Too Much

When I was eleven, a babysitter bought my sister and me a game, a two-player tabletop basketball toy where near-weightless balls got popped into the air by plastic players controlled by our fingers. That night, we played at the kitchen table after shoving Mom’s mail onto the floor. We strained the wooden chairs with our jerky movements. We tested the limits of the plastic. Yes, we were having fun, but as we struggled to score, I felt this sense of dread about the lifespan of our new toy. Our toy, I thought, would fail quicker than those purchased for other kids. The plastic would break or the balls would dent or the buttons would refuse to work, not from our vigor but from bad luck. I won most of the games that night, or my sister did; our babysitter only kept a vague score. Just before our parents came home, I put my back into the game, hunching over the table, turning my fingertips red from the pressure, forgetting to be strategic or careful. And I broke the chair. A wooden rod snapped free and slapped me on the shoulder like a punishment. I can’t remember when the basketball game broke. It would’ve only lasted a week or two.

~

Toy ramps and tracks rarely supported our Hot Wheels. Doll hair tangled quickly. Scrabble tiles went missing. Puzzle pieces went missing, if they were ever there. Cardboard blocks sagged, as if they’d been wet. Batteries didn’t last long. Mouse Trap came without instructions. Our Etch A Sketch never made precise lines. Some of the Operation pieces got stuck in that man’s unhappy body. The Hungry Hungry Hippos developed lockjaw and wouldn’t chomp. But our Legos, which never broke, which would never break, bored me.

~

Until I was twelve, we only had a rotary phone. The phone worked perfectly fine, except when the pharmacy called, or any other place that needed us to ‘press’ a number instead of dial. Even after buying a simple, wireless touchtone, my parents kept their rotary phone. It hangs sturdily on the wall, as if its cord is keeping the house tied together. But when I was a child, I thought the phone might be cursing us, punishing our toys and everything new we owned for striving to be modern.

~

For Hanukkah and my birthdays and my half-birthdays, I never knew what to ask for. Anything I wanted, I wanted only for a day. Maybe a week.

~

At sixteen, I used my mother’s credit card twice without asking. After enrolling in Chinese class to spend time with a friend, I bought Rosetta Stone Mandarin for about $350. Then I bought a 16mm projector for $500 from an Army surplus auction; the military no longer had use for the technology. The projector arrived broken, sticky with a black goo I once meant to investigate. “It has to work,” my sister said. But it didn’t. I used the Rosetta Stone for a week, learning no more than 10 words, the word for apple, Píngguǒ, the word for teacher, Lǎoshī. Rosetta Stone came with a thick, constrictive headset and microphone that made me feel like I was preparing for a small job in a small room. After I gave up on the program, the headset lay on my bedroom floor for years, tangling with the rest of my forgotten wires.

~

When my boyfriend spends money, he only buys cutting-edge. We laughed when he bought a self-cleaning water bottle and I said, “A techie water bottle can’t help you outrun destruction.”

~

I sometimes believe objects are destabilizing. A pretty journal can force me to write something I shouldn’t. A warm blanket can ruin my sleep and a faulty bottle of lotion can ruin my day. I’ve been trying to think less about objects. I keep them as far from me as possible. In June, a coworker said, “I love your shoes,” like anyone would say, “I love your shoes,” but I said, “I don’t know which ones I’m wearing,” as if the shoes would’ve proved their importance had I given them any attention.

~

There are objects I don’t think much about: my toothpaste, my doorknobs, my couch, my tote bags, my swollen collection of books, and most of the objects other people own.

~

My parents have an overstuffed house but are not materialistic. They have hundreds of vinyls, hundreds of books, hundreds of toys still sitting in the basement. My great-grandfather’s sewing machine stands nervously in the crowded attic, like it’s waiting to be rescued; it’s surrounded by a welter of objects on which I have trouble focusing. Most rooms in the house look like the attic, like they’ve been spilled onto by neglected storage units. When I visit home, I think ahead to the dumpsters my sister and I will need after the deaths of our parents. I’ll have the impulse to empty the whole house into them. I’ll want to do it quickly, get rid of room after room as if that could purify me, as if that could disentangle my memories of Mom and Dad from our barren Chia Pets and dying Tamagotchis. But my sister will be there too. She is gentle. She’ll want to keep the sewing machine and our copies of the Froggy book series. And maybe she’ll help to slow me down, help me to really look at their stuff, pick up their stuff, feel their stuff, as if stuff were more than just a distraction.

~

Am I a hypocrite for loving those luscious green palm tree socks my boss gave me on my birthday?

~

My sister last visited my apartment wearing a horse charm dangling from a slim necklace. She noticed that I don’t use many dishes anymore. I eat out of Tupperware and pans to avoid dirtying a plate because then I would have to clean that plate. After a dinner served on dishes, I asked if she remembered our stuff breaking and breaking as kids. I said, “Didn’t everything we own feel defective?” She said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” In college, my stuff stopped feeling defective, as if I’d become aligned with the world. I’d graduated from childhood, from being savage and clumsy. My sister and I didn’t come back to discussing our childhood that night. But my mind worked itself into a silent thought: if everything I touched still broke, or still felt like it was breaking, I’d have somewhere to point to for the uneasy feelings I sometimes get.

~

When shopping online for presents for my boyfriend, the options seem part of a desperate catalog transported here from a galactic world. Or maybe they feel too much from Earth, as if the Earth would collapse without all its manufactured stuff. Last year, I bought my boyfriend a puzzle of the cover of The New York Times from the day of his birth. He kissed me for my thoughtfulness. When he stored the puzzle on top of a cabinet, I knew he’d never put it together. But he did. And I helped. When we finished, I wanted to ask, “So now can we throw it out?” Then two months later, we did the puzzle again when his cousin was in town. When we finished, I wanted to ask, “Now can we throw it out?”

~

Books are ideas when I pick them up. Books are clutter when I put them down.

~

At my most anxious, I sit on the couch and imagine the couch away and the TV too and my tufted rug and the sink and the shower and the bag of laundry and the flooring and the apartment and the apartment building and the city and the plants that will grow here without the city and all perceivable matter until I’m falling through an empty plane with nothing to touch my skin.

~

I used to think a lot about my excessive book collection. My books were all stacked above the bricked-up fireplace in my old apartment. I’d arranged them with potential guests in mind. Ferrante novels visible. Nabokov novels visible. Catch-22 close to the entrance. I’d interspersed Octavia Butler’s novels throughout the stacks so a sensible person might think I read them all at different points in my life and that I have a long history with Butler even though I sped through four in one winter and none since. And then I moved into a smaller apartment and got dogs that couldn’t stop themselves from pulling books off of piles and tearing out chunks of text. (I worry I’ll begin to think of my dogs as stuff. I also worry I’ll begin to think of them as human.) So now when I finish a book, I bring it to my parents’ house. I spill onto my parents’ house. My books are now stacked in my childhood bedroom as if I’d had them inside of my head since birth. The last time I was home, I apologized for adding to the clutter and Mom said, “Books aren’t clutter.” In that house, I can let them be clutter. I like the feeling of having my brain in two places. And I like being able to clean out my things into a space that can hold their weight.