Lost Things

Photo by Kevin T. Smith

Lost Things

Michelle Cacho-Negrete

        I lose things, a few so precious that I mourn them even as they vanish, most so insignificant I never notice their absence. I wear mismatched earrings, socks, and gloves, wear shirts and jackets with replacement buttons that need to be teased in and out of buttonholes. I lose sunglasses, books, sweaters, house-slippers, keys, scarves, lunches, but most especially I lose eyeglasses. I’m plunged into despair when yet another pair is missing, berating myself again and again for my carelessness. I always buy two pairs because the consequences of not having a pair on hand and being unable to read is devastating. I once lost a pair of glasses in the airport as I was boarding a plane, horrified that I would fly six hours unable to enjoy my new book. I slumped in my seat so distraught that I considered buying a drink to calm down, something I never do when flying because it leaves me foggy. Just before the plane took off, an airline employee came rushing up the aisle and stopped in front of my seat waving them. She remembered my frantic search and knew immediately who they belonged to; they’d fallen under my seat in the terminal. My headache began to dissipate and by the time we were in the air I was on page thirty of my new novel.
        The last pair of eyeglasses I lost was in January while walking with a friend. I slid on some black ice and fell into one of the snow-banks lining the sidewalks. When I stood up I realized the glasses were gone. I had, just two weeks earlier, lost a pair and these were my spares; it was inconceivable to lose two pairs in such a short time and I was panic stricken. The friend I was with buys four pairs at a time at the drugstore and leaves them around her house or in her purse so she doesn’t ever worry, but my eyes are so different from each other that non-prescription ones would essentially leave one eye blurry enough to be a distraction. We searched methodically through the snowdrift, all around it, further along the street where they couldn’t have possibly fallen, but they were gone. We were chilled and miserable when she finally shrugged, reminded me that “We’ve done our best and it isn’t the end of the world,” and left. I felt hapless, hopeless, clumsy and bereft as I made my way home.
        Josh, my eye doctor’s assistant, assured me that he had a tray filled with discounted frames, at least two of which he would offer me free since this was the third pair I’d lost in the last six months. I sighed gratefully and experienced both a sense of futility and of resignation at buying and probably losing another pair in the future. When I tried on the free glasses in his office, neither pair was flattering, but I felt this unattractiveness was penance for my repeated losses. The always-kind Josh cocked his head, adjusted them a bit, then smiled and said, “Oh, these don’t look bad on you at all,” but I had the evidence of my own eyes. The retired therapist in me wondered if this repeated loss of eyeglasses is symbolic, maybe a desire not to clearly see the world. In reality I see it with frightening clarity, since my profession demands a clear view of it. I accept that it’s just my general absent-mindedness that allows me to pass my exit on the turnpike, forget dates even when they are written down, leave things at home like my cell-phone, and lose eyeglasses.
        Perhaps the strangest thing I lost was my pet Max, when I was eleven. He was a small box turtle, a pet popular in the 1950s and more convenient than a dog or cat in a tiny apartment. Now I’m appalled that these poor creatures, and others like chicks, parakeets, baby alligators (leading to the urban legend that New York City sewers were rife with adult alligators), were sold as cheap disposable commodities rather than as living beings. That particular morning, I put Max on the drain-board while I cleaned his bowl, and when I was done and turned to pick him up, he was gone. Nothing had swooped in to get him. The window was closed, and I was certain he moved too slowly to drop to the floor, but he was gone. On hands and knees I searched every corner of the kitchen, paying special attention to where our steam radiators sat an inch or so above the floor. When I was done, I did it all over again, even searching cabinets he couldn’t have gotten into. He never turned up. For a few weeks I suffered nightmares imagining his horrible death, like being scalded by steam or eaten by one of the rats that occasionally made their way into the apartment.
        I thought of that poor turtle years later when my four-year-old son wandered away in Macy’s, and I searched frantically before discovering him hiding with great glee beneath a rack of sale coats that draped him as efficiently as a theatre curtain. On the drive home I told myself, better to have lost the turtle rather than him, as though that loss was an early exchange for my son. The memory revived nightmares of my pet’s fate for a few nights with the added horror of my son being trapped beneath the radiator as well. I saw the two of them, and in one nightmare my brother as well, as though in a horror movie, trapped in clouds of rusty steam, the turtle’s eyes staring sadly at me as if to say, this is what comes from your carelessness.

