Life with Iron Giants VI: Mollie & The Storage Unit

I was working at home a few weeks after I'd met Mollie* at our local strudel shop when the phone rang.  I didn't recognize her voice at first, she seemed out of breath.     "I have a favor to ask," the voice said without preamble.  Since I'm new to the helpful neighbors code of behavior I was taken by surprise.

      "Who is this?" I asked politely, not certain if it was a sales call.

      "Mollie,"  she said, assuming it was not necessary to remind me where and when we'd met.  We lived only a few blocks apart, after all.  We went to the same grocery store, the same bank, the same cafes.  We practically breathed the same air.

     "I need a ride."

     "Okaaay," I replied, somewhat cautiously.  I knew she didn't have a car.  The entirety of our conversation was coming back to me and at least she wasn't asking me to ghostwrite her daughter's life story.  A ride somewhere I could do.....as long as it wasn't to another state.

     "I have to take care of my daughter's things."  She was starting to get upset.  "They've been jerking me around at the moving company, they told me I didn't have any right to take her belongings, I've paid money to lawyers, I have an affidavit....." she was talking a mile a minute.

     "The man's a monster," she went on, voice rising to a pitch. "I need a witness, someone to come with me when I give him the money he's extorting from me in exchange for the key to the storage locker."

     This was turning into more than a ride.  I had visions of a shady transaction involving a big burly mafia guy, a hysterical victim trying to short him at the last minute and a tire iron being pulled from the trunk. But before I could think of an excuse to refuse she started crying.

       "Please tell me what to do....."

       "Do you have the money to pay him?" I asked.  Yes, she did, but he kept upping the price to release the key every time she called.  It was now over a thousand dollars.  I couldn't believe that someone as poor as Mollie could put her hands on that much ready cash but it underscored how desperate she was to reclaim her daughter's belongings.

     "Her things......they're all I have left," she said.  So I agreed, wondering where all her friends were and why she had called a stranger to help her with this intimate task.

     The next day I came by her place.  It was then I discovered one of the many surprises about Mollie that shattered my preconceived notion of who she was.  Instead of the shabby storefront I thought she'd bought years ago for a pittance, the address on a main street in downtown San Pedro was a large commercial building painted a blinding shade of white.  No shabby corners or rusty fences.  It was quite modern, with large windows along the front and a row of studios running along its length.  Mollie was standing at the main gate waiting for me, her snowy hair frazzled.

     "Who lives here?" I asked, curiously.  

     "Just me."  There must have been 6,000 square feet in this complex.  She saw my puzzled look and went on, "I need the space - my studio, home, and storage space.  My paintings take up a lot of room.  I figured they'd have to be either very big or of a huge quantity to warrant that much space.

     She asked if we could stop at the bank first, a task that turned out to take over an hour as Mollie confessed later she hadn't any official I.D. (no driver's license and her passport had expired four years earlier).  It had taken some time to establish her identity to the bank officials before they gave her the money.  Which came from her line of credit, even though she told me she had the option of dipping into her savings, another interesting piece of information.  Obviously she had more assets than first appeared, and her lack of a car was by choice rather than necessity.

     The ride to the nearby storage facility was short but when we got there the mover, Carlos, who was supposed to meet her there hadn't shown up.  He was really just a middle man who charged customers a fee to move their stuff into the facility and then held the contract, charging a fee every month just for taking the check and paying the storage company.  A scam for sure.  The woman in the office wasn't very friendly, partly because I gathered Mollie had made quite a pest of herself during the six months it had taken to prove she was entitled to her daughter's things.  Zora had left a suicide note, but no will.

     While we waited for Carlos to show up, the facility manager made Mollie sign a piece of paper memorializing their part in the transaction  and it took several attempts on my part to convey its legal purpose to my new friend.  Mollie seemed by turns to be both canny and persistent as hell but when she wasn't happy with something, she affected a fragile, blank demeanor as if well into her dotage.  So much so that the manager stopped talking directly to her and addressed me as if I were her daughter and she the senile granny.  During this conversation, Carlos called and said he was on his way.

