Once, right after we were married, my grandmother had come over for dinner. As we showed her around, she was delighted to see a few pieces of hand-me-down furniture she’d thought were gone forever, sold or lost to time. “Very charming,” she’d said, eyeing our old couch and scratched end tables, the kitchen chairs we’d picked up on the sidewalk. “It’s just like the place your grandfather and I lived in when we were first married.”
I reminded her that when she and my grandfather had been newlyweds, they were nineteen and living in postwar Hamilton, in tenement housing where the heating was operated with nickels. She hadn’t even had a job. We were both pushing thirty, worked more than full-time, and could barely afford to live here, in this place where the kitchen “tiles” were easy-peel stickers, and the landlord locked the thermostat in a small plastic box to avoid us turning the heat on before November.
“Still,” she’d said. “Nice to see my old dresser again.”
I thought about where my parents had lived at my age: in a little house they owned, with a baby on the way. Jon and I had once talked to a mortgage broker to see what we’d need to buy a home. He’d suggested saving $80,000 and leaving the city.
The Laurens broke my bed frame trying to take it apart, so we put the headboard on the lawn with the rest of the sale items. To avoid spending money on a moving van and hopefully make some money on the side, I’d decided to hold an impromptu garage sale, spreading my possessions in front of the house and offering them to anyone who stopped to check them out. So far, a hair dryer and a clothing rack had earned us twelve dollars and eighty-five cents, which we immediately put toward pastries.
We spent the day alternating between manning the items for sale on the lawn and driving boxes and bags and poorly protected plants over to Merris’s in Lauren’s car, depositing them roughly in my new digs before heading back to pick up the rest of my garbage. After our last trip, Lauren and I returned to find Emotional Lauren victorious and overwhelmed. Some students had come by and cleared out the lawn. “Their house full-on burned down a few weeks ago, and they didn’t have insurance, and they were starting over with nothing,” she said.
She’d offered them the lot for fifty dollars. “They were so happy, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said, beaming. “We did a good thing today.”
Back at Merris’s, we unpacked and ate falafel wraps, and Lauren noted that I might have preferred to make more than fifty bucks for a similar percentage of my possessions.
“Do you have any records?” Emotional Lauren asked. “When Nour put his out at our yard sale, all these men materialized from nowhere. They were drawn. We made, like, hundreds of dollars.”
I consulted a box labeled very misc. The only records in it were Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, an Ella Fitzgerald live album, and something called NONSTOP DANCING 1600, which was a compilation of seventeenth-century reels and jigs, curated by two different men named Siegfried. We decided to sell some of my old clothes instead.
Lauren had recently received eighty dollars for a beat-up Gucci belt of her mother’s at a secondhand store on College. I did not own any Gucci but thought maybe they would have some interest in the approximately three hundred pairs of too-small denim I’d ordered online and could not bring myself to return, because to do this was to abandon the fantasy that one day they might fit, and perfectly. I resolved to drop by the secondhand store tomorrow, after first trying on all the jeans one final time, to see.
“I want to stress that these problems make it sound like I am not very beautiful, but I think we can all agree that I look pretty good, possibly even great, and it is the contemporary method of manufacturing, sizing, and marketing clothes that is the problem,” I said.
The group obliged.
We sorted through my clothing and accessories, throwing anything I was tired of that neither Lauren wanted in a big plastic bag. At some point I came upon my wedding and engagement rings. I chucked them in too.
“Maybe . . . wait on that,” said Lauren.
I told her I couldn’t imagine ever wanting them again, that surely if I did it would be a sign I’d succumbed to full derangement. What could I do, string them on a chain and make a miserable necklace? Repurpose them for a second time around when I finally gave in to everyone’s pressure and decided to get married again? Anyway, the entire set had cost under $400 from a pawnshop near Jon’s office. I did not like to guess the resale value of a twice-used wedding ring, but it felt safe to assume: not high.
Lauren touched my shoulder, then reached in and fished out the small box. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll keep them for a bit. You can tell me if you want to do something with them later.” She slid them on the ring finger of her right hand. “Okay, these look great on me. Maybe I should call Jon?”
Emotional Lauren screamed, which made Lauren cackle. I threw a pillow at her and told her to keep the rings. They did look pretty on her, and someone should get something out of them.
“Will it bum you out to see them?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Dope,” she said. “Free diamond. When I helped my brother move, he just gave us pizza.”
We kept sorting until Merris arrived with a box of welcome cookies. “Children are always coming to our door with something or other,” she said. “The only way to get rid of them is to buy whatever little trinkets they’re selling. Cookies today, so here you are, bienvenue.”
The cookies were the superior mint chocolate kind, and we were happy to have them. Merris and the Laurens got along great, though she departed after her first cookie, promising not to come downstairs often.
“Your space is your space; your business, your business,” she said. “I don’t want to learn anything that might make me view you differently.”
I told her she was more confident in the wildness of my lifestyle than I was. Lauren made a joke about hosting an orgy and inviting the gals upstairs for an air of authenticity. Merris rolled her eyes and shut the door, yelling over her shoulder that those only happened in the suburbs. The Laurens left soon after, headed to the launch of some doomed magazine, and suddenly I was in my new apartment, alone.
I looked at my boxes and bags and various piles. I sorted through some general misc. I applied a face mask and sat in different corners of the room and thought, this is a place to become yourself. Then I saw a mouse, cried, peeled the mask off with great effort and not insignificant pain, and went to sleep.
The next morning, the unfamiliar setting had me awake early and disoriented. I made coffee, climbed back into bed, and drank it while attempting some “morning pages.” I abandoned this effort almost instantly: journaling felt embarrassing and pointless. Why write my feelings down when I could tell them to my loved ones or write a too-long, fake-deep caption under a picture of some clouds? At least then there would be feedback. Keeping a journal seemed like a slower, somehow more tedious way to think about the things I had already bored myself with by overthinking. No.
The apartment was really a studio, compact but bright. Big double doors led to a backyard covered in a thin layer of six a.m. mist. Unlike at my old place, the quiet felt intentional here: the sound of an apartment for one. I did not feel an absence; there was only room enough for me.