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I watch her back her new truck out of the driveway. The pickup is too large, too expensive. She’d refused to consider a practical compact car that gets good gas mileage and is easy to park. It’s because of me, I think. She bought it to spite me.

She’d dropped out of college, and I’d made her come home. All summer long she’d been an unstable cloud of gasoline fumes, looking for a match to set her off. We’d fought about her job, about leaving school, about her boyfriend and her future. She’d cried a lot and rebuffed all my attempts to comfort her.

“I’m twenty, almost,” she’d told me so often that my teeth ached. “I am an adult!”

Each time I silently replied, no, you are not. You still watch cartoons, and expect me to do your laundry, and ask me to pick up toothpaste for you when I go to the grocery store.

Now she is gone, off to be an adult far away from me. I’m glad she’s gone. She’s impossible and cranky and difficult to get along with. I am sick of fighting, tired of her tantrums.

Her father is angry. He watches television and will not speak. He helped her with the down payment on the truck and got her a good deal. He slipped her cash before she left. I want to say, if only you hadn’t helped her buy the truck, she would still be here. It’s a lie.

“I am never coming back,” she told me. “I’m a grown-up now. I want to

live.”

What had she been doing for twenty years? Existing in suspended animation?

The cat is upset by the suitcases and boxes and unspoken recriminations. She’s hiding. For a moment I fear she’s sneaked into the truck, gone off with my daughter on an adventure from which I am forbidden.

She left a mess. Her bathroom is an embarrassment of damp towels, out-of-date cosmetics, hair in the sink, and nearly empty shampoo bottles. Ha! Some grown-up! She can’t even pick up after herself. I’ll show her. She doesn’t want to live with me, doesn’t want to be my baby girl anymore, fine. I can be even stinkier than she is.

I bring a box of big black garbage bags upstairs. Eye shadow, face cream, glitter nail polish and astringent—into the trash. I dump drawers and sweep shelves clear of gels, mousse, body wash, and perfume. I refuse to consider what might be useful, what can be saved. Everything goes. I scrub the tub and sink clean of her. When I am finished, it is as sterile and impersonal as a motel bathroom.

In her bedroom I find mismatched socks under her bed and frayed panties on the closet floor. Desk drawers are filled with school papers, filed by year and subject. I catch myself reading through poems and essays, admiring high scores on tests and reading her name, printed or typed neatly in the upper right hand corner of each paper. I pack the desk

contents into a box. Six months. I think. I will give her six months to collect her belongings, and then I will throw it all away. That is fair. Grown-ups pay for storage.

Her books stymie me. Dr. Seuss, Sweet Valley High, R. L. Stine, The Baby-sitters Club, Shakespeare, The Odyssey and The Iliad, romance novels, historical novels and textbooks. A lifetime of reading; each book beloved. I want to be heartless, to stuff them in paper sacks for the used bookstore. I love books as much as she does. I cram them onto a single bookshelf to deal with later.

I will turn her room into a crafts room. Or create the fancy guest room I’ve always wanted. But not for her benefit. When grown-up life proves too hard and she comes crawling back, she can stay in the basement or sleep on the couch.

My ruthlessness returns with a vengeance. Dresses, sweaters, leggings, and shoes she hasn’t worn since seventh grade are crammed into garbage bags.

Her thoughtlessness appalls me. Did I raise her to be like this? To treat what she owns—what I paid for—as so much trash? No, she left this mess to thumb her nose at me, as payback for treating her like the child she is.

“Fa la la, Mom, I am off to conquer the world, off to bigger and better things. Do be a dear and take care of this piffle.”