 

        My first husband, scrupulous about everything we owned, was astonished by my extensive history of lost objects, which he considered both disgraceful and a sign of poor character. We lived in Queens then and owned a small Volkswagen Camper that we took around to Long Island, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, New Jersey and once to Virginia because my husband, an engineer, insisted on being one of the first people to drive through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. Our camper had two tiny beds, one for each of our young children, and room on the floor for our double sleeping bag. There was a small icebox and we relied on campgrounds or trees for a bathroom. My husband was a man of rigid habits and always parked in one of two places after work. But this particular morning, it wasn’t in either.
        The camper’s absence was inconceivable to him. He was a man who felt himself given a dispensation from normal tribulations—that his flight at thirteen to Miami from Cuba, the early death of his mother, his father’s abandonment, had provided a guarantee against further loss—and that he must have left it somewhere else after all. His belief in that dispensation led to frequent tension between us because I had no illusions that there was a quota on loss. Indeed, I considered us both lucky to have gotten this far with all four limbs intact in the violent neighborhood I grew up in and to which he moved at thirteen.
        He wandered the streets for at least two hours certain he’d had an unheard of bout of absent-mindedness, came home, told me, and then took a cab to the train to get to work. The next day, still refusing to accept the apparent, he spent combing the area, block by block, rather than going to work. After hours of hunting, he finally came home and called the police. They informed him that we lived in an area where car thefts were frequent. Our camper never turned up.
        While the loss of that camper was a blow to our finances and our lives, I lost something more profound during that marriage, myself. My first husband wanted the American story, complete with a middle class housewife. Because I loved him, because I had no idea how marriages worked, but especially because I trusted him, I did everything I could to be that woman. He had a sense of purpose and a clarity on how to achieve his goals more powerful than almost anything else I’d ever witnessed, and it left me awed and longing to be that woman as a gift to him for getting us out of the slums. It made me believe anything was possible, including my own transformation into somebody I never wanted to be.
        Years later, I lost that husband after endless quarrels, my own rising ambition to be more than a housewife on an allowance, and because of my husband’s rigidity. It was a loss I regretted but didn’t mourn. I did mourn him, however, after he died, choosing to remember our camping experiences, his love of traveling, his enjoyment of music, his regular payment of child support and alimony validating my belief in his trustworthiness, but especially I mourned the idealism, optimism, and efforts of our young marriage that left us irreversibly connected to each other. Although we both had successful second marriages, there were ties that would always remain.
        I lost a coat, when I was fifteen years old, on a frigid day in the enormous New York Public Library in mid-town Manhattan. It had been draped over the back of a chair while I put in a request at the desk for a particular book. I never recovered the coat, but I learned a lesson in big city discrimination and bigotry. The man behind the counter looked at me narrowly, noting my apparent low-income status, and said, “This is a very learned book.” It was one on Native Americans for a report I was doing. Many years later it became apparent that it was not a learned book at all, but rather a white man’s interpretation of Native American culture, back then the only interpretation available.
        I loved this particular library, the marble floors and impressive art, the gleaming oak tables and comfortable chairs, my vision of what a cathedral must look like. The books, hidden behind walls like the fine treasures they were, reinforced my faith in America back then, just as visiting museums did. If I, a girl from the slums, could lay hands on these books or walk past museum walls hung with Van Gogh, Monet, Rembrandt, then somehow this country would take care of my family and me, even though it hadn’t yet. I look back on my younger self with no envy of her naiveté, but rather pity, knowing the difficult lessons she would go through and how very long it took her to understand political reality.
        But back then, this majestic library felt safer than anywhere else in my life, and it was a jarring reorganization of how I thought of things when I returned to my seat and the coat was gone. It wasn’t an expensive coat—made of blue wool and a little worn when we’d bought it second hand—but it was my only winter coat and had served me well with a sweater underneath it. After searching and searching again to assure myself that I hadn’t hung it in another room, although I knew I hadn’t, I resigned myself to the fact that somebody walked off with it. I hoped it was one of the homeless people who often ducked inside for shelter.
        It was frigid as I hurried through the snow-packed streets, my sock hat pulled low over my forehead, still in my possession because I’d stored it in my purse rather than my coat pocket. The tips of my fingers, although jammed into the pockets of my jeans, were tinged blue, my gloves left in my coat. It was an affluent neighborhood with store windows well-lit and furnished with expensive items that gave even the smallest storefronts the appearance of a genteel home. Back then I was proud and somewhat amused by the glances thrown at my ancient jeans and the holes worn through the back of my wool sweater pulled tightly around me for whatever warmth I could muster. It wasn’t until my fifties, in wintertime Maine where I now live, that I grew self-conscious about the carelessness with which I dressed, sweat clothes over thermal underwear, then shrouded in layers of down and old windbreakers over that. Although my husband assured me that it wasn’t true, I felt that I’d begun to look like a bag lady when not dressed for work. I pay attention now, although on the coldest days I sometimes regress.
