Yesterday, after a crappy day at work, I came home and almost tripped over a fat package sitting in the entryway of my building. It’s always fun to check and see if a brown box has my name on it, though that’s pretty rare. The first thing that jumped out at me, though, was the name on the return address label. The box was from Glenn’s parents. In my post-work burnt-out haze, I stood there wondering why they would send a package to someone in my building. Then, of course, I looked to see who it was addressed to—duh.
The box was big and heavy, and I knew immediately what it contained. Before Glenn and I moved to LA, we stored our winter jackets and other stuff like scarves, gloves and long underwear at his parent’s vacation house in Vermont. At the time, the decision seemed logical because we figured that his parents could bring it down with them when we came out for holiday visits. Cut to last fall, when I sent a few polite emails to Glenn’s mother, asking her if she could ship me my winter things so that I wouldn’t freeze my ass off when the seriously cold weather arrived. She hemmed and hawed in what I now recognize as the classic XXXXXX way—Glenn was a champion procrastinator, too—and then she stopped responding to my emails. Until the box arrived yesterday, I hadn’t heard from them in almost a year.
I lugged the thing up to my apartment, dumped it on my kitchen table and then sat down on the couch, unsure of what to do next. Should I open it? I didn’t even really want to touch it. But that was silly. It was just a box, even though it felt more like a big, brown emotional bomb. I busted out a kitchen knife and opened the thing up. Out fell a small, white envelope. Mary Jane had sent a note.
I called my mother.
“She sent my winter things, but there’s a note and I don’t want to open it.”
“So don’t open it. Stick it in a corner and ignore it until you feel ready to open it.”
“Am I 12? Why does this bother me so much?”
“Because she was terrible to you, and you had no closure on your relationship with her.”
I could hear my mother seething quietly on the other end of the phone. Her protective mother bear instincts were coming to the fore. She hated that Mary Jane could still make me feel badly.
In the end, I sacked up and opened the note. How one little white envelope can feel more dangerous than a loaded trap is beyond me, but that’s how it felt. On a simple Cape Cod notecard embossed with a blue scallop shell, she wrote:
Dear Moxie,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to send you your winter things. As always, I find that my job interferes with every aspect of my personal life. I hope this finds you well. Glenn tells us that you might move to San Francisco. It’s a wonderful city and if you get out there, I wish you all the best. We see a lot of baby granddaughter B and I think of you every time we see her because she will only sleep with the quilt you made for her.
Warm, best regard to you and your family.
Mary JaneI cried then, curled up on the couch with the note in my hands. For some reason the image of baby B sleeping with the quilt that I stitched by hand just killed me. Apparently B was the only member of the XXXXXX family that still held on to anything connected to my presence in their lives.
As I tried to explain to Lunchboy over IM last night, the sadness had almost nothing to do with Glenn. I think I let go of him a while ago, but losing my relationship with his mother was a cut that hadn’t healed yet, and getting the package and her note caught me off guard. I’d thought that the soft place inside of me that used to be raw was impervious to further interaction with that family, but I suppose it’s good that I’m not made of stone.
