“Oh, go off and be a yuppie puppy,” says Eleanor to the dog. Sometimes, like a spooky ventriloquism act, Eleanor assumes, and overassumes, my anger. Gerard is a tired lounge pianist who is leaving in two days to start law school in California. He is taking Magdalena. He is not taking me. He says he needs to make Law Review so he can get some wonderful job somewhere. Eleanor likes to define yuppies as people who buy the expensive mustard and the cheap ketchup, while the rest of the world gets it the other way around. “Gerard, you’re too old to become a yuppie,” she says, though she is wrong. Gerard is one year younger than Eleanor, and almost two years younger than I.
Eleanor strolls over with a paper bag and sits down. “A watershed moment!” she announces, and reaches into the bag and pulls out an opened box of Frost ‘N’ Tip for Brunettes Only and places it on the table next to my beautiful Chinese evergreen and my wine decanter, which my brother gave me; I’m willing to pawn more than I realized. “My entire past, right here, and I’m only asking a dime.” Eleanor grins. She has recently rinsed her hair red. She and her husband, Kip, are moving in ten days to Fort Queen Anne, New York, where Kip got a better job, and Eleanor wanted to start over. “Dead town,” she said, “but you can’t beat the money with a stick.”
I stare at the frost kit. The lettering is faded and there are coffee cup rings, like an Olympics insignia, on the front. “Eleanor,” I say slowly. People walk by, look at the clothes in the trees, smile, and keep walking. I’m about to tell her her sense of retail is not ours. “Eleanor,” I begin again, but then instead I dig a dime out of my change cup and give it to her. “How do you think I’ll look?” I smile, and hold the frost kit next to my face like a commercial. I’m the only one here who’s not moving out of town, though I am taking a vacation and going to Cape Cod for two weeks to think about my life.
“The terror of Truro,” she says. “You’ll dazzle.” She rips off a hangnail with her teeth. “Gerard’ll rue the day.”
It’s two against one out here.
Gerard sits back down next to me on the other side. Eleanor, suspecting she’s been overheard, reaches over and pats Gerard on the thigh, tells us again about the ketchup and mustard.
Gerard isn’t smiling. He stares off at the trees. Magdalena has settled at his feet. “Looks like someone was murdered in that thing, Eleanor,” he says, pointing at the lace teddy.
I reach next to me, under the table, and clasp Gerard’s hand, in warning, in rescue. It’s two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.
“No, we’re not getting married,” I told my mother on the phone when she asked. “He’s going to California and I’m staying here.” Usually she doesn’t phone. Usually she just does things like send me notes with histrionic scrawlings that read, “Well, you know, I can’t use these,” and along with the notes she encloses coupons for Kotex or Midol.
“Well,” said my mother. “The advice I hear from my women friends nowadays is don’t get married until you’re thirty. Just take your time. Have fun gallivanting around while you’re young. Get everything out of your system.”
Gallivanting is a favorite word of my mother’s. “Mom,” I said slowly, loudly. “I’m thirty-three. What on earth do you think I’m getting out of my system?”
This seemed to stump her. “You know, Benna,” she said finally. “Not every woman thinks like you and I do. Some just want to settle down.” This yoking of mother and daughter was something she’d taken to doing of late—arbitrarily, without paying attention. “No, you and I are kind of exceptional that way.”
“Mother, he said he thought it would be hell to live with me while he was in law school. He said it already was a kind of hell. That’s what he said.”
“I was like you,” said my mother. “I was determined to be single and have fun and date lots of men. I didn’t care what anyone thought.”
· · ·
Everyone keeps asking about Magdalena. “Dog’s for sale?” they say, or “How much ya asking for the dog?” as if it’s their own special joke. Then they laugh and stay around and poke through our belongings.
The first thing to go is my ten-speed bike. It is almost new, but it’s uncomfortable and I never ride it. “How much?” asks a man in a red windbreaker who has read about our sale in the classifieds.
