I set the box of our unwanted crap on the sidewalk like bait and wait to see who will take them. Sunglasses, a Turkish coffee pot, retro salt and pepper shakers, some white IKEA cereal bowls, to name a sampling.
I thought the nesting stage of pregnancy would look like a diaper commercial, gazing down at my belly in a muted, sparsely decorated nursery. But instead it’s been more manic: scrubbing mold from the laundry machine, eliminating finger smudges from the doors, and especially, ousting any extraneous stuff. Luckily, you can put anything on the sidewalk in Brooklyn and it will disappear like magic. Usually, this happens mysteriously when I’m preoccupied elsewhere, but this time if I had a large enough second box, I might have rigged it with a pole and a rope so that I could catch an interesting neighbor. I set myself up on my birthing ball, taking a break from decluttering, to observe at the window. Given a moment to feel nostalgic, I hope to see a young couple maybe, like Henry and I were eleven years ago when we moved into our first New York City apartment.
The first item that we procured together that meant anything to us was a record player sitting on the sidewalk outside our new building. It had a pinup girl sticker on it and a handwritten sign that read: works fine, much loved, we’ve just upgraded.
The record player felt like treasure, like ours, not just a necessity like the things we picked up on our first emotionally charged trip to IKEA. We thought it would be fun to be a little stoned for the excursion, but it only added paranoia to the initial overwhelm of the labyrinthine warehouse. The staged living rooms forced us to consider: who were we as an adult couple, not just two college kids sleeping on each other’s hand-me-down mattresses? Were we eclectic, Scandinavian, mid-century modern? We shared Swedish meatballs and an existential crisis in the rug section, ending up with a Southwestern themed rug, because Colorado and the school we left behind for the real world was what we had together then. We had his stuff and my stuff and our memories of college, but we’d scarcely begun to meld into the partners we are today.
In college our vastly different backgrounds hardly mattered, because who would have thought fifteen years after he bought me beer with his fake ID we would be starting a family together. I came from the Colorado Springs public-school system and a single income household, my mom having raised me on her own after my dad died when I was fifteen. Henry grew up in a big, brick house at the end of a long New England driveway and attended a boarding school where last names meant something other than a vague understanding of your heritage.
Our small liberal college was a pseudo-hippie haven where I scarcely understood everyone was pretending in just the right way to equalize us. Taken out of the context of our homes, and the things our parents filled them with, and put into the same dorm accommodations, there were no haves and have-nots. There were just a bunch of kids, naked aside from their clothes. The coastal elite kids paying their full tuition wore tattered t-shirts they bought ironically at the Goodwill, trying out a life committed to the earth and social justice, and the Colorado loan and scholarship girls who hated high school like me enjoyed their new role in a made up movie at “The Harvard of the West” where they could be anything they wanted to be. My meal plan card, five odd jobs, tuition remission (thank you for working at my college, Mom), and loan money allowed me to join on the same trips as my peers, go to the same concerts. It was easy to wear the same clothes. I’d been buying secondhand for years.
That’s all to say, I didn’t know where Henry’s family came from when he first approached me. All I knew was that I liked his kind, green eyes, his funky maritime ball cap, his Volvo t-shirt, and yes, his fake ID. That night, when I lost my wallet in the chaos of moving into college, he bought me a pack of cigarettes. When he lit one for me, and I said I’d get him back some other time, there was something conspiratorial, unfinished, or maybe just-beginning about the exchange, like we knew it was not the last time we’d walk to the corner store together.
It wasn’t love at first sight, but maybe partnership. It wasn’t just that I had the car for liquor store runs and he had the ID. In conversation, I brought the emotional intelligence to talk about the past; he brought a present, positive outlook. On vacation, I brought the travel itinerary; he brought spontaneity and confidence. Over and over again the team of us prevailed, and I felt safe in the seesaw of our providing for one another even in a time where we required so little.
One morning after some time apart on school break, we lay, two gangly blades, on his dorm-sized twin bed as he showed me photos of his grandfather’s birthday party. Because of the heavy, ornate rugs, the oil paintings on the walls, I mistook his childhood home for a museum, and he began filling me in on his upbringing from there. Despite the alienness of the things in his parent’s house, on dates we managed to act out equality. He’d buy dinner, and I’d buy coffee. Of course, I noticed his nicer gear on ski trips, started to become suspicious and teasing of the holes in his t-shirts, but I can honestly say I never resented him. Maybe it’s his generous nature or humble needs, but mostly I think it was that we were just two kids having fun, falling in love, living in the bubble of college. What each of us had was irrelevant on campus because it was only make-believe adulthood. The version of myself in a lifelong partnership felt so far into the future, she seemed like someone else.
When we first reached NYC we both continued living as the people we were in Colorado, me supporting myself with several jobs at once (publishing intern, cocktail waitress, teashop clerk, freelance writer) and a $40 weekend budget for frivolity, and him with a favorable bank account to support his first internship, but now we were “adulting” side by side.
We’d driven our meager possessions across the country in a hitch-on U-Haul—the mattress I had stolen from my junior year dorm room, the desk from Henry’s childhood bedroom, the dresser from mine, a compact dining set handed down from his sister. Our couch, a futon we found in the last section of the Red Hook IKEA, was our first big purchase. We were proud of its dual function, the fact that we sprung for the armrest pillows. So proud we ignored its nubby texture, the ass-numbing structural bar, and the chemical factory smell that emanated from it for weeks. We were pleased by what we could individually score for our home and took care to split the cost of all else we needed.
He thought it more logical for him to pay a larger portion of our shared costs, but at first, I refused. He resorted to buying me gifts for arbitrary occasions to make up for the financial gap between us—gifts I sheepishly accepted.
