Selling My Mother's Dresses

I moved from Chicago to Brooklyn in July of 2004, just in time to watch my mother die. That wasn't why I moved back. She was supposed to be getting better; the chemo was working. I came because I'd rented an apartment with Jay, this cute guy I'd started dating, who was originally from New York too. But a week after pulling up in a U-Haul, I found myself cleaning out my childhood home with my siblings. Our parents were both gone now; anything that we couldn't take with us had to fit in a 20-cubic-yard Dumpster.

I could barely squeeze the little I saved into the one-bedroom Jay and I shared. I didn't even try to unpack the boxes of my parents' books, the bags of my mom's dresses. Jay (who held me up at the funeral and painted our place all my favorite colors and quickly proved to be much more than just a cute guy) had to shimmy sideways to get between my father's easy chair and my mother's broken desk. I was claustrophobic from the mountains of photos and misplaced knickknacks, and yet I found myself drawn to someone else's castoffs.
We hadn't lived there more than a month and already I was claustrophobic from the mountains of photos and misplaced knickknacks. So it made no sense when, out walking one Saturday later that summer, something caught my eye — a pale green scrap of fabric — and suddenly I was steering Jay toward someone else's castoffs. My first stoop sale.
Laid out on the pavement was a batik scarf with dangling earrings, glass candle-holders, a small wooden jewelry box, books from Heidegger to Nora Ephron, a videotape of "Risky Business." Draped on the wrought iron fence behind: a tan knit shawl, a few pairs of jeans, a green cotton dress with buttons that looked like the inside of a seashell. I'd never owned anything green, but I had to feel those buttons between my fingers, the cotton so thin it was maybe two washes away from disintegration.