Corrections
I keep a grocery list on a little magnetic notepad on the side of my fridge. Everyone has one of these. You run out of something, you write it down, and on Saturday you tear off the sheet and take it to the store. It is the most boring object in my apartment, and I want you to understand that I am a boring person who lives alone and has no history of anything.
The first one was batteries (D).
I didn’t own anything that took D batteries. I stood there with my coffee looking at it, and it was my handwriting. Not like my handwriting. Mine. The lazy loop on the b, the way I never close the top of an a. I figured I’d written it half asleep, some note about a flashlight I’d meant to buy after the last storm, and on Saturday I bought a pack because it was on the list and that’s what lists are for.
On Tuesday the power went out across the whole east side for nineteen hours. I found the old camping lantern in the hall closet, the one I’d forgotten I had. It took four D batteries.
After that I paid attention.
gauze. tape. That was a Thursday. Sunday I put my hand through a pane of the back door trying to unstick it, and I sat on the kitchen floor holding my wrapped palm and laughing a little, the way you do when you’re scared and can’t say why.
salt (lots). The first ice storm of the year. My front steps were glass.
call Mom. I hadn’t spoken to her in six weeks. I called. She’d had a fall that morning and hadn’t wanted to bother anyone. She was fine. She was fine because I called.
I want to tell you I was frightened, and I was, but mostly what I felt was looked after. I’ve been on my own a long time. There’s a particular loneliness in being the only person who will ever notice that you’re out of milk. And here was someone noticing. Someone who knew things before they happened and wrote them down for me in my own hand, quietly, the way you’d leave a note for someone you loved.
I started saying good night to the fridge. I’m aware of how that sounds.
The first one that was wrong was coffee (the dark kind he likes).
I drink the light roast. There is no he. I stood in the kitchen for a long time with that one. Then I decided it was a mistake, the way any list has mistakes, and I tore it off and threw it away.
The next morning it was back. Same words. Same pen pressure. Underlined.
second toothbrush.
bigger towels.
razor blades. not the pink ones.
I stopped buying from the list. I’d tear off the page and not take it with me, and walk the aisles from memory, and come home with exactly what I wanted and nothing else, and feel ridiculous and stubborn and very alone.
The notepad didn’t like that. It started crossing things out.
Not the new items. Mine. I’d write yogurt and the next morning it would have a single neat line through it. Oranges, struck. Shampoo, struck. The things I’d always bought for myself, the small furniture of my life, struck off one by one in steady blue ballpoint, and in the margins, the other list kept growing. Ashtray. Extension cord. Heavy-duty trash bags. There is no one in my building who smokes.
I took the notepad off the fridge and put it in a drawer. In the morning the list was on the back of my electric bill, which had been on the counter. I put the bill in the trash. In the morning it was on a receipt in my coat pocket. In the morning it was on the inside of my wrist, very small, the way you’d write a phone number in a bar.
don’t bother with anything else. he moves in Thursday.
It’s Thursday.
I’ve been awake since four. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with every piece of paper in the apartment in a pile in front of me, because I thought if I could see them all at once I might understand what it wants, and I think now I do.
It isn’t a list of things to buy. It never was. It’s a list of corrections. Of what this apartment needs to look like for whoever is coming. And it’s very nearly done. The batteries and the salt and the call to my mother were never about me at all. They were about keeping the place in good order. Keeping the tenant from breaking before the new one arrived.
The last sheet is the original notepad page, the one from the drawer. My oldest items are all crossed through. Milk. Bread. Dish soap. Stamps. At the very bottom there’s one more line that I didn’t write, and it’s been crossed out already, in the same steady blue.
It’s my name.
Under it, in handwriting that is almost mine, but straighter, and pressed so hard it has torn the paper, is a single word.
Done.
Behind me, I can hear someone in the kitchen putting the groceries away.
I live alone. I don’t remember going shopping. And whoever it is knows exactly where everything goes.