I turn the key in the lock and gaze distractedly through the lowest pane of the back door window. A slight but unaccustomed disorder in the dining room. Chairs at an oblique angle to the table, the rug somewhat crooked. Now that I’ve walked in, why are the winter draft rolls in the middle of the room? The hall door to the upstairs unaccountably open? No one seems to be here, but I feel a sense of someone having rushed by rapidly. I call out my son’s name questioningly---the only other person with a house key and who might enter at any time. Maybe an emergency search for tools or auto parts still socked away in attic and garage. And then it hits me; someone else has been in my house.
I stare hypnotized at details not yet part of a picture, like a gawker at a highway accident. Treading carefully through my own house as if not to disturb it more, I move from the dining room, through the hall to the bedroom. Why are the dresser drawers open, underwear and socks rising like yeasty bread dough overflowing the sides of a baking pan. Of course: this is where ladies’ loot might be tucked into little private places, or nestled in sateen-lined boxes with lids that snap shut, or laid out in the efficient squares and rectangles of the burgundy faux felt compartments that organize everything.
On top of the mahogany dresser sits the pottery dish where the jewelry most a part of me was dropped each night---empty. Pearl earrings received at college graduation, my dad’s signet ring, a watch fob from my grandfather made into a pendant. What else had been there just hours ago? Each piece was bound to a family story. Everything was old, laden with memories. Only this morning everything had been tangled in the dish, linking my life to those now dead but daily remembered.
I reach out but can’t touch the disarray, its surfaces tender like a wound. I retrace my steps and exit, but this time through the front door. I need to tell someone that my things are gone, grabbed in haste by someone who did not know them. I stride with purpose across the street, ring my neighbor’s bell, and blurt out my distress. She and her daughter are more alarmed; could someone still be in the house? We call the police there and then return to my house. A kind of post mortem begins, though the body is gone.
The next morning I sit at the dining room table, trying to list the missing items, to describe their shapes, name their materials, and estimate their ages. Their identities derive from their history. In my grandfather’s time, gentlemen wore stick pins and had monogrammed watch fobs; they carried small penknives, engraved with their initials, relatively useless but indicative of elegance. One stickpin had been made into a ring for my mother and a watch fob had been mounted as a pendant. New sorrows emerge as lost pieces come to mind that I hadn’t remembered initially.
Unlike princes and warriors of the ancient world, we are not buried with our treasure; it is handed down. My grandmother and mother would give me some small piece for an important birthday, a coming of age gift. Closing the tale of a ring or pin I admired, they would say, “You may have this when you are older.” And so it was that the story melded to the object. A ring or a bracelet marked the passage from childhood, to adolescence, to graduation, to marriage. Small pieces just lay in the drawer, waiting perhaps for another young girl to grow into them.
The household insurance did not cover these losses; I had not lost enough, it seemed. The agent needed valuations in the thousands. The city police station sergeant, impatient and patronizing, had much more serious, life and death issues in his office distant from the front desk. I should just leave my list of items with the somnolent officer behind the cage. In any case, the goods were probably long since out of the area, on their way to Detroit. Pawnshops might help---although they aren’t supposed to deal with hot goods--- but I could take my list around to them.
Steeled by loss, I set off for the local pawnshops, remembering their locations out of disdain and now fearful in their parking lots. Weaving through dusty tunnels of tools and tvs at the entrance, I make my way to the back and the jewelry counter. The clerks vary. One takes my list to the backroom, perhaps smokes a cigarette and returns: “no descriptions match.” Another, more conversational, confides that he has so much jewelry in the back safe that every three weeks some of the stuff is just shipped off to be melted down. Once chosen with care, engraved, presented as gifts marking important occasions, my family jewelry might return eventually to its original state. A fate more appalling than theft. Sold at market price, re-cast into ingots, my family jewelry could simply revert to its elemental state and re-join the world supply of precious metal.
A neighbor tried to console me with urban lore. Every once in a while, a local drug bust turns up a cache of stolen jewelry. The stuff never makes it to pawn at all. Dealers hoard it, give it to favored women; the goods are traded internally. Just hang in and wait.
It’s been several years now since the break in. From time to time, I stop in at the pawn shops in town, following clerks’ advice that the stock in the cases changes every few months. I’ m almost a regular. Now comfortable, I slowly walk the cases. Bending over the glass, I see bracelets and necklaces, mostly gold, their designs clichéd and rarely distinctive; perhaps their lack of originality makes them easy to move on the pawn market. Twelve to fourteen feet of wedding ring sets arrayed in rows, the rank and file of failure. Engagement rings with sad, small stones; the purchaser could afford little, but wanted to be proper. The recipient was thrilled at the new stage of life this tiny diamond signified. But now through disappointment or desperation it’s in pawn along with the wedding band. Sadder stories than my own.
Some of my losses I can still visualize quite clearly, their color, engraving, detailed filigree, or how a ring felt on my finger. Thinking of the objects fondly, I wish that I could tell their stories to the new possessors---it’s the stories that can still pierce my chest. Other losses I’ve forgotten. No longer a young girl anticipating the occasions of adult life that they marked, I wait to pass down what is left. With their stories, of course; that’s the most important part.
See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/
See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/
