Gillian Kleiman

What There Was

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

“I think this will be good for us,” David said as the men took the place apart.

The movers had already carried out the TV and the couch and the microwave. David was a seabird in their wake from room to room, voice pitched high in pain as glass nightstands were dropped and nicked. Elise poured caramel latte concentrate into the last of the milk as they thumped around, and sat at the table, still as she could, to see if they’d haul her into their truck. Instead they took the table. David came in as they were carting it off and gave her a look of impatience and stomach cramps. He was paying $200 an hour for the three men and the truck.

Elise kept still in her chair and touched the mug to her lips, the illicit thrill of caffeine against her skin. She thought maybe she wasn’t supposed to have caffeine.

When the movers were gone David went too, following them to his new place somewhere in the city. He hadn’t told Elise exactly where, as if fearing she’d follow, but he had a soul for Kips Bay, despite making lousy money as a paralegal. Maybe he’d have roommates.

Alone in the apartment she rose, moved easily across the splintered floor. There weren’t any hindrances yet in her body: no changes in balance, in breath. No swelling or nausea. She crossed the creaking floorboards without a ginger recalculation of weight. A slight thickening across her midsection could be overlooked, new tightnesses blamed on old bras. It happened like that sometimes, she’d read. Growths hidden beneath a history of spotty periods. But still, inside, processes were occurring: chemical compositions sparked and bloomed. Naturally she imagined them as harsh colors, reds and neon greens, things sickly and things mad. Swellings into new flesh, clumpy like wet dough. At the appointment tomorrow the doctor would scrub sticky bits of her doughy insides off gloved fingers afterwards.

The wooden wheeled pantry shelf was gone. So were the three chairs, the table. The garbage cans were still there, because she’d bought them, practical vessels to fill and purge. He was scrupulous about taking only what was his in this changing he’d proposed, as he’d proposed the pantry shelf and the glass nightstands. His proposals sprouting up, around her, inside her. Away from her, as he proposed to leave.

David liked a specific kind of space: straight lines and modern materials. Not the kindergarten kitsch she’d brought into the apartment, mismatched pillow covers and mugs, splotches of paint on tiny canvases bought for five bucks at art fairs, bright plastic magnets bought on vacations, old green bottles found washed up at the beach.

She felt her stomach without meaning to. Another practical vessel to fill and purge. She hadn’t decided if she’d tell him.

Elise admired his sense of place, sense of confidence, as he imagined himself into an ordered apartment designed with careful foresight. She’d tried the other way: tried to plan more exciting weekends and complicated new forms of lingerie to stave off his discontent. The day he’d told her he’d hired the movers, rather than hire her own she’d made a big vat of fettuccine Alfredo, enough for the two of them to eat for a week.

But the leftovers had gone bad, and as she scraped them into the trash can she’d chosen he’d said behind her, “The lease is up in June,” seabird alighting on her finger to cry. “You can stay till then obviously but on your own, the rent...” He pushed his laugh out, encompassing what they had: a suburban apartment without tenants, in a weedy complex eight minutes from a laundromat and two gas stations, ten minutes from the Parkway and a man-made trash-scattered lake.

He’d touched her shoulder, her face, her ass; he was tactile, someone easy to nestle into, but he kept saying, “It’ll be good for us. You know I need to be closer to the office. You know we both want our space.”

The pasta had glued itself to the pot. The fetus had glued itself to her guts. “You don’t mind if I leave some stuff here a few days?” David had asked her bent back. “So I can unpack a bit first, if you aren’t leaving right away.”

“I never said I was leaving,” she retorted. “I don’t know why you are...”

Globs of cold pasta stared up at her from the trash. David frowned, went into the living room. She let the trash lid clang shut, followed him with the dirty pot hefted in both hands. Weighed down by the pot and by the pregnancy she wasn’t calling a pregnancy. On the stubby half-wall that divided the entryway from the living room she’d lined up a series of small wooden cat figurines in cheerful, garish colors. Arched backs and hefted tails. David hated them, hated clutter, wanted room for the two of them to breathe, and she’d thrilled to be part of his space, but he wanted nice dinners too, and long vacations, and friends with summer homes, and instead there’d been the drudgery of life, traffic on the Parkway, milk expiring in the fridge, and eventually their life had become part of the clutter he hated.

