The Librarianist

Forty-six years prior this scrap of paper was passed to a barely recognizable version of Bob, and now he was an old man in an attic, and his heart was muted as he returned the receipt to its file. He thought he should discontinue his excavation, but then the next box he came across was adorned with Connie’s handwriting, and he felt he couldn’t look away. SALLY ANNE it read, which was what Connie had called the Salvation Army. He opened the box and found a neatly folded stack of his own old clothing. At the top of the stack was a housecoat, a loud number in gold and red rayon, SILKLIKE RAYON as it was named on the tag; stitched to the side of these words was a small, green palm bent by a hurricane wind. He put the housecoat on, discovering that the sleeves had been folded up, two folds per sleeve, which meant that Connie had been the last to wear the garment. Connie had often worn his clothes around the house, and was always adjusting his sleeves in this way, so that it happened he would put on this shirt or that sweater, and there would be this evidence of her. Or there was her habit of using a single blond hair as a bookmark; he had seen her pluck a hair from her own head and set it in the pages of a book that she might or might not return to. And so it was that Bob would happen upon it later. When she and he were together these little touches were such sweet remembrances of her presence; but when it happened after she’d run off with Ethan Augustine, then it prompted a shock of bitterness in Bob, as if he’d been unkindly tricked. Now, after decades with no sign of her anywhere in the house, and Ethan long dead, the folded sleeves were simply bizarre. He stood looking at his own bony, homely wrists, recalling how he used to tease Connie about the sleeve-folding practice, saying she had the arms of a T. rex and that it was a wonder she could blow her own nose. Bob unrolled the robe’s sleeves and resumed his survey of the box. It held several pairs of pants and button-up shirts and was a fair representation of Bob’s wardrobe circa 1959–60. This box was confusing for Bob, because none of the clothes were damaged or threadbare, and it wasn’t as though Connie and Bob had the money to be cavalier about their purchases — clothes were rarely bought, and only thrown out when approaching disintegration. But Connie did have strong opinions about certain articles of Bob’s clothing; when she didn’t appreciate or enjoy a shirt of his, she might tell him, “I don’t like that shirt.” If he wore it again, she would say, “Let’s talk about the removal of this shirt from our lives.” Recalling this, Bob formulated the theory that the box held her discards, the ones she most wished to get rid of. Why the box hadn’t made it to the Salvation Army was a mystery he couldn’t answer — likely it was that their marriage had collapsed before the chore could be completed.

At the bottom of the box Bob discovered a dress of Connie’s. It was a summer dress with spaghetti straps, worn cotton the color of sun-bleached bone with flecks of color threaded throughout: red and blue and yellow and green. Bob remembered the dress but couldn’t picture Connie wearing it — he knew it as an artifact rather than living souvenir. But he felt a pull to engage with it, and he took it out of the box and brought it down from the attic. He hung the dress from a hanger and set this on a nail on an otherwise naked wall in the kitchen, sitting in the nook to consider both the dress and the feeling the dress brought to him. He went back in his mind, and believed he could remember her wearing it in the sunshine, in the backyard. Perhaps this hadn’t happened at all, but it felt a real enough, a likely memory, and he went into it, his thoughts both faraway and close by when he saw by the side of his eye that the dress was moving, undulating, on its hanger. It took Bob some few seconds to understand what was actually happening — he’d hung the dress above a heat register — but within that short span of time he experienced the hauntee’s bottomless terror. After, he felt the flooding gladness of relief, and he shook his head at himself, but he didn’t look away from the dancing, ballooning dress. It was Connie laughing at him the way she had laughed at him when they were in love, not unkindly, but with sympathy, with care for him and his deep and permanent Bobness. An odd-enough Sunday, he thought, running his fingers over the creases from the rolls on the sleeves of his robe. When the heater stopped pushing air the dress, as a film run in reverse, became still again.