Solvent Typography and Stationery by Elliott
Staying in LA for Christmas relieved me of inevitable holiday stresses that came with visiting New Jersey. I called my mom, as I did every day, to check on her. She answered with an ache in her voice, alone at her kitchen table in New Jersey watching the 6 o’clock news as usual. She started crying, something she tries to avoid, so I knew something was deathly wrong. Her stomach hurt she said. Her arm hurt she said. I called for help and went to the airport with my dog.
A month later she was home, recovering from a quadruple bypass, and I was by default the caregiver. My brother had moved to Florida days after her heart attack. My bedroom was unchanged from when I had last lived there my senior year of high school, but the twin-sized bed felt too small for me even though my body wasn’t much bigger than it had been the day I moved out. My days were spent pushing away any desires of furthering my own life in order to accept where I was, and trying to get my mom to eat, take her medicine and agree that she needed a hearing aid. She couldn’t even feed herself so the uncomfortable conversation about what to do next hung in the air. I wasn’t going to tell her what I thought she should do. She knew she couldn’t stay in the house alone anymore. She refused to move to Los Angeles, and eventually chose to move into a continuing care facility as long as the house could be sold.
When she was sleeping, I would go down to the basement. The stairs down to the basement had a railing my grandfather welded together from pieces of steam pipes. My dad painted the stairs, railing, and a portion of the cement floor battleship blue, his favorite color, a color my mom only let him use in the basement. The moldy air from annual floods down there tickled the inside of my nose and made me sneeze in threes. A single light bulb barely illuminated the foot of the stairs, enough to see dead crickets scattered around the sump pump in the corner. To the right behind a wall of floor to ceiling boxes was partial view of an antique glass cabinet, a place my dad could protect and conserve his VIP junk. I could make out a couple of model airplanes in there but the file cabinet in front of the boxes was too heavy to move. His clever way of making sure no one messed with his precious models. To the left was a set of shelves, sagging in the middle, with boxes, suitcases, and plastic bins. And then there were the garbage bags. Mom’s method of manically getting rid of anything she saw as junk was to throw it out in a plastic 30-gallon garbage bag. Sometimes her definition of junk was anything on the floor in my room, or all my brother’s GI JOE gear, or loose papers on the dining room table—whatever happened to be in her way. One afternoon she emptied the mess of papers on my father’s desk into a garbage bag. When he came home that evening to discover this, he screamed a curse word we’d never heard come from his mouth, “GOD DAMMIT ANNA! All of our savings bonds were in those papers.” After that, the garbage bags stopped going into the trash and instead were hurled down the basement stairs.