The Junk Drawer

Wet snow began to pile on the windshield of her bright red 1984 Honda Civic in thick glops as she yanked her parking brake into place. The rhythmic ratchet and click of the brake were the first two noises in the routine of familiar sounds at the end of any given commute. Next the switch of the key, cutting Bing Crosby’s dreamy croon of White Christmas mid “glisten.” There was a moment of silence before she finally released her swollen left foot from the clutch. She hated driving in the snow. The days were getting shorter and shorter, and her patience for the mundane tasks of adulthood was growing thinner and thinner.

The pregnancy glow, it seemed, wasn’t advantaging her the way she had always imagined. Each time she looked in the mirror, her reflection reminded her of the plump and irritating faces of the children who visited Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. She had an inherently round continence as it was. Her middle-aged high school art teacher used to tell her the shape of her face reminded him of a shining sun, which was creepy both at the time and also as she recalled it in this moment. Throughout her life, she was reminded by many men that she could pass for much younger than she was, and was far too often mistaken for eighteen at twenty-two.

Forcing herself out of the sedan’s warm grey interior to brave the snowy terrain, she pondered how snow could be both silent and obtrusive. The blizzard had compromised plenty, namely the common sense of drivers on the way home, and her ability to walk up the outdoor staircase to her second-story apartment now. Fat flakes—which were not at all flaky but instead soggy and dense—landed on the shoulders of her black peacoat, the one that no longer buttoned shut, thanks to her protruding belly. It was seven thirty, and normally she felt a little scared as she trekked up the stairs in the darkness at this time. It wasn’t that she lived in a bad part of town or that any of the neighbors posed a threat to her safety, but that the darkness stole daylight and snatched time, which she was coveting more and more as she counted down the days until her life would change forever. Tonight, though, as she unloaded two paper sacks from her car and hobbled up the wooden staircase to her door, the snow illuminated her world. The ivory blanket caught every drop of light from the moon and its artificial companion: the flickering streetlight on the corner of the block.

Her mother would have scolded her for not taking two trips to unload the groceries. Her mother would have been right, but one trip was faster. That and she had vowed that she would let her fierce independence lead her into motherhood, an attempt to distinguish herself from the mundane and nagging maternal voice she had always known. Not to mention, the quicker she made it inside, the quicker she could sink into the living room sofa and nurse a cup of herbal tea by the gas fireplace.

Steve would be home at eight, which left her just enough time to put the groceries away and start the kettle before the cold crept through the front door again. She switched on the TV. A Christmas classic flashed in familiar black-and-white on the screen as she put away the Cheerios. T-minus sixteen days until December 25th and she couldn’t find a single channel that wasn’t playing either the news—which she’d come to discern, after years of being subjected to television anchors, was infinitely more reliable in print—or some old Christmas movie. She huffed a humored exhale as the characters bantered in their comforting old-timey dialects, supposing that if her life existed in black-and-white she would over-enunciate, too.

Their whole apartment was like one big room. She loved that she could hear murmurs on the TV while she cooked, cleaned, or did the dishes. The kitchen, crisp and lemon-scented on account of its biweekly bath in citrus-scented Pledge, was separated from the living area only with an island and three barstools, where she and Steve ate most of their meals, and where she deposited her coat and scarf.

A central component of the couple’s home life was their television. It fostered Steve’s indulgence in Monday night football and her affinity for I Love Lucy reruns. The show often played in the background as she folded laundry on nights she couldn’t sleep, simultaneously lulling her with its simplicity and challenging her to find contentment in domesticity, which she was not entirely sold on. Yet.

The living room is also where she and Steve sat on Saturday mornings—in the recent winter months in front of the artificial, gas-lit fire. Here, she would read from her collection of marked-up classics, worn paperbacks she had kept from high school or picked up on a whim at used book stores. Again and again she sifted through titles like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and most recently, an anthology of American poetry, which she had scavenged from the local flea market. She liked frayed and yellowing books best—those puzzlingly both musty and crisp in scent, as if the pages had not been opened often enough for the new ink smell to wear off and it had instead settled in the paper and grown sour with age.

