Bored stove factory workers, whiling away the time until the loneliest hours of their day were gone, would pay Don, Nellie, whoever was at the bar, a dollar and signal for the punch board to be brought over. Then they'd crook their fingers at Jane, calling her over for good luck, and ask her to punch out a winner. If she did, she got to keep the candy, a whole box for herself; and if she lost, she still got the glorious pleasure of punching out those tiny paper pills of hope. Don had once referred to a customer who played the board incessantly as having "gambling fever," and Jane hadn't known what he was talking about. Gambling was sweaty men in a backroom rolling dice, wasn't it? Or tuxedoed James Bond types at a Baccarat table, yes?
No, Don had told her. He described gambling fever, and she recognized her own symptoms— the tiny beads of perspiration that broke out on her upper lip, the intense need to swallow, and the fullness in her chest when Vince called her over and threw down a dollar. That moment of tension and release when he told her to punch out some winners, that satisfying fit of the key into the punchboard…that was gambling.
Jane held JACKPOT CHARLEY in her hands. Twenty-five cents could win you a dollar and a chance to punch out a jackpot winner, another five or even twenty-five dollars. ALL AWARDS PAID IN TRADE it read. Don had always had candy punchboards, but here in Bateman's corner of the basement, Jane ran her hands over money boards, radio and television prize boards, and a small, round MORE SMOKES board where you bought a punch for a nickel and a winning number got you five packages of cigarettes.
Jane snapped back to the present. She looked at Dorothy and Ollie, who had become energetic helpers, putting leather dice cups and Bakelite dice, boxes of glass jars, bar towels with SHANGRI-LA embroidered in rainbow colors into her makeshift shopping cart. Jane had been a picker only a few months. Timid and still distracted by the owner's history, she had often let the owners' property, what she was really at a sale for, slip away. She had to make a quick decision and the right offer. Prices were low in this room. Clearly the sales team expected to get their money from Mary's fabulous vintage clothes and the "smalls" upstairs.
Bateman's old inventory was nickel-and-dime compared to the stuff in the rest of the house. Because this was a separate room with a door, a sales representative stood with a clipboard and pencil, ready to add the cost of the odd shot glass to your ticket. Jane hoped this was an owner, someone in authority and not just a helpful friend of the sales team, wearing an apron for the day just for the opportunity for early bird shopping.
Jane went up to her and talked low and fast. "I'll give you three hundred dollars for the whole room." Jane hesitated only a second, then upped her ante, "Five hundred and we tape it off right now."
Jane had never made such a bold offer. She had seen rooms sold though. Once she had been at a sale during the last hour and tried to go into a bedroom, getting tangled in some string across the doorway where a Donna type had barred entry with her body and waved her away. "I bought this room; it's all mine. See the string? I own the room."
This sale had only been going on twenty-five minutes at the most, and clearly this was a last-hour offer. Its appeal was the figure. Three hundred was a fair wholesale price for everything in this corner room, and five hundred was a fair retail price. Jane knew she would have to get the saleswoman's full attention. One of the other helpers was distracting her, telling her about some man who had tried to slip her a twenty to get to the front of the line. "Can you imagine?" she was saying. "Thought he could just buy me off? The people in line would kill me if I started taking tips like that."
"Look, Lois," Jane said, reading the name tag on her apron, "I'm a decorator and I'm doing a recreation room as a vintage bar. You're not going to get that much money for all this stuff even if you sell everything here individually for your asking price. And you know you're not going to get the tagged prices on all of it."
Five minutes later, Jane offered Dorothy and Ollie their choice of some of the Shangri-La souvenirs or cash if they'd help guard the door while she carried Mary's neatly taped boxes and bags out to the old van she and Charley still shared. They were terribly excited over meeting a real interior decorator and waved away any notion of payment.
"Mary'll be tickled pink when she finds out the Shangri-La is going to live on in some