Files in Tupperware Bins by Meredith Metzler

Work had finished for the summer, and I was getting ready to go back to school. It was the first time that I’d actually taken the time to pack for school—three summers of working up to the last minute so that the night before I would stand in front of my Ikea dresser—the one my dad bought me for Christmas when I was in third grade because I hated the bulky, Victorian wooden dressers that my aunt gave me after my mother moved out—and I would realize every summer, without fail, that I would be bringing dirty clothes back to college because they weren’t going to get washed before I got on the cheapest plane out of Richmond at six a.m. and back to Boston. Beginning the year with dirty laundry. Bringing the best parts of home—the dirt, the dust, the mold, the cat hairs—back to college.

That’s why she left, dirty laundry. Or at least that’s how my brother and I had always understood it. My dad left wet towels on the bed, and it drove her crazy. So she left and took us along with half the house. (We got to go back half a year later, the furniture didn’t.) I’d never bothered finding any other explanation. She went crazy once and tried to tell me. She was driving and I thought she was going to kill me. She was furious that my brother and I packed up our belongings and ended our six-weeks of summer vacation and were moving to our dad’s. It was switch day, and I was sixteen with a car, and my brother and I wanted to get the hell out of that two-bedroom apartment. So we packed up and left because there was no official “switch time” like the year before when someone had to drive us. She came home as we were loading up and started screaming. It wasn’t our fault that she forgot, but as a punishment I had to get in the car with her to go to the mall to pick up something and have her scream at me for thirty minutes. I never stood up for myself back then, and I planned to just take it until she turned to me with a vicious smile and asked.

“Do you want to know the real reason your father and I got divorced?”

It was the first time I’d yelled at her. I just screamed back that I didn’t want to know because I had to live with my dad, the same way that I had to live with her and I didn’t want to know anything from dad about her.

I didn’t want my year to start that way—with dirty laundry—so I’d swung a few days off. I stood in my room sorting through the piles of clothes—sorting blacks from white, darks from lights, letting the grays fit into different baskets based on their shade. I always felt secure in my room. Everything stayed in its place, a perfect ode to my high school self even after I left for college. The wall above my bed was covered with trite and angsty lyrics and photos and ads from discarded Teen, Teen People, YM, and Rolling Stone magazines. Somewhere between those were a few motivational quotes and e-mails. The whole thing had felt a little contrived, even at the time, but it kept me from stewing on those nights when we had the obligatory “good night call” with our mom. I hated the frequent guilt trips for having plans on ‘her time.’ But saying “I love you” was even worse. We didn’t say it all the time, but the times that she initiated it, the whole thing just felt unnatural and awkward. Like she was supposed to say it. Like I was supposed to respond. I always felt like crying at that moment, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. So up would go another black and white picture of an emaciated model fading into the black background. All the anger just felt contrived like the pictures anyways. The whole upset divorced child just was just too clichéd.

My personal favorite quote on the wall was the one that said, in Times New Roman size 36, “You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.” I used it to subtly snub a few friends in high school who had had it easy, who didn’t get what it was like to have it tough, who didn’t even know that I had it tough. It went up after I went to my best friend’s country club sophomore year of high school. She invited me to Kentwood Garden’s Fourth of July celebration, and it was a horrifying experience. Physically, I didn’t quite fit in: a little too pale, no platinum highlights in my blonde hair, hunched shoulders, and no ditzy smile filled with glowing white bleached teeth plastered to my face. But I got by. I was still white, and my face was proportional enough to compensate for the overall too natural appearance. I’d even honored my friend’s request to not go a little too “out there,” and ditched the black tee shirt for the black polo shirt. We were sitting at a picnic table with her family when one of their country club friends came over.

“Oh! Eileen, hello!” her parents cooed.

“Hello! I haven’t seen you here for weeks. How are you?” She responded with the proper inflections of true concern.

Her father chuckled. There was nothing funny, but it was just that chuckle to put a good tone in the air. “Great. We just finished the additions to the Smithwick’s house so it’s been very busy.”

“How is Jenna? We heard she was just married.” Her mother piped in naturally with the same inflated smile.

“Oh, great! And a lot of her girlfriends from Colligate were there.” She paused smiling over at my friend and I, letting us know that we were part of a great tradition of friendships.

“Isn’t that just wonderful. I can’t wait to see their photos in the alumni newsletter. How are they doing?”

“Oh great, just great. The girls are all doing really well. But you know, it was so sad that some of them were—apparently-- having some real relationship problems. A few didn’t even have boyfriends to escort them.” Then she let her voice drop as if letting us in on some secret, “But, you know it’s sad, most of those girls came from bad home life.”

