Seashell Boxes By Hillary Transue Moser

Sean Benham CC




Seashell Boxes


    Grandma Gale gave me a seashell box the last time she came to the house. It is a small box with bright red, faux-velvet lining covered by tiny yellow conch shells. In it, I keep some chewing gum, a chocolate-smudged sticker, several pogs stolen from my older brothers’ collections, and a few baby pinecones. 

    I love the seashell box because it feels good in my small hands. The weight of it, like a hefty rock, and the sharp edges of the conch shells satisfy something in my fingertips. I often find myself unconsciously pressing down hard enough on the outside of the box to create little indents on the edges of my fingers.

    I smash the seashell box for the first time after being locked in my room for being bad. I don’t remember what I’ve done to deserve it—but I know I deserve it—so I scream as loud as I can, until my throat is raw and it hurts too much to keep going. After a long while, in which I finally accept no one is coming, I notice the seashell box sitting in a lonely corner of the room. 

    I don’t know what compels me to throw the box; it is special to me. Maybe that’s exactly why I throw it because it’s not really a box being slammed into the ground with all the force a five-year-old can muster. It’s me who wants to shatter so Mommy will come back in and glue all my pieces together and feel very sorry for me that my seashell box is broken. But it doesn’t break, and now throwing it against my floor becomes that much more appealing. A few pieces of conch chip off the edges, but it has been painted, reinforced with resin so as not to be destroyed with ease. 

    I stare at it hard, examining the missing bits of shell and the new appearance of my beloved trinket box. I sit down on the floor and sob into my hands, harder than before. My seashell box has changed, and I’m unsure what to do about it. 

    As the years go on, the seashell box is slammed against things more often. Every time I’m sent to my room, screamed at, or punished, the seashell box receives all my anger. I am frustrated by the seashell box’s seeming indestructibility. More than a few chunks of shell are missing from every side of the box, but it endures the abuse. I throw it at the wall with more conviction as I grow, but it never comes completely apart, and I must continually navigate the emotional journey of being livid about that fact while also indescribably relieved that the seashell box is still intact. 

    No one in my house knows about the seashell box, though they probably hear the dull thud of it against my floor. For my brother, Zach, it’s cookie jars, and he always performs in the center of our family kitchen. Dad broke an ugly cookie jar in the early years of my parents’ marriage—either by accident or during a fight—and Mom has been to every antique store and junk auction in the state searching for its replacement. Instead, she comes home with ugly cookie jars that only remind her of the one gifted to her by some beloved grandmother. 

    The first few times Zach lifts a cookie jar off the refrigerator and smashes it, Mom cries. But, after a while, she learns not to react. There is always a moment or two before the collision when the whole scene becomes suspended in time, Zach’s arms swaying a little under the unwieldiness of the jar, his eyes searching Mom’s face across the chasm between them.  Anyone can see by the way her jaw is locked into place, her body rigid, that Mom is working very hard to pretend none of this hurts. 

    I always cry when it’s time for another cookie jar to be smashed, either because I’m empathetic towards Zach’s rage and his desperate need for a reaction from Mom, or Mom’s unspoken, unhinted at inner devastation. Mom watches impassively as each cookie jar bursts against the linoleum tiles of our kitchen over the course of a year. She never swerves, never admits how much it bothers her. But Zach knows, it’s why he keeps doing it. I cannot bear to watch the cookie jars break, which is why I never throw anything but the seashell box, because I’m the only one who suffers when I do. 

    It’s a while before I’m aware of my hatred for it.

    I find the ugly, red velvet lining that’s begun to separate from the box itself humiliating to look at, the broken bits of shell whose insides are all exposed embarrass me. I hate Grandma Gale for giving me the box—​it’s always been ugly, why would she think this is for me?—​So I keep it tucked under a pile of toys to avoid looking at it or having to explain it to someone. Why was this thing ever special to me? Why can’t I get rid of it? It never really occurs to me that the seashell box is me. Angry, ugly, broken, but not completely, not enough for anyone to do anything about it.

    In middle school, my best friend says it’s babyish to play with Barbies, so I rid myself of all my dolls, and the seashell box goes with them. I’m too old to be throwing seashell boxes. After, I feel lost without it. I’m scared to throw anything else, and there’s very little of mine to break that would satisfy me as much. Instead, I run to the woods, the only place where family fights don’t crash against me until I feel exposed with my bits of conch shell busting off.

    By the time I am a young adult, the seashell box is long forgotten, but that doesn’t stop me from throwing things—​like a child—when I feel small, powerless, and alone. A second-hand phone is thrown at my college dormitory wall. I rediscover the feeling of breaking something important to me halfway, but not all the way. No one is coming to fix my phone or me, so I carry around a cell phone with a fuzzy screen for two years that makes me ashamed every time I answer it. 

    The last time I throw my seashell box, it is actually a bottle of scented body spray, and I don’t throw it at my boyfriend, but near him, close enough that he storms out of the building. I’ve never thrown anything in front of him before, but I’ve wanted to, so today I do. I’m unsure if he’s coming back, which is why I slam a door with a mirror on it so hard that several pieces of mirror become lodged in my palm. My boyfriend hears the shattering from outside our apartment, and he returns to extract chunks of mirror from my hand, calmly placing band-aids across the bloody little cuts as he gently explains he will leave me if this happens again. 

He means it, and I believe him. I cry, and cry, and cry. It’s not his job to fix me.

    But I’ve been waiting twenty years for someone to come back into the room. It feels like just my luck that, when he finally does, I feel worse instead of better. Maybe I’m not an adult until I can mend the seashell box. In therapy, I’m told that the seashell box can’t be repaired or even replaced, but I can learn to love it in this new state.

    I still haven’t completely healed the girl who first threw the box. Sometimes, I’m worried she won’t forgive me for staying angry for so long. The irony, of course, is that I’ve only prolonged things by refusing to face her. I wonder when I will be brave enough to step into the room with that angry little girl, hold her seashell box in my hands, and say, “It’s okay that you broke it, it’s okay if it can’t be fixed, and it’s okay to still love your seashell box”. 

    I am in my 30s the first time my four-year-old tells me he hates me.

    “I hate you! You’re a bad mom!” he screams, his lip quivering, a little foot pounding the floor of my bedroom.

   “Okay,” I scoff and roll my eyes. My first instinct is to pretend I’m indifferent and invulnerable, like it doesn’t fucking gut me that my favorite person just told me I’m bad at being his mom. But anger is inherited as much as dimples or brown eyes, and this is how it starts. With a child whose parent pretends not to care. I stand at the doorway to my bedroom with my back to my son, petrified for just a few seconds that the moment has passed too quickly. That I won’t get a chance to do this over. 

    I step back into the room, and what comes out of my mouth is, “Actually. That really hurts, bud. It really hurts that you would say that to me.” And even I’m surprised at my honesty.

    I sit on the edge of my bed so we are at eye level, and hardly any time passes before he buries himself in my arms. After a while, he mutters, “I’m sorry” into my chest, and I say, “Me, too,” because I love him.
​
    And I want to help care for his seashell box. 




​Hillary Transue Moser is a writing professor at Widener University with an MFA in creative writing. She lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband, son, and two terrible dogs. She writes about the strange vulnerabilities of childhood.


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