Chapter 12. Yard Sale
My mother told me on the phone that she wanted to have a yard sale. For years she’s been trying to clean up the old house, going through the detritus of the eons, the 1930s dresses and top hats, cracking shoes, electric trains, leather-bound books, yearbooks from North Central High School. This mountain of material weighs heavily on her, as she doesn’t like to think of my sister and me having to go through it all after she’s “gone.” Or maybe she’s afraid we’ll just toss it all, which affronts her frugal sensibility.
I visit her every April to take off the storm windows and put on the screens, and every October to reverse the procedure. There’s also a summer visit, and of course a Christmas one, which every other year takes place at my sister’s house instead of in Indianapolis. At every one of these visits my mother will have packets of old letters, addressed in sweeping 19th-century script, wrapped in rubber bands and ready for my perusal at the breakfast table. We’ll sit there together looking out the window at the birds that come and go on the feeder and reading letters my father’s grandmother wrote to him when he was at Ann Arbor or that my mother’s mother wrote to her when she was trapped in Michigan for the summer with three screaming brats (my sisters and me).
Mother’s distractibility has increased markedly in the last couple of years, as my father has sunk inexorably toward the nursing home where he now resides, talking very little and sometimes drooling when he dozes off in his wheelchair. The financial and maintenance responsibilities she once deferred to him as the man of the house have now fallen on her overloaded mind, never the most organized. She has to get someone to mow the lawn and someone else to blow the scale out of the aging hot water pipes, whose flow has been reduced to a trickle. She’s developed a close personal relationship with Mr. Amron, who fixes the washer and dryer, and the tile guy who redid the bathroom because the floor under the bathtub was rotting out. The nursing home fees are of course unpayable by any normal economic entity; she’s had to apply for spousal impoverishment status so that Medicaid will pick up the bulk of the payments. She walks rapidly from room to room with furrowed brow, stopping frequently to mutter “shit shit shit” and stare sternly at the dog-stained rugs, as though the location of the missing pharmacy bill or property tax receipt might be inscribed there. Her vagueness comes in handy in such situations, as she can be easily sidetracked by one of the North Central yearbooks, or even the question of what to cook for dinner. But she’s lost weight as the relentless point of old age has pressed down on her, and her posture has developed a symbolic stoop. Excruciating foot cramps wake her up nearly every morning before sunrise. She’s all bones, which I can feel through her blouse as I try to relax her shoulders, although her mind generally still functions in its accustomed swerving manner, like a kitten chasing leaves in the wind. Out in the world, at the mall or grocery store, she walks with one hand in her pocket and shies away like a diffident puppy from the younger people who barrel along the aisles with their beefy shopping carts. Getting on the phone to make a restaurant reservation is a terrifying chore for her; a call to the Social Security office drains all her reserves of courage. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who apologizes to waitresses for not finishing her oatmeal.
But she seized on the idea of a yard sale, thinking it would help her get rid of some of the stuff she knows my sister and I don’t want. “Maybe I could make some money too,” she told me enthusiastically. She worries a lot about money, even though her daughter’s husband, a very generous man, has so much rolling in these days he’s literally looking for ways to get rid of it. He sends her a couple of thousand a month, which she allows to build up to five comforting figures in her checking account, drawing essentially no interest.
She got the idea for the yard sale from her new friend, Deanna Dubai, who had lived in the dark brick house across the street while she was growing up and whose parents have recently died in quick succession. Though I shared a neighborhood with Deanna Dubai for probably 10 or 15 years before she left home, I’m not sure I ever saw her in all that time. She was a few years older than I was, so I wouldn’t have known her in school. I have a vague image of a girl in a plaid skirt walking along the sidewalk in subzero weather near that house, but that could have been almost anybody female. Deanna Dubai recently had a yard sale for some of the things in her parents’ house. “I don’t think it worked very well,” my mother told me on the phone. “There was nobody there even looking when I went over. I don’t think she advertised it. There isn’t enough traffic on Wing Street. And everything I looked at she forced me to take without paying for it, so I had to stop talking about things. She gave me some nice insulated cups. I think I’ll use one for my bathroom glass; it looks very nice in there. She’s really a very nice person. I never even knew she lived there all those years! I wonder why she never got married.” I refrained from pointing out to her that everything she accepted or even bought from Deanna Dubai would have to be sold at some other yard sale after she passed away. We agreed that on my next visit we’d do it.
