1999 Charles River Review: The Wardrobe

Three things remained unclaimed when Maura entered her childhood home two months after her father died: her father's family Bible, her Mother's hope chest, and the wardrobe. She and Claire both wanted the hope chest and the Bible. Neither would take the oak wardrobe.

The Bible, printed in 1846, inscribed with the names of generations of Garrets, sat where it had since before both girls were born, on the library table next to the boxy upright piano in the living room. Maura ran her finger across the cracked leather surface, leaving a trail in the dust. Having the Bible in her home would be comforting, but she knew Claire felt the same way. They had avoided the subject politely since their father's death. Morning light poured through her mother's yellowed lace curtains, casting delicate shadows across the table. If she inherited the Bible, she would not leave it out in direct sunlight, Maura thought.

Sitting down on the wobbly bench of the piano, where she had practiced scales every day for 10 years of her childhood, she imagined her own children playing it some day. Her mother's gaze seemed to linger in the doorway, where she used to melt in the molding while Maura and Claire practiced. Taller than both of her daughters, with thick blonde hair that neither girl inherited, Ruth pulled back into the shadows whenever the music paused. She thought they didn't know she was watching.

Maura owned the piano now. The two sisters had divided their parents' furniture, silver, art, china, and personal effects on the phone. They knew every corner of the small house, knew every spoon and every ribbon in every drawer. They didn't need to be there. They talked on the phone--Claire in Connecticut and Maura in California--for hours, each with her eyes closed, walking through their parents' house in their minds because neither could face the emptiness in person. They started in the kitchen.

"Do you mind if I take the maple table and the hutch? I helped Dad refinish it when I was in high school. He let me help cane one of the chairs, which is probably why there's a hole in the seat," Claire said.

"Yeah, I remember that. You were so impressed with yourself. You take it. Sitting on that chair pinches my leg anyway," Maura teased her younger sister. "It'll look nice in your kitchen."

"Your turn. Anything you want from the kitchen?"

"I don't know. The pie pans. Rusty, bent up pumpkin pie pans."

Without opening their eyes the sisters walked through the entire house, gleaning memories in the form of furniture, clothing, and mementos. Maura had put off the trip home three times, but the real estate broker had told the sisters time was running short.

Maura had come to the house that day in search of the Christmas ornaments, which the sisters had decided to divide in person. No one had seen them in the six years since Ruth had died. Claire would be there in two hours to help. Maura drifted into her parents' room, for the first time in two years, although she knew the ornaments wouldn't be there. Pausing at the gilded oval mirror above her mother's dresser, Maura caught the likeness of her father, Paul, just as she saw him every day when she looked in the mirror. She saw his eyes, his auburn hair, his fair skin, and the moderately cleft chin she had hated as a teenager. Touching her chin with her mother's long fingers, she smiled, remembering the story her father made up about how his daughters had gotten so lucky as to have dimples in their chins.

"When I was born, I had dimples in both cheeks and one in my chin. My daddy told me I had triple good luck, and I think he was right. Maura, when you were born I was so happy I plucked the dimple right off of my left cheek and popped it in into your chin. I saved the other for Claire." Paul told the story over and over when the girls were little. To prove it, he always reached for his silver-framed baby picture and pointed out the dimples in his cheeks. Sure enough, he didn't have dimples in his cheeks anymore, they noticed each time.

Maura stepped away from the mirror and sat on the edge of her parents' bed to open her mother's hope chest, which leaned up against the footboard. Inside, Ruth had saved locks of the girls' red-brown hair, bound in tiny yellow ribbons, the christening dress that Maura, Claire, and Maura's three children had worn, and her wedding dress. Their mother twice had showed them the wedding dress, which she kept in a long cardboard box, neatly folded in a perfect rectangle, tied like a Christmas package with white ribbons. Maura resisted the urge to unfold the creamy dress and spread it out on the bed. She had never seen the bottom half of the gown.