“I don’t know why,” she’d said again. “Why would you call movers?”

He touched a cat figurine, drew a finger down its dusty back. “I’m not going to get stuck here,” he said, and brushed it off the ledge. It hit the carpet and the top half of its tail snapped off. Elise dropped the pot.

❧❧❧

She’d kept the dented pot and the chipped cat. Then David’s movers came and helped themselves. They left the bed, consuming most of the floor. The bedroom was still full of him: button-down shirts, loafers, his laptop, his heavy set of law books handed down by a grandparent. There was also a floor lamp with three silver heads pointing in different directions, schizophrenic and ungainly. That was hers. The two book shelves were gone, along with most of the books. Books could be clutter, especially the ones she liked, with bright cartoon covers or pretty women in periodwear facing away from the reader. Plus Eric Carle and Mo Willems, poster board and glitter sticks, things that followed her home from her job at a daycare.

Her toothbrush was in the bathroom, her sneakers by the front door. There was a carton of eggs and the bottle of caramel latte concentrate in the fridge. But the rooms looked denuded, sparse, the apartment separating itself from her. No one was meant to leave an impression.

Yet she herself was no longer sparse. She imagined what she would look like after tomorrow: a pale patch to match the one on the living room wall where David’s painting had hung in a thin silver frame. The painting was itself a thin line in silver oil on a blue background. Avant-garde, he called it. Demands thought. The room looked more thoughtful with it gone.

Looking at the patch on the wall she thought that she could cancel the appointment tomorrow and then there’d never be an ending. This era of her life, so quickly unraveled in the space of a day and three men with a truck, would never complete. That was the whole point of pregnancy, wasn’t it? A continuation. He’d left so much stuff behind, even valuables, assuming she’d wait for him to collect.

One cat figurine had been knocked out of line by a mover’s elbow, or maybe by David in a last fit of pique, its pink front paws dangling into space. Its tail chipped. With one finger Elise nudged it back into place. Its head was orange, its flanks blue. She thought again of the riot happening within her, neon reds and greens. “What if I do leave right away?” she asked it.

❧❧❧

Unearthing a piece of the poster board and a plastic bin full of naked, dirty crayons and markers, she knelt on the thin carpet and spread her tools out around. Knees pressed to the place where the couch wasn’t, surrounded by old pressure—but soon the pressure would fade, the carpet pile begin to lift. Maybe there would always be a slight impression left behind, but maybe not. Elise wriggled her knees as if to prove how easy it still was to kneel and bend.

She wrote. This too she didn’t plan out: a red marker got her half of the way before it died and she had to switch to green sharpie. The -hing didn’t fit on the same line as the Yard sale: everyt—. She moved it down to the next line with the for sale must go TODAY. Writing TODAY with heavy pressure, then underlining, then, after a moment’s reflection, boxing it in purple crayon.

The complex maintenance room was in a different building, guarded 8 to 4 by an older man, Earl, in faded jeans and t-shirts for deceased radio stations. He shuffled about the low-slung buildings with a metal toolbox fixing things or breaking them.

When Elise got to the maintenance room she found Earl was off somewhere with his toolbox, but she tried the doorknob and it turned. Inside was a folding table. She was wrestling it out the door when Earl appeared; he watched her maneuvering and grunted without offering to help. Pleased, she bore her prize back to her building, hoisting the table over her head and using her skull as an extra limb. If he could tell, if she was showing, he might have tried to carry it for her, but all he saw was a scrawny chick stealing a table.

Hers, once theirs, was a first floor garden apartment. She set up the table in front of her door, blocking the strip of sidewalk that separated building from patchy grass. On the other side of the dying yard, traffic was constant along a two-lane street. She watched it stack up at the traffic light, then turned back into her apartment. In the welter of a place half-scooped she put hands to hips and considered. Fishes and frogs and snotty viscous knots swam inside her, but maybe it was only her beating heart.

❧❧❧

What there was: the remains of the caramel latte concentrate, the cat figurines, her paperbacks with cartoon covers. Her kitten heels, rarely worn; her sneakers, often worn; a pair of high red heels she couldn’t remember ever wearing. Her shirts, pants, maxi skirts, undershirts, things thrifted, bought in malls, bought online. Her laptop. His laptop. His law books, which she stacked on top of her romances, threatening to collapse the whole pile. She thought it would make for more tactile browsing. Keep buyers alert to their weight, to the shifting, gravid nature of things. How quickly life could rebalance from what you were used to.

