The Beautiful Between - Alyssa B. Sheinmel [18]
Later, while my mom is still shopping, I decide to do some amateur detective work at home. Like, really amateur—my detective work is limited to going through the drawers in my mother’s desk, a piece of furniture I’d never really taken notice of before; it always seemed more decorative than functional. My mother takes up most of the apartment—on phone calls, she literally paces from one end to the other, snaking her way in and out of each room, even the bathrooms. Her clothes take up the closets in her bedroom, the ones by the front door, and even part of the closets in my room. I don’t think she could possibly confine anything of importance to something as small as this desk.
But still, its three drawers are the only place I can think to start looking, even if I’ve never actually seen her sit there.
The first drawer is full of envelopes and stamps—old stamps, like twenty-five-cent ones that would barely get a postcard to its destination now. And old greeting cards: not cards she’s received, but cards I’m sure she intended to send to people—blank birthday cards and anniversary cards and get-well-soon cards. I’m sure my mother bought them all so that she’d have a supply on hand when the need arose, but I’m equally certain she has no memory that they’re here. Or maybe she’s just stocked up this drawer because she believes that a woman should have such a supply at her disposal.
The second drawer, I’m surprised to find, has old pictures of mine—not photographs of me, but drawings with crayon and marker that I made when I was much younger. I find my kindergarten diploma, which isn’t really a diploma so much as a piece of construction paper on which we’d drawn pictures of ourselves and over which our teacher wrote “Kindergarten Diploma.” When I was little, my now-dark hair had flecks of blond in it, and I notice that I’d tried to show this in my picture by using both brown and yellow markers for my hair. The result makes it look like I had a group of bumblebees attacking my skull. I take it from the drawer to save it. I’m sure that my mother won’t miss it.
The third drawer is photographs. My mother has albums, but she never fills them properly, and ends up leaving photos around the apartment: stuck between books on shelves, piled up in a basket in the kitchen and on top of her bedstand, crammed into her jewelry box. She may hate clutter, but she’s still not particularly organized. The photos in the desk are older, like maybe she stuffed them in here when she cleared up the piles of photos that she’d left around the house we lived in before my father died, before we moved into Gram’s apartment. There are baby pictures of me, pictures of her from when she was in college, pictures of her when she was pregnant and of my grandparents holding me not long after I was born. And there are pictures of my father, of course. There’s one of him holding me as a baby; one with both my parents in which it looks like they were off to a costume party—he’s dressed as a football player, she as a cheerleader. And there is one of the two of them sitting in a chair, my mother on my father’s lap. It must have been taken in the seventies or early eighties: their outfits make me laugh. Both of their pants flare out at the bottom. My mother is smiling at the camera and my father is smiling in another direction, like he’s in conversation with someone across the room, his arms twist around her back. I don’t know why, but this picture means more to me than the ones I find from their wedding day, of the three of us together, of my father holding me while I sleep. I don’t take any of them except for this one of the two of them. I think I like it best because they just look like any other young couple. There’s no gravity to it, no wedding ceremony or new baby, and certainly no awareness that their time together would be limited. They were just a pair of young people spending time with friends. It’s comforting to think of them this way—there’s nothing special