Places for Hands to Gather by girlunderglass

I keep my shoes high up in a closet. I have to stand on a footstool to reach them. My daughter Annie thinks this is ridiculous and comes every year from Colorado to help rearrange the house. She says she wants to make my belongings more prominent.
She brings with her an endless list written on her schoolteacher’s stationary. Her handwriting is like her fathers, awkward and compact. The plan by her design is to circle inwards, downwards, toward the basement, to the bomb shelter and to Rudy's workshop. It is the last place I want to excavate.
This year our first task is in the garage. It is an enormous job that seems small. We collect the half empty gallons of house paint, the rusted cans of Raid, and bags of lawn refuse left from last season. We take the dangerous chemicals to the mill where they can be disposed of properly. They make tiny noises clinking together in the back of the Lincoln. On the way we stop at a diner I used to take the kids to when they were small. Our waitress is slow. She relays the entrees to us several times and makes unwanted suggestions. The soup is cold.
Later as Annie is driving us home it begins to rain. I prepare a plastic bag on my head to keep my hair from going flat. I watch the droplets connect and disconnect on the window. I think of Rudy then. His lifeless kiss. No warmth in the man. Filled with non-committal bravery, swollen chested. He allowed one picture taken the morning he left for Korea, 1950. Dressed in his a sailors uniform, cock grinned, immobile, and leaning against an upright piano. I watched him through the screen door as he walked away with uneven steps, a baby swollen in my stomach, kicking like some stupid animal. Rudy’s mother’s engagement ring was on my finger now. He departed to some unknown land that I could not even half imagine and came home two years later, shrapnel lodged between his knuckles. I was not proud or happy to see him.
It has always been a complicated duty to love someone you don't.
Annie distracts me when she suddenly starts up the radio. Minutes pass in monotone and then Frank Sinatra starts singing about the moon. I look at my daughter. Her profile is much more pleasant in such diffused light. She does not look so awful. I try not to hate my children.
Annie is a seventh grade English teacher. She is married to a painfully boring blonde-haired man named Jim. They have equally boring hobbies. Jim collects ducks. I've never been to their house but I imagine it filled with ducks. My son David is simple. He never went to college. He is an alcoholic. He comes to clean the gutters seasonally. I stand at the bottom of the ladder, worried about its structural integrity and how much a new one would cost.
The Voice is nearing a climax on the radio when I say,
"Annie, you're father was really an exceptional man."
"Mom- he was a son of a bitch."
Once in our forties, Rudy left a note once on the steering wheel of my car. We had our two children by then and a house with all the proper rooms. I dusted furiously, darned socks and mailed hundreds of Christmas cards every December. The note said:

Dear Evelyn,
I am writing to tell you that I am leaving you for another woman. You are not as pleasant as you once were.
Signed, Rudolph.

That night Rudy was there at dinner, making demands about what condiments he required, what he wanted for dessert.
It is now the fifth year of Annie’s direction, and we are nearing the end of our organization. The workshop is what remains. My things, perpetually in storage, are now deposited on surfaces or have been moved to make them more accessible to me. Annie smiles half-righteously as she hangs cataloged buttons in glass frames on the walls. I watched this happen as I have watched all things in my life happen. The same way I saw myself grow wrinkled and short of breath. In the way that I shook Rudy’s porous legs every morning to get the disease out, so he could walk to the breakfast table. Sit dignified until I came to tie a bib around his neck because he couldn’t get food into his mouth properly anymore.
I watched it and took part in it but felt nothing but purpose. Things with which to fill time, places for my hands to gather. Essentially this is what all things are.
It is the evening of my eightieth birthday. Ten years past Rudy’s death, ten years from what Annie calls my liberation. I am not sure what or whom she learned about freedom from, or why she finds it important. She feels I should pursue things that interest me. I’ve tried to tell her it is of some people’s character to have no ambition, but she insists that I have hobbies, likes, and dislikes. I keep the house as she has arranged it. I let her plan my activities, a schedule I follow even when she is gone.
Before we go out for dinner, I put on my coat and rabbit fur lined gloves and sit on the edge of my bed. I know that my family has moved on from me, my reason for living died long ago and my son and daughter are in conspiracy against me. Waiting to inherit a fortune that does not exist. I am sure my son David has spent the money already. I am not surprised. I take the gloves off. I realize how many rabbits had to die so I could wear these gloves. I feel ashamed to have bought them at a department store. I would have rather killed them myself.
Dinner is painless. We eat frog’s legs at an overpriced restaurant my children believe to be of my era. I pay. We go home and eat ice cream cake in the dining room. David reads the obituaries aloud at the table.
“Gale Bernstein… Mom, didn’t she live across the street when we were over on Brantwood?”
Automatically I reply,
“I don’t remember David, maybe.”
Annie has a mouth full of gossip,
“I remember her. Her kids are all in jail now”
David is amused.
“Well, dead as a doornail, age 83.”
The next morning I rise early, and lock myself in the bathroom. Inside are Rudolph’s combs. I have hidden from Annie, wrapped seriously in a terry cloth towel. I spread them on the sandstone tile countertop. I touch them, organize them in Rudy’s manner, and go about getting ready. I tease my hair to hide the holes in my head. Apply concealer to age spots, try not to get lipstick on my teeth. The combs watch me. I wink at them while I wrap them again. Replacing them in the drawer before I unlock the door. Annie is hovering in the hallway wearing pleated shorts. Her kitten earrings dangle from her earlobes, they match her socks. She has the list in her hands.
“Its time for the workshop Mom.”
“I know.”
The workshop is tucked between our two basements, joining them, though I had never used the workshop as a means to move from one basement to the other. It has an unusually low ceiling.
We spend all day there with huge black trash bags. I pull down from makeshift shelves enough national geographics to fill every month of a year for six decades. We uncover nothing unexpected. Tools, scrap wood, a collection of empty liquor bottles, half a packs of cigarettes, and these masks Rudy used to make from hollowed coconut husks. He painted faces on them and glued feathers on their brows.
The process takes three days and at the end we stand in the middle of the emptied nook. Annie is glad to see all the aspects of her father finally gone from my life. Light makes its way in from the tiny half window, struggling against the tinted glass. I look at my hands. Hands which have removed someone much more substantial than myself from a particular area which they belonged to. It is the deletion of a life. I look at my hands. I thought that by now there would be some new information in them, a route. A decision. But, they are practically lineless.