My mother was a closed-door woman too.
When I was growing up in Albany, there was a room at the end of our upstairs hallway that we called “the sewing room.” My mother kept it locked. Always. She said it was where she kept her sewing things and her Christmas presents, and that little girls who went snooping would find coal in their stockings.
I believed her until I was twelve.
That was the year the police came to our house.
A detective in a brown suit and two officers in uniform, standing on our front porch on a Tuesday afternoon while I watched from the top of the stairs. They had a warrant. They opened the sewing room.
It was full. Floor to ceiling. Shopping bags. Shoe boxes. Things with the price tags still on them. Perfume. Scarves. Silver picture frames. Jewelry. Kitchen gadgets she’d never used. Hundreds and hundreds of things, from department stores and drugstores and gift shops all over the Capital Region.
My mother had been stealing for years. Compulsively. She had kleptomania. She didn’t sell any of it. She didn’t even use it. She just took it, and hid it, and locked the door.
She didn’t go to prison. A judge sent her to treatment instead, and she did get better, mostly. She’s seventy now and lives in a little apartment in Troy, and we talk on the phone on Sundays.
But I was twelve when I watched those officers carry box after box out of that room and down our front steps while the neighbors stood on their lawns and stared.
And I learned something that day that I’ve never been able to unlearn.
Closed doors can hide anything. Anything at all. Even in the house of somebody you love.
So when Eleanor kept that guest room door closed, I had two voices in my head.
One said: She’s a private person. Respect it. Don’t become your mother’s daughter. Don’t become the snoop.
The other one said, very quietly: Closed doors can hide anything.
For six months, I listened to the first voice.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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