Reaching into the paper bag on the counter, she unloaded a red mesh bag full of clementines she bought impulsively. While passing through the produce section, she was reminded of Christmases growing up, when her grandmother served clementines to all the cousins with Christmas cookies after holiday dinner. The thought of a clear Chinet plate full of red and green sugar cookies, chocolate covered cherries, and orange slices complemented by the smell of freshly brewed decaf wafting through the warm air of Grandma’s little dining room emboldened her nesting tendencies. This baby was going to get clementines every Christmas.

She fetched the step-stool from the utility closet, positioned it on the white tile of the kitchen, and opened the cabinet above her toaster, carefully stabilizing herself with a palm on the counter as she reached for her grandmother’s crystal serving bowl. For the second time since her return home, she imagined how her mother might scold her--this time for not waiting for Steve to get home before retrieving something so unreachable.

“You get your pregnant patootie off that stepstool right this second,” she would nag. “You’re in no position to be endangering my grandbaby with attempts at a... nimble… maneuver....” Her mother often took long pauses between phrases while berating, determined to pick the perfect insults and often willing to concede a facade of quickwittedness in exchange for expressing her disapproval through a pretentious and devastating vocabulary. “You get down from there, or so help me God, I will... call child protective services before you have the chance to give birth.” Pulling the crystal bowl down from its spot on the shelf where it’d been collecting dust since she and Steve moved in last March, she bowed to the audience of no one after sticking the precarious landing from the last step to the tile, an admittedly questionable feat in her bloated state.

She tugged at the mesh bag to rip it open, but to no avail. The plastic dug into her now-chubby fingers, leaving three raw, red indentations around each of her pointer fingers, like little rings. “Oh, just use the scissors, darlin’. You’ve got nothing to prove,” she could hear her mother once again. Opening the drawer where she kept things with sharp edges, she reached for her kitchen scissors on the right hand side. They weren’t there. Exhaling in resignation, she knew exactly where to look.

She yanked open the next drawer over. This was the junk drawer. The concept of the junk drawer was something Steve had introduced to her after they moved in—where everything that didn’t have a place was housed. “Every family has to have a junk drawer,” he explained on the day they unpacked their wedding registry gifts into the little kitchen, running his hands through his thick brown hair.

“Oh yeah? If every family’s got one, then why didn’t my family have one?”

“Oh please, woman!” he exclaimed, coming up close, kissing her cheek, and placing his palm on the small of her back, and humming in her ear, “Have you met your mother?”

Organized daughter of her mother that she was, she loathed the junk drawer, but Steve’s plea for control over one aspect of the hyper-categorized, labeled, and color-coated kitchen convinced her to allow it, if only as a secret feature in their little apartment. It was excruciating to her, using her pristine white drawer--so maintained, composed, and inconspicuous--to conceal such a mess. She seldom opened the junk drawer. The very thought of it stressed her out, but this night she has no choice. She was certain that Steve used the scissors earlier that week to cut the tags off a new pair of socks. She was even more certain that Steve would never live in her home long enough to pay attention to where the kitchen scissors actually belonged. She was pleased with herself for understanding things like this and believed it meant that she really knew him and really knew how all men were.

She hesitantly pulled open the drawer, which overflowed with papers—coupons, bills, and the fliers that solicitors left on their doorknob from time to time. Rummaging through the mess, including a stress ball the eye clinic was handing out at the Fourth of July parade last year, a ruler which advertised an insurance company, and a jumbled collection of half-used notepads, she was immediately irritated by the incoherent collection of things. She pulled a few things out and set them on the counter before finally locating the pair of scissors she’d be searching for. Once she found them, she uncharacteristically left the junk drawer contents sprawled on the counter, eager to cut open the mesh bag and unload the clementines into the crystal bowl. She proudly displayed the fruit bowl on the center of the kitchen island, where Steve would have no choice but to notice it when he arrived home. Beaming at the start of their little family’s newest Christmas tradition and the fact that she finally found a sentimental use for the vintage crystal and feeling her child rumbling inside of her, she experienced a sudden and acute awareness of the life she sustained. Recognizing that this was the most essential she had felt in her life, for a brief moment, a sharp and instinctual confidence surpassed the fear of inadequacy she always clung to.

This sensation was one of the few things she would miss about being pregnant. She remembered the first time she felt a kick. Excited, she had fled the kitchen and burst into the bedroom, interrupting Steve’s Sunday afternoon ritual of falling asleep while reading the paper.