Her pillows. The eggs. An unopened roll of mints found behind the bedroom floor lamp. The dented pot, a burn mark at the bottom where a noodle had stuck. The lamp. Her cellphone, factory restored. The garbage bins. One bag of garbage and one bag of recycling, sold separately; she rested the bags against the bins for better visibility.

She hefted out boxes from her closet morass: some she left opened, to be picked through; others she taped shut to be sold as mystery hauls, three dollars per. She couldn’t move the bed herself but she drew a picture of it in marker on an envelope with FOR SALE underneath.

The markers. The tape. The bathroom mat. The contents of her medicine cabinet: unopened toothpaste and used toothbrushes, her acne wipes, dried-out tubes of eyelash glue, used lipsticks and flat plastic compacts of blush. David’s prescription antacids, which he must have forgotten.

There were too many fiddly containers to be carried out in one trip. She scattered everything out into a black bucket bag, and as she did so she imagined what her medicine cabinet would fill with if not for the appointment tomorrow. Vitamins and things. That would be one excuse for this apartment dump, that she was making room for the coming claim of someone else. Growing up she’d had a plecostomus in a tank and it grew only as large as the tank allowed.

The purse full of bottles and tubes she dropped on the edge of the folding table. Her other two purses went alongside. She pulled her credit card and license and stack of store punchcards from her wallet, dropped the wallet there too; on further consideration she added the punchcards.

Elise had never considered herself a shopper but layered on the folding table the excess became clear. Towers of jeans, blouses stalagmited. She ran out of room on the table and began spreading things out on the concrete path alongside, on top of passing ants. It was late May, muggy and overcast; a colony of midges sprang from the disturbed soil as if adding themselves to the sale pile.

The apartment echoed. The last round required more intensive ingenuity, lifting and straining and peering under. It brought to mind a childhood friend who was Jewish and had to spend the days before Passover searching out crumbs in corners. In one cabinet Elise found spices, thyme and rosemary and cardamom. In another, a box of stale crackers. A plastic tourist magnet that David had overlooked. It all went outside.

By the time she put the poster out (that too she could sell, she thought; there was unused space on the other side) a few people had gathered, neighbors on their way to the parking lot or the Wawa. She didn’t know any of them except in passing, the man with the shouty husky, the woman who drove an ancient Ford truck. She posted herself by the table to answer questions: yes, prices were negotiable. No, she didn’t have change. The man with the husky looked confused but bought the laptops anyway, for 25 bucks, and the bed sheets for the dog’s crate. The woman in the old Ford was brisk, unsurprised that someone might sell a used toothbrush. She nudged the bag of recycling with her foot. “You can do bottle return,” she said. “ShopRite’s got a machine.” Elise gave her the bag for a dollar.

Someone driving on the road beyond honked. Elise recognized the blue Chevy as her mom’s. The car turned into the lot and a few minutes later her mom walked up. She often drove by on her way to the supermarket or the gas station, but she didn’t usually pull in without calling first. Elise sold a preteen the crackers and the cellphone and all the lipsticks for $17.50.

Her mom, Annamarie but she shortened it to Ann, was a tall, reedy woman who kicked the seats back in other people’s cars and left them that way when she got out. She chain-smoked and inserted herself. Now she angled over Elise’s folding table; the table sagged and she had to bend, so that from behind it looked like she was praying. “I don’t understand,” she said in lieu of hello. And kept saying it, until Elise nodded politely and slunk her shoulders sideways to spot other buyers. But her mom stepped with her, pointed at each item in turn with her cigarette: the books, the living room curtains, one of David’s shoes. Elise was selling them in mismatched sets, one brown loafer paired with one sneaker.

Her praying mantis mom said out of her smoking mouth, “But who is buying this? This is junk. And if it’s not junk it’s things you need. Your hairbrush? Your bras?”

