We sat at the table and ate in silence. It was a very nice table, no question, made of cherry wood, with two leaves and four matching chairs. She had always had excellent taste. But that weekend it was just me and my parents, sitting at the table, looking out through the bay windows to the lake, pretending to eat.
Just at the edge of the lake was an overturned canoe that hadn’t been used in, oh, probably fifteen years. I remember fishing on the lake when I was young, with my two cousins, rowing the canoe to the middle of the water and fighting over who would get to use the good fishing rod. We fought so hard we practically tipped over the canoe. We never caught anything, if indeed there was anything to catch.
Another time, we amused ourselves for hours by standing at the edge of the lake and throwing rocks in, and letting her golden retriever gallop in and fetch them.
Also, we would take individual inflatable rafts out on the lake and lay there for hours, going nowhere, doing nothing. Years later, I had a therapist who told me to relax by envisioning the most peaceful scene I could, and I told him about those rafts, and that lake. He told me that whenever I was feeling tense, I should close my eyes and picture myself on that raft.
Now I need a different picture.
So anyway, there we were, my parents and I, eating dinner at what used to be her table, in what used to be her house, overlooking what used to be her canoe. We each swished our ravioli around our plates and made clanking noises with what used to be her forks. For as long as I can remember, she had had this clunky, oversized silverware set. It had always seemed to me to be so out of character. She was not a heavyset woman, just the opposite. She was one of those women that other women hate, had no natural appetite, an ultra-fast metabolism, never gained weight, and had long, slender, elegant hands that could only be described as dainty. And silverware made for a construction worker.
Dinner preparation was made even more difficult by the fact that nowhere in this beautiful contemporary $400,000 lakeside house was there a microwave.
After the last meal we would ever have in what used to be her house, we cried a lot, and then went back to the business at hand. Next up: what used to be her bedroom closet. Racks of clothes, already earmarked for the local Salvation Army. No news there. But on the shelves above the racks were boxes, endless boxes. Some important, some mundane, some, as we discovered, downright treasures. More crying. Pictures strewn all over the bed, including Wilfred, the grandfather I never knew, of whom I am, as they say, the spitting image. These boxes must be taken home, he said. Saved, preserved, put in a pile of things to sort out, and finally put on a shelf in a closet — above a rack of old clothes no doubt — and wait for the next generation to discover them.
The house is sold now. The estate is packaging and shipping all the stuff people said they wanted, auctioning off the rest, and dividing the proceeds as specified in her will. My table arrives tomorrow.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim