This Could Be The Last Time, I Don't Know...

by Nancy Grossman-Samuel

             

            Margaret is looking around the room as if she doesn't recognize anything in it. She gingerly sits at her desk with its random and haphazard piles and shakes her head. “Shit.” She sighs deeply. “I might as well just give up. I’m 60 and my life is never going to change.” Glancing from pile to pile and stack to stack she says, “It’s always just going to be me, alone, with piles of shit. No friends, no purpose, just paper, books, and junk I must think holds the secrets of the universe.”

She knows she is again being overly dramatic. She has friends, and a life, but she, like Pig Pen, the character in Peanuts, is constantly trailing a cloud of stuff. She’s tried to get the stuff under control for years – since birth probably – her cross to bear. “Humph,” she says as she remembers her mother telling her college roommates not to let her have a chair because it would just disappear under debris. And she had been right. Within days, no chair, just a pile, mostly clothes, that looked like it was floating off the ground. Good thing her roommates didn't really care. No one except her mother really did. At least no one except her mother had ever said anything, and now, even though she had been dead for years, her mother's voice continued inside Margaret’s head. “I’m 60!” she shouted, “why do I still give a flying fuck about what my mother says – inside my head no less – she’s not even here!”

“Hey,” came a sleepy voice from the room down the hall. “No swearing!! And grandma is still here. I saw her ghost floating down the hall on my way to bed last night.”

“It’s not noon yet, go back to sleep!!”

She heard Sean laugh, and the sounds of Green Day, or Maroon Five, or one of those groups came drifting from the speakers in his room.

I’m going to die in this chair with piles around me. Sean and his sisters will come in with a dumpster and get rid of it all. Why am I holding on to so much crap? I will never read all these books, I will never again look at the majority of these papers even once I scan them in, and the clothes in my closet that will never touch my body, could clothe a small country – well, small city, maybe, and even the ones that do, the meager handful of things all my friends are sick of seeing me wear, will go to Goodwill when I'm gone! I really should just get rid of it all now before the kids have to. But then, I spent years cleaning up after them, maybe turn around is fair play. I just wish I could toss this stuff without feeling like I’m betraying someone! This is the familiar liturgy that goes through her mind pretty much daily, with and without the child revenge portion.
       She had done his laundry that day and found an old tee shirt of hers that her son had adopted – an old Rolling Stones tee that she had never gotten rid of, but also hadn't worn in thirty-plus years. It had been hiding in a box until her son rummaged around the garage one day and came out wearing it.

       She felt a pang that she should still have it herself until she slapped herself upside the head and remembered that it is better on his back now, then in a box in the garage until after she was dead – at least he was enjoying it. He even thought his mother a little cooler for having once worn a Rolling Stones tee shirt – and he felt that owning and wearing that shirt made him seem a little cooler too.

      So maybe the junk is okay? She allowed herself to question. Maybe it isn't the end of the world. Maybe it’s just my old stories that have no place in my life any more. “But I really don’t WANT all this shit all over the place!!” She screamed.

     “So toss it,” came Sean’s voice.

     “Mind your own business!” she called back. “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to myself.”

     “Should I call a doctor?”

     “Ha ha. Go get your clothes. I washed them. They’re folded on the ironing board.”

     “Cool. Did you iron my shirts too?” asked his smiling face as he came around the corner to her office.

     “As if! If you want them ironed. Iron them yourself!”

     “But mom.”

     “Jeeze Sean, you’re 21, you shouldn't even be bringing your laundry here to do any more.  Well, you can keep bringing your laundry if you keep coming to visit, but I should not be doing it!”

     “I would have done it. You just don’t like it sitting by the garage door.”

     “You’re right. I didn't have to do it. Next time, you’ll do it yourself.” She called to his receding footsteps, proud of herself, but knowing in her heart that she could easily wind up doing it again, though truth be told, he did do his own laundry, sometimes. “Ugggg,” she said almost under her breath. “I am such a push over. I really need to stop doing that. I need to let him do things for himself.”

     “Did you say something, Mom? You’re mumbling!”

     “Not talking to you,” she said in a sing-song.

     “You really need to get married again. You’re talking to yourself too much!”

     “Thanks for the advice. I happen to like my company, and you keep coming back, so I must not be so horrible to be around.”

     “Nope,” said Sean heading back up stairs. “I got my laundry! Brought it up myself!”

     “Gold star for you bud."

     “Hey Mom, you ever going to clear off that desk?”

     “No. I’m going to let you do it when I die. Make you go through every piece just in case there is something important.”

     “There isn't,” he called from his room.

     He’s probably right, she thought. There’s nothing on this desk that is going to bring forward world peace or a cure for cancer, or even a small or medium sized windfall. So maybe I should just dump it all. But she knew she would not.

     So, once again, she clears a small space in front of her to which she can drag a few pieces of paper or random items at a time, and ever the hopeful optimist thinks this could be the last time. She starts to sing the lyrics, “This could be the last time/This could be the last time/May be the last time/I don’t know/Don’t know…," and turns to her Apple computer, opens Pandora and creates a new station – The Rolling Stones. But it isn't “The Last Time,” playing – it’s The Beatles – “Come Together.”

     “Yes!” she shouts and then sings matching the Beatles staccato, “One thing I can tell you is/You got to be free/Come together, right now/Over me.”

     She sighs, picked up a receipt, and says “Oh look – I was free to buy a dozen greeting cards I’ll probably never send. At least they were on sale!”

     The sounds came wailing from the Goal Zero speaker she’d gotten at Costco and for which there was a receipt around here somewhere. “’Got to be good looking cause she so hard to see…’

     Sean comes walking back down the hall wearing the Rolling Stones tee shirt and holey jeans. “Oh yeah Mom! Rock out!”

     And she did.