In Georgia, we lived in a three bedroom apartment. As a military couple it was expected that we would have many children and would need the extra space. Knowing that having kids would not be a part of our future together, we each claimed one of the spare rooms for our own personal space. I lined mine with bookcases that I quickly filled at an annual library sale that offered all the books that one could cram into a single shopping bag for $5. I eventually added a small reclining chair, area rug, and curtains that colored the sunlight peach as it poured through the sheer fabric.
My husband carpeted his spare room with clothes, empty beer bottles, cigarette ashes, and unpacked boxes that had traveled back with him from Germany. In the two years we lived there he cleaned the room once so that he could move in the new gym equipment that we'd purchased at a local Sears. "You don't need this," the saleswoman had said, looking at us skeptically. "Y'all are already in shape." We should have listened to the seeds of Southern wisdom.
I was soon to discover that putting anything together was an event for my husband. He'd turn the AC on arctic, roll up his sleeves, scatter every screw across the floor, and spend hours swearing over the instruction manual, grunting as he tightened bolts, occasionally asking for my help, which meant I'd inadvertently hold the pieces a centimeter in the wrong direction and his anger would rise up like a mushroom cloud. "Go in the other room," he'd shout with an urgency I didn't dare disobey. Over the years this process was repeated with everything that carried the warning "assembly required," however, the home gym always stood out as the most onerous. It took three days before he'd finally managed to assemble it.
Once it was assembled he suggested we work out together. 20 minutes in, he was yelling at me like a drill sergeant. I gave up and retreated to my library. To say that he used the gym a handful of times over the next year and a half that we were in Georgia would probably be generous. It was a place to hang wet clothes and a table for beer bottles and ashtrays. It was a colossal waste of space, time, and money.
Hoping to get a teaching job before the next school year, I returned to Massachusetts several months ahead of my husband. Before I left I packed up everything I knew he wouldn't be using so that the move would not be so burdensome. The day that he and his closest friend were piling our belongings into a Budget rental truck to drive north, he called in a rush to say he'd broken the kitchen table. I had images of him slamming his fist straight through the center, sending the wood splintering, when really, it turned out, he'd just broken the leg off.
Back in Massachusetts, his friend parked the Budget truck in front of my brother's house, where I was living at the time, and left in my husband's car to do something urgent that I can't recall. After they'd left, my brother helped me lift the sliding door in the back. Everything inside was tilted forward and on the verge of spilling over the tailgate at any moment. My can opener randomly fell out into the street.
I learned later that when it was time to move, he'd worked on breaking down the gym first. It took him eight hours, he said, to dismantle it. The awkward metal poles and plastic plates were the first thing he put into the truck. Everything else was hurriedly packed in without regard. For years after, I discovered more and more things that got left behind on the curb. Among the items, an end table my father had crafted in a high school shop class that he'd given to me to take to Georgia. My husband complained incessantly about my books, which, he claimed, had taken up so much room that he had no choice but to pile everything in.
It was a sweltering August afternoon when we moved everything from the rental truck into a storage space. Sweat soaked the front of my shirt and left salt rings in the fabric. I've always been one for order and finding tetris tight patterns and gladly directed the moving into the concrete garage. By the time the three of us had heaved everything except the gym down the narrow truck ramp we were exhausted, annoyed, sweat-soaked, dehydrated. Something broke-- a plastic piece perhaps-- as he tried to lift a piece of the gym from the truck and his anger that had been rising with the temperature all afternoon, erupted. In a fit of swears, he yelled that we'd just leave the entire gym outside of the storage place on the side of the road. I spoke to him in a voice I'd recently discovered teaching inner-city high school students, a voice I didn't know I had. I pointed away from the truck and sharp and loud ordered him to go for a walk and calm down. In that instant something shifted. He stopped moving and stared at me in surprise. His best friend receded into the distance to smoke a cigarette. After a while breaking the silence I said, "You left half of our things for trash in Georgia, and broke almost everything we own for this stupid gym. We are not leaving it on the street now." That moment might have been the only time he ever conceded without arguing, without even speaking. We loaded the gym into the storage unit in silence, speaking only to say "lift your end up" or "move it to the right."
Two months later, we'd finally found jobs and an apartment with a spare room that could accommodate the gym. He set it up surprisingly quick in the front room that let in the most light. He worked the overnight shift 9 PM to 5 AM, and I was working two jobs from 7 AM to 7 PM, so we barely crossed paths. If I had to guess I'd say he probably used the gym another handful of times while I was at work that year. For a while, I started waking up at 5 AM to find time to work out and thought using the gym might be a way to make everything we'd gone through to get it there worthwhile. I never really cared for it and after a while even I stopped using it.
My husband told me he was moving out in April last year. He stayed around for another month, hardly lifting a finger to pack up his things until the day before he finally left. The only thing he packed up in the month that he lingered around were the letters I'd sent to him every single day while he was stationed in Georgia, then Germany, deployed to Iraq, and back to Georgia. There were hundreds of them. They were the one thing he bothered to get rid of, claiming he was going to burn them all. At 8 PM the day before he left, he started packing his clothes away, only stopping at midnight when I reminded him I had to get up for work the next day.
When he walked out he left the DVD rack, but he took all of the DVDs. He left the picture frames on our mantel, but took away the pictures. Most of his clothes went too, but many of them hung around in the closet. It was six months after he left that he finally came back for more of his things, which I'd piled into the front spare room around the gym. It was just a few weeks ago that he admitted he wouldn't be returning for any of the gym equipment or other things left laying around my apartment.
Whether it ends up in someone else's home, cut into scrap metal pieces, or donated to the Salvation Army will not matter. The important thing is that I will have lifted this heavy burden from my heart for the last time.
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