        The subway ride home wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined it would be. It was rush hour and the compacted press of people one against the other provided a sort of insulation. I stepped out into snow whipping against buildings and lampposts, sending garbage flying from the open trash cans so that it appeared to be snowing old newspapers, used McDonald’s bags, greasy sandwich wrappers. I was slapped by flying debris, and the seven block walk from the subway felt longer than it ever had. The coldest encounter that day, though, was with my mother who had saved two weeks to purchase the coat. She shook her head in disgust and turned away from me while my younger brother made faces, gave me the finger and said, “Michelle loses everything, Ma. I never lose a single thing, right?”
        I gave him the finger back saying, “What do you mean, you’ve lost your mind.” My brother and I fought as all siblings do, but we also took walks together, split a slice of pizza when we had the money, snuck into the movies when the back doors opened to let people out, sat on the fire escape, even in the coldest weather, talking about our present lives and what we wanted in our future. We both wanted to get out of the ghetto and my brother wanted to travel to far-away places. We spent a lot of time in the library, and he often took out books on other countries. When we went to the Museum of Natural History, he usually studied artifacts from foreign places, marveling at their intricacies and swearing that he would visit each one.
        It’s true, my brother rarely lost anything, mostly outgrowing his clothing and carefully stacking his books underneath his bed, but at the age of seventeen he lost his life in Vietnam in a war whose reasons were as remote as the country of Vietnam itself. His life had been a dark, narrow corridor blocked off before it widened into the world like emerging into sunlight. He was a poor student and had asked my mother to sign him into the marines, imagining that it would offer him a way into a skill and an opportunity to get out of the ghetto. The recruiter, who witnessed the signing, insisted that my brother was too young to be sent to Vietnam and that the war would most likely be over by the time he was old enough to go. I wondered if his lie was deliberate, if he honestly believed what he said, if he engaged in self-deception rather than acknowledge his role in the explosion of American and Vietnamese deaths. My brother was sent to training camp, then to Vietnam where he survived a mere four months.
        My brother’s far too premature death was the loss of so much more than just him. I lost a future sister-in-law, nieces and nephews, and memories that would never happen. Losing him changed my past, present, and future. There are things I remember, almost, but my younger brother could have confirmed, denied, corrected those memories. My younger brother could have helped after the death of my mother, the arrangements, the grieving, and the laughter that can soften the death of a loved one. I have no sibling to celebrate the milestones of my own, my children’s and grandchildren’s lives, to ask “Doesn’t that remind you of?” to offer feedback from long-ago knowledge on decisions I currently make. I also lost the opportunity to be somebody else’s reminder of a past that drifts further and further away even while ironically remaining near. I feel alone at holidays, despite my husband, children and grandchildren, as I watch extended families laugh together and share childhood memories. My younger brother and I could have had secrets that made us laugh, could have had stolen time when it was just the two of us, could have cheered each other on as we grew old. Others incurred that loss as well: my sons lost an uncle, my grandchildren a great uncle, and my husband a brother-in-law.
        My brother was about five foot eight, with solid broad shoulders, stocky without being fat, and dark eyes open to everything he saw. He had lustrous hair that never stayed in place, a confident way of walking, enjoyment in being with others, and great kindness, always putting money in a pan-handler’s cup and adopting a Korean orphan with his first paycheck. I have photographs to remember how he looked, posed in the past, easily recognizable as still something of a child in his marine uniform as though playing at soldiers. His youth especially hit me when my oldest son turned seventeen, and now that my oldest granddaughter is nearing that age, a particular incomprehension of how these things happen, the disbelief of sending our nation’s future to be killed in war after war after war is more pervasive than ever.
        Since my brother died before the age of answering machines, the sound of his voice quickly vanished for me. I’ve had a few dreams in which we’ve spoken to each other, and I try to hold on to how he sounds when I wake up, but I can’t; I’ve always lost dreams as well. For a brief period I retained the whole-hearted feel of his body when we hugged, a body lost at the instant of death, never again seen because it was blown up.
        Unlike eyeglasses or gloves or earrings there are lost things that can never be replaced. There are some vanishings that will always be immediate: that sharp intake of breath, the almost physical pain you feel running through your body, the narrowing vision and ringing in your ears when there is nowhere, except in memory, to search for them.