Svetlana Turetskaya
When Jim, her ex-husband, sent her a package with some “old things,” she was not surprised, for he said he was moving and it made sense that he wanted to downsize. The package contained a yellow envelope, a 6 X 8 size, stapled at the top, by her own hand, many years ago, when they were living in their red brick house in Omaha, back in the day when Jim taught English Literature at the University of Nebraska, and her mother visited from California, to help with child care. Her mother liked to look at things, open boxes and drawers, look for things, find things. She remembered stapling the envelope so her mother wouldn’t open it—you can’t open a stapled envelope and not leave a trace.
She tore it up at once—this time capsule.
Inside the envelope were several drawings, each an early attempt of their son to depict their cat Moshka, a cactus, a house, a flower. There was also a bundle of cards, large cards that fold, a big bundle, maybe forty of them, a rubber band keeping them together, which was Jim’s touch, for he rubber-banded together all sorts of things.
She recognized those cards at once. The one with a cat inside a paper bag she bought at Cody’s bookstore in Berkley, on Telegraph Avenue. She wrote these while still a graduate student at Berkeley, when Jim moved to Texas to start his PhD, years before the wedding, the child, the house. She’d fly to visit him once a month, and wrote cards every other day. That’s why there were so many of them, the whole batch dated back to her Berkley times.
Here was a card with a fluffy owl and another with naked tree branches. They all began with “Dear Love.” Sandwiched between the fluffy owl and the naked tree was a card she could not recall at all. It depicted a painting by O’Keeffe, an artist she never cared for: two white calla lilies. Why on Earth did she buy this card and when? Her heart began to beat a little faster when she opened it. Those Lilies!, she read. It said nothing else and it wasn’t signed. Blue ballpoint pen, fat round letters, a nice, confident hand. A card from a woman, she thought. The handwriting was unfamiliar, a foreign territory, like some small country with a flag she didn’t recognize.
Every contact leaves a trace. Isn’t it the basic principle of forensic science? She examined the envelope that had been stapled, looking for evidence, for any information at all, but the back of the thing said “cards” and it was her own handwriting, as if proving that this was her life.
She brushed her teeth, washed her face, put on her black nightgown, got into her bed with sheets dotted with tiny red roses, and then studied the flowers O’Keeffe decided to paint one more time, noting the fat yellow stigma in the middle of those otherwise identical evil lilies.
Her son was having a sleepover with his school friend, so she was alone, freed from all responsibilities.
At 2:45 a.m. she was suddenly wide-awake, three-shots-of-espresso kind of awake. His sister used to send cards. She said this thought out loud, into the dark, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own, and it felt like forgiveness, almost. There you are, she said to no one, just to feel it again, to confirm it.
Jim’s life extended in all sorts of directions before her, while with her and now, after her.
She rarely thought of Jim these days, but it was time to think of him now—it was why she woke up: to think about their marriage, to give it an honest assessment, a grade, an adjective, something final, concrete, an image or an object to place into an envelope, then staple it, put it in the storage closet.
The marriage—she decided, for she had to make a decision—was the sum of their trips to Targets and Safeways, Trader Joe’s, Wallmarts, trips made together and separately, trips so numerous she would need a calculator to come up with a number, well over 4,000 trips, she surmised, a number spanning nineteen years of married grocery shopping. She had felt innocent excitement every time Jim came home with grocery bags and placed them on the countertop. Grocery bags with paper handles that often broke, or their plastic bag companions that sat useless in kitchen drawers, stashed one inside the other, waiting for nothing in the end.
“I’ll get more milk.”
“We need more diapers.”
“I got us that cheese we like.”
“I forgot to get the bread.”
“Sorry, I bought the full fat yogurt by mistake.”
Svetlana Turetskaya grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia before she immigrated to the United States. Her poetry and short fiction appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Wigleaf, The Florida Review, The Cortland Review, Quarterly West, Blackbird, and elsewhere. She lives in Palo Alto and works at the Stanford Humanities Center.
