It was that bad and worse, I discovered, when Sally allowed me inside. By then I had on a disposable white suit over my clothes, rubber gloves, and a dust mask over my nose and mouth, but I still couldn’t escape the feeling that I was wading in bioactive muck. The house was dense with broken-down matter, papers and plastics, abandoned food and piles of clothing, much of it still on store hangers. Little could be salvaged, but Sally was a maniac for recycling, and bin after bin filled up under the tent. Rochelle seemed to hold it together fairly well, until, at around noon, she unearthed the first relic: a debating trophy, behind piles of crumbling newspapers in a downstairs cupboard. “Let’s go out for a bit,” I heard my sister say.
I kept on with what I was doing. I was feeling the rhythm of it, the weird mindlessness of reaching and picking and sorting and, above all, expelling matter. Space began to open in the rooms, and filthy air to expand around the objects. It was glorious to see the floor, or at least the destroyed carpet （once … brown?） that covered the floor, and then to see that small, open area widen and grow. It was thrilling to find some article that might conceivably be personal. When I did—a pocketbook, a silver chain, a photograph—I carried it reverently outside and placed it on the designated table.
“You’re hired,” Sally told me when I came out carrying a recipe card file.
“You already hired me. Remember?”
“Yes, but I was just being nice. Now I’m serious. You’re a good worker.”
“It’s very … satisfying, isn’t it?”
“It can be. I find it satisfying. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Obviously.”
Rochelle came over and took the recipe file from my hands. “I remember this,” she said. “When my dad was alive, my mother was such a great cook.” She had opened the box and pulled out a card marked Eve’s mother’s chicken Florentine. “Eve was my friend in grade school. Her mother made this dish, which I loved, so Mom started making it, too. But really it was veal at my friend’s house, and my mother objected to veal, so she made it with chicken.” She stopped. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear about my friend’s mother’s recipes.”
“No, it’s good,” Sally told her. “It’s good for you to have these memories. You’re excavating them. Literally. And they belong to you. You’ll probably have a lot more before this is over. And a house you can say good-bye to.”
Rochelle nodded, but glumly. She put the box on the sorting table and went back inside.
“Jeez,” I said, “were you always so … insightful?”
Sally burst out laughing. “Me? Absolutely not. But you can’t help picking it up. Years of watching people go through this process. They’re everything: furious, relieved, bitter, grasping, unbelievably generous. But that’s just the pain, refracting all over the place. The pain’s the only thing they all have in common.”
We went back to work. There wasn’t a lot of talking. It took four hours for Drew and me and a couple of the neighbors to finish the living room, after which we moved on to the kitchen. Sally was working in the garage and Rochelle went upstairs to go through the bedrooms before the heavy lifting moved up there. When I went outside for a rest and something to eat, I found my sister and Rochelle on the oddly immaculate front porch, each in a chair, deep in conversation. I took my sandwich and some coffee around to the backyard.
It took most of three days, in the end. I stayed with Sally in a motel, so wrecked each night that I fell asleep in the bathtub, then again, in bed, during Rachel Maddow. Rochelle had wept over a desiccated stuffed dog, unearthed from beneath her mother’s bed, and a camp autograph book, circa 1991, and on the third day, in an airtight Tupperware tub in what had been Rochelle’s mother’s bedroom closet, a satin wedding dress. Each afternoon we sent a couple of trucks to the dump and another to the town recycling. Windows were opened. A shockingly pristine dining set of vintage chrome-and-green kitchen chairs and a matching table were carried out of the basement, and everyone stared at them.