The Wall That Isn't (2)
Rita started hanging things on the cinder block wall in March, after her mother asked her the same question three times in a row—not the asking itself but the way she'd asked, each time fresh, as if Rita were a stranger bearing news.
Kitchen things mostly. A whisk first, because it was in her hand when she walked outside. Then a wooden spoon her grandmother had used for fifty years, darkened by all that stirring. Then the yellow rubber gloves that made her think of her ex-husband saying she had dishpan hands, which was both true and unkind, the way most true things are.
She lives in Tucson, forty-eight years old, in a house that's too big now but was the right size when her daughter lived here, before college, before the thing where they talk every week and say nothing. The wall separates her yard from the Nguyens' yard, though "separate" suggests a purpose, and the wall just stands there, six feet of cinder block accomplishing nothing except being wall.
Her neighbor Paulo leans over one afternoon. "You decorating?"
"Maybe. I don't know yet."
He nods the way people do when they're filing you under "harmless eccentric" and goes back to watering his desert plants that shouldn't need watering but do because desire doesn't follow logic.
The things multiply. Clothespins in rows, wooden ones that used to hold sheets that smelled like sun. A potato masher. Three ladles of different sizes, arranged by height like children. The measuring cup her mother gave her when she moved into her first apartment—"You'll need this," her mother had said, and she'd been right about that if nothing else.
At the call center where she's worked for eleven years, Rita explains insurance policies to people who don't want to hear them. She's good at it. Patient. Her supervisor says so in reviews. But lately the calls blur together, all those voices asking the same questions in different words, like her mother but sadder because they know they're repeating themselves.
A woman calls about her husband's surgery. The insurance denied something. The woman starts crying mid-sentence, not loud crying, just her voice going damp. Rita explains the appeal process while looking at her own hands on the keyboard, the dishpan hands, thinking about all the appeals that matter and don't work.
That evening she hangs a colander on the wall. The light comes through the holes and makes patterns on the cinder block, tiny spotlights going nowhere.
Her sister calls from Phoenix. "Mom asked for you three times today."
"What'd you tell her?"
"That you'd visit soon."
"Will I?"
"I don't know, Rita. Will you?"
They talk around it—the money, the decisions, the fact that their mother is forgetting them in order, oldest memories last, which means Rita has maybe a year before she's also gone. After they hang up, Rita sits at the kitchen table with a cup of tea she doesn't drink and watches it get cold, which feels like something, though she couldn't say what.
She hangs the cup on the wall the next day. It looks wrong and right simultaneously, which maybe is the point, though Rita doesn't think in points, just in actions that seem necessary until they're done and then they're just done.
Her boyfriend—though at forty-eight is "boyfriend" the word? probably not—texts less frequently. Tom. Good guy. Divorced. Kids in California. They've been seeing each other for two years in the casual way people their age do, trying not to need anything. He comes over on Wednesdays, and they cook dinner and watch television and don't talk about the wall because what would they say?
Except one Wednesday he doesn't come over, and Rita realizes she's relieved, which tells her something she already knew.
The wall fills up. Kitchen things still, mostly, but also a paperback she never finished, a belt her daughter left behind, clothespins, so many clothespins, like a strange wooden crop growing from cinder block soil. The Nguyens stop looking over. Rita notices their absence, the way you notice silence.
Her supervisor mentions her numbers are down. Not terrible, just down. Rita says she'll work on it and means it and doesn't work on it. The calls keep coming—people with problems she can't solve, just process, move through the system like blood through a body that might be dying but keeps pumping anyway.
She hangs a drum. Found it at a thrift store, small thing, probably for kids. Cost three dollars. She hangs it crooked, and the asymmetry satisfies something she didn't know needed satisfying. When wind hits it—rare in Tucson but it happens—the drum makes a sound like memory trying to become music and failing in a beautiful way.
The city sends a letter about zoning. Rita reads it and understands she's supposed to care and doesn't care and feels bad about not caring, which is almost like caring but isn't. She puts the letter with the other mail—bills she'll pay late, catalogs she'll recycle, postcards from her daughter's semester abroad that say "Wish you were here" when what they mean is "I'm glad I'm here and you're there."