As she inched open her mother's long-empty dresser drawers, the smell of soap, roses, and tea drifted out and surrounded Maura. Paul hadn't touched anything in the house since Ruth died. He used the same few dishes over and over, washed and reused the same bed sheets and towels each week. Maura and Claire had hired someone to clean every two weeks so he never had to disturb anything else in the house. Only the closet had become his. It smelled of his wool suits, fresh earth, and coffee. When they had been 6 and 5 years old, Maura convinced Claire to hide in that closet with her one night so they could eavesdrop on their parents and find out where their Christmas presents were hidden.

"C'mon, don't be a fraidy cat. I know they talk about the secret hiding place in bed. It's the only place they think we can't hear them," Maura urged her little sister. "We can peek at the presents and no one will ever know."

"But I don't want to hide in the closet. Spiders live in the dark."

"Please. I'll give you my Barbie with the red hair if you come with me," Maura pleaded. "There's nothing scary in a closet. I'll take care of you."

Paul and Ruth were in the bathroom brushing their teeth when the girls padded down the hallway holding hands in their matching red plaid nightgowns. With deliberate footsteps they avoided the creaky floorboards outside their parents' room, silently slid the closet door open, and curled up together in the darkness, terrified.

They discovered from their parents' conversation that the electric bill was unusually high. "I'll call the electric company in the morning," their mother had said as the girls drifted off to sleep. Both heavy sleepers, neither heard their panicked mother calling them in the morning. They awoke when a police officer opened the closet door and yanked them out.

"I found them, ma'am," he hollered to their swollen-faced mother, who was sure someone had kidnapped her daughters from their beds during the night.

Ancient pangs of guilt nibbled at Maura's stomach as she closed the closet and wandered into her parents' bathroom. The shock of the cold tile under her bare feet pulled her away, for a moment, to her grandparents' farmhouse in the mountains, where she and Claire had spent most of their summers, picking berries and apples, making jelly, setting traps for chipmunks, and playing in the creek. Mornings were so cold. They huddled in front of the Franklin stove, stamping their frozen feet while Gram cooked bacon, eggs, and toast. Maura walked out of her parents' bathroom and went into the kitchen to look for a snack.

She found a can of Campbell's tomato soup, her father's favorite, which she heated up and poured into his coffee mug. She wrapped both hands around the mug and inhaled the steam as she walked downstairs into the basement family room.

The giant oak wardrobe took up half the width of the wall opposite the stairs, and it nearly touched the ceiling. The deeply grained wood, carved with leaves and scrolls, looked grand and patriarchal. Two heavily carved doors swung open wide, not that Maura had ever opened them, at least not since she was six, when the dream began. It recurred for three years, and although it was Maura's nightmare, it infected Claire too. The dream started with Maura opening the door to her grandparent's farmhouse and finding a trail of bloody footprints. She followed them from room to room until finally they stopped at the wardrobe in her grandfather's den. Inside the wardrobe she found a dead body.

The dream recurred sporadically, possessing Maura for three years. Claire took on Maura's fear and wouldn't go near the wardrobe either. The girls used to keep their jump ropes, scooter, wiffle balls and bats on the floor of the wardrobe. But after the dream, they stowed their toys under the porch. They stopped going into the den all together so they wouldn't have to look at it.

When his father died and his mother sold the farmhouse, Paul took the wardrobe and moved it into the family's garage, despite Claire and Maura's protests. "It doesn't look that great now, but it will clean up great," he assured them. But they didn't care what it looked like. They avoided the garage after dark for two years. Paul spent weeks removing the gummy black finish from every crevice of the wardrobe before finishing the dimpled wood in a rich reddish brown. Remembering the care he put into it, neither of his daughters could bear to sell the frightful piece.

When Maura was eight, her parents moved the refinished wardrobe into the family room and placed it against the wall on the other side of Maura's bedroom in the basement. Only a thin wall separated the wardrobe from Maura's headboard for ten years. The same year that the wardrobe came to live with them Maura inherited her grandfather's four-poster bed. Sleeping in the bed where her grandfather died three days after his stroke gave her comfort, as if he always kept watch over her when she slept in that bed because it was the last place he had been before he died. Maura took the bed when she got married and now shared it with her husband. The wardrobe, however, remained.