“I feel him!” she exclaimed. She was filled with such unadulterated joy, and her face of twenty-three read thirteen as she hurtled herself onto the bed, waking her husband.

“Hmmph? Oh, hey, careful baby. Careful,” he said groggily, stiffly blinking twice before reaching over to the bedside table for his glasses. “What’s the matter?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. It’s the baby! I felt the baby kicking!” She grabbed Steve’s left hand and placed it on her stomach, “Can you feel him? There! He did it again! Did you feel it?”

“I think so. I think I felt it. Was that it? That right there?”

“Mhm,” she murmured, “I never expected it to feel like that.”

“How does it feel?”

“Like—it’s hard to explain. Almost like little popcorn kernels popping inside of me or something.”

Steve smirked. “Popcorn baby. Does it hurt at all?”

“Hmm. No. Not really. Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?”

“Yeah. He’s saying, ‘hey Mommy,’” he laughed, adopting a voice three octaves higher, “’I’m doing okay.” He placed his ear to her belly, like he was listening to decode and relay a secret message. “What’s that, kid? Uh-huh. He says he’s doing just fine. Oh, and what else?” He lifted his head and met his wife’s eyes, grinning wider and raising his eyebrows “He says he doesn’t think one glass of wine will really hurt him, especially if you’re stressed.” She playfully smacked her husband’s shoulder. “Enough about you, popcorn boy” he continued, speaking to her abdomen like an old friend, “How’s your mom doing?”

“All this popcorn talk is making her hungry.”

“Oh, is that the newest pregnancy craving?” he teased, rolling his eyes and poking at her belly. “Maybe it’s not the baby kicking after all, maybe it’s just your stomach growling.” She shook her head. “No, no,” he pressed on, “I don’t think he’s trying to tell us about your snack food obsession. No, he’s saying, ‘Mommy’s okay. She’ll be just fine as long as she lays down right here next to daddy and stops working so hard.” Then he pulled her in close, planting a kiss on her cheek.

“Oh does he?”

“Uh-huh.” he kissed her again, but this time on the nose.

“Don’t be silly, little baby,” she chided in her best sitcom housewife register, blinking at the ceiling and patting her stomach as Steve kissed her one last time on the forehead, “there is far too much left for me to do for that.”

Adjusting the crystal bowl so that the light coming down from the kitchen ceiling reflected off its textured surface and glimmered attractively, the young mother pivoted to discard the clementine bag in the trash and return both the scissors and the junk to their rightful place. Scooting the drawer’s contents back into their nest of squalor, one particular yellow sticky-note caught her eye. Written in Steve’s horrendous scrawl in harsh blue ink was the name “Donna,” and written underneath the name was a phone number.

“Donna?” she thought “Well, that’s silly. Who’s Donna?” Suddenly, she felt a deep wave of pain, grabbed the edge of the counter, and lost herself in a fit of quick and anxious breathing. “That’s not right” she repeated to herself a few times. She clutched the countertop tighter, huffing a contrived laugh, attempting to recall some statistic. She couldn’t recall either statistic. She couldn’t recall anything.

“Oh no,” she whispered under her breath, realizing that it was all happening. “Who the hell is Donna?”

The latch of the front door clicked, and Steve walked in, lingering in the doorway just long enough to invite along the frigid draft.

“Honey? Did you say something?” he beckoned, expecting this Thursday evening to unfold like any Thursday evening would until he noticed, first, his junk drawer flung open and casting a rectangular shadow on the white tiled kitchen floor and, next, his wife grasping the counter with her left hand and supporting the weight of his child with her right.

“I can’t believe this is happening" she said quietly, her gaze locked on the floor.

“You can’t believe what is happening?”

Christmas and needles and snowfall and white walls and a car ride and a thin blue gown and a pile of shit on the counter to come home to and ice chips and Donna. She looked up from the floor, blinking away the fear and meeting his worried stare.

Slipping into the peacoat she had draped over the barstool next to the island just thirty minutes before, she strode to the door that Steve hadn’t yet locked behind him.

“It’s time to go now.” She said this with temperate certainty, plucking a clementine from the crystal bowl and stowing it safely in her pocket as she walked out the door and past her husband without looking back.