Moving Day

1.

The doorbell rings.  Stanley Peke moves to the big gracious front door slowly.  He finds himself moving everywhere a step slower these days.  He opens the big door, and there stand four huge men in crisp green uniforms, an immense white truck behind them.  

The day has come.  The day he has vaguely known would come since he and his wife moved in forty years before.      

The man in front with the clipboard smiles.  A short, broad man.  A short, broad grin.  “Good morning, Mr. Peke, sir.  Nice day for it, isn’t it?  Just give us your John Hancock right here, sir, and we’ll get started.”

Peke frowns a little.  “Thought it was tomorrow.”

The man with the clipboard frowns now too, looks down at the clipboard, shakes  his head gently, pleasantly, and looking back up at Peke says cheerily, “No, sir, it’s today.  The 24th.”  Even checking the clipboard one more time, just to be sure.   

Peke can tell, though, just beneath the crisp cheerfulness, what the man is thinking: that Peke, despite his hale, healthy appearance, must be a little forgetful.  A little senile.    

“Who is it?” his wife Rose calls out from the kitchen.

“The movers.  They’re here.”    

“I thought it was tomorrow,” Rose says, unsurely, coming around the corner, a frown of mild consternation that probably very much mirrors his own of a few a moments ago. 

Because I told you it was tomorrow, Peke thinks guiltily.  But he doesn’t say it.  Doesn’t want to further embarrass himself in front of the foreman.  At seventy-two, he is physically robust, the envy of his friends, but he finds that he occasionally forgets things.  Little things.  He’s noticed that he sometimes misplaces his keys, his wallet, but he’d just as soon not worry his wife.  It shows that what they’re doing - heading for the easy, breezy perfections of Santa Barbara - is the right thing.  That keeping track of the details of running a big home is - at their age - starting to get a little beyond them.  “Nope.  It’s today,” Peke informs his wife authoritatively, and turns and winks at the man with the clipboard.  

A day he’s known would come someday.  A day that’s been coming for forty years. 

Forty years, three children.  

Forty years of birthday parties in the den and on the back deck; graduation dinners and holiday feasts in the bright dining room with the facing bay windows; even a daughter’s wedding on the back lawn.  

Forty years of life’s triumphs, setbacks, and celebrations.  Family crises, and resolutions. 

Today is moving day.

  Peke watches.  Long retired now, a happy half-attentive homebody, like Voltaire’s Candide, cultivating his garden after his adventures in the world, he has nothing else to do now, really, but watch.  So he watches them move every piece.  Moving the pieces more carefully than they would if unobserved, he’s sure. 

Almost everything is already packed, of course.  The company sent a crew to do most of the packing a week before.  Obviously that’s how it’s done nowadays.  First a packing crew, then a moving crew.  The packing crew must go job to job, just packing.  Specialists.  More efficient.  The world has changed mightily in the forty years they’ve been in this house.  And for the last week he and Rose have been wandering among the cartons as if through a cardboard graveyard.  

The last few things, though, the big things, this crew packs.  He can see they know what they’re doing.  They take care of the big Empire mirror, swaddle it in protective layers, then build a protective wooden box around it.  Such care is amusing, considering how haphazardly the mirror came in here.  He and Rose got it at an estate sale.  They were kids, really.  (Or so it seemed now, from this perspective.)  They’d just bought the house.  Nobody wanted it, a big gaudy old thing like that.  Didn’t even have a price tag on it.  The people just wanted it taken away.  Rose mentioned to him recently that it’s worth a fortune today.  He’s sure she’s exaggerating, but he’s continually surprised at what old things fetch.  You watch that show on PBS, and it’s astonishing.   

He watches them pack the big oils.  When they lived in the Village before buying the house out here she purchased a few of these crude-looking canvases, saying it was good to support the artists.  He’d argued that he didn’t see any evidence that these exuberant flings and smudges of color qualified as art.  Abstract Impressionism, she’d exuberantly explained.  They had to put the big canvases in storage, because they were too big for the Village apartment, and he told her how foolish it seemed to buy things you put right into storage.  Now they own some canvases that by all rights should be in museums.  Museum people have come by over the years.  The damn things are still too big even for these walls, but they do draw their share of oohs and aahs at dinner parties, and you can’t have them in storage anymore, you’d have to have your head examined.