Her sister visits. Sees the wall. Stands looking at it for a long time while Rita makes coffee they'll drink and pretend tastes good.
"It's something," her sister finally says.
"Is it?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Does it help?"
"Help with what?"
Her sister doesn't answer because they both know what, they just don't say it: their mother turning into someone who doesn't know them, Rita living in this house alone with its right-sized rooms now wrong-sized, the way life keeps asking you to let go of things before you're ready, which is always.
They drink the coffee. Talk about normal things—Rita's car that needs an oil change, her sister's son who might go to grad school, the weather which is always the same. When her sister leaves, Rita stands in the driveway waving until the car disappears, then keeps standing there, looking at nothing in particular.
She hangs more things. Tupperware lids that lost their containers. A cheese grater. Wooden spoons. The wall becomes an archive of domestic labor—all those years of cooking and cleaning and caring that leave no trace except worn-out tools that once had purpose.
Tom texts: "I think we should talk."
Rita texts back: "Okay."
They don't talk.
At work a man calls about his daughter's medical bills. He's quiet on the phone, too quiet, the kind of quiet that comes from being too tired to yell. Rita looks up the account. Sees the numbers. They're bad numbers. She explains what she can, which isn't much. The man thanks her, which makes it worse somehow, that he thinks she helped.
That night Rita dreams about the wall. In the dream it's taller, stretching up past the roof, past the sky, covered in every object she's ever touched. Her mother is there, young, asking her the same question over and over, and Rita keeps answering but the answer keeps changing and none of them are right.
She wakes up and it's 3 AM and she goes outside in her bathrobe and looks at the wall in the dark. The objects hang there like patient students waiting to be called on, and Rita thinks—though she doesn't usually think in metaphors—they look like grief, if grief were objects, if grief were something you could nail to a wall and look at from a distance and say: there, that's it, that's the thing I'm feeling.
But it isn't just grief. It's also the opposite of grief. All these objects that held food, cleaned dishes, dried clothes—monuments to the mundane work of keeping people alive and comfortable. Her grandmother's spoon. Her mother's measuring cup. The gloves she wore washing her daughter's bottles. Evidence of care that nobody sees because care is invisible until it stops.
The city sends another letter. Final notice. Fine pending. Rita puts it with the others.
Her daughter calls. "Dad says you're doing something weird."
"Define weird."
"With kitchen stuff on a wall?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
Rita thinks about answering honestly—because I don't know what else to do with these objects that remember what I'm forgetting, because hanging them feels like building something instead of watching things fall apart, because the wall was there and empty and now it's there and full and somehow that matters—but instead she says: "Just felt like it."
"Okay. Well. I'm coming home for Thanksgiving."
"Good."
"We can take them down if you want. Together."
"Maybe."
They both know she won't.
After they hang up, Rita hangs another ladle. The wall is completely covered now, layers upon layers, a history of meals and cleaning and the invisible architecture of domestic life. It looks absurd and beautiful and sad, which is probably how most honest things look.
Paulo leans over. "It's something."
"That's what my sister said."
"Is it done?"
Rita looks at the wall. Thinks about her mother forgetting her. About Tom not texting. About all the insurance claims she'll process tomorrow that won't help enough. About her daughter coming home to a house that's too big and a mother who hangs kitchen tools on walls for reasons she can't quite name.
"I don't think anything's ever done," Rita says. "It just stops."
Paulo nods and goes back inside.
Rita stands there as the sun sets over Tucson, over the wall that separates nothing from nothing, decorated now with the evidence of her life. The wooden spoon. The yellow gloves. The measuring cup. The ladles. All these ordinary things that witnessed ordinary care, now hanging in the dry air like prayers or protests or maybe just like themselves—objects that served their purpose and now serve this other purpose, which is being seen.
She hangs one more clothespin.
Not because it means something.
But because she has the clothespin and the wall and her hands and the late afternoon light, and sometimes that's enough, that's all there is—the small ceremony of placing something where it wasn't, of making the invisible visible, of refusing to let the ordinary disappear without a witness.
The wall glows gold in the sunset.
Rita goes inside to make dinner for one.
