A tightly woven story that uses crisp details to capture the universal emotion of loss.
I don't know what to do with the mink stole. It's in my closet, bunched on the shelf across from my bed. Because I tend to leave my closet door open, I see it when I go to sleep and when I wake up — a brown clump of tattered fur, formerly a symbol of status and elegance, a daily reminder of my mother.
I brought it to the auction house with the 20 or so boxes that contained my parents' estate. I pulled back the hefty bag I'd thrown over the hanger. "It's a little ratty," I said to the plump man behind the desk. I pointed out the tears, the places where the threads had broken. He moved his eyes but nothing else. "I should have sewn it up first," I laughed, embarrassed. "We don't take ratty," the man said in his British accent, trying to join my jestful tone. I stared back at him. His smile disappeared. "No one will buy it," he said. "Take it back with you."
He let me leave everything else — the boxes of crystal vases and bowls, the gold-rimmed china we used at every holiday, the trinkets from my parents' travels. Everything that made up the nearly 50 years of my parents' lives together. In boxes and trash bags, to be sold off. "You'll get a check in the mail," the man said lightly.
I stumbled back to my car, the mink stole clinging to my wrist by the hanger.
When I got home, I put the stole on the rocking chair in my living room. "What am I going to do with this?" I asked my dog plaintively. It sat there in a brown heap, like the dead animal it was, for several days.
But one afternoon in my absence, my dog pulled it off the chair. Not a hunting dog, she didn't tear it to shreds as I thought she might. Instead she licked it, slicked the fur down flat the way she does to her haunches when she's bored. The fur clumped into sharp-looking spikes. "Good job!" I said to my dog, happy for the massacre.
But then I realized — I could no longer give it away.
My mother had tried to give me her furs several times. My excuse was consistent. "I don't wear fur," I said with the tone of an activist. If this wasn't true before, it became true at the point of first refusal and will be true for the rest of my life. I never lied to my mother.
In one of the many notebooks I came across as I prepared my parents' house for sale, I found an old newspaper clipping. My mother, a very young woman, was modeling a mink stole. Was it this one? She held her head high and slightly cocked, her eyes looking down with dramatic distain, staring at the middle distance. "Fur Sale. Three Days Only!" the ad said.
I was reminded of what was most important to my mother, what mattered more than anything or anyone else — her looks. With her flowing chestnut hair, deliberate cheekbones, and hard expression, she exemplified the phrase devil-may-care. She had no education; instead she had beauty, studied elegance, and job as a model in the 1940's. She strutted the latest in high style on New York runways for photographers and an audience.
And then she got married, and had two children — my brother and me. Taking care of us became her job. She grew more resentful, more anxious, and more drunk with each passing year. But her love for elegance, for silks and furs never changed.
Once a week, she'd go out with my father. She'd spend hours putting on silk slips, fashionable dresses, jewelry, and a spritz too much of expensive perfume. In cooler weather, she topped it all off with a fur.
She'd look down at me, chin high and one eyebrow raised, and ask, "How do I look?"
"Great," I'd say. It was always true.
As an adult, I turned down her furs the way I turned down everything she offered me. "You can have it," she said every time I complimented her on a new dress. "Oh no, that's nice of you, but it wouldn't look good on me," I said. "Oh nonsense! Take it home!" she'd say, exhaling stale breath and gin, her hand trembling as she thrust it at me. Her scarves, her belts, her jewelry, her perfume. "No, no, really thanks, but no." I said.
In my 20's my tone was angry. In my 30's, I became kinder. After all, she wasn't well. Now, in my 40's, she is dead.
So I look at the stole every morning and every night — torn and ratty, slicked by dog saliva, too decrepit to give away.
And I feel my mother's presence.
Fay Robinson is a writer and poet living in the Chicago area. She has published poems in magazines such as Bark and Sensations Literary Magazine. She is also the author of several children's books.