Free Endless Love by Scott Spencer Page B

sense of order or trying to make me feel there were real live people out there, waiting to see me and make my life real. She offered to take me shopping and when I refused that, she went to my room and took all of my old clothes out. She brought them into the living room and dropped them on the floor and forced me to go through each piece and decide with her that practically none of them fit me any longer—I’d gotten taller in Rockville and I wasn’t quite thin any longer. This was on my third day home, and after I admitted that my clothes didn’t fit me—and assured her that quite soon I would allow her to buy me new ones—Rose gathered them in her arms to dispose of them in the cellar.
    “You could give them away, you know,” I called after her as she lugged them toward the door.
    “Charity is for the ruling class,” she answered.
    “Sharing’s not!” I shouted, suddenly electric with frustration and shame.
    I listened to her heels clatter down the stairs. For the first time since arriving home, I was truly alone in the apartment. I had searched my room and hadn’t found any of the old letters to and from Jade, and now at last I could look elsewhere. I ran to the bookcases and opened the sliding cabinet doors at their base: folded tablecloths; aqua and burgundy burlap napkins from Mexico; a few old copies of The National Guardian; a chessboard and a White Owl cigar box for the chess pieces; dozens of little boxes of delicate pink birthday candles; boxes of checks; boxes of unsharpened pencils; a portable sewing kit, housed in heavy, shiny paper and decorated by a drawing of an elephant waving its trunk; envelopes; empty spiral notebooks. Just the kind of innocent, chaotic accumulation that at another time might have made me grin with pleasure—my parents’ hidden clutter was utterly beyond reproach. It was like prying open a locked diary only to read recipes and descriptions of nature, or hearing someone murmur in his sleep, “I must remember Ezra’s birthday.”
    I closed the cabinets, turned on the TV, and flung myself onto the sofa, trembling in the wake of the missed opportunity. Rose stalked back into the apartment. I could tell that her temper had subsided and she no longer had the impulse to remove my old clothing, but she still had another armload to go and it would have been too complicated not to follow through. She avoided my eyes and gathered the last of them and was gone.
    I raced into my parents’ bedroom. Even on bright days it was a dark room but today it looked submarine. I switched on the overhead light, which was covered with a convex square of cloudy cut glass. There had never been any sign of activity in that room. They dressed and undressed in the bathroom down the hall. There was no desk, no telephone, and the only chair was an old wooden one pressed against the wall, which had never, as far as I knew, supported human weight. The floors were carpeted and the bed stood in the middle of the room, between a closet on one side and a dresser on the other. There were two Irv Segal lithographs of toiling hands on the wall but no mirror. The bed itself was made so tightly that it looked as if you’d need a penknife to roll back the covers at night. Racing both against time and my own admonishment, I searched through their yellow lacquered dresser. What unvarying innocence! First drawer: socks, shorts, tee shirts, handkerchiefs, and a bottle of Arrid deodorant that Arthur evidently felt was too personal to store in the common medicine cabinet. Second drawer: Arthur’s shirts. Third drawer: nylon stockings, one pair still attached to a garter belt, brassieres, panties, a lady’s shaving kit. Fourth drawer: an empty wristwatch case, an empty photograph frame with its glass cracked, and stacks of manila envelopes. For a few pounding moments I was certain I’d found my letters. But the envelopes held canceled checks, old income-tax statements, snapshots of me as an infant and a child, old