Writing Exercise

Lynn York

Imagine yourself nel mezzo del cammin, in the middle of your life, or maybe just a little bit past that, which is the season when all roles change. Your parents are becoming your children, your children not yet your parents. Begin by describing what this condition looks like in your own body. You’ll want to stay away from mirrors, for this is a tired tactic. You may be tempted, however, by the elaborate mirror that hangs in the foyer of your mother’s house because of course, you have stood there so many times before: worrying over a pimple, admiring your outfit . . . other times, putting Visine in your eyes, watching yourself kiss your guy. Now, in the time when you no longer want to look, this mirror must be covered in bubble wrap and carted off, like every other item in this beautiful house.

Refrain from further reflection. Instead, climb the stairs to the wide landing and focus on the task before you, to clean out the items of the oldest bureau, the one that has stood in this place for four decades and in your grandmother’s house before that.

First, describe the bureau, or do you want to call it a chest of drawers, as your mother might, or a dresser? It’s Queen Anne, maybe. To you, it just looks heavy. It is simpler than you remember it. When was the last time you looked? Try to imagine it in your own home. Will it stand in your dining room like an overdressed matron, reprimanding the rest of your décor? Maybe your sister will take it.

Record your first memory of this dresser, up in the guest room of your grandmother’s house where there was always the scent of the heated wood from the rafters. Tell the story of the doll—or maybe hold off on that one until you get to the bottom drawer.

On to the drawers then. No one cleans out drawers in your family until someone gives up the ghost or moves to a small condo in a retirement community. Sometimes not even then. However, today this is your job. All around you, your siblings are sorting bath towels and laughing at four boxes of cassette tapes, and you are swimming in molasses. You are a writer, and therefore there is an irritating holiness to your mission. For you, every object in each drawer is infused with a certain quality, an accumulation of time, irony, and neglect. The ridiculous sentimentality that serves you well at your writing table makes you slow and inept today, but you will mine this experience, you will mine even the forty-seven inoperable pens, because you can not help it. Make notes and hope that your more efficient siblings will think it an inventory.

In the top drawer, ruffle through the geological layers of papers, receipts from the cleaners mixed in with church bulletins and wedding invitations, yellowed stationery at the bottom. Here is the program for your college graduation, your name listed in the back on heavy paper. Quick, throw it into the black body bag at your feet. Here is a ledger of household expenses, 1963, more promising than a pistol or an awful family secret. In her neat hand, your mother has listed: groceries, light bill, baby’s medicine, bday presents, cake. It is the mundane that always gets you, the sudden recollection of six ballerina candleholders twirling on a pink cake.

Here is a white ladies glove, just one, and two plastic rain bonnets that fold like fans and snap at the chin. You find your sister next to the linen closet and you try them on together. As she laughs, your sister looks to you for the first time like your nana. Decide if you want to tell her that, and if you do, describe the look she gives you.

Drawer two is socks, your father’s worn out socks, circa 1985.

Drawer three does not pull out, but hinges down, designed as a lady’s desk. Imagine the correspondence written on this surface, run your hand across it to feel what marks remain. Listen to the words that whisper through the tiny drawers—dearest, midsummer, bombardier, receiving blanket, love. Find things your children would not recognize: a dried up pen cartridge, sealing wax, an ink blotter. Is there a lost letter moldering in a tiny cubby? That seems a bit too easy, right?

Maybe an envelope has become wedged against the back of the dresser and when you open the fourth drawer, you find it crumpled on top of your Aunt Clara’s evening purse collection. Take it out and smooth it enough to see the postmark—some local correspondence from 1953, an unfortunate period of ease and not sad wartime. Before you can open it, your sister is behind you, admiring the purses. Stop and divide them, making sure to mark their contents: a dead lipstick, a clouded compact, old dimes, Kleenex Kleenex Kleenex. Stuff the letter in your back pocket and move on.

When you open this last drawer, of course, you expect to see the doll—a large doll whose eyes are tilted shut and who looks like she might be sleeping in the drawer or dead. You found her here in the fall the year you were five. You and your sister were sent to nap in your nana’s upstairs bedroom, and instead of sleeping, you had been a snoop. She was a pretty thing, not a baby but a girl doll with a lace collar and real socks and shoes. You did not understand why your nana had hidden her from you, and you were afraid to pick her up. Instead you woke your sister, who was three and squealed when she saw the doll, and then the jig was up. You did not get in trouble. Your nana had first sighed, then laughed, then let you two play with her. She was to have been a present from Santa, your mother told you years later. Your nana had to go out and buy something else.

You have no idea what happened to the doll. There is nothing in the drawer now except an old sheet of wrapping paper that served as a liner. You stare into it, touch the dust in the corners, and wonder if in this faint debris are the cells from your nana’s hands.

Of course, days later you find the letter that you stuffed in your pocket. Imagine what it could be: a bill, a thank-you note, a letter that your nana wrote with instructions for the funeral home director. In fact, maybe that is what it was. Never mind, your assignment is to write that letter, write down your nana’s instructions for the undertaker and then, write your own.