Oh-Oh City

"O.K. You know what I've been thinking? This sounds odd, but I've been wondering what is she going to clean when she comes next week? What is there left to do?"

The basement.

"Oh Beenie, that's not necessary. It's only the laundry room and storage. We're never there."

"I went down last week to have a look, and I think it's got a lot of possibilities if you want to use them. I'll need only a few hours, and we'll have everything ready and right."

Roberta said, for the rest of that morning until I came home for lunch, she heard the most disconcerting mix of sounds coming from that pit. Which is what it is, truth be told. The dark at the bottom of our stairs; the once-a-week-descent-with-a-basket-of-laundry-under-your-arm ordeal when there are so many other things you'd rather be doing.

In our house, there are two places to purposely misplace things – attic and basement, in that order. If you vaguely want to keep something, but have little desire to see it for a while, disappear it into the attic. If you don't ever want to see it again, but have neither the heart nor guts to make the big break and toss it in the garbage, travel it to the basement. The land of damp shadows and dead suitcases. If it had been up to me, I would have detached that bottom part of our house like the first stage of a rocket once it's reached a certain altitude. With the exception of the ten-year-old washing machine, the only function the basement served was as momentary memory flash now and then of kids stomping around down there, yelling across hide-and-seek or monster games. Our children were grown and gone. When they came to visit, their own were still too young or uninterested to play there.

A house closes down on you as you grow older. Because you need less space, the rooms once filled with life accuse with their closed-door stillness: you gave me life, but now you've taken it away. Where are the kids, the parties, the noise and movement and things resting on the floor a moment? No one's ever reflected in the mirrors anymore; there are no teenage-perfume or warm-chicken-di

I call it the creeping-museum syndrome – everything we own becomes more museumlike the older one gets, including ourselves.

"Uh-Oh City!"

I forgot to mention this. The floorboards between the ground floor and basement in our house are not thick. The first time I heard that loud and strange exclamation coming from down below, I looked to my wife in her chair nearby for enlightenment. We were eating lunch, and, by coincidence, both of us happened to be holding potato chips in midair.

"What is 'Uh-Oh City'?"

"That seems to be her war cry when she finds something interesting."

"Oh. I take it, that means I'll be seeing her soon? The egg salad is very good today. There's something new in it."

"Horseradish. Beenie gave me the recipe. Isn't it good?"

"Scott, you're back! What are these?"

"Hello. They're old New Yorker magazines, as you can see."

"I saw, all right. You want to keep them, or what? I found 'em down the cellar, but half are so rotten they don't even have print on them anymore."

She was right, but the scold in her voice reminded me of Miss Kastburg, my insufferable first-grade teacher. That was not a good memory.

"Beenie, you're here to clean the house, not clean it out. Leave the magazines, O.K."

"Even the rotten, ones? I could sort through 'em and –"

"Even the rotten ones. I like rotten. I turn the pages more carefully."

"You're an odd one, Scott."

"Thank you, Beenie. Just leave the magazines."

She reappeared several other times, holding mysterious or forgotten objects at arm's length, wanting to know if they could be thrown out. On each occasion, Roberta and I enthusiastically agreed they could.

The last time she trudged up, the stairs sounded heavier, more weighed down. No wonder – she had a television on her head, and looked like an African woman carrying her pot to the well.

"My God, Beenie!"

"Oh Beenie, what are you doing?!"

"Bringing up treasure! Do you folks realize what you've got here? This's a Brooker television. These things are collector's items! Some people say the Brooker was the best TV set ever made in America. Strong as a Model T Ford."

My wife and I exchanged smirks. "That was the first TV we bought, and it was terrible from the moment we got it. Nothing but trouble. How many times did it break down?"

Roberta looked at Beenie and shrugged as if the breakdowns were her fault. "At least five. Remember that terrible fat man who used to come and fix it?"

The memory of his Vandyke bearded face came to me like a blastful of exhaust from a dirty truck. "Craig Te

"Nope, that's not true. Once you get it up on the head, your neck'll pretty much support anything. Waddya want to do with it? Don't leave it downstairs. I'm telling you, whether it works or not, it's worth a good chunk to a collector."

"Well then, it's yours if you'd like to have it."

She looked at me appraisingly. "How come you kept it if you don't want it?"

"Probably because I was too lazy to cart it to the dump. Really, if you want it, take it."

"You've got a deal. I know a man who'd be interested."

Ihadn't laid eyes on that set for years. it had lived so long in the basement that even if i had seen it, i didn't remember because it had grown invisible. objects have a way of doing that when they are broken or serve no more function in our lives. yet seeing it again like that in the light of day, returned once more to the middle of our living room where it had once owned the eyes of an entire family, i found myself remembering things about that set. like the awful repairman who used to pontificate to me about the state of the world while purportedly fixing the damned machine.

There were also nice memories. Like the whole gang of us sitting around that tube after di

So, great things had happened in the presence of this now-departed pain in the ass. It almost made me want to ask for it back.

Apparently, Roberta had had much the same experience. Over di

"Remember switching it on, and, at that moment, Oswald was brought out and shot by Ruby? I remember it so well. The world was in mourning. We all walked around like we were drugged. No one thought something else was going to happen. But right there in front of us on that TV, it was like the first public killing ever televised!"