     Mollie and I waited on a bench outside the office and that's when she told me more about her own history, the two failed marriages, the hand-to-mouth existence in Mexico, a stint in an Oregon commune, and her determination to make a living as an painter. A lot of tough times, a lot of moves, men with drinking and gambling addictions.  Through all this tumult her daughter, Zora, had seemingly flourished, doing well in various schools, then on to a scholarship at USC and an advanced honors degree. Mollie was immensely proud of her daughter's achievements, the first in her family to graduate from university. 

     But with such a zig-zag childhood legacy, it finally became apparent that Zora had only been hanging on by her fingernails and the burden had finally caught up with her.  Mollie was eccentric, Zora was mentally ill.  She was bipolar and spent most of her adult life in a cycle of intense, manic creativity followed by periods of crushing depression.  Mollie supported her daughter throughout the decades, paying for bills left after jobs fell through, moving her furniture from place to place, sometimes five or six times a year, often providing a safe haven between disappointments.  Mollie seemed unaware of the danger Zora was in psychologically. Because her daughter was an artist like her mother perhaps that's why her illness was hidden from the person who knew her best.  In her brilliant times, Zora produced documentaries, wrote scripts, painted striking canvases, but her personal life was a mess.  At age 40 the marriage and children she'd always craved had never materialized and there was one last depression that found her with a house full of furniture stuffed into a bedroom in Mollie's studio and a final argument that escalated into violence.  

     Mollie responded by kicking Zora out.  The last time she saw her daughter she was moving hundreds of boxes and assorted furniture into the moving van to be stored.  It was only a few days later that the call came from the Zen center with the news that Zora was dead.  She had committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills and tying a plastic bag over her head.

     Mollie pulled out a snapshot she kept in her purse of Zora and handed it to me.  She had honey blond hair and the same strong features of her mother.  Over-thin, a sad and fragile woman who had just run out of options.  Mollie had no one but Zora, and now even she was gone.

     Carlos, finally showed up and we all trooped down to the 12X12' locker.  Far from being a big burly monster, he was pleasant and businesslike.  The only hint of his monster side was that he had strung Mollie along for many months, racking up storage and late fees which she had been forced to pay.  He appeared immune to the pain of this elderly, forlorn woman who had lost her daughter in the worst way possible.

     When  Carlos cut the lock to the space, the manager raised the corrugated door and we took in the huge jumble of boxes piled to the ceiling, the shabby, overstuffed chairs, rafts of oil paintings next to broken lamps, a pair of lone shoes sitting in the corner.  

     Suddenly, Mollie let out a wail, a long thin cry that pierced the air.  She fell forward and clung to the boxes as if they were Zora's coffin, weeping and clawing at the sad jumble while we stood mute, eyes averted. She kept crying out her daughter's name.  "Oh, my God, my baby, my baby!" she wailed over and over, "this is all you are!"

     The mover made his escape, obviously embarrassed by this show of pure agony.  I stayed close to Mollie, supporting her thin frame, acutely aware of the sad collection of junk that Zora had hauled from place to place at great expense, because this was all she had, would ever have. The sum of her life lay in a jumble before us. The dusty canvases, the unfinished scripts, the filthy shoes, the thrift-store, shredded lamps, the smell of decay and ruin. 

      And yet to Mollie, they were all as precious as gold.  She had fought like a mother lion for these things, moved heaven and earth to reclaim them for her child.

     Back in the car Mollie apologized to me for taking up most of the day.  I assured her it had been my privilege to help.  She turned to me.     "I couldn't let them take her life, everything that was precious to her and sell it off like garbage."  She searched my face.  "You understand, don't you?"

     In that moment Mollie was the most eloquent, beatific person I'd ever known.  I held her hand and we drove in silence.  I don't pretend to understand why life can be so cruel, even when we believe we may be responsible for some of the weight put upon our children, even when we cannot see our own part in their pain.  

     I took her home to her white castle and she talked and talked until I gently reminded her I had to get my daughter from pre-school.  She told me that the next morning she would be returning to the storage unit to pick up all the boxes with another mover and a van, to take them all back to the bedroom she'd cleaned up and painted.  To her daughter's altar, a place where she, Dorota, would try to fulfill her daughter's lifelong wish to be famous, loved, and admired.

     I may not be the one to write Zora's story but if I know Dorota, she will search and search until she finds someone who can.