I didn’t say anything to my friend, and she didn’t say anything to me. Why bother? I wasn’t those girls. And Eileen probably defined “bad home life” as the club alcoholic for parents who let the lifeguards raise their children all summer. I was over it, and it wasn’t going to define me. I’d come home, printed off the quote, put it up on the wall, and it hadn’t moved since. Just like everything on the wall. My dad threatened to do it while I was at school, but I fought to keep my room exactly the way I left it. I didn’t want a single goddamn thing to change.

I picked up my basket of laundry, and stepped outside of my room.

Home every year stopped feeling so much like the familiar home I grew up in, and I hated it. And now, things in the house were undergoing an overhaul. Every summer I had tried to be around the changes less and less. This year, I’d split my time between two jobs and filling any spare moment between that in bars with co-workers and friends from high school.

Outside my room were the first stages of my father’s rampage. This year, he started by ripping up the wall-to-wall carpet that had gone so far into disrepair that the mold and dust ingrained it made him sick from allergies every winter. In the room to the right of mine, my brother had already left for his first days of “art school.” Of course, he’d left only a few bits and pieces of his high school self behind. Everything, from the black posters with the shitty bands that spend more time on their image than their music to the abandoned church pew with the deep burgundy cushion that he’d found on a street corner in high school, went with him. He sure as hell wasn’t going to leave behind any potential memento of why he was so angry. How else would he be so legit in fucking himself up if he didn’t have the memory and evidence of his “dark, traumatic past” with him at school? I’ll admit, it was a relief that he was gone. He started hating me a few years ago and hadn’t stopped. I couldn’t blame him. He always got stuck dealing with my mother when I was running late or accepted an invitation that interfered with “her night.” He thought he could make her happy by listening to her, and I knew it wouldn’t fix anything. He just detached and distanced himself from her—and my dad and I-- a lot later than me. He was probably never coming back home, though, and all his empty space was now filled with cleaning supplies, purging away the traces of my brother’s sloppy mess.

Down the stairs, into the hallway, through the door to the left of the kitchen, and down to the basement. Every year, since I left, I knew that practical things kept changing—the microwave was replaced twice, the tv in the basement was new, an old couch was thrown away-- but the bizarre little details of my house stayed the same. The wreaths of twisted dried twigs that my mother put up in the basement were covered in dust, but had never been removed. Just like the arrangement of plastic flowers in my bathroom. Just like the baby photos in the transparent frames gradually developing a yellow tint from the dirt, dust, and disrepair. The set-up had stayed the same as when they moved into their dream house, married with their blonde-haired, blue eyed two year-old daughter and green-eyed new-born son. That is, until now, as he prepared to begin pulling down photos and dried foliage.

Through the basement into the laundry room. I slowly emptied out the clothes, realized that I’d completely forgotten to put the detergent in first, poured the detergent on top, closed the lid, and started the washing machine. Thirty minutes before the next load. It’d been a long time since I’d had time to spare. Even in high school, I’d crammed every moment with any possible extracurricular. Some people did it because they thought that they needed to get into college. I did it cause I didn’t want to go home. It gave me an excuse to avoid anything related to home, and just look like another high achieving girl at Colligate.

As I made my way out of the laundry room, I looked left into the closet of a room my dad calls his “office.” When I was younger I thought he decided this room was his “office” so that he could keep the ugly pea-green, reclining armchair my mother desperately wanted to throw away. God, the number of fights that the dumb green lazy boy probably triggered. I only vividly remembered one of those lazyboy fights. My brother and I sat in my room feeling completely terrified. We snuck down to the office, found a box of paper clips, and linked them together to make necklaces. We tried to bring them to our parents to make them stop, but my dad picked up my brother and my mom picked me up, and they just launched into a few snippety comments about how the other parent had “hurt the children.” I think my mom moved to the guest room around that time, but who knows. Memories from childhood always seem full of loops and outside of time. The few memories leftover just seem to link up so that I could tell myself one cohesive story. It might be biggest misconception about divorces that kids will always ask their parents why they got divorced. I never asked and I never will. I didn’t think about it too much either-- dirty towels and lazy boys always seem good enough.

That shitty green chair is now the prominent piece of furniture in front of me in the open part of the basement, even though my brother broke it when he was stoned with his friends, and the lever to recline doesn’t work anymore. I’d always figured that my dad put it as a statement of his independence, but he notoriously under reads everything so I doubt he even saw it that way. But I doubted he’d get rid of it when the new furniture arrived.