Elise had grown up in southern Jersey in a wide new house surrounded by defunct fields, and apartment living had been an adjustment: to buy the replacement spices when the originals were empty and not when they were near, for lack of space to put the new ones. To plan meals around what could fit in the undersized fridge as well as in stomachs. And yet still, today, all those spices waiting for this final full purge. You needed little, you needed less—or: David had moved out and left her with space, but there was no room for what he had left her. Once she had emptied she could begin to refill.

❧❧❧

Her mom paced her fingers through the piles as they lessened. All up and down the road were apartment complexes as low-slung and stretched as this one; a few people walked on the crumbling tarmac where a sidewalk wasn’t, while others pulled their cars into the apartment lot. One or two made U-turns in the strip mall across the way. Everyone wanted things, the good things and the junk.

Ann, informed that David had left, shook her head. For her it was sudden news. It must have been sudden for Elise too, even if David talked for months of their separation, their breathing room, their transformation, what would be good for them as a them and what would be good for them as individuals. How tired he was of shopping on budget and commuter buses home. There must have been a first time he said the words, “Good for us,” or, “doesn’t have to be a breakup,” or, “This is smothering. Being here, the junk in the yards, your car that always breaks.” Even if he’d talked about it for months there must have been a first time.

“I never liked him,” her mom said, swatting at a fly. “He told me it was nice weather out, I checked the clouds.”

This was probably untrue. Ann—veteran of three marriages, the last the one that got her the suburban house and the daughter—always liked the men Elise brought home. It’s no good alone, she’d say after her daughter’s breakups, after her own divorces. Being alone is too much pressure. But she was loyal to her daughter. Loyal and hopeful for the next thing.

Elise sold a cat figurine to a little girl, a sloppily painted red reclining one that her mom bought on a vacation in Puerto Rico. Ann watched as the girl paid for it with six quarters, one after the other emerging from the pudgy fingers with picked polish. When the girl and cat were gone, she said, “I always thought I’d forget where I’d been if I didn’t have mementos. Are you turning minimalist like him now?”

“No,” Elise said. “I’m just trying to make room for new things.” Room for a line she could step over and point to after, saying, that was me, but no more.

“Well,” Ann said and sighed. “If you need to move home for a while, you can.”

Elise, refolding her jeans for an old woman to stuff in a tote, contemplated telling her mom. The point of pregnancy was continuation, but what if you didn’t want to continue? Even if David had stayed. Even if his paintings were still on the walls, the couch still covering its carpet patch. He’d been righter than he knew, to retreat back to the life he wanted.

To give away the adornments you never planned for, scrape off the sediment built up over the years. To claim your aloneness, to take it with you to the daycare and the movies and the supermarket. Elise’s mom had left two marriages for want of children. And yet, her father spent long hours at work, and her parents would have hissing midnight arguments sometimes, about money and her mom’s smoking.

The old woman walked off down the side of the road with her tote-bag of jeans. They’d fit her granddaughter, she’d said. Elise tried to imagine children, or grandchildren: they were dandelion fluff at the end of a chilly spring. They were cumulus clouds. They were banks of ocean fog seen from a high bridge.

❧❧❧

Earl walked by, muttering about permits. Her mom smoked a new cigarette and lingered. Elise didn’t mind. Most important things in life needed witnesses.

But if she told her mom about tomorrow’s appointment, Ann might argue or reason, or even cry. Or more likely set her jaw just as she was doing now, insist on coming along to hold Elise’s hand and barrel through the protesters (Elise wasn’t sure if there’d be protesters). She’d want to go through the paperwork the clinic had given, the instructions. When and where and how and how much and what they did with it after. Why this way and not another way. She’d crowd.

Elise wanted it unaccompanied, just her and the doctor: a finger snap of pain, then moving on. As much grief as ordering a steak or mailing a letter. If the appointment had been today, this morning, she could have asked for the contents and left those out here too on her sale table. A jar of undesired future and viscera. That was me, but no more.

“It’s just,” Ann said, “You have to start worrying about your age. Once you hit 40...”

A laugh bubbled, then popped in Elise’s mouth. She could picture every cell aging, withering past worth. She wished she could hold piles of herself in her hands, runny handfuls dripping through her cupped fingers. She wished she could bathe in herself, only herself, whatever age.

“I don’t want you alone,” her mom said. “I worry about that.”

