We Had Hummingbirds

by

Lukasz Grabowski

The basement in our little house served the functions of an attic and a storage space for beer cartons.

“I’ll be so glad to have this cleaned up,” my mother said, digging her nail underneath the pull tab of a Coors Light. A pop, a hiss, and immediately after, a long, needy guzzling.

“Oh, Sam, I’ll be so glad,” she repeated. “You just decide what you’d really like to keep. There’s such a thing as sentimental value, of course, but we haven’t touched these in years and years.” She took a swig of the beer thoughtfully. “So how valuable are they really? And who knows, it might free up enough space for a ping pong table.”

“Works for me,” I said, returning her smile. A ping pong table had been on my Christmas wishlists once upon a time. Mother must have run into one of the lists. It was the only way she would bring it up now, full of anticipation as if there would be enough money or energy for ping pong.

I rolled up the sleeves of my sweater and lifted down a cardboard box at random from the pile that took up half the basement. The boxes were uniform and stacked in a way they might be at a warehouse, cubes next to cubes upon cubes, an almost satisfying grid if not for its stifling presence under the low ceiling. Aside from the labels, written with a sharpie in neat, slanted cursive, there was no indication that family memorabilia were stored within. If a spell had been cast that turned their contents into packing peanuts, we wouldn’t have known.

“Now, I’ve thought about this.” She burped quietly into her palm, looking around the room. “We’ll split things up into three piles. Here” – she pointed toward her left, against the wall – “whatever we want to keep. Here, in the middle, garage sale. And there“ – she indicated the area near a shelf that held 24-pack beer cartons – “the trash.”

I nodded. The box I had grabbed read Samantha 3. I cut through patches of duct tape with a dull knife from the kitchen. Mother was peering at the tops of boxes on the tips of her feet, noncommittal, sipping her beer.

Inside: plush animals on top of a manila folder held together by a single thread, which could have been a metaphor for something. The folder was bloated with art projects vomiting glitter everywhere, quizzes marked with As and Bs, and flyers for school events (“Register for the Thanksgiving FUNdraiser!”). Like the objects themselves, the memories that surfaced were dusty and, for the most part, devoid of emotion: grandma telling me to check under the living room couch for my name-day gift, a Winnie the Pooh plush; the school night evenings at Laura Daugherty’s house; twelve-year-olds giggling in a classroom darkened to set the mood for a violent adaptation of “The Masque of the Red Death.”

“This is all trash.” I nudged the box toward the liquor cabinet with my foot. “Except him.” I grabbed Pooh by his stubby arm and sat him on the windowsill.

“Cute,” mother said, not looking. She had gotten around to opening a box and was leafing through photo albums with her free hand and smiling sad smiles to herself. The pictures – stuffed into the album pockets – were grainy with the eighties, with the exception of the camera flash closeups at unknown discotheques. The ghosts in them had their mouths open and their eyes squinted. I picked out another box, and then another, going through the Samantha series before taking on the family ones that mother claimed as her lot earlier that day. A makeup kit here, an earmarked guitar magazine there. Wool sweaters with a musty funk and fleece jackets that smelled like nothing at all anymore. Taking up half an unmarked box was a foot massager that mother once ordered from a Sharper Image catalog. It was still bubble wrapped.

By the time I sliced open my fourth box, she was finishing her second beer, but had otherwise not progressed past the initial box, past the photo albums.

“Gosh, look at you,” she said over a picture of little me mounted on our old dog Hector, one hand on the collar and the other as if wielding a lasso. I could see the tears welling up, pulled by the drink. “That dog loved you something crazy, you know that? We’d get ready to go out, and as I’m putting your little shoes on he’d step in between, shuffling his body around and pushing with his snout. Sometimes show his teeth, even. Crazy old dog.” She traced the rim of the can with her forefinger, smiling down. “Our Hector.”

“He lived a good life,” I said, half-listening. By now, I had been fully absorbed by the task before me. Unlike mother, I spent no time staring into the time machine eyes of teddy bears. There were three options: keep, sell, or throw out, but box by box, I felt that the only way to clean up was to throw out, to purge. Mother was right: sentimental value in itself was not enough when doing a cleaning like this. Sentimental value had already kept the things here once before.

For a few minutes, we were silent, each engrossed in our boxes. Then she said, “I have to pee,” and got up. “Want anything from upstairs?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“I’ll get you a Sprite. On the rocks.” She lingered on the s like a snake.

“Okay,” I said.

“This is looking promising, Sam. I’m telling you, if the garage sale goes well…” Going up the stairs, she made paddle swinging motions in the air and grabbed for the wall when she lost her balance. I didn’t point out that, except for a zippie bag of old presidential campaign pins, there was nothing in the garage sale corner.

Raspy coughing penetrated the floorboards above me. The toilet flushed twice, no more than a minute apart.

The particular woozy tone of her steps creaking on the floor told me she walked to the fridge, then the cabinet, then the fridge again. The basement steps groaned under her and I tracked the drinks with my eyes as she climbed back down.

