Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Thomas said, “It’s getting on toward eleven, you two. Maybe we should be setting out for the airport.”

“Not to change the subject or anything,” Daphne told him.

He pretended he hadn’t heard. They all stood up, and he said, “Then driving back, you and Grandpa can drop me at the train station. I’ll just get my things together. You want me to put my sheets in the hamper, Daph?”

“Are you serious?” Daphne asked. “Those sheets are good for another month yet.”

Agatha rolled her eyes and said, “Charming.”

“You have no right to talk if you’re not here to do the laundry,” Daphne told her.

“Which reminds me,” Agatha said. She stopped short in the dining room, where their grandfather was collecting his cards. “About the linen closet and such—”

“Don’t give it a thought,” Daphne said. “Just go off scot-free to the other side of the continent.”

“No, but I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of cleaning service that could sort this place out for us? Not just clean it but organize it, and I could pay.”

“There’s the Clutter Counselor,” Daphne said.

Stuart laughed. Agatha said, “The what?”

“Rita the Clutter Counselor. She lives with this guy I know, Nick Bascomb. Did you ever meet Nick? And she makes her living sorting other people’s households and putting them in order.”

“Hire her,” Agatha said.

“I don’t know how much she charges, though.”

“Hire her anyway. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

“What?” their grandfather spoke up suddenly. “You’d let an outsider go through our closets?”

“It’s either that or marry Ian off quick to that Clara person,” Agatha told him.

“I’ll call Rita this evening,” Daphne said.

Rita diCarlo was close to six feet tall — a rangy, sauntering woman in her late twenties with long black hair so frizzy that the braid hanging down her back seemed not so much plaited as clotted. She’d been living with Nick Bascomb for a couple of years now, but Daphne hadn’t really got to know her till just last summer when a bunch of them went together to a rock concert at RFK Stadium. They’d had bleacher tickets that didn’t allow them on the field, where all the action was; but Rita, bold as brass, strode down to the field anyway. When an usher tried to stop her she held up her ticket stub and strode on. The usher considered a while and then spun around and called, “Hey! That wasn’t a field ticket!” By then, though, she was lost in the crowd. Daphne hadn’t seen much of her since, but she always remembered that incident — the dash and swagger of it. She thought Rita was entirely capable of yanking their house into shape.

On the phone Rita said she could fit the Bedloes into that coming week, so she dropped by Monday after work to “case the joint,” as she put it. Wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket, black jeans, and heavy leather riding boots, she ambled about throwing open cupboards and peering into drawers. She surveyed the basement impassively. She seemed unfazed by the smell in the linen closet. She did not once ask, as Daphne had feared, “What in hell has hit here?” She poked her head into Doug’s bedroom and, finding him seated empty-handed in his rocker, merely said, “Hmm,” and withdrew. This was tactful of her, of course, but Doug’s room had urgent need of her services; so Daphne said, “Maybe after Grandpa’s gone downstairs …”

“I got the general idea,” Rita told her.

“That’s where Grandma’s closet is and so—”

“Sure. Clothes and stuff. Hatboxes.”

“Right.”

“I got it.”

She climbed the wooden steps to the attic, which had a stuffy, cloistered feeling now that it was no longer in regular use. She bent to look into the storeroom under the eaves. When she plucked one of Bee’s letters from a cardboard carton, Daphne felt a pang. “I guess these … personal things you’ll leave to us,” she said, but Rita said, “Not if you want this done right.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, I don’t read your mail. Or only enough to classify it. Stuff like this, for instance: too recent to have historical interest, no postage stamps of value, and the return address is a woman’s so we know it’s not your grandparents’ love letters. I’d say ditch them.”

“Ditch them?”

Rita turned to look at her. Her face was tanned and square-jawed; her heavy black eyebrows were slightly raised.

“But suppose they told us what young women used to think about,” Daphne said. “Politics, or feminism, or things like that.”

Rita shook a piece of ivory stationery out of the envelope. Without bothering to unfold it, she read off the phrases that showed themselves: “… tea at Mrs.… wore my new flowered … self belt with covered buckle … ”

“Well,” Daphne murmured.

“Ditch them,” Rita told her.

They went back downstairs. Daphne felt like a little fairy person following Rita’s clopping boots. “What I do,” Rita said, “is sort everything into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Query. I make it a practice to query as little as possible. Everything we keep I organize, and what’s discarded I haul away; I’ve got my own truck and two guys to help tote. I charge by the hour, but I generally know ahead of time how long a job will run me. This place, for instance — well, I’ll need to sit down and figure it out, but offhand I’d say if I start tomorrow morning, I could be done late Thursday.”

“Thursday! That’s just three days!”

“Or four at the most. It’s a fairly straightforward house, compared to some I’ve seen.”

They were back in the kitchen now. She opened one of the cabinets and gazed meditatively at a collection of empty peanut butter jars.

“It doesn’t look so straightforward to me, ” Daphne told her.

“Well, naturally. That’s because you live here. You feel guilty getting rid of things. This one old lady I had, she could never throw out a gift. A drawing her son made in nursery school — and that son was sixty years old! A seashell her girlfriend brought from Miami in nineteen twenty—‘I just feel I’d be throwing the person out,’ she told me. So what I did was, I didn’t let her know. Well, of course she knew in a way. What did she suppose was in all those garbage bags? But she never asked, and I never said, and everyone was happy.”

She slammed the cabinet door shut. “I’ve seen houses so full you couldn’t walk through them. I’ve seen closets totally lost — I mean crammed to the gills and closed off, with new stuff piled in front of them so you didn’t know they existed.”

“Your own apartment must be neat as a pin,” Daphne said.

“Not really,” Rita told her. “That Nick saves everything. I would end up with a pack rat!” She laughed. She hooked a kitchen chair with the toe of her boot, pulled it out from the table, and sat down. “Now,” she said, drawing a pencil and a note pad from her breast pocket. The pencil was roughly the size of a cartridge. She licked its tip and started writing. “Six rooms plus basement plus finished attic. Your attic’s in pretty good shape, but that basement …”

Ian appeared at the back door, lugging a large cardboard box. “Open up!” he called through the glass, and when Daphne obeyed he practically fell inside. Whatever he was carrying must weigh a ton. “Genuine ceramic tiles,” he told Daphne, setting the box on the floor. “We’re replacing an antique mantel at a house in Fells Point and these were just being thrown out, so—”

“Will you be putting them to use within the next ten days?” Rita asked.

He straightened and said, “Pardon?”

“Ian, this is Rita diCarlo,” Daphne said. “My uncle Ian. Rita’s here to organize us.”