Clutter - A short story

CLUTTER

Clutter was everywhere. It came crawling toward her like roaches stalking fudge.

Binder clips, post-it notepads, ceramic cups stuffed with pencils and pens. One cup said “Julia”; another said “Paris, Las Vegas,” the hotel where she and her husband had honeymooned five years before.

Yellow Number 2 Hard pencils, mechanical Bics with hard erasers that smudged across words she wished could be wiped out; blue, pink, and yellow highlighters, spelled H-I-L-I-T-E-R-S; blue, black, green and silver Sharpie permanent markers; black Uniball pens, green and red Micron 08s, red Pilots with see-through bodies, the ink inside squishing around like blood, and three Schaeffer calligraphy pens, her favorites.

With the Schaeffers, her neat, correct penmanship seemed artistic. Even the bank tellers and sales clerks at Nordstrom’s and Pier One remarked on her beautiful hand, as she raced around with her handwritten checks paying bills mere hours before the due date, another sign of her procrastination and cluttered mind.

Clutter was behind her, on the bookshelves that lined one wall: books on Eastern philosophy and religion, books on writing, reference books like The Ultimate Visual Dictionary, Office 2011 for Dummies, The Barnes & Noble Book of Quotations; and stacks of incomplete projects. Or should she say, unfinished. What were they: incomplete or unfinished? The first implied hope, a promise of completion. The second seemed more definite, something that would never happen.

The roof of the dog crate, where the two-year-old Shih-Tzu snored peacefully on his grayish mattress, served as a bed for clutter: her open Day-timers, with lists of things she had to do, and only a few of which she’d actually accomplish, unpaid bills, unopened mail, stray papers that needed filing. One look at it made her stomach turn. They were akin to the business cards that spread out like a jigsaw puzzle on her desk and windowsill: people she shouldn’t forget, people who could help her with information or leads to new business, or people she’d met who she liked and wanted to be in touch with, like Diza, the meditation practitioner she’d studied with six years ago, and whom she’d recently run into at the Galleria Mall, when she and her husband were shopping for Christmas gifts for his grandchildren (now her grandchildren too).

But most of the clutter was in her mind, spiraling out of control. She woke up exhausted every morning, no matter how much sleep she had. Exhausted and depressed. Dreams depleted her, echoing the struggles of the day. Dreams of lost keys, of lost purses with her credit cards and driver’s license gone. Dreams of being stranded on strange streets in unfamiliar cities. Dreams of directionless stasis at airports and seaports, adrift and alone in crowds of people who knew where they were headed.

Julia stared at the computer screen, waiting impatiently for the spy zapper to finish its frenetic work and allow a new page to appear. When it did, she wrote, in a stream of consciousness style recommended by Natalie Goldberg:

Sweating, I toss the comforter off my feet. Anxiety lies across my stomach like taut elastic bands controlled by an unseen creature who derives joy in squeezing the bands even tighter at unexpected intervals.  I sit up, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed. Elbows on knees, head in my hands, I rest a moment, summoning up energy to shake off the debilitating dreams. JJ barks rudely and nips at my toes as I squirm my feet into my slippers. Is he being playful or trying to master me? And why not, I think. Everything else controls me.

Julia took a swig of sugared coffee from the mug that rested just left of the laptop. Every mug in the house held memories. This one said “Sylvester’s Restaurant & Bakery, Northampton’s favorite place for breakfast and lunch, Massachusetts.”

She cherished the mug for the memories it evoked. She and Joseph had visited her sister Shanti in Northampton a half dozen times in the five years since they'd married. Sometimes they’d stayed in a hotel, other times in the house Shanti shared with her partner Toby. Julia glanced up at the photo on the wall to her left. It was Shanti looking radiant, taken on the day two years ago when Shanti and Toby had married, in a civil ceremony sanctioned by the State of Massachusetts.

Julia smiled. That was probably the happiest day in Shanti’s all too short life.

She rubbed the burning sensation in her eyes, and turned away.

JJ stirred and shuffled toward the office door. He stuck his flat-nosed face and fluffy paw between the door and the doorframe, edging it open. Loud rock ‘n’ roll assailed Julia’s ears. “Jailhouse Rock.” The beat was compelling. She couldn’t help shaking her head from side to side. She smiled, thinking about the transitory nature of mood. One moment, low and melancholy, a second later, buoyant.