I look at Gerard for assistance. “Forty-five?” I say. The man nods and gets on the bike, rides it around on the sidewalk. Gerard scowls at his sneakers, walks off, circles back. “Next time,” he whispers, “ask for sixty-five.” But there isn’t a next time. The man comes back with the bike. “I’ll take it,” he says, and hands me two twenties and a five. Gerard shrugs. I look at the money. I feel sick. I don’t want it. “I don’t think I’m good at these things,” I say to Gerard. The man in red loads the bike into his Dodge Scamp, gets in and starts the ignition. “It was a good bike, but you didn’t feel comfortable with it. The guy got a great deal,” says Gerard. The Scamp has already lumbered off out of sight. Now I own no bike. “Don’t worry,” says Eleanor, putting her arm around my shoulder and leading me off toward the birch trees. “It’s like life,” and she jerks a thumb back toward Gerard. “You trade in the young spiffy one and then get yourself an old clunker and you’re much happier. The old clunker’s comfortable and never gets stolen. Look at Kip. You have the old clunkers for life.”
“Forty-five dollars,” I say and hold the money up in front of my face like a Spanish fan.
“You’ll get the hang of it,” says Eleanor. There is now something of a small crowd gathering by Eleanor’s box of halter tops, by Gerard’s records, by my plants. Not the plants, I say to myself. I’m not sure I should be selling the plants. They are living things, even more so than Eleanor’s halter tops.
Eleanor is being a saleswoman by the birches. She indicates the black skirt. “This is a Liz Claiborne,” she says to a woman who may or may not be interested. “Do you know who she is?”
“No,” says the woman, annoyed, and she moves off toward the jazz records.
“We’ll take the plants,” says a teenaged girl with her boyfriend. “How much?”
There’s a small ficus tree and the Chinese evergreen. “Eight dollars,” I say, picking a number out of the air. The sick feeling overtakes me again. The Chinese evergreen is looking at me in disbelief, betrayed. The couple scrounge up eight dollars, give it to me, and then take the plants in their arms, like kindly rescuers of children.
“Thanks,” they say.
The branches of the ficus tree bob farewell, but the Chinese evergreen screeches, “You’re not fit to be a plant mother!” or something like that all the way out to the couple’s car. I put the eight dollars in my cup. I’m wondering how far you could go with this yard sale stuff. “Sure,” you might say to perfect strangers. “Take the dog, take the boyfriend, there’s a special on mothers and fingers, two-for-one.” If all you wanted to do was to fill up the cash cup, you might get carried away. A nail paring or a baby, they might all have little masking-tape price tags. It could take over you, like alcoholism or a religion. “I’m upset,” I say to Gerard, who has just sold some records and is gleefully putting cash in his cup.
“What’s the matter?” Again I’ve unsweetened his happiness, gotten in the way, I seem to do that.
“I sold my plants. I feel sick.”
He puts one arm around my waist. “It’s money. You could use some.”
“Gerard,” I say. “Let’s run off to New Hampshire and wear nothing but sleeping bags. We’ll be in-tents.”
“Ben-na,” he warns. He takes his arm away.
“We had a good life here, right? So we ate a lot of beans and rice.”
“Take your eight dollars, Benna. Buy yourself a steak.”
“I know,” I say. “We could open a lemonade stand!” The evergreen still shrieks in the distance like a bird. In the birch trees the stain on Eleanor’s teddy is some kind of organic spin art, a flower or target; a menstrual eye bearing down on me.
I know what will happen: He will
promise to write every other day but when it turns out to be once a week he will promise to write once a week, and when it becomes once a month and even that’s a postcard, he’ll get on the phone and say, “Benna, I promise you, once a month I’ll write.” He will start saying false, lawyerly things like “You know, I’m extremely busy” and “I’m doing my best.” He will be the first to bring up the expense of long distance calls. Words like res ipsa loquitur and ill behooves will suddenly appear on his tongue like carbuncles. He will talk about what “some other people said,” and what he and “some other people did,” and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are.
