The pandemic had stolen those precious days and hours. Even when everyone was tucked away in their bedrooms, Sarah could feel them, as if their presence had a physical weight, or a sound. It was the constancy of it, the unending-ness. She felt crowded and edgy and half-crazy; every time she turned around there was someone standing too close to her, speaking too loudly, needing something. Mom, have you seen my sweatshirt? Mom, can we have chicken with mashed potatoes for dinner? Mama, do you know where my phone charger went? Sorry, Mrs. D., but we’re out of toilet paper on the fourth floor. Every request, no matter how polite, clawed at her with sharp nails. Every breath of air in the house felt stale and flat, like it had already been in and out of someone else’s lungs; every surface she touched felt sticky. And she knew, from her friends, that she wasn’t the only woman feeling that way. They were all trying to do too much, for too many people, in too little space, trying to manage their jobs and their kids’ schooling, the meals and the housework and their working-from-home partners or spouses while they clung to sanity with their fingernails. As the months went by, Sarah thought that, if there wasn’t a true end coming soon, there’d be a wave of women leaving their marriages, just as there’d already been a wave of women leaving the workforce. They’d log on to Expedia en masse; they’d buy themselves one-way tickets to the most deserted parts of the world with no plans to ever come home.
When Ruby and Gabe moved out, Sarah felt a measure of relief. When the boys began in-person school again, she told herself that things were getting better. Then Eli had declared 2021 the Year of Buying Nothing and launched a major purge. “We’re at the stage of our lives where we need to start getting rid of things, not acquiring more,” he’d announced, with a significant look in the direction of Sarah’s side of the closet, where the racks and shelves were, admittedly, quite full.
Sarah’s job at the music school had no dress code. If she’d wanted to, she could have worn jeans and blouses, or even Tshirts and sneakers to work. But Sarah loved clothes. She loved finding new boutiques and discovering new designers; she loved the feeling of buying the perfect azure-blue necklace to wear with a new navy-blue dress, and a pair of vintage leather riding boots to pull the look together. Even the clothes she didn’t wear made her happy. She’d brush the sleeve of the pale-pink cashmere sweater she’d worn on her second date with Eli and feel, again, the first flush of infatuation; she’d flick past the black gown she’d worn for her last recital and feel a bittersweet pang. She loved the challenge of putting together an outfit, searching out each individual piece, shopping her closet, combining old and new. Getting dressed was its own kind of creativity, and it satisfied her in the same primal way she imagined gathering a perfect sheaf of wheat or an unblemished handful of berries might have delighted her hunting and gathering forebearers.
Eli, who treated his suits and ties like a uniform, didn’t get it. He’d read a book about Swedish death cleaning and joined a Buy Nothing group on Facebook, and various upcycling and barter groups online. He donated their belongings, and gave things away, and when there were items he couldn’t donate or trade away, he’d simply leave them on the sidewalk. Which meant that every week or so, Sarah would walk outside of their building to take Lord Farquaad for a stroll and discover some cherished belonging on the stoop with a TAKE—FREE sign taped to it somewhere.
At first, Sarah had been fully on board with this project. They did have too many things; the house was getting too full. She’d helped Eli excavate Ruby’s child-sized desk from where it had been sitting, ignored, in the back of their basement for the past ten years, and donate it to a family shelter. She’d been fine giving away the bread machine, a wedding gift she’d used once before deciding that she preferred baking bread from scratch. She’d collected boxes of board books and chapter books that the boys no longer read; she’d had Ruby help her perform a merciless edit on her closet, getting rid of anything that didn’t fit or that she hadn’t worn or that was not attached to some specific pleasant memory. “Do not let me backslide,” she’d told her stepdaughter as they’d filled three contractor-sized trash bags, and Ruby had whisked the discards out of the house, never to be seen again.
It was fine that Eli wanted them to pare back, to reduce, reuse, and recycle. It was not fine when she’d find that he’d gotten rid of something that she actually did use, or wanted to keep. She’d had to wrestle her old leather bomber jacket, purchased in college, with a small KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY pin still attached to its lapel, away from some hipster girl with a pink bob and a pierced nose. “But it’s vintage!” the girl had wailed, which hadn’t made Sarah feel good about herself or the state of women’s reproductive rights in America. That had been bad, but not as bad as the morning she’d walked outside to discover her beloved Le Creuset Dutch oven sitting on their stoop. She marched upstairs in high dudgeon, the vessel clutched to her chest. Eli had blinked at her, perplexed.