Clutter of emotions, too. Julia took a deep breath. Her old meditation companion, Diza, had continued their meditation practice while Julia had gone off in another direction, to graduate school. Diza had progressed, if that was the right word, to meditation group facilitator. Would renewed meditation help untangle Julia’s cluttered mind or add a new burden of responsibility, the demands of self-discipline, and the inevitable guilt?

Her younger sister, Shanti, had studied meditation in India, where she’d lived for four years. There, she had changed her name from Linda to a word meaning peace. When she came back to the States, Shanti was already in her thirties, and had become a different person, a better person, Julia thought. She went to graduate school at Smith College and began a therapy practice specializing in trauma, incest, and self-destructive behaviors.

Living a thousand miles from each other, Julia and Shanti were connected by Saturday morning phone calls, and infrequent visits, until Shanti’s voice, weakened by chemotherapy for a greedily rapacious cancer, was too thin to be heard, and Toby became the interpreter. 

On Julia’s last visit to Northampton, Shanti had shrunk nearly six inches in size, her cracked spine, attacked by tumors, bent and stooped like an old woman’s. 

Julia stood up to look closer at Shanti’s wedding photo, her hand at breast level, where the cancer had started, holding a pure white rose. Underneath, Toby had highlighted Shanti's writing in yellow: It’s amazing all the things one can accomplish when there is belief in the self.

The music in the living room seemed to swell. “Let’s Go to the Hop” bopped through the open door. Joseph seemed to be in a teenage nostalgia mood that morning. Torn between the music and the act of willful consciousness toward writing practice, Julia half-danced across the floor to close the door. JJ lay on the floor like a white dustmop but raced to beat out the closing door before it nearly cut off his feathery tail.  

Even with the door closed, “Blueberry Hill” threatened to do Julia in, leaving her sobbing, with its “wind in the willow trees, love’s sweet melody.”

Damn it, love is even doing me in, she thought. It was seductive. Life was seductive. Grief was seductive. Helping people was seductive. Being busy-busy was seductive. Maybe it wasn’t clutter after all – even mind clutter – that was doing her in. It was seduction, being pulled here and there, wanting to do it all, be everywhere, experience everything, being in the thick of life.

Then again, life could be too messy, too painful. Easier to pull back, be an observer, be part of it, but not part of it. Watching, seeing, listening, feeling, but shying away from responding, from making a commitment, from being obligated, obliged, responsible. No, she didn’t want to commit. She didn’t want to be held accountable.

Was it laziness? Fear of taking a stand? Fear of choosing? Fear of losing? Clutter, clutter of thoughts and emotions. How to untangle them.

The dog barked at the closed door from the other side. 
Let me in, he cried.

            “What’s all the racket about?” Joseph shouted.

Let me out, she cried.

***

Night. Moonless night. The overhead garage door creaked open. Julia dragged the battered old trash can down the driveway. Joseph had left to play bridge for the evening at the bridge club. Julia gathered armfuls of files from her office. JJ was locked in his crate, barking, wanting to follow Julia.

She balanced file folders in her arms and dumped them into the trash can outside. Inside the garage again, she pawed among some gardening tools in search of a box of candles she thought she had stored there a couple of years before. The box was sticky where the wax had clung to the bottom, but she clawed out one of the half dozen vanilla-scented candles from its neighbors, lit it with a safety match, and shielding the flame as she walked, placed the candle on top of the paper pile in the trash can. From one of the file jackets standing on end, she slipped out an eight-by-eleven sheet of paper and held its corner to the flame. She held the paper until the flame reached her fingertips, then dropped it. The small flame grew and crept deeper into the can. Julia strode back to her office and shoved the debris on her desk into a carton.

Ashes and sparks shot up from the top of the can like miniature fireworks. Flames licked low into the can, transforming information into dust. Julia up-ended the carton and slowly spilled out the contents, careful not to smother the flames below. A peculiar smell of melting plastic and charred metal rose from the can. Julia wiped her brow with the back of her hand, streaking the sweaty silken ashes across her forehead and into her hair. She smiled, satisfied.

Time after time she returned to her office, methodically emptying every drawer, every filing cabinet. Some things took longer to burn than others, and soon a backup of trash lined the driveway, waiting to be incinerated.

Julia returned to the office for the last time, to open JJ’s crate. She attached the leash to his collar even as he squirmed and nipped at her hands. Once the leash was secured, he stopped barking. She pulled him along through the garage toward the driveway.

They sat there together, Julia atop a pile of phonebooks, JJ at her feet, quieted.  She rescued a blank notepad and a pen from the tongues of the fire,  and watched the starry conflagration sizzle and sparkle, like the birth of the Milky Way. 

The End