Someone Else Will Love It

My husband is better than I am at letting things go. He can empty a full drawer in the time it takes me to decide about one shirt, and when a thing leaves his hands he doesn’t grieve it. He has a line he says when he sets something in the donation pile. Someone else will love it. He means it, and it’s usually true.

He would help me with my closet if I asked. He’d be kind about it. I don’t ask. I’ve told myself it’s because he’d be too fast, but that isn’t the reason. The reason is that I don’t want him to see what’s in there, and I don’t want to stand next to him while he decides what stays.

To explain the closet I have to go back to a bin store in Ontario, the kind you don’t really see anymore, where the shoes came in deep bins you dug through with both hands. I was eight, maybe nine. My parents didn’t have much then, and a new pair of anything was a real event. I had already learned to read a price tag by that age. What I hadn’t learned was how to read a boot. I picked out a pair of grey ones because I liked them, and what I’d actually chosen were rain boots, thin rubber with no lining, for a slushy Ontario winter.

I remember the cold feet. Cold feet are most of what I remember about being that age. The rubber let the wet through, and then the sole wore into a hole the way all my boots did that winter, and my toes sat with nothing between them and the ice but a thin sock. I lived for the moment we came inside so my feet could thaw before the next recess. When the hole got bad I’d peel off my wet socks and lay them along the baseboard heater at school, hoping they’d dry before I had to go back out. Sometimes they did.

Somewhere in those winters I learned a rule I didn’t know I was learning. A thing that still works does not get thrown away. Nothing with use left in it gets wasted.

So I keep shoes. Not the way you’d keep a wedding shoe wrapped in tissue. I keep them because they still work, and I check whether they still work with a small inspection I only recently noticed I perform. I turn them over and look at the tread. I check whether they’re holding their shape, whether the leather’s still good. I do this standing over the donation bag, and if there’s wear left in them I put them back.

A while ago I had a pair of New Balance I’d bought on sale at Sporting Life, and they were so comfortable they felt like socks. I wore them until the soles went lopsided without noticing they had. My brother noticed. He was visiting and looked down and said, I think your soles are crooked. He grew up in the same winters I did, at the same heaters, and somehow he could see the wear from across the room while I’d been walking around inside it. I wore them another three months anyway, to the end of the summer, and then I threw them out and felt proud.

It’s a strange thing to feel over a garbage can. I think I felt it because I’d worn them all the way out. There was nothing left in them to save. The rule was never really keep everything. It was closer to waste nothing, and throwing those out wasn’t breaking it. It was finishing.

Here is the part that ruins the neat version of this story, the one where I’m a woman quietly ruled by a cold childhood. I love clothes. Not as memory, as pleasure. I love shopping, I love a good fabric, I love the way the right shoe finishes an outfit. I am not one of those calm people with one pair of heels and one pair of sandals for every occasion. When there was finally a little money in my family, shoes were the first thing we bought. I think the wanting and the keeping came into me through the same door, in the same winters, and I have never found the seam between them.

There was a pair of black suede platform boots. Heeled, a little high, the kind that made every outfit look better than it was. They weren’t comfortable, so I barely wore them, and eventually I did the thing my husband does. I put them in the donation pile and told myself someone else would love them. And someone probably does. But I still think about them. Every so often an outfit comes together that would be finished by exactly those boots, and I go to the closet to get them before I remember, mid-reach, that they’re gone. For a second I doubt the whole decision. I gave away the ones I loved and I’m proud of throwing out the ones I didn’t feel a thing for.

That’s the part I can’t get to sit still. He would be gentle about the closet. That’s almost the problem. His gentleness would still be the end of the rule, and I’d have to stand there and watch a rule a cold nine-year-old wrote get overruled by a man who never had cold feet a day in his life. Some part of me is still at that heater with wet socks, making sure nothing goes to waste that didn’t have to.

So I keep the door shut and do the sorting myself, a pair at a time, on my own schedule, which is to say almost never. Last week I held a pair over the bag, turned them over, found tread still left, and put them back. What I notice, when I let myself notice, is that the shoes I keep are the ones I feel nothing about. The ones that still work. The ones that owe me a little more use. The ones I actually loved are already gone, given away easily, the way he taught me, and I miss them. I don’t know what to make of the fact that the wanting and the keeping never seem to land on the same shoe. I keep the door shut partly so I don’t have to find out.