I opened the door to the office to go check my e-mail and piss around before the load finishes. The office was usually neatly organized into contained messes sitting on the workbench and the desk. The rarely used power tools, cardboard boxes deformed by age filled with rolls of every tape imaginable, three different types of glue, and metals pieces at various angles with precise marks for measuring sit on shelves above the workbench. And like most of the house, they’re covered with a layer of dust. I really don’t think my dad has put anything together in seven years. The last time I saw the tools out was when he put up some wire shelves next to the tv for his ten dvds last summer. On the other side, the desk is always in constant motion. There are always new stacks of papers, millions of bills, financial budgets, and memos from work quickly entering and leaving the desk. My dad is always paying bills because apparently it takes “a lot of time to run a household.” That’s why he couldn’t help me change the oil in my car last week. Too much to do, always too much to do to do anything else.

But today. What the hell was he doing? Spread across the office are large green and gray Tupperware containers filled with hundreds of files. I’ve definitely seen the containers before… they’re the exact same ones that my dad used outside for garden tools, old seeds, and our spare key. Putting files into garden bins, who does that? My father apparently.

I sat down at the computer, one of the bins next to me. As I waited interminably for the computer to get started, I looked down. Not that I really want to know what was there, but it was general boredom.

And then I saw the name on one file—“Pre-Divorce.”

My eye uncontrollably passed over the rest. Pre-Divorce. Court Settlement. Testimonies. Custody Agreement. Dr. Dahlgran. Dr. Pulanski. Dr. Eperts. Education. Church-Divorce. Health. Every single file was about the divorce. It’s all there. Years and years of information and mystery were all in an ugly plastic gardening box. There were answers—official recorded truth of what happened. There were even the psychologists I’d seen before I decided that I was too stable for a psychologist. Ultimately, I had made the decision that sitting and talking to someone for an hour wasn’t going to fix anything, that I couldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, and that basically, I was normal and nothing was wrong with me. I’m glad they let me decide that when I was ten… I figured it out for myself. And I figured out that included never knowing the details of the divorce.

But this was tempting. Real tempting. Answers. Real Answers to the myths of my childhood. That’s what these files promise. And there was no time to decide. My dad was obviously throwing them away… even shredding some. By the time I got home for Thanksgiving, they would be gone. Hell, by the time he got home from work in a few hours, he might get through another set. The evidence would be sitting in the trashcan next to the wreaths and picture frames.

And what was there to lose? I barely saw my mother anymore… she’d slowly become a missed call every two to three weeks. I’d stopped speaking civilly to my father when my brother got out of control with the drugs and crashed my car while his was in the shop.

Could I answer the unasked questions and finally get an answer? I never understood why she called Officer Lawrence when she found out that I locked the door to my room. Or why she would always honk from the top of the driveway instead of walking up to the door and knocking. Or why she looked at my father coldly from a distance with her arms crossed, only responding to his inquiries with one-word answers. Could it really have been that bad? Nothing could be in these files… but so could everything.

Those dumb, giant garden containers with the hundreds of generic files could hold the answers to the questions that had shaped my life.

The computer was still loading and humming as it got all its bits and pieces into place to produce the colors on the image on the screen. I reached down and opened up “Pre-Divorce” and began sifting through. The cream page with boxy type-writer letters caught my eye. “Divorce Statement by Andrea Anderson” read the title. I began to slowly read her history, in her own words. I’d always known bits and pieces from my father, but I’d never allowed it to excuse her. It started to memorize me, however, this time. I’d never heard the whole story directly from her voice: both her brother’s dead, her father an alcoholic, her mother hospitalized for mental instability. It was all there in her background statement. Then I saw the first line of the next paragraph. “Alex and I dated for a few years. We wanted the same things from life—a family and stability. He came from a big family. I thought I could escape my past.”

Suddenly all the tears came out. All the years built up and poured out through my eyes, my nose, my sobs. I shove the damned piece of paper back into the file and slam it into the bin. I’m nothing like her goddamnit. Nothing like her. I’d spent my life getting over it, distancing myself from her, and I wasn’t going to get in the thick of it. Never. I’m not her. I never will be like her. Ever.

I took control of my sobs as the computer finishes loading, and redirected my attention to the screen. Clicking okay, I search for upcoming concerts, movie reviews, the text books for my next semester of classes, and finally print off my plane ticket. I move the mouse to the start button, and hit “Turn Off Computer” right as the laundry machine chimes. Standing up, I look straight ahead, and leave without looking down once.

In the laundry room, I pull out the sopping wet, but now clean, clothes.

My eyes burned and my throat ached, but I just kept repeating to myself, “No dirty laundry.”