Someone new had pulled into the lot, was calling her name. She finished selling the last law book as David approached, smiling at first, quizzical. He had an earnestness to him that had been appealing, how firmly he felt everything. Elise had her mother’s gangly height and her father’s big feet, but he smiled at her as at something flawless. In crowded city bars and expensive seafood restaurants down the shore he had drawn her, a collection of opinions and dark eyes, expansive fantasies and dark hair, a handsome rounded face, wanting the finest and wanting her. It was addictive but it was almost exhausting. She’d had a sudden bolt of grief and freedom, the day she dropped the pot.

David drew up to the table, watched one of his law books being carried off by the woman above them who stomped at night. His eyebrows knit. But he didn’t say anything until Elise waved at another man walking off with his last loafer. Then he said, “What are you doing?”

“You explain it to him,” Ann said, almost mocking.

But it seemed so obvious Elise hardly knew how. David was pushing his hands through the thinned leftovers on the table, a swimming motion, parting the humid air and searching in vain for his stuff: the laptop, the shoes, the rest of his books. She’d wedged the apartment door open with a rock and he ran inside, where even the bed had gone, to a quartet of men in colorful unbuttoned shirts. One of them she recognized from down the hall; he had just moved into the complex and had a large family. His kids rode Big Wheels down the cracked concrete paths. Expertly the men had taken the bed frame apart, carried away the mattress still in the bedbug protector.

David came out again into the overcast, sweating, sputtering. “My laptop? Where…What are you doing?”

“Moving out,” she said. “Emptying out.”

“Why?” he said. Ann’s eyes fixed on his.

Because, not because, she thought. Not because he had left her. Not because she was losing dinners at the shore they hadn’t been able to afford, or this bland apartment decorated with the ghosts of his art. Not because of finances or cliches: single mothers, broken homes. Because, not because. Because having others meant a pressure too. Pressure on the heart and head, pressure in the stomach and against the bladder. She wanted to press outwards. Because David loved kids, clucked longingly at friends’ babies. He might even come back if she told him – the three men and their truck and all the shared detritus of life, moving back into place in reverse. Table slotted back against the wall, latte spilling back into the cup. He was a good liberal man who voted blue but would be horrified to learn of her appointment. He wanted. But she’d never wanted, and so she wouldn’t. In some parts of the world that was still true. She’d sold the cup and the latte concentrate.

“It’ll be good for me,” she said. David was running here and there along the table sifting through wrappers and papers and clothes. She wished he would stop and put his hands on her waist. But she said it again anyway: “It’ll be good for just me.” She looked at the apartment behind his head, his pretty hair all mused. “Ending, then starting again. You can decide where you start and end.”

Ann softened. Elise remembered her smoking in the living room, watching a windstorm out the big bay window, the driveway empty, her dad not home. Ann put a hand to David’s shoulder, pausing his frantic rush so that he looked at her, helpless, gulping. “You explain it to him,” she said, much gentler now.

A woman clattered up in flip-flops, wanting to buy a lightly used loofah. As David and Elise stared at each other, Ann sold it to her for a quarter.

❧❧❧

Everything went. Even the bag of trash Earl humped to the big dumpsters around the back of the building as the sun sat down heavily on the horizon. David had gone too, alternately shouting and soothing. “We’ll talk, calm yourself down and we’ll figure it out,” he said, then threatened to sue and slammed his car door. It was Ann who bought Elise’s bras and blouses, with a wry smile. “Let me know when you want them back,” she said before she drove home to Elise’s dad.

Elise left the table propped up and went back inside. The room smelled damp, fertile, from the air drifting in all afternoon. It was bare. On the half-wall was the one thing that hadn’t sold, the pink and orange and blue cat with a chipped tail. She picked it up, rolled it from palm to palm. Pressed a thumb against the little nub of an ear until that snapped off too, a paint chip pricking under her thumb. Then she lowered it down onto the beige carpet, the last possession, the last pop of color, the one thing she would take with her into wherever she went next.

❧❧❧

Gillian Kleiman is a writer and tabloid copyeditor who lives in Brooklyn with a cat prone to unusual disasters. She graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University and has interned for The Literary Review and The Center for Fiction. Her writing has been published in Blood & Bourbon Magazine, and her flash fiction piece “Then” was the winner of a multimedia flash fiction contest at Brooklyn Book Festival 2016.