At the breakfast table on Columbus Day weekend she showed me her ad in the North Side Topics, laughing embarrassedly at the unaccustomed feeling of public exposure. All she’d been able to think of to say was “Yard sale, Saturday, October 13, 5935 N.E. Wing Street, between 59th and 60th.”
“You didn’t mention any of the big draws, like your antique tablecloths the squirrels used for nesting material or the electric hedge clipper that doesn’t work any more,” I told her. I went out and tied a couple of balloons on the mailbox. It was a beautiful day for a yard sale, clear and brisk. In all the well-tended yards and in my mother’s, which wasn’t well tended, the trees were turning orange against a cobalt sky. I’d had in mind major items, such as boxes of old books and 78 record albums, and my father’s dusty rowing machine and punching bag, which hung by springs from the ceiling beam in the basement and used to flex the entire living room floor with a sound like a squeaky mattress when he went down there to vent some hostility, of which he had an abundance. There were a lot of tools that had been rusting for decades and a portable workbench, never used. Also some of my old clothes from high school days – pants that still fit me and that would look as nerdy on me now as they did then – plus army uniforms and brittle “combat” boots from that era in my life, weird ties, both mine and my father’s, spanning the wide and narrow epochs of tie fashion. My mother also made me drag down a lot of drapes, still in their cleaning bags, which she’d never gotten around to rehanging, the aforementioned 30s dresses and hats, both my sisters’ high school clothes, including saddle shoes and threadbare pointy brassieres, the mismatched golf clubs I’d used with a great sense of grievance through my teenage years, hockey sticks, fossilized baseball gloves, great granny Armstrong’s mandolin and my abandoned trombone, various bedraggled typewriters. Mother rushed back and forth into the house, bringing out the bizarre items she kept finding in forgotten corners and cupboards, like a set of leather coasters in a little holder, and partial sets of dogeared playing cards (but they have nice pictures on them, don’t they?), and a white glass hen you could lift off her glass nest. My grandmother always put the soft-boiled eggs in it and let one of the kids open it at the breakfast table. There are no kids any more, however. My sisters’ have grown up, and my wife and I have proved to be an infertile couple, as it would say in the Reader’s Digests that sit on the laundry hamper in my mother’s bathroom, open to “Laughter, the Best Medicine.”
We laid it all out in the October sun at the foot of the weedy driveway, where it looked pretty odd, as if someone’s life had been lazily bombed. For me, the image of my high school self suspired irresistibly from it: the crewcut and acne, the horn-rimmed glasses, the thoughtless clothes hanging on my jumpy frame, the unspeakable lusts. The subsequent 35 years of development might have been all for naught, and I felt that, at my core, I was still the same pitifully shy adolescent.
T
he first person to show up for the yard sale was Deanna Dubai, who’d read the ad and, I suppose, wanted to provide moral support. She was a secret the neighborhood had somehow hidden from me for 40 years, and I examined her carefully while she politely nodded and exclaimed over the junk on the lawn. A tall woman apparently in her late 50s, she had an unadorned straight hairstyle, smooth skin, and active brown eyes behind rimless glasses. Her presence had a kind of stillness, like a dignified house, full of years and character, with sweeping lawns. This made me want to keep sneaking looks at her.
“Now it’s your turn to take some of my things,” my mother told her. “How about this,” pointing to a little round three-legged table. Its top was designed to hold an ashtray, and it also had a wider, skirt-like shelf for I don’t know what – something social. My parents had devolved from origins in the canape crowd of Grosse Pointe, Michigan. One of the three curved legs had lost its toes, probably as a result of one of my preteen living room football games, giving the table an awkward tilt. “Well, I don’t know,” said Deanna Dubai, her eyes flickering. “I don’t smoke.” They were both laughing, my tiny gray mother and this tall woman curving over her, holding up the table by its convenient handle in mock speculation. In an indefinable way they resembled each other, despite the disparity in size. The skin was softening along Deanna Dubai’s jawline, and her carefully pressed print dress made no attempt to hide her broad, middle-aged figure.
