UnderWoman: Up From Storage

Recently, Scoot Do-It had urged sister Wendy to “CLEAR OUT (at least a little of Mom’s storage unit)…I mean, c’mon!”

In fact, Wendy had never been in Merrie Do-It’s storage unit -- a capacious subterranean cage spanning almost a square block of apartment complex and containing most of the contents of their former house.

Wendy knows she is not equipped -- perhaps even genetically -- to do the job.

Over bottles of wine, as fair warning, she recounts Merrie’s hesitancy to part with a lifetime of old soap stubs; her insistence on saving unmatched socks….To which Merrie rouses from a slight slumber at the dinner table and adds, “Because you never know when a one-legged visitor will come to dinner!”

The next day, they head down to the storage unit, intending to “make room,” although this is not exactly what happens.

Wendy Do-It -- who looks up, who looks out, who looks forward, but who hardly ever looks back -- opens a slew of boxes…and falls in love with the past!

There are homework assignments from first grade. A science magazine and gossip rag she started in third. Her Girl Scout sash and patrol belt.

There is a badge from her first job, at the Capri movie theater, which says in extruded plastic letters: Wendy, Cashier.

There is her caricature from age sixteen, when she had bigger eyes and thinner thighs, which she props up against an old bookcase and photographs:

This will later become the beginning logo of UnderWoman. This is where and when the concept and name first take shape.

There is a filing drawer full of correspondence with former soul mates (some of whom she recognizes as soul mates only in retrospect). And don’t you know: There is the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

There are originals of AWARE, a magazine she started as part of her application for Mademoiselle’s guest editorship. There are snapshots and postcards from that glorious summer in New York. There are the hands-on food and farming articles that she wrote and photographed during a junior year in France. There is every element of her post-college career at Friends of WINE magazine, including a note from publisher Ron Fonte extolling the virtues of how good for and tough on each other they could be.

There is an article that her Dad, Archer, wrote for the magazine. There is the “Sunny Day Clause” she negotiated after one year on the job – establishing that, since she would do whatever it took to make the wine magazine and its 240-chapter international tasting society a success, and since she would never call in sick when she was not, that she reserved the right to go sailing with Dad when the weather was good and and/or to attend med school lectures with Hans when the subjects were interesting.

Okay. The archives ended there, for she had moved, with the magazine, to New York. And the rest resides in that city and state – crammed into a tree house of a Manhattan apartment and spanning an array of storage spaces from the outer boroughs to Brewster.

So she begins to unpack her brothers – likewise festooning the caged unit with their caricatures and accomplishments.

Admittedly, she has not so much “cleared out” as redecorated.

But it’s looking lively in Do-It storage land!

And then, she spies the real prize: In a box marked boldly, in red and black, on all six sides:

FUZZY! FUZZY! FUZZY! IMPORTANT: FUZZY! FUZZY! FUZZY!