“Sure, I’ll take a check,” Eleanor is saying. “Are you kidding?” Miraculously, someone is buying Thoroughly Modern Millie. A man with a swollen belly and a checkbook but no shirt. The hair on his chest is like Gerard’s: a land very different from his face, something exotic and borrowed, as if for Halloween. He picks up the wine decanter. It’s ugly, a hopeful gift, expensive and wrong, from my lonely and overweight brother. “You can have it for a dollar,” I say. Once I found a fairly new book of poems in a used bookstore, and on the inside cover someone had written, “For Sandra, the only woman I’ve ever loved.” I blushed. I blushed for the bitch Sandra. Betrayals, even your own, can take you by surprise. You find yourself capable of things.
The man writes checks to both Eleanor and me. “Is the dog for sale?” he chuckles, but none of us responds. “My wife’s crazy about Julie Andrews,” he says, holding up the record. “When she was little she wanted to grow up to be a nanny, just so she could sing some of her songs. Doe a deer and all that.”
“Ha! me too,” I say, a ridiculous nanny, a Julie Andrews with a toad in her throat. The man toasts me with the wine decanter, then takes off down the sidewalk.
“The taste of a can opener,” mutters Eleanor.
And on the phone in California, in one final, cornered burst of erotic sentiment, he will whisper, “Good night, Benna. Hold your breasts for me,” but the connection won’t be very good and it will sound like “Hold your breath for me,” and I’ll say “You’re out of your mind, baby doll,” and hang up with a crash.
There is a lull in our yard sale. I go inside and bring out beers, pouring one into a dish for Magdalena. “Well,” says Gerard, leaning back in his lawn chair, exploding open a can and eyeing the birches. “No one’s gone for the lavender teddy yet, Eleanor. Maybe they think it’s stained.”
“Well, you know, it’s not really a whole stain,” Eleanor explains. “It’s just the outline of a stain—it’s faded in the middle already. Bruises fade like that, too. After a few more washings the whole thing’ll be gone.”
Gerard blinks in mock seriousness. I gulp at my beer like a panicked woman. Gerard and Eleanor count their money, rolling it and unrolling it, making cylindrical silver towers. It’s two against one. People stroll by, some stop and browse, others keep on going. Others say they’ll come back. “People are always saying they’ll come back, and then they never do,” I say. Both Eleanor and Gerard look quickly up at me from their money cups, as if I have somehow accused them, one against two. “Just noticing,” I say, and they return to their money.
A very beautiful black-haired woman in a denim jumper walks by, and, noticing our sale, stops in to poke and rearrange the merchandise. She is tan and strikingly gray-eyed and all those things that are so obviously lovely you really have to give her demerits for lack of subtlety. “Oh, is the dog for sale?” She laughs rather noisily at Magdalena, and Gerard laughs noisily back (to be polite, he’ll explain later), though Eleanor and I don’t laugh; he is closer to her age than we are.
“No, the dog’s not for sale,” says Eleanor, recrossing her legs. “But you know, you’re the very first person to ask that question.”
“Am I?” says the beautiful woman. The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: “So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?” You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.
“A clunker,” whispers Eleanor, noticing Gerard. “Get yourself a clunker.”
I’ll probably watch a lot of TV specials: Sammy Davis singing “For Once in My Life,” Tony Bennett singing “For Once in My Life,” everybody singing “For Once in My Life.”
“Can I interest you in a Liz Claiborne?” says Eleanor, pulling down the black skirt from the tree. “I don’t know much about designer clothes, but supposedly Liz Claiborne is good stuff.”
The beautiful raven-haired woman in the denim jumper smiles only slightly. “It’s okay except for the lint,” she says, gingerly lifting the hem of the skirt, then dropping it again. Eleanor shrugs and puts the skirt back up in the tree. “No one knows anything about character anymore,” she sighs, and lurches back toward the tables where she piles up old complimentary airlines magazines and back issues of People and Canadian Skater.
“Just this, then, I guess,” says the woman, and she hands Gerard a dollar for a record album. I look quickly and see that it’s a Louis Armstrong record I gave him last Christmas. When the woman has left, I say, “So what’s this, you’re selling gifts? I gave you that record last Christmas and now it’s in our yard sale?”