“It was a wedding present, I think. Mrs. Jay gave it to us. She was our wealthy benefactor. Everyone smoked in those days,” my mother told her. “But see, you could put a vase on the top with some flowers, and then some – things – on the lower shelf.” Deanna Dubai glanced at me. I liked the way her mouth kept threatening to smile but didn’t quite. While my mother was urging a pair of bent candlesticks on her, a truck turned the corner down at the end of Wing Street and slowly grew larger. Mr. Spock, the dog, who had been briskly examining the bushes he’d already watered hundreds of times, lifted his muzzle to look.
The truck moaned to a halt beside us, hanging a blue gauze of exhaust on the still air. It was a world-weary thing with a rounded and sagging grill, missing a fender or two and wearing a coat of the dandruff found on the shoulders of freeways no longer young, as opposed to the more macho stuff airbrushed onto shiny new pickups and their nouveau gaucho drivers in TV commercials. The cargo bed, which was formed by a sort of sagging picket fence that had perhaps once been hemlock green, was about half full, a mound of stuff thrown in at random. The jumble made it impossible to focus on any one item; it had the look of one of those great archaeological finds where the bones of 50 species of dinosaurs were tossed together by some antediluvian cataclysm. In the cab a huge, overhanging nose and bright, birdlike eyes scanned my mother’s array of goods, then rotated toward us. “Anything left?” The voice had a slight quaver. Its owner fumbled, muttering, with something by his side; then the door swung open with a scream that startled all of us, and a small, rotund man in a stained pale blue summer blazer stepped to the ground.
“George Curtis,” he said, looking sharply at the little table still in Deanna Dubai’s hand. His voice had a quality of confident but mousy entrepreneurship; his long white hair was in need of a shampoo. Mr. Spock warily sniffed the toes of his wrinkled shoes and whined. “Good morning,” we all said. “Are you here for the yard sale?” my mother asked him. He nodded impatiently. From the handle of the open truck door hung a length of clothesline. It appeared to me that Mr. Curtis used the clothesline to secure the door when the truck was in motion.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
My mother was taken aback. “You want to buy something?” Even though this was a yard sale, it had apparently not occurred to her that anyone would actually want to take away any of her things.
“All of it,” said George Curtis. “I’ll take all of it.” He ignored our shocked expressions and stood with his hands like two bunches of bananas riding his hips, surveying the cluttered lawn. “I’ll give you two hundred dollars for the whole lot.” He finally met my mother’s gaze, having somehow deduced that it was she who was offering this load of mismatched family history. A pure white cloud of hair haloed my mother’s suddenly panicky expression. “All of it?” she said. “Well...” She looked at it all again. “Shouldn’t we leave some for the other people who might come along?”
I felt it my duty to speak on behalf of efficiency. “Why don’t you go for it, Mom? Who knows how much of this stuff you’re going to sell. We’ll probably just have to carry most of it back in the house, and you’ll be right back where you started.” I felt Deanna Dubai’s flickering eyes on me.
Mr. Curtis put one banana hand in his pants pocket and pulled it back out with a thick fold of obviously pre-owned bills. He counted them, pausing now and then to lick his thumb. My mother was speechless, staring at him, then at the punching bag and the rowing machine. I could tell things were moving far too fast for her. She no longer trusted her own judgment, and my endorsement of the plan, the pressure to be sensible, had swayed her. “Well,” she finally got out, “I suppose so. I guess the point is to sell things. But not that table,” pointing at the three-legged ashtray holder. Deanna Dubai appeared to be about to object, but kept silent. Mr. Curtis nodded, peeling off one five-dollar bill from the stack and adding it to the remainder, which he tucked back in his bulging pocket. “Help me load this in the truck, will you,” he said to me.
