‘I don’t know why you want to keep all of this stuff; I know your mom would tell you it’s dumb.’
Amanda knew she was right but where would she put everything that had belonged to her mother? The clothes, the cheap jewellery she loved so much. Her mother had a collection of brooches, which were no longer fashionable, but Amanda swore she could remember a time when her mother wore each of them during her childhood. She looked at them in the wooden jewellery box. None of them were worth anything but how could she let them go?
She picked up one of a parrot in shiny green and blue metal. She remembered her mother wearing this to her college graduation. The Lucky Parrot, she’d called the brooch. Amanda couldn’t face letting it go when it held such a beautiful memory. She remembered her mother’s proud face and her cheering as she walked to accept her degree. No, the parrot would stay. She placed it carefully in the box again and looked around.
The books… so many books. What her mother lacked in reaching her writing goals, she made up for in buying books, particularly children’s picture books.
‘I just feel awful about getting rid of anything.’ Amanda picked up a picture book about a girl with red curly hair that couldn’t be brushed.
‘She used to read me this one all the time.’ She showed Lainie the book.
‘Looks like an autobiography.’ Lainie laughed.
Amanda’s hair was the bane of her life. It was long and curled into ringlets, and if she brushed it, it went frizzy. If she cut it short, it turned into a red fuzzy helmet.
Mostly she kept it in a bun on top of her head and no matter how hard she tried to smooth it now, little sprigs of hair popped out to see their surroundings.
‘I’m going to keep this one.’ She put it onto the keeping pile, which was looking suspiciously taller than the throw-out pile.
‘Did you meet the other roommate yet?’ Lainie asked, adjusting one of the pillows on the bed and leaning back.
‘Not yet,’ Amanda answered.
She was moving into a shared apartment with two students from the art school she had graduated from two years earlier. It wasn’t ideal but it was cheap until she could find a new job.
‘You could move in with me,’ Lainie reminded her for the umpteenth time.
‘I love you, but I don’t think our friendship would survive cohabiting.’
Lainie was a minimalist who loved black-and-white photography and turned her book spines backwards so you couldn’t tell what was on the shelf. It was a design choice more than a process decision, she said when Amanda questioned how she searched for a book.
Lainie worked in a gallery while also trying to grow her career as a photographer, and had enjoyed infinitely more success since leaving art school than Amanda, whose cute drawings of animals didn’t have quite the same reach as Lainie’s moody black-and-white images.
Even though Amanda was upset about the eviction she also knew she couldn’t have kept on paying the rent.
She had hinted to Mike – her on-and-off-again boyfriend – that she needed a place to live, and he had sent her a link to apartments to share on Craigslist. Not subtle. She wasn’t sure why she’d even texted Mike. He had been missing in action since her mom had died and was barely around when she was sick. But Amanda couldn’t face more loss, so instead of breaking up with her boyfriend of two years at the same time, she had ignored that he was unreliable, unsupportive and a total prick. He was a lawyer and behaved like he was in an episode ofSuits, when he was really just a junior patent attorney whose student loan was crippling, just like Amanda’s was from art school.
Amanda didn’t want to think about Mike or money.
Her mother’s savings had gone on the rent and bills. It was only thanks to a fundraiser to keep Wendy at home for the end of her life that they were able to stay until then, but it was inevitable that she would have to leave eventually. Eventually everything changed, especially in New York, no matter how hard you wished it would stay the same.
Part of Amanda was surprised at the financial situation they found themselves in at the end of her mother’s life. She was sure her mother had more savings, but felt she couldn’t ask because she didn’t want to sound greedy and selfish when it was her mother who was losing the most.
Heaving another box to the table, Amanda opened it and saw all her artwork that her mother had saved over the years.
She hadn’t had been able to draw since her mom was diagnosed. Nothing had inspired her during the past year. If she was asked how she saw the world before and after, it was as though she had gone from technicolour to monochrome. Everything felt like a shadow, and nothing was sharp.
‘Jesus, this whole task is brutal,’ Amanda said and closed the box again.
‘Why don’t you just put it all in storage and think about it in a year? If there is anything you really want or miss you can take it out of storage and if, after a year, you don’t want it you can just piff it out.’ Lainie was, as ever, the voice of reason. Her lens of seeing things through black and white was sometimes very helpful.
‘I think you’re right,’ agreed Amanda, mostly because she simply didn’t want to have to sort through the things now or ever.
‘Let’s go and get a drink somewhere and I can call someone tomorrow.’
But Lainie shook her head. ‘No, you’ll just put it off again. Do it now. I’ll look for a place on my phone and give you the number.’
Lainie scrolled while Amanda frowned, knowing her friend was right. She did procrastinate as an avoidance tactic. It was her toxic trait, she had once told her mom.No, it’s not a toxic trait, it’s a coping mechanism,Wendy had corrected her.You worry so much about the outcome that you end up collapsing under the weight of your own expectations.
