The buttons I’ve pushed

Outside a drab, industrial detention center, we pull in and drive up to a keypad mounted on a post in front of an electric gate. We’re merely a four-digit security code away from our rented storage unit, then merely a padlock away from all our crap we’ve come to reclaim.


The gate gives its affirmative nod – a beep – but then hesitates as if re-checking the guest list. It decides not to budge.


“Wha-? What’s the number again?” I’ve got my fingers back up on the keypad. 


“The last four digits of my old South Salem phone number,” my wife says.

How could I forget? 2-8-2-2. Thirteen years ago, those four digits represented a security code in their own right. ...

She gave it to me. I would punch the buttons of a telephone, and there she would be on the other end of the line, attainable riches in a mezzo-soprano. My future wife. The gate to her heart would open wide. I would place my sanity with hers for safekeeping.

I punch the numbers again. 2-8-2-2. The gate beeps again but doesn’t budge.

I can never forget those last four digits. In large part through them a relationship was assembled. My heart would thump, my fingers would carefully tread upon the 2, the 8 and first 2, then that last decisive “2” — that no-turning-back “2” — that “2” that seemed like such a gamble then. Her phone would ring. And then there’d be a “Hello,” and it’d be her.

I’d see her “Hello” and raise her a “How are you?”

She’d see my “How-are-you?” and raise me a “Fine, but I miss you.”

The gamble escalated from there until we finally laid everything on the table. Hearts were wild. We showed each other our hands. We placed a band of gold upon each.

“What’s wrong with this thing?”

“Are you pressing the star button afterwards?”

“Yeah.”

Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I’d been pressing the # button.

2-8-2-2. It was so easy then. Sometimes her mother answered. She was an older, equally lovely version of her daughter. How did I fall in with these lovely people?

A light drizzle begins.

I haven’t been to this storage facility for 13 months, back when we dumped off a bunch of belongings we had no room for in our new apartment. Now we’re moving into our new home. I recall stuffing the 10x10x10-foot unit from floor to ceiling with tables, a sofa, a mattress, china, books, bikes, a hobby horse, even a trombone. I recall pulling the shed door down till it clanged to a close, then clicking a padlock, then pulling away feeling a bit guilty, like I had just interred a family member for whom we never really cared.

Clarification: “I care about those things,” said my wife, six months into our storage fees.

“But we’re clearly surviving without all that. I don’t even remember what’s in there.”

“Our living room is what’s in there,” she said.

When the weather was nice we’d joke about visiting our stuff, tailgating at the storage facility, pulling out our living room — the rug, lamps, everything — setting it all up on the asphalt for a few hours and having a nice time of it. But as the months passed, even she had to admit there was nothing in storage we “needed.” Even with regards to our boy’s collection of stuffed animals, I doubted that after so much time he and they would have much to talk about beyond that first emotional embrace.

2-8-2-2. It’s a password top-heavy with 2’s.

One + One.

She + Me.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” I’d say.

“That’d be great.”

It was great.

Now here we are, a month from our 11th wedding anniversary. Along the way, the tin cans behind the honeymoon car have become ensnared with an indiscriminate collection of crap -- objects -- a third of which we’ve placed into storage.

The drizzle gets heavier.

We sit for a moment. Is there any such thing as a beautiful storage facility? Most are located on land that looks as if it has been condemned and backfilled with repressed memories. Bearing themselves against the alternative of the landfill, storage facilities provide someplace within nowhere, cleverly bound with the sutures of barbwire that give currency to an accrual that could just as easily been lost in a Hefty bag as hoisted onto a U-Haul.

The rain smashes down upon the car roof. Our windows fog up, but not enough to block the identical lines of buttoned-lip, locked-down shed doors. There are no plantings here. No pansies. Not even a stupid boxwood.

Really? Is this what our special 2-8-2-2 has come to?

She’s calling the phone number posted on the office door. With nothing better to do, I try the keypad once again. 2-8-2-2-*.

For whatever reason, it works this time. The gate pries itself open with arthritic obstinacy. We’re in. We pull up to number 98. We unlatch the padlock. The shed door screeches open, and there it all is. God help us.

She starts picking her way through it all, all these things that matter because they matter to her, an accumulation she’s kept safe, secure and loved behind a four-digit code chosen because it opens doors, and who could forget it?