My mother watched with a stricken expression as we piled everything in the back of the truck, avoiding landslides with some difficulty. “Well, that was easy,” Deanna Dubai said, trying to soothe her. But I understood. I felt a little ache in my gut as I loaded my old clothes and all the other artifacts into this stranger’s hands. Each item suddenly seemed to bloom with vague possibilities as I found a place for it on George Curtis’s mountain, potential that we’d somehow overlooked during the years it had sat silently in the dark upstairs closet or silting up with dust on the mantelpiece. There was a feeling of opportunities and little friends lost forever.
“I’m selling some things too,” said Deanna Dubai as we finished loading. George Curtis slammed the gate of the picket fence and secured it with a few turns of a frayed bungee cord. “Well, let’s have a look,” he said.
We paraded across the street to the Dubai house, with Spock reconnoitering ahead of us. My mother walked with her head down, the slump of her bony shoulders more pronounced than before. In the garage were neatly arrayed all of Deanna Dubai’s parents’ worldly goods. They were much nicer than ours, I thought. The pieces of furniture seemed to go together, and there were full sets of china and dinnerware. Everything was in much better condition, as though the Dubais had lived a more orderly life, a better life, than we had. There were no oil spots on the garage floor. I tried to picture an adolescent Deanna Dubai in this habitat, doing homework in white knee socks, but nothing came.
George Curtis wandered along the edges of the display, abruptly lifting a candlestick or a fork and then putting it down just as fast. “No,” he said, “I don’t think so.” Danna Dubai blushed. “You don’t want any of it?” “Nope,” said George Curtis, dusting off his hands on his smudged polyester pants and heading for his truck.
He maneuvered the sputtering truck around and crept off in the direction he’d come from. We all gazed after him, Mr. Spock standing on three legs, like a pointer. In the silence I could hear the dry tick of maple leaves sifting down to the lawn.
“Never mind, Deanna,” my mother said. “I think your things are really too nice for him, don’t you?” But when the truck turned the corner onto 60th Street and disappeared, it was as though a door had closed. My mother was near tears. I could see that this lightning assault was not at all what she’d had in mind. She’d just liked the idea of a yard sale; she hadn’t really wanted to sell anything, or maybe just big white elephants like the rowing machine. She’d been looking fo
rward to all the people who would stop by and fondle the leather coasters, try on the top hat, blow a blast on the trombone, and then, maybe, buy a cut glass ashtray for a quarter. She’d wanted to talk to them all, to hear what they were doing with their houses, and about their children in grade school or college, their elderly aunts who were moving into condos, or the old Victorian they were renovating downtown. But George Curtis had short-circuited the whole thing. His rude hands had swept away the frayed web she’d been unraveling one careful strand at a time for the last couple of years. Our family history was riding off into the unknowable on a plume of blue smoke, to be touched by strange hands and worn on alien bodies. Perhaps it would be abused.
“Oh, now what are we going to do?” she lamented. “We advertised this yard sale, and now people will come and there won’t be anything.”
“We could sit out here all day and apologize to everyone,” I suggested. “Make some lemonade or ice tea and give it away. Maybe that would mollify them.”
Deanna Dubai looked at me disapprovingly. “Why don’t I put my things out?” she said. “Nobody will know the difference.”
And so we carried her stuff out of her garage and plunked it down on our lawn, and we made the lemonade and ice tea and sat in our lawnchairs, wearing floppy hats against the slanting sunlight. My mother and Deanna Dubai talked about parents, life, old age, shopping at Marsh’s, the horrendous traffic on 62nd Street, the changes 40 years had written on the neighborhood, the lives that were moving in to replace our own. I mostly just listened, watching Deanna Dubai’s long hands gesticulating and remarking again her inexplicable resemblance to my mother, the guilelessness of her words. Strangers drove up from time to time and got out to look over the display, shyly at first and then more confidently as we plied them with lemonade and conversation. Deanna Dubai even sold a few things, driving diffident bargains.
Trade dropped off as the afternoon arrived and then narrowed toward evening. The day grew cooler despite the rich sunlight, and I took the balloons off the mailbox. We hauled Deanna Dubai’s remaining items back to her garage.
“Thank you for rescuing me,” my mother told her.
