Shredding

“Why is that there?” I ask my father, pointing to the bulky black machine on the kitchen table.

He shrugs and turns his back to me. “A shredder. You must have seen them in your office.”

My father makes himself busy with the coffee machine, trying to measure the number of grinds for the filter. Since my mother’s death eight months ago, he struggles with so many seemingly mundane tasks. Pushing the right button on the dishwasher. Mixing up the bleach with the laundry detergent. A former carpenter, who built our family home, my father’s hands have become useless. My sister and I, both lawyers, live in San Francisco. We insisted our father move to California, but he is determined to stay in the New Jersey suburban house he built for my mother in 1957.

“I know what a shredder is,” I tell him. “But why do you need one?”

“Because.” He spills the grinds on the counter and then hastily wipes it with a paper towel. His hands are now covered with liver spots, the fingers bent slightly with arthritis.

“Because why?”

I don’t understand why there is a shredder here. The people who have shredders are often guilty businessmen destroying incriminating documents.

When my father turns to me, I realize his blue eyes are almost colorless. This is what seems to happen to old people with blue eyes. The color, year by year, drains away. My mother’s eyes, before she died, were almost as clear as glass.

“Your mother’s letters,” he tells me as he crumples the dirty paper towel and tosses it into the trashcan. “I bought the machine so I could shred your mother’s letters.”

For a long moment I cannot speak. Then I ask, trying to control my voice, “Dad, why would you do that?”

“They were private. Isn’t that why people buy those machines? For privacy.”

“All her letters?”

“All. They weren’t meant for you and your sister. They were for my eyes only.”

My father moves away from me. He opens the back door and slowly walks down the porch steps to the backyard. I turn to stare at that awful machine. Who would think such an ugly thing, so solid and dull, would be capable of such violence?

My father has murdered my mother’s words. All the letters she wrote when he was in Korea. All the letters when her father, a Catholic Irish policeman, forbid her to marry a Protestant. The letters she wrote when she ran away and lived with her sister in Boston, awaiting his return. Two teenagers writing letters of love and tenderness and hope.

It would have been better if my father had collected all her letters and left them in a garbage bag for pickup. Slicing them makes my body feel physical pain, as if my limbs were those letters, violently mutilated. I wonder if I could somehow find all those shredded remains of my mother’s words, I could fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But I know it’ s too late. What’s gone is gone. Like my mother’s mind. She died of dementia. In the end, she did not know any of us. Perhaps this is the reason why my father bought the shredder. To destroy her letters was his way of connecting to her erasure of her past.

I sob for a moment and then wipe my face with a dishtowel. Outside my father stares at a mound of fresh lawn clippings, which move slightly in the breeze. I open the door and join him in the yard where the late summer grass is still gloriously green. My father cannot turn to look at me. I reach forward to hold my father’s hand that shakes like the leaves in the trees that surround us.