When I began going on interviews for jobs in the publishing industry, I lamented my shabby white and pink ski jacket. Though we went to Nordstrom because he needed t-shirts, he ended up buying me a peacoat that cost more than any winter coat I’d ever owned before. I loved the coat, but felt a sting in my cheeks at the checkout counter already wearing it, like a child with her parent. Later that year, on a trip to Thailand with friends, I called Henry from Bangkok crying when my computer crashed. I hadn’t budgeted well for the trip and didn’t know how long it would be until I could afford a new one. When I came home, there was a new laptop on the desk. It cost more than my first car, the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased myself. That night, I tired him out with how many times I insisted it was too much. Of course, a writer in need, I kept it.
Accepting his picking up the bill became a tougher pill to swallow in New York, where the consequences of having less money are more serious. No longer could I dip into my loan money, swipe my meal card, or walk to my mom’s office on campus for a couple twenties. When I thought too much about the alternate universe I would be living in if it weren’t for Henry, I started to convince myself I didn’t deserve the one with him in it.
In the ways that I could, we kept things separate. Everything I owned was once so precious to me, as if my very self was held in the talismans of our everyday things. I saw to it that everything was divided. The grocery bill, the medicine cabinet, the dresser drawers. We even had individual toothpaste.
This insistence on separation was a point of pride for me, even, a desperate attempt to cling to the idea of being a single entity. It was a little bit about feminism, a little bit about the shame of having less, and a lot about being twenty-two and in the “real world” for the very first time, unwilling to hitch my wagon to anyone’s horse even if it was Henry’s.
When he announced one day in that first NYC year that we were invited to brunch at his coworker and his wife’s house, I recoiled, all but refused, as if matrimony was contagious. “We can’t have married friends,” I rebuked. He, of course, found this objection unhinged, and we attended, despite my fears.
I still remember their apartment. How cozy it was. How easily they worked together in their small kitchen, him handing her a champagne flute from a tall shelf, her reaching around his waist to grab a tea towel. I found I was not disgusted by their married life, but awed by, charmed, and a little scared of their enmeshment. Was it so different than ours? The way he lifted the tall bike from the rack for me. The way I thoughtfully organized our kitchen utensils.
One Thursday night I came home emptyhanded from the drugstore, after I realized a tube of toothpaste cost eight dollars in NYC and my direct deposit wouldn’t hit until midnight. Henry passed his across the sink with an earnest smile that said, “Let me share with you in this small way.” He looked just like the kid who bought me cigarettes when we first met. Maybe because he was, I realized. And so why was this so different? Couldn’t I still accept being his partner, even if it might last longer than a school year? Even if, especially if, it might just last forever? My pride was chinked, but we never went back to separate tubes, and our lives continued to fuse from there.
Eventually, I got my footing and a better paying job and we moved into a new apartment where we split the rent and our shared credit card bill according to our income. When we upgraded from the fifteen-dollar IKEA coffee table, we watched a family of five happily haul it away before we could even make it halfway down the block. We smiled, holding hands, hoping it would feel like theirs, like the record player had for us when we needed it.
It once felt like a failure and a loss of self for Henry to suggest we share toothpaste. Now, watching our things get picked from the sidewalk I can’t remember where half of them came from. Whether I bought them or he did. Because now all of it is ours, the stepping stones and building blocks of our shared life.
The futon, the rug—all the IKEA items have been rehomed now, except that set of scratched white bowls still sitting at the bottom of the sidewalk box. Now a man in his early 20’s is trying on a pair of sunglasses Henry wore to a disco-themed birthday party and I wore to a Phish concert, though neither of us could tell you where they first came from. The man’s boyfriend snaps a picture and they assess the image on his iPhone to appraise if this treasure is now their own. They walk away arm in arm with the sunglasses and a quirky sign featuring an elephant balancing a ball on his trunk and the words “Welcome to the Circus.”
We’d lived together in NYC for three years when Henry proposed. We were on a hike in the Catskills. Bug eaten and breathless, he dropped to a knee in front of a waterfall, his face pleasantly dewed, and offered me a ring, as if to say, this is the last thing that will be only yours, the rest we’ll share.
Now, I’m overwhelmed by the comfort of our things. I’d imagined more calm and serene moments like this while pregnant, looking out the window, thinking. I thought I’d paint for the baby, maybe take up needlepoint or crocheting. We’d talk about the baby, define our family values, discuss what makes a good parent.
But mostly, like our other leaps in life, it’s been about stuff. What stuff was dangerous? Taking up too much space? Ready for an upgrade? What stuff do we need to parent? What does the baby need? How many pajamas, booties, winter hats? When we bought the baby’s first outfit together, a strawberry-patterned romper from the original Liberty of London department store, our baby felt more real than when we talked about her. Now, the more our surroundings fill with things for her, the more I can feel her here already. Looking around the home we are preparing for our baby, a home that looks so much like ours, like his and mine, I wonder what it means to build a life with another?
As we bring in new things and ship the old out, I am beginning to think when it comes to partnership, despite its lack of romance, maybe it is the stuff that binds us. Brick by brick. A set of towels. A toothbrush holder. A poster you both like. A souvenir. After all, even when one of us dies and we part with each other we won’t part with each other’s old teddy bears, crumpled receipts, photos, magnets, blue light glasses, resin-stained bongs, baseball caps, or mysterious keys.
When two become one is when the majority of your objects hold both of your memories, when you have enough stuff to haul a load to the sidewalk, when you don’t remember whose tapestry that man is walking off with, whose singing bowl that couple is trying out, who first provided the old silverware divider no one seems to want. To have and to hold is your shoes in my hallway, my underwear in your hamper, until what’s mine is truly yours and yours is truly mine.
