The Last Box in the Apartment

By Saturday noon the apartment has been divided so politely that it feels like a negotiation conducted by people who have never raised their voices. Teresa gets the bookshelves; he gets the stereo. She keeps the good frying pan, he takes the better knives, and the arrangement, announced over takeaway dumplings on Friday night, was so reasonable that neither of them admitted how much it hurt. They parted in March, without villains, which turns out to be the harder thing to pack.

The objects are not the problem; the sentences attached to them are. "That was your aunt's." "No, she gave it to both of us." The blue lamp, which they bought at a market in the rain after haggling for twenty minutes over a price neither can now remember, goes to him because he works late. The plant, which has survived four moves and a winter of neglect, goes to her because it has always leaned toward her side of the window. Taping the first boxes, Teresa notices that the labels alternate between her handwriting and his, as though they were still a single household being sent somewhere.

By Sunday afternoon the rooms have the faintly hollow sound of a place already left, and every voice comes out like an announcement. Only the kitchen drawer remains, the one everybody has and nobody can sort. It holds batteries of uncertain charge, string, a corkscrew, six menus from restaurants that have since closed, and a photo-booth strip of two people trying not to laugh. What Teresa had not expected was that this would be the hardest part. A drawer like that has no owner. It is simply what two people accumulate when they are not paying attention, and nobody ever decided it should be kept. Only now does Teresa see how much of a life is stored in places like this.

He lifts out the strip and holds it at arm's length. "Do you want this?"

"I assumed you did," Teresa says.

"That's what I assumed about you," he says, and they both laugh, a short, unconvincing sound. For a moment they stand there holding the question between them like a hot dish. Had they quarrelled, Teresa thinks, this would have been easy: one of them would have stormed out with the pictures, and the other would have thrown out the rest. Instead there is only the afternoon light, and the strip, and the politeness, which has begun to feel like a kind of weather.

In the end they cut the strip in two with the kitchen scissors, the last object in the apartment that nobody has claimed. Two frames each. His half has the frame where they are laughing; hers has the one where they are not, which is, she thinks, the more accurate picture and not the one she would have chosen. At the bottom of the drawer there is also a small brass key that neither of them can identify. They try it in the front door, the balcony door, the bicycle lock. It fits nothing.

"Yours," he says, "since you'll go on wondering."

"Mine," she agrees.

She tapes the last box, writes nothing on it, and carries it down to the car. On the stairs she threads the key onto her own ring, between the apartment key she must hand back tonight and the one for her office, where it hangs, small and brass, opening nothing yet.