“Here you go, honey.” She handed me the Sprite in a heavy-bottomed glass. The ice was clinking against the sides like in a commercial. She held on to a fresh can of beer, the fourth since we began – not the fourth that day.

Assessing our work, we sucked on our drinks under the exposed fluorescent light bulb. I pinballed an ice cube around in my mouth, watching her. The cleanup continued. The rest of the boxes contained objects much older than me, like jewelry caskets with satin padding and anonymous figurines that smelled of grandma’s apartment. I imagined what it would be like to know the year everything was from and line it up from one end of the room to the other in a chronology. Would I see my life in a new light, confronted with its material markers? Picking up an old frisbee, I didn’t think so.

“Would you look at that,” she said. “Almost done.” Her voice, with tired inflections, failed to find its initial excitement.

“One each?” I asked, pointing to the remaining two boxes, snug against the far corner.

“Sure, that’s fine.”

I ran the knife across the tape on both boxes and pushed one toward mother.

My last box held nothing special. There was no reason for it being the last one standing or, for that matter, the first to have been stacked roughly and made to hug the wall for years. Dust-black video and audio equipment. A stereo, a scratched-up Walkman and a pouch with cassettes. And, covering the entire bottom of the box, a VHS player and tapes, with white notes on their spines in the same handwriting as on the boxes themselves, its italics so unlike mother’s chicken scratch.

The videos had names like Donna & Jay’s Wedding ‘91 or Samantha’s Baptism ‘03. I looked at the sum of the box, considering whether we could get something for it at the garage sale or, if not, whether Goodwill would take it. The equipment, I figured, was too contemporary to have any vintage value, but too worn and crappy to be of actual use.

“All done,” I said, placing the box with all its contents in the hefty throwaway pile. “Need help?”

No response.

“Do you remember this?” She raised up a wooden birdhouse, its entrance the size of a peephole. “What is this? Did we have birds?” She stared at me, bewildered.

I took it from her and turned it over, remembering. “It was a gift from aunt Lily. She came over once and saw the hummingbirds outside by the willow.” I peered into the opening. “Dad said Hector would make good friends with them.”

“Oh,” she said, remembering. “Oh, that was a lovely gift.”

We fell into a silence.

Placing my hand on her slouched shoulder, I said: “Do you want to keep it?”

“Well. Shame to throw out a gift, don’t you think? When was the last time you saw the hummingbirds?” She kept running her fingers over the wood. When I didn’t immediately respond, she began tapping its underside, which produced a soft, hollow sound.

“Why don’t we bring it upstairs and think about it some more,” I said finally.

She let me lift her up under the elbow. “Yes, okay. Let’s do that.”

We passed our three piles, dominated by the throwaway, which now obstructed from view most of the cabinet. In the keep pile, I saw photo albums from mother’s first box and trinkets that had been passed down in the family for several generations. I had seen her fiddling with them earlier. Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh hadn’t moved from the sill.

“You’re sure about all this?” she asked, turning to the trash, scanning for anything precious that could be saved. “That’s an awful lot to throw out.”

“I’m sure, mother,” I said, watching her watch the pile.

We walked up the creaking steps. Guiding her by the arm, I felt the drunkenness, and underneath it a kneebuckling exhaustion.

Night had fallen and the house was caught in the silent blue darkness one encounters when returning late after a long time away. I left her side to switch on the corner lamps and the TV, the movements deft and automatic.

“Sam,” she said, turning her head sluggishly back to the basement door, “I still have to pack that stuff into trash bags. And break down the boxes. God.”

“You rest. I’ll take care of it.” She let me deliver her to the armchair. I helped bring her legs up onto the ottoman and covered them with a faded chenille blanket. “Can I make you a cup of tea?”

She fixed her gaze on the ceiling. “Just a beer, if you could? Please. There should still be one up here.”

“Okay,” I said, without hearing the word come out.

I took my time navigating the darkness of the kitchen. The breath came through my nose rhythmically as I looked out at the front lawn and the barren willow that drooped over the sidewalk.

The fridge illuminated the last beer. I did a quick tally, pretending to myself that I hadn’t been keeping track. In the family room, the TV volume spiked until the infomercials sounded like an interrogation, but I found it comforting and the tight knot in my stomach loosened a little.

I stood there for a while, but mother didn’t rush me. Maybe we were both breathing within the safety of white noise.

“Thank you, love,” she said when I returned, popping open the can with some difficulty. “You know what, let’s keep the birdhouse. What do you say?” A lethargic sip. “Something nice to remember the day by.”

I tried to make eye contact with her, but even though her diluted blue eyes were wide open, they wandered somewhere along the kitchen door frame, glazed over. “Okay, mom,” I said at last with a kiss on her forehead.

“I’ll be downstairs. Call out if you need anything.”

I grabbed a packet of thirty-gallon trash bags from under the sink and returned to the basement, determined to finish the day’s work.