With the mug of soup in one hand, Maura approached the wardrobe, embarrassed that the piece of furniture still intimidated her. The wrought iron handle felt heavy in her hand, just as it had 30 years ago. But an image of the body burst into her head, and she jerked her hand back and ran upstairs.

The yellow kitchen walls smiled as Maura emerged from the basement. Trying to distract herself, to calm her pulse, Maura began washing the soup pan in the sink. She didn't wait for the water to heat up, instead plunged her hands into the icy pool, tinted red from the soup.

At the farmhouse, they always had washed dishes in cold water. They didn't have hot running water. The water came directly from the creek in the backyard, which flowed down from the mountains. Her hands used to ache as she stood on the wooden crate, rinsing plates after dinner in the big farm kitchen. During the day, Maura and Claire used to wade in the creek looking for salamanders and smooth rocks. The water, so cold they frequently submerged cans of soda and watermelons to chill them overnight, numbed Maura and Claire from the knee down, so numb that Maura once stepped on a piece of glass and sliced her foot without even feeling it. When she climbed the bank of the creek and stepped up on her scooter to coast down the hill, the blood pooled around her foot. Noticing the trail of bloody footprints in the grass leading up from the creek, she passed out cold on top of the scooter.

Maura never got stitches in her foot, though the cut was deep, because about ten minutes later her grandfather collapsed in the potato field from a stroke. Maura waited, applying pressure to her cut and gliding on the porch swing with Claire, as the ambulance came down the bumpy dirt road to take him away. Everyone, including Maura, forgot about her foot.

Hot tears poured out of Maura's eyes at the long-forgotten memory. Bloody footprints. The tap water began to warm up and soothed her hands. She dropped to the floor, cradling her left foot in her wet hands, stroking the forgotten pink scar near the base of her big toe.

The warped oak door didn't respond to the first timid tug on the wrought iron ring. She pulled harder and the doors exploded open, throwing her backwards a few steps. Her heart beat fiercely. Feeling like a six-year-old confronting the boogie man, she leaned forward to peer inside, still undecided whether she should proceed or run. She stepped forward, breathing loudly and deeply. Dusty light from the single basement window cast long shadows across the wardrobe, making it impossible to see what lay in the bottom. She cleared her throat. The sound of blood coursed through her ears as she reached out and pushed the door open wider, exposing the inside of the wardrobe to the light. Placemats, sheet music, boxes of jigsaw puzzles, and multicolored plastic party cups lined the top shelf. Two dirty jump ropes looped over coat hooks. She flattened her hands against the back wall of her nemesis. The ghost of her grandfather's headboard pressed back through the paneling.

The floor was bare except for one large brown box and two unopened packages wrapped in Christmas paper. The secret hiding spot revealed. Almost afraid to disturb the boxes, Maura leaned into the wardrobe and squinted to read the names on the tags. "To Maura, Merry Christmas, Love Mom," the top box read in her mother's flowery script. With trembling hands, Maura lifted it out, along with a similar package addressed to Claire, both crisply wrapped in red and green metallic paper with gold ribbons. Hidden from the light for six years, the paper hadn't even faded. Peeling back the dried tape, Maura imagined her mother's long, pianist's fingers wrapping the boxes just weeks before she died. The corners were perfect, the bow matched the stripe of gold running through the paper.

Inside she found Christmas ornaments, including the candy cane she had made of clay in kindergarten, her wooden nutcracker, the dancing bear, and the fragile gold crest with her name and birthdate, which read Baby's First Christmas. Wrapped in red tissue, she found one unfamiliar ornament, a small porcelain angel with the year 1993 painted in gold on the front. That was the year her mother died. "For my little angel. Love always, Mom," appeared on the back side, painted in the same gold paint, clearly by her mother. Maura smelled roses, tea, and soap in the red tissue and pressed it against her face to absorb it before it escaped.

Removing the large brown box filled with the remaining ornaments, she lowered herself into the hollow wardrobe. Pulling her knees up tight to her chest, she pressed sideways against the back wall and sobbed. Claire could have the Bible and the hope chest.