of wood. She objected that it was not for a child to have, but Vicky assured her they would keep it up for later. Pearl said she might be coming down with the flu and wouldn’t want to give it to the children, so Vicky took them home early.

Then there was the old wooden duck pull-toy from his childhood to which David attached a new rope; at Pearl’s insistence, it did go to the baby. And David spent days in the garage digging through his toolkit and coin collection, his logo caps and scout badges, all of which went to Charlie. The old golf magazines and business school textbooks went to the library sale. Then he started in on the encyclopedia set she had selected and purchased one by one on sale from the grocery store in the late 70s. As he was boxing up the heavy books, she grabbed the index volume and held it to her chest. She thought David Junior’s children might need them to study when they visited, but David said he’d never seen either one crack a book. He packed the rest up, and she released her volume when it was time to make dinner. He gave his old glasses to the optometrist to pass on to poor clients and the pennies out of his jar to the children collecting for the handicapped.

While he moved and removed things, she gathered up the old receipts which would fly around the office and filed them year by year in accordion folders. She put her cooking magazines in order by date and stored them in plastic holders in the study. She polished the silver and relined the kitchen drawers and arranged her utensils and gadgets. She hung scoured pots and ladles from hooks in the kitchen and piled fruits and vegetables in dangling baskets. She cut coupons and stocked up on staples, stacking the cans and packages in the pantry like cement blocks for a new building. The kitchen gleamed and bulged with her wares and provisions.

The moment came when the two met at the games cupboard between the kitchen and family room, at the border of their domains. David opened wide the glass cabinet door containing rumpled boxes of playing cards like half-empty cigarette packs, baggies of colored poker chips, score boards without pegs, and collapsed cardboard puzzles with lost leafy corners and missing patches of cloud. She pushed his hand away and latched the door sharply.

“That’s not yours.”

“It is too,” he said. “How are you going to play with these by yourself?”

“It’s for the children to play with.”

“Alysa will put the poker chips in her mouth, and Charlie will spread the puzzle pieces all over the floor just to get tracked around the house like so many clumps of grass.”

“What are you planning to do with this cupboard when you clean it out--leave it empty like the one in the office?”

“We could put some pieces of our china in here, instead of hiding them away in the kitchen. This is supposed to be for displaying our plates.”

“It’s supposed to be for our activities, our fun together. Why don’t we play cards?”

“You hate to play cards.”

“That’s because you were always a poor loser.”

“Then there you have it. We won’t need to be fighting over it.” She stopped talking, but that didn’t do any good either. The puzzles and cards were thrown out because the boxes were torn and the integrity of them was in question. The poker chips and score boards were given to Goodwill.

Many things had left, and she could account for all of them except the glass elephant. David denied he gave it away. One afternoon she came upon it, in pieces. David was at the park with Charlie trying out a new blue and red box kite they’d built together. The wind was too rough, she’d told them; she advised a less breezy day next month, but they went off anyway. She was cleaning the basement bathroom when she found the glass pieces glittering at the bottom of the tin trash can. The ring was still attached to the gaping upper lip, but it was broken off from the face of the beast. The trunk was cut in a couple of curved strips like a chopped snake. The tusk points must have shattered to a fine dust. It was then that she remembered it. She and David were on their honeymoon and they had stopped on the boardwalk by the sea to watch the glass blower make the elephant. They stood swaying foot to foot in the cold windy night and shivering shoulder to shoulder, watching by the light of the hot white blowtorch as the man rolled and pulled and twisted the piece until it billowed into an ample shape formed out of curves and angles of soft glass. She had fancied it, and David bought it for her. She took the pieces and emptied them onto a piece of her china and placed it in the middle of the china cabinet.

