Elizabeth was entirely unsentimental. She barely kept photographs, let alone souvenirs or letters or any sort of memorabilia. Cleo kept it all. She kept every birthday card she’d ever gotten, even the ones from people she didn’t like. When she tried to throw them out, she found that she couldn’t—they looked so sad in the trash, the balloons and smiling animals staring up at her, and so she ended up pulling them back out and putting them safely in a box.
Cleo saved tests and old notebooks, papers that she was especially proud of, notes from her classmates. She saved the cap from the first beer she ever drank (a Miller Lite). She hated to give away clothes, even if she never wore them or they didn’t fit anymore. It seemed so mean to just discard them, like they had feelings and would be hurt when boxed and sent to Goodwill.
It was problematic to be a “low-level hoarder” (as Elizabeth called her) while living in New York. Their apartment at Seventy-ninth and Riverside was nice—spacious even, by most standards—but it was still an apartment in New York. Sometimes Elizabeth would reach her breaking point, and lay down the law, sounding more like a mother than she usually did. “You need to get rid of this stuff,” she’d say, looking in Cleo’s closet. “What is all this junk?” She’d hold up a stuffed elephant by its ear, and toss it on the floor, like it was going to be the first thing they threw out.
“No,” Cleo would say. She’d rescue the elephant. “I’ll clean it out, just don’t touch anything, please don’t touch a thing.”
It was the same thing she’d made her mom promise when she went off to college. “My room is off limits,” she said. “You aren’t allowed to throw out one thing—not one thing—while I’m gone.” She made Elizabeth swear up and down a million times before she was satisfied. And still she sometimes worried that Elizabeth would get the urge to clean and would throw out all of her memories—her stuffed animals and dolls, her favorite books, her journals—would bag them up in big black garbage bags, until there was nothing left of her.
ELIZABETH WAS IMPATIENT WHEN CLEO moved into the dorm. Most of the other mothers were making the beds, dusting, or folding clothes. Elizabeth sat on the desk chair and watched Cleo do all of these things, looking at her BlackBerry or her watch every few minutes. Elizabeth hadn’t offered to help, but even if she had, Cleo would have declined. Cleo wanted to put everything together herself. She knew that if her mom helped, she’d rush through it, and she didn’t want her underwear thrown in a messy pile in a drawer. She and Elizabeth didn’t have the kind of relationship where she trusted Elizabeth to fold her underwear.
Every so often, parents or other kids moving into their rooms on the hall popped their heads in to say hi. Elizabeth, who was wearing jeans that looked crisp and pressed, flats, and a button-down, barely smiled at these people. “Hello,” she’d say quickly, nodding her head at their response as if agreeing with them, Yes, it is a pleasure to meet me, isn’t it?
Cleo was used to the way her mom didn’t quite fit into social situations. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do or say to come across as normal and friendly—she just didn’t care. “Be your own person,” she always said to Cleo. As if there were a choice to be someone else.
Once in sixth grade, when Cleo was crying because Susan Cantor cut her out of the lunch table, told her she couldn’t sit there anymore, Elizabeth had said, “Why do you care about those girls? If they don’t want to be your friend, why do you want to be theirs?”
Whenever Cleo went out of her way to be nice to people, writing letters to her grandmother, being polite to her friends’ parents or to her teachers, Elizabeth would sometimes comment later, “Good God, Cleo, you can’t get everyone in the world to like you. Why try?” Elizabeth was used to being disliked—Cleo suspected she even enjoyed it—and she couldn’t imagine why her daughter wasn’t the same. “You’re such a people pleaser,” she’d said on more than one occasion, in the same way people said, “You’re such a liar,” or “You’re such a cokehead.”
Cleo’s roommate, a small Asian girl named Grace, had already moved her things in and gone off to