“Oh no, thank you,” said Deanna Dubai.
“I don’t know what I would have told all those people. It would have been very embarrassing.”
“Well, it worked out perfectly didn’t it?” They smiled at each other.
“Why don’t you come over for breakfast in the morning? My son will cook. He has to fly home tomorrow afternoon.” She looked at me, laughing guiltily at this presumption of old age, that other people would do things for you. However, I was quite willing.
That night I lay in the upstairs bedroom thinking about my long-lost neighbor. I invented a life for her in our 30 years of ignorant separation. She’d lived in Indianapolis the whole time, I knew; but I gave her a small Eastern women’s college, embellished her vague career at the art museum with docent tours and slide presentations, and allowed her a couple of lovers. One in particular, a tall, no-nonsense businessman, she spent 20 years trying to coax a laugh out of, after which he left her for a younger woman. At intervals, as I drifted in and out of this vision, I could hear my mother in the bathroom downstairs, getting ready for bed, brushing her false teeth, turning lights on and off, opening and closing doors as she swished through the quiet house in her flimsy cotton nightgown, making sure all was buttoned down for the night. Mr. Spock was already flattened on his rug next to her bed.
It was a warm night. Outside the open French doors was the derelict silence of the suburbs, suddenly ripped by the mouse-curdling command of a screech owl. In the familiar and sensual darkness of my adolescence I kept returning to the stillness of Deanna Dubai’s almost-smile, and I imagined a sadness in her eyes, a childless woman strolling the littered shoreline of old age. I summoned up her tall, heavy body in the print dress, which I unbuttoned carefully, first to nuzzle the pale dune of her stomach, then to lay my balding head on her slack and comforting bosom. I awoke almost immediately to a gray, birdless dawn.
Deanna Dubai arrived for breakfast with a companion, a petite, pale woman with dark hair, considerably younger than herself, whom she introduced as a friend and who spoke hardly a word as we ate scrambled eggs and toast but not the oatmeal with a mashed banana in it that my mother had insisted on making. Dressed in dark slacks and sweater, the friend sat wrapped in her own arms, sipping coffee and following the conversation with quiet black eyes. Our glances met occasionally, but I was mentally halfway back to the West Coast and not in the mood for more mysteries. Mr. Spock browsed under the table while Deanna Dubai and my mother chattered.
“It’s so odd, that she never said anything,” my mother mused on the way to the airport in the afternoon. “But she looks like an interesting person. She has a nice face.” I said nothing. It’s not always clear whether my mother is talking to herself or expects a reply, and she never insists. If no one answers, she’ll just carry on the dialogue with herself. She sat very straight in the passenger’s seat, and I knew she was holding at bay the thought of separation. In the nursing home that morning my father had been apathetic, as he usually was before the afternoon insulin shot, nodding or shaking his head slowly in response to our questions about his nurses, his bath, his breakfast. She stroked his tousled white hair with one arthritis-knotted hand, but he didn’t look up. “We sold your punching bag, Dear,” she told him. “To ‘George Curtis’.” She laughed. “He’s a funny little man. Anyway, I don’t suppose you’ll be needing it.” He shook his head slowly, after a long pause.
“I wonder who’ll be punching that punching bag now,” she said later, while we waited at the departure gate. She was looking around at the airport trail mix of travelers and their families. “There are all these people, living their complicated lives. And you never know about most of them.” I gave her a long goodbye hug and went down the jetway and squeezed into my window seat, but I knew she was still standing out there waiting to make sure the plane would really pull back from the gate and that there were no freak accidents while we taxied to the takeoff point. She always had to see the plane actually in the air, and would have liked to follow it visually all the way to landing, just to be sure; whereas for me, once inside the plastic environment of the plane it was as though I’d already left. Still, when we finally got airborne, with the usual lilt at the transition between ground and air, I looked down at our skewed shadow racing over the browning fields and imagined her white head, seen from above and shrinking as we elevated, an old lady with one hand in her pocket, walking pigeon-toed on painful feet through the terminal, moving her lips slightly as she tried to remember where she’d parked the car.