That night, she watched his face as he breathed, his mouth slack, his yellow teeth jutting from his lips under his graying moustache. His nostrils trembled in his sleep. Her blood ran rampant, giving her no rest. He’d spent the whole day with Charlie, carving in the garage, swinging at the park, following him as he rode his bicycle, and then he was so exhausted he didn’t have a word or a look left for her the whole evening. He yawned as he choked down a few green beans and nearly snored as he chewed the grilled skinned chicken and bit into a dry whole wheat roll. He barely made it from the table to the couch before he went out cold. Why she kept that man going when every bit of salvaged energy was spent on the boy, she could not calculate. She then threw her design into reverse with a mania that surged to every nerve ending: she undid recipes, reversed the calorie count, backed in the butter and salt, and devised her new menu.

The next morning, a Sunday, she cooked David his favorite breakfast. He drank his coffee with the caffeine left in and added real cream and heaping teaspoons of sugar. He ate all five pieces of bacon, two huge scoops of golden fried hash browns and three extra large eggs, fried over hard, with 210 grams of cholesterol each. He licked his knife and kissed her. After breakfast he fell asleep on the couch and Vicky called to ask what was wrong when they didn’t show up for church. That night Pearl made him his favorite liver and onions smeared with gravy and served chocolate pie swirled with whipped cream.

“What’s gotten into you, dear?” David asked.

“You only live once,” she answered. He hung around her kitchen over the next days and weeks to smell and taste the chocolate chip cookies, the swelling loaves of white bread, and the pudgy dumplings and blood red roast beef she prepared. She snagged Charlie in her food web too, giving him a piece of chocolate cake on a paper plate and sending him out to play while she and David ate theirs together at the table. She didn’t remind her husband to check his blood sugar anymore, and he neglected it.

They were driving together to church one fall day as the speckled yellow leaves dropped from the trees, scattered over the sidewalk, and piled up against the houses in the bitter wind. David turned pale and slumped over the steering wheel. She never had time to lean over and steer, since the gear box came up and caught her by the throat as they landed in a tree at the median strip. David’s head was bowed into his wheel and a long crescent cut gleamed bright red above his eyebrows, while she was pierced at the neck by a jagged piece of metal and pinned at her waist. Blood and air bubbled from her wound.

In the hospital, she watches David watching her. She remembers the load of delicates in the washing machine that David will put in the dryer and shrink up too small to give away. And she knows they all know about his hyperglycemia and her part in it. He takes her tiny shrinking hand with the wedding ring bobbing over her finger, cups it in his palm and settles back in his chair.

“Pearl, I’m sorry about the elephant. I was just looking at it and remembering how the glass blower made it for us by the sea. It somehow slipped and dropped on the wood floor. I didn’t know what to say since it meant so much to you.” She can say nothing now, but squeezes his arm a little and wonders if he notices.

She doesn’t remember being brought in, but she knows David went straight to her bed after they released him with stitches. Vicky visited in the afternoon, and David Junior is flying out tonight. The priest came and gave her holy oil and absolution even though she could no longer voice her sin. The grandchildren aren’t allowed in. They should let them in. She should have let them in herself.

The sun is setting over the sea behind the hills in the west and is crackling in a collapse of orange, yellow and pink streaks. It’s the pollution, they always say, but she’ll take it for itself, the fiery beauty. David is stretched back in the vinyl chair now and snoring with his mouth wide open, a trickle of saliva rolling down his chin, and his hand has dropped open, releasing hers. He will have a hard time of it, but Vicky and Dan will take him in, and Charlie will adore him until he grows up like his cousins and crowns his own head with a walkman. She’s glad it will be a long time before every last thing leaves David, or at least until he realizes it.

The blood pumps slowly through her veins carrying the bilious infection with it. She draws herself up, feeling the rush of her life running with her heart, like those nights when her desire was awakening as David caressed her. He would start with some tip end, her fingers, her knees, her nipples--and a ripple would go through her, a thrill, as he moved in closer to her center. And so it is tonight with the retreating warmth of the day: her sparse flesh prickles in the living air and her skin grows taut in expectation, with the cold blast of still living, the shock and shudder of her life. David lies asleep, blissful, as she inhales, exhales, another and another breath, each more difficult and distant. The tiny mother of pearl rosary beads lying on the rolling hospital tray flash in the red gold day’s end at the window, and she fingers them inside her memory—as now and the hour of her death merge emerge amen.

2005