Gerard blushes. I’ve made him feel bad and I’m not sure whether I intended it. After all, I have sold the wine decanter my brother gave me last year, his foot jiggling, his entire impossible life printed on his face like a coin.
“I’ve got it on tape,” Gerard says. “I’ve got the Louis Armstrong on tape.”
I look at Eleanor. “Gerard tapes,” I say.
She nods. She’s looking through some old People magazines that she wants to sell for a dime apiece. “So, Billy Joel’s getting married to a fashion model,” she is saying, flipping pages. “What can you expect from a guy who writes ‘I don’t want clever conversation’ and calls that a love song.” Pretty soon Eleanor has lost it and is singing “I don’t want clever conversation, I just want gigundo buzooms.” “Kip loves Billy Joel,” she adds. “The man’s got the taste of a can opener.”
It’s every man for himself out here.
I will move to a new apartment in town. I will fill it with new smells—the vinyl of a shower curtain, the fishy percale of new sheets, the peppery odor of the landlord’s pesticides. I will take too many hot baths—a sex and alcohol substitute and an attempt to get reoriented.
At work, suddenly, no one will seem to understand when I’m joking.
We are actually doing fairly well in the yard sale, though the sweaters aren’t a big hit since the weather’s warm. “I’m sorry about the record album,” says Gerard, putting his hand on the part of my thigh where the shorts end.
“That’s okay,” I say, and go into the house and bring out a lot of junky little presents he’s given me in the last two years: crocheted doilies, Crabtree and Evelyn soaps, a drawer sachet that says, “I Pine for You, and Sometimes I Balsam.” They are all from other yard sales. They have sat for years in someone else’s drawers, and then in their yards, and now I’m getting rid of them. I suppose I’m being vengeful, but I never really liked these presents. They are for an old maid, or a grandmother, and now’s my chance to dump them. Perhaps I’m just a small person. Sometimes I think I must love Magdalena more than I love Gerard, because when they both take off for California, I want Magdalena to be happy and I want Gerard to mope and lose his hair into his water dish. I don’t want him to be happy. I want him to miss me. That is not really love; I suppose I understand that. But perhaps it is like a small girl who for one baffled and uncharmed instant realizes her rigid plastic doll is not a real baby—before she resumes her pretending
again. Perhaps it is like a football player who, futile and superfluous, dives in on top of the manpile, even after he knows the tackle’s over; even after he knows the play’s completed and it all had nothing to do with him; he just leaps in there anyway.
“Oh my god,” cries Eleanor, picking up the balsam sachet. “I’ve seen this in at least two other yard sales.”
“I got it down on Oak Street,” says Gerard. “Is that where you saw it?”
“I don’t think so.” She holds it up by two fingers and eyes it suspiciously.
For a while I’ll find myself talking to myself, which will be something I’ve always done, I’ll realize, it’s just that when you’re living with someone else you keep thinking you’re talking to them. Simply because they’re in the same room, you assume they’re listening. And then when you start living alone, you realize you’ve developed a disturbing habit of talking to yourself.
As medication, I will watch a lot of HBO and eat baked apples with sour cream. The whites of my eyes will chip and crack with scarlet. Only once or twice will I run out into the street, in the middle of the night, with my pajamas on.
By three-thirty-five business really winds down. I have already sold my ladderback chairs and my Scottish cardigans. I’m not even sure now why I’ve sold all these things, except perhaps so as not to be left out of this giant insult to one’s life that is a yard sale, this general project of getting rid quick. What I really should have brought out is the food Gerard and I still have: potatoes already going bad, growing dark intestines; parsley and lettuce swampy in plastic bags; on the shelf above the stove, spices sticking to the sides of their bottles. Or I should have brought down all the mirrors—the one in the bathroom, the one over the dresser. I’m tired of looking into them and putting on so much make-up I look like a prostitute. I’m tired of saying to myself: “I used to be able to get better-looking than this. I know I used to be able to get better-looking than this.”