Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [126]
On the phone Rita said she could fit the Bedloes into that coming week, so she dropped by Monday after work to “case the joint,” as she put it. Wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket, black jeans, and heavy leather riding boots, she ambled about throwing open cupboards and peering into drawers. She surveyed the basement impassively. She seemed unfazed by the smell in the linen closet. She did not once ask, as Daphne had feared, “What in hell has hit here?” She poked her head into Doug’s bedroom and, finding him seated empty-handed in his rocker, merely said, “Hmm,” and withdrew. This was tactful of her, of course, but Doug’s room had urgent need of her services; so Daphne said, “Maybe after Grandpa’s gone downstairs …”
“I got the general idea,” Rita told her.
“That’s where Grandma’s closet is and so—”
“Sure. Clothes and stuff. Hatboxes.”
“Right.”
“I got it.”
She climbed the wooden steps to the attic, which had a stuffy, cloistered feeling now that it was no longer in regular use. She bent to look into the storeroom under the eaves. When she plucked one of Bee’s letters from a cardboard carton, Daphne felt a pang. “I guess these … personal things you’ll leave to us,” she said, but Rita said, “Not if you want this done right.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, I don’t read your mail. Or only enough to classify it. Stuff like this, for instance: too recent to have historical interest, no postage stamps of value, and the return address is a woman’s so we know it’s not your grandparents’ love letters. I’d say ditch them.”
“Ditch them?”
Rita turned to look at her. Her face was tanned and square-jawed; her heavy black eyebrows were slightly raised.
“But suppose they told us what young women used to think about,” Daphne said. “Politics, or feminism, or things like that.”
Rita shook a piece of ivory stationery out of the envelope. Without bothering to unfold it, she read off the phrases that showed themselves: “… tea at Mrs.… wore my new flowered … self belt with covered buckle …”
“Well,” Daphne murmured.
“Ditch them,” Rita told her.
They went back downstairs. Daphne felt like a little fairy person following Rita’s clopping boots. “What I do,” Rita said, “is sort everything into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Query. I make it a practice to query as little as possible. Everything we keep I organize, and what’s discarded I haul away; I’ve got my own truck and two guys to help tote. I charge by the hour, but I generally know ahead of time how long a job will run me. This place, for instance—well, I’ll need to sit down and figure it out, but offhand I’d say if I start tomorrow morning, I could be done late Thursday.”
“Thursday! That’s just three days!”
“Or four at the most. It’s a fairly straightforward house, compared to some I’ve seen.”
They were back in the kitchen now. She opened one of the cabinets and gazed meditatively at a collection of empty peanut butter jars.
“It doesn’t look so straightforward to me,” Daphne told her.
“Well, naturally. That’s because you live here. You feel guilty getting rid of things. This one old lady I had, she could never throw out a gift. A drawing her son made in nursery school—and that son was sixty years old! A seashell her girlfriend brought from Miami in nineteen twenty—‘I just feel I’d be throwing the person out,’ she told me. So what I did was, I didn’t let her know. Well, of course she knew in a way. What did she suppose was in all those garbage bags? But she never asked, and I never said, and everyone