Garaged

They were garage smokers.  We could gauge when they woke and what time of night they went to bed by the rise and fall of the garage door. 

 

Joe spent lots of time sitting in a kitchen chair just inside the door.  It was an older chair, probably maple, judging by the color of the wood and the half-moon style so popular thirty years ago.  Next to the chair sat a tall, gray file cabinet of the same era.  I always wondered what was in that cabinet.  I wondered if it was happenstance, or the result of a purpose-filled decision that the cabinet was in easy reach of the chair in which Joe spent so much of his time.

 

I never saw him open the cabinet, but he did other things in that chair.  He smoked, of course.  Sometimes I saw him raise a beer with his left arm.  He’d sacrificed his right to Vietnam.  It was there, but half the size of the “good” one.  Contracted muscles had rendered his hand useless.  Sometimes it twitched when he talked

 

He talked in that chair, mostly to my son, and mostly about cars; specifically, the 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass.  They both drove one.  Josh built his from the ground up, painted it silver, and referred to it as “Girl”.  Joe’s was navy blue.  Both were pristine. 

 

Sometimes, he had his hair cut in that chair.  He sat with a white towel draped over his bony shoulders and smoked with his good arm while Brenda, his wife, sheared him using electric hair clippers.  She finished before he did.  There wasn’t much to cut.

 

While spring air still carried winter’s bite, Joe sat several small, plastic greenhouses just outside the garage in the morning sun.  He took them inside at night, repeating this ritual for weeks until the ground had warmed enough to plant.  His gardens always flourished.  Mine paled in comparison.

 

Their mowers woke me on Saturdays.  Joe rode.  Brenda pushed.  Sometimes they wore pith helmets. 

 

On Sundays, sometime after lunch, they emerged from the open garage carrying sudsy buckets.  Hoses were unwound.  Thus began a laborious process that entailed spraying water followed by endless circles made by soapy white towels.  They used real chamois to dry their cars before opening all four doors to admit the vacuum.  Slamming car doors punctuated our dinner conversation before they emptied their buckets on the lawn.    

 

Brenda filled buckets with bleach water.  Steam enveloped her hand as she carried a bucket across the lawn towards a park bench that sat between a large pot of silk sunflowers and a birdhouse on a tall, white pole.  Once a month she dusted the garden hose with a feather duster, while Joe struggled, one-handed, to control the telescoping pole he used to dust the rafters.  She mopped, first the front porch, and then the garage.

 

Their ritual went unbroken.  No visitors interrupted their dusting.  They never came home from a long vacation to find their lawn had gone to seed.  They didn’t sully their freshly scrubbed front door with a Christmas wreath or mar the freshly mopped porch with a pumpkin.  Nothing interfered with their quest for extreme cleanliness, not even Joe’s illness.  

Sometimes, as he sat in his chair, a clear, plastic bag of urine peaked out beneath the hem of his khaki shorts.  

 

The procession of cars in a driveway blown clear of autumn debris could mean only one thing.  The emergence from the garage of a portly woman wearing a black picture hat over an unflattering black dress left no doubt.  An older man joined her.  They stood just to the left of the open garage, in front of a carefully maintained flower bed, and waited.  Brenda emerged, also in black, and the three left in one car.

 

Two days later, Joe’s bedroom sat in a pile in front of the open garage.  A large, red Salvation Army truck backed up the driveway, and as fast as the two young men loaded items onto the truck, Brenda brought more.  Joe’s chair was the last piece loaded.

 

The Cutlass disappeared, as did Brenda’s Buick.  Her shiny new Civic took up very little room inside the empty garage through which an assortment of craftsmen beat a path to Brenda’s door.  Custom cabinet makers were followed by electricians who gave way to plumbers who were supplanted by painters who were replaced by roofers. 

 

I watched as she purged him.  Immediately, methodically, purposefully, Brenda removed every trace of Joe from her life. 

 And, the garage door rarely opens.

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