In the Final Draft, What Will All Those Pieces of Your Life Reveal to Others?
It was the last weekend of the year 2000--a too-warm, California day that made the Christmas decorations and lights, which were still up on many houses, look out of place. I was driving through Santa Monica, grateful for a thin lens of clouds moving in as the sun sank toward the ocean; I miss winter and appreciate anything that resembles it. I passed a corner house with a painted wooden sign out front and the words that have always made me hit the brakes: “ESTATE SALE.”
I climbed up the wooden steps onto the porch, quickly checked the price on a wicker corner shelf--definitely overpriced, as was the matching mirror. Some quaint wall decorations were also costly, by estate sale standards, and I was about to leave. But something pulled me into the house, where everything except the roof was for sale. A large note was tacked to the open front door: “Please, no smoking, no strollers, no shopping bags.” As I stepped across the threshold, the smell of old cigarette smoke hit me--smoke that had seeped into the floor boards, the walls, the furniture.
More things were laid out on tables: lace doilies, Roseville pottery, delicately embroidered tablecloths and napkins--feminine artifacts, not a golf club or a tool set in sight. An elderly woman lived here alone, I thought, noticing the more recent additions: a huge TV set, a cheap, imitation Chinese rug. Four or five people were in the den and living room, presiding over the sale, and I was trying to figure out who was family and who were helpful neighbors.
At some point, I got the distinct feeling that the woman had died in the house; it was as if I had overheard it, although I hadn’t. I had such a clear impression of a woman living out her days in this old wooden house, sitting in front of the television, smoking . . . I glanced around for old photographs but didn’t see any. I knew I wasn’t going to buy anything here, yet I didn’t want to leave. Even though I have frequented garage sales for years, I had never before had the feeling that I was crawling inside a person’s life--or death.
As I made my way into the kitchen, I thought of the strange intimacy of going through a person’s things, particularly those they leave behind, when they aren’t there to weed through those possessions themselves. Just as in the rest of the house, the kitchen was a display of every dish, every wine goblet that this woman had owned. Platters that might have, in years past, held Thanksgiving turkeys. A stack of glass ashtrays. Old mixing bowls. Drawers of silverware, although I suspected that the woman had used only a few pieces as the years wound down.
The stale residue of cigarette smoke was starting to get to me, and I was feeling claustrophobic. There were no houseplants, no signs that any kind of pet had lived here. Maybe it was the sense of loneliness that was closing in on me--the feeling that this woman had shuffled through these rooms, remembering when she used to set tables with her fine lace tablecloths and crystal wine goblets. Remembering--that’s what she had left. That, and the brand-new TV set, which was sold for a hefty price while I was there.
I walked out the back door, and in the area between the house and the detached garage, two men were talking; one was buying a bundle of firewood from the other. Behind them was a wheelchair, also for sale. I lingered long enough to pick up snatches of the conversation: “ . . . lived here most of her life . . . don’t know yet about the house . . . a hard time of year . . .” The wheelchair looked ghostly and sad to me, and I walked the two blocks to my car, wondering what kind of lives were unfolding behind other front doors.
When I walked through my own door, I stopped and looked around . . . as if I were entering another person’s life . . . pretending I was. If this were an estate sale, if everything here were now displayed, price-tagged, assessed by strangers, what would they gather about the life that had been lived here?
I looked at the basket of cat toys, and my cats’ favorites scattered across the floor. The coffee table I bought at a yard sale and refinished myself. The rabbit cookie jar that I got for $2 at a flea market, which I’ve never filled with cookies--I just like the way it looks. The mismatched dishes . . . I don’t like things that match.
And then I focused on my desk--every writer’s worst fantasy, I think, that we’ll die and someone will go through the fragments of writing, the unfinished novel, the scrawled ideas that bloomed in a sleepy mind at 3 in the morning. Maybe I should leave instructions somewhere--taped to the wall, on file at my attorney’s office--that when I die, whatever is on my desk should be promptly destroyed. The hard drive of my computer, too--erase it, make it crash.
I felt I had to do something. The woman whose house I had wandered through was tapping me on the shoulder, asking if I wanted a sleuth going through my things, my life, when I was no longer around. No, was my firm response. I should do some weeding out now, just in case. I settled on a notebook of my short stories and poems, compiled over many years, starting when I was in high school. An hour later, I was surrounded by a pile of shredded paper.
Only a few pieces of writing passed the test: the “Would I want someone to find this when I’m gone?” test. As I scooped up the ribbons and scraps of paper and put them in a plastic trash bag, I wondered if this was an attempt to outrun death, or outsmart it. After all, once I’m gone, who cares what’s left behind? But I think we all care. There was more to that woman’s life than lace doilies, old comforters, glassware. Somewhere were probably letters, photographs, maybe even journals. Perhaps she burned them in her fireplace when she knew her time was running short. I found myself wishing that she had.
We all write our own stories, in one way or another, and long to edit them ourselves, with no intrusion from others. Part of my story is in pieces now, waiting for the morning trash pickup. But more chapters are being written. On a cloudy Saturday, I grazed the edges of a stranger’s life, but her mysteries, her secrets, remain safe, at least from me and the others who walked through her home. I touched the remnants of her life, but I took with me a reverence for what was beyond my reach.
