Werner Low // Fiction

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The Empty Drawer

     She wasn't snooping. She was just putting away his socks. Because that was their new deal. Now that she was at home, with the baby, she’d do the household chores. But no ironing.

     Folding the still warm laundry, sunlight dappling the leaves outside their bedroom window, she felt ridiculously domestic. But also more at peace than she could remember. Until she opened the top drawer of his dresser, and her head exploded. Because the drawer was empty. Unbelievably empty. No socks, no flashlight, no plastic tray of buttons, collar stays and foreign coins. No old theatre programs. No nothing. Just the pale wood of the empty bottom.

     He was leaving, as she’d always known he would. He’d packed in the night, and when she’d seen him that morning at breakfast, he was already on his way. She knew it couldn’t be. But might. If the next drawer down was also empty.

     As her fingers gripped the pulls of the second drawer her heart pounded with dread. But there was also, interwoven, a vibrancy. And when she tugged the second drawer open and saw that it was still stuffed with clothes, it wasn't only relief that she felt. Or disappointment, either. It was more a postponement.

     She took a breath to steady herself, then analyzed what he’d done, which was to divide the middle drawer into two unequal compartments. His balled socks were now in the smaller section – on the left – and the boxers and undershirts were on the right, folded, to make more efficient use of the space. The black flashlight, which had always reminded her of a gun, was under the socks. The plastic tray with the buttons, collar stays and foreign coins – it took her a while to find this – was in the drawer of the night table on his side of the bed. The old theatre programs, and a few other items, were in the trash.

     When she asked him about it that night he said he’d been feeling that things were getting too cluttered. “You know,” he said, shaking his head, “there must be a hundred drawers all over this house and every one’s jammed. That top drawer in particular was beginning to collect all sorts of junk. Whenever I didn’t know what to do with something I’d just pop it in there, and it was just getting to be a mess, you know.”

     She waited for him to go on. To say – in so many words – that his life was also too full. As hers was, perhaps, too empty now.

     “Anyway,” he said, chuckling, “I had this silly idea that as long as I had at least one completely empty drawer, it would mean that things weren't totally out of control. So I decided to make that top drawer my ‘sanity drawer.’ As long as that drawer’s empty, then I still have room, you know, and I’m OK.”

     She did know what he meant. But there was also something about it that sounded wrong. Or familiar, in a troubling way.

     It came to her a day later.

     “Your thing with the top drawer,” she said, as he was putting the video they’d just watched back in its case. “I figured out what bothers me. It’s that it reminds me of ‘Wednesdays Without.’ Remember?”

     Five or six years ago, in the early days of their relationship, when they’d just begun to see each other every night, he’d come up with the idea of “Wednesdays Without” – one day of the week when they wouldn’t see each other, or even talk on the phone. “A little island in the middle of the week,” he’d called it.

     Of course it wasn’t long before Wednesdays Without were washed away. They’d joked about that for a while, then forgot about it, but now, this thing with the top drawer felt similar. She wondered if something else was going on with him.

     Over the next few weeks she kept an eye out for other signals – new clothes, a blossoming interest in fine wines, changes in his schedule, whatever. But she spotted nothing amiss. If anything, he seemed calmer, more present, and increasingly comfortable in his new role as a father. She reminded herself that he truly was under a lot of pressure these days, and if a silly little thing like the top drawer helped him, then what was the harm.

     It took her six months to accept this and even then, instead of letting go of her fear, the best she could do was to flip it. Now, she found the empty drawer as comforting as it had been troubling. When the baby was asleep, before lying down for a nap herself, she’d steal a peek at the empty top drawer, and when she found it empty she’d lie down with a smile, as secure as if he was resting beside her. But even as she half-slept, keeping one ear open for the baby, the impossibility of such emptiness continuing forever, defying the mad on-rush of the world, brought with it the fear she’d always had, and always would need.

– end –

Werner Low’s short stories have appeared in a dozen publications, including The Journal (of Ohio State University), Lily Literary Review, The Literary Review (of Trinity College, Hartford), The Pedestal Magazine, Piedmont Literary Review, Pinehurst Journal, Slow Trains, The Square Table, and Void Magazine. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and can be reached at WALow3 at Comcast dot com.

Date of Publication: 02 May 2007