He watches them struggle, the four movers all together, with the Spanish armoire.  He remembers the island vacation where she picked it up.  He remembers arranging for a trailer to fetch it at Idlewild (before it was called Kennedy.)  Just a single, undistinguished terminal building at the end of a runway amid dank, swampy fields.  Arranging it from overseas - the phone connection in those days was impossible.  Shouting into the phone. Getting cut off a dozen times.  He remembers all that.      

They’re a good crew, he sees, working together, the foreman calling out the directions calmly and accurately, everybody’s eyes on doorways, on doorjambs.  He can see he’ll have nothing to complain about.  

He watches them struggling with the highboy.  Some famous maker in Philadelphia, he remembers.  There was debate and some research done, some years ago, about whether it belonged at one point to John Adams.  He forgot all about that until this moment, because he forgot all about the highboy.  It’s not the kind of thing you think about. 

The two younger movers, as they pass him, look over and smile pleasantly.  He can’t tell if that’s company training, or are they just decent men who see an old couple moving out after a lifetime.  Seems like the latter.  Seems sincere.  But he isn’t so naive about the world to think it might not merely be pasted-on smiles.   

Cartons of dishes.  Passed down from Rose’s mother, and her mother’s mother.  And removed much like this, no doubt, when they’d left their homes in Cambridge and on the Cape.  Into the smaller, squarish, paneled trucks of a couple of generations ago.

He watches the books.  Cartons and cartons of them.  The green uniformed men in a steady bibliographic parade, hefting and transporting the cartons like heavy cubic drums in front of them, or balanced on shoulders, one or two cartons at a time.  His favorites in there somewhere.  His leatherbound Montaigne.  His Dante  folio.        

And then the truly valuable: the family pictures, still on the walls.  Christmas in the Rain Forest.  April in Paris.  The five of them and their hosts atop the Great Wall.  In Moscow on business.  His life passing before his eyes, he smiles to himself.  His life passing orderly before his eyes, carried by green-uniformed men.

“Must feel weird,” says the black one, smiling, pleasant, stopping for moment, as if reading Peke’s thoughts.  Thoughts easy to read, after all, in an emptying house.  A house soon to have in it nothing but thoughts.       

“I’d rather watch the furniture carried out, than have the furniture watch me carried out,” Peke quips.  He only means it to amuse, to somewhat forgive his idle standing around.  But he sees the momentary alarm cross the face of the black mover.  He shrugs.  “It’s a day that comes for all of us.”  Sounding like too much grim wisdom, unfortunately.  Particularly with his mild foreign accent.  

“How long you lived here?” asks the black man, perhaps only politely, perhaps genuinely curious.  

“The whole time,” says Peke, smiling pleased at his own friendly wit, and the black man smiles back, appreciatively.   

  At the truck, the foreman with the clipboard is supervising the loading.  Surveying the space and the items, fitting things together ingeniously.  He looks up, smiles at Peke, looks back to his work.  You can see the man has a talent for it.  And has been lucky enough to discover that talent.  Peke has been lucky like that too.  It was at a desk, it was manufacturing, but the business grew, always steadily grew, and he was fortunate enough to be doing the right thing at the right time, and it gave him this house and this life.        

Peke watches the man fitting, refitting, thinking ahead.  A three-dimensional puzzle to solve.  It probably isn’t a bad living, thinks Peke.  He begins to compute in his head what the move is costing, times the number of people a crew might move in a week, minus the capital costs of the truck, minus the percentage you shared with the moving company, but still . . . you could raise a family decently.  You could do fine.   

He watches as they continue loading.  Every item having its moment in the  sunlight - in many cases for the first time in forty years - and then, in another moment, it is wrapped snugly in blankets like a precious child, and tucked into the truck.  He watches until he can’t watch anymore, and he wanders out back to the patio, sits and scans the Times, until at last they come and take the patio furniture too.  

Late in the afternoon, looking out the kitchen window, he sees the four of them pull from the truck and position two steel rails, and then, with exquisite care, coax the old Mercedes SL convertible up into the truck.  It feels almost ceremonial, because it is one of the final items.  

And then, they’re done.  The foreman with the clipboard rings the doorbell.  The other green uniformed men are arrayed behind him, just as when they arrived.   

“That’s it.  You just initial it here, saying no damage was done to the floors or doorways.”

“And you’ve got the exact address?”  Peke looking over his bifocals at them.  

“Yessir, we do,” crisply.  “And we stay in touch with our office as we go, so you can always check in with them.”  The broadly built foreman drums his index finger on the clipboard as he reads through the shipping manifest once more, double-checking the sheaf of papers himself.  

“Here’s your receipt,” he says, pulling the top yellow copy off and handing it to Peke. 

Following it with his hand for a handshake, and his quick efficient grin.  “See you at the other end,” he says with a smile.  His eyebrows lift.  “And uh, you’re all set for tonight?  With a place to stay?”  Peke detects the note of concern.  A sudden sliver of uncertainty.  That since Peke confused which day, maybe he has also confused or even neglected his own sleeping arrangements.  

Peke smiles.  “Staying right here,” he says.  The foreman looks puzzled, his concern deepening.  “On an old mattress.  With a candle.  Same way we spent the first night in this house.  With nothing but our name.”  And now the movers presumably know what is packed in the big carton at the back of the garage that Peke instructed them to leave there.  

The foreman with the clipboard nods, smiles with understanding.  “Wow,” he says.  He seems to be pausing, really thinking about it.  “Huh.  Well...enjoy it.”

* * *

Peke lights the candle.  He positions the mattress.  He builds a fire in the fireplace.  The mattress, the candle, the fire.  It was all they had when they moved in forty years before.  (The house much smaller, simpler then, before they added and renovated and transformed it into the stately grey shingle palace it is today.)  They will recreate that night.  Though not in all its details.  He smiles.  Not with all that youthful energy.  But in effect, in feel, it is the same.   

As he lies down next to her on the mattress, lowering himself carefully to the floor (the floor where he hasn’t been, it occurs to him, since playing with his infants years ago and since a back spasm one midnight a decade earlier), he can still remember so vividly how he lay down next to her on the mattress in this room in front of this fire forty years ago.  What a strange moment - time disappearing, time upended.  Forty years like a single day.  A finger snap.  A blink.  He is seventy-two, she seventy, and though they tease each other about the new pills available, their affection now takes the place of their sex, but their sex was vivid enough that the memory satisfies.  

They say little.  They hold each other.  Her flesh against him - after a half-century of his male rumination and regard - is truly more familiar to him than his own.  They fall asleep to the candle and the fire.  

  He gets up in the middle of the night to urinate, to empty his old man’s bladder.  He walks through the silent house.  The house is empty, couldn’t be more empty.  The house is full, couldn’t be more full.

Each room echoes in its emptiness.  

Echoes with memory.  

In the morning, a short time after they awaken and dress, the doorbell rings. Peke moves to the big gracious door slowly, as slowly as he finds himself moving everywhere these days.  Peke notices now, sees through the skylights, that outside it is an identically cloudless day to the day before, to moving day.  

He opens the door, and standing there is a different foreman with a clipboard, another team of green-uniformed men and a white truck.  

They seem slightly, indefinably, less crisp than yesterday’s crew.  He’s confused.   “You...you were here yesterday.”

The clipboard man looks at him, with a mirroring expression of confusion.  “Well, no we weren’t, sir.  You’re scheduled for today.”  The man looks at his clipboard, then at Peke.  It is precisely the same look that the short broad foreman gave him yesterday, Peke sees.  Like Peke is a little senile.  Peke is put off by that.  “Look, your guys were here yesterday,” he says more insistently.  With irritation.  

“Sir, these are our guys,” the man says with a matching insistence.  “And they weren’t here yesterday.”  The clipboard man looks past Peke into the gracious entrance hall and the living room behind it, and sees that they are both empty.  

“Tell me I’m not seein’ what I’m seein’,” he says.

Police trace the receipt Peke was handed to a printing shop in Wheeling, West Virginia.  The printing bill was paid with cash, and it leads no further.  The flimsy yellow receipt is checked for fingerprints - fingerprints other than Peke’s.  Peke can’t remember whether the man ever touched the receipt fully or not.  The results come back.  Apparently, the man did not.        

“Usually, of course, the residents don’t stay in the house.  They’re not so romantic,” says the detective.  “So usually it’s only discovered a week later.  When you’re waiting for your belongings.  And they never come.  And who knows where these people are a week later.”

Stanley and Rose Peke have a lifetime of memories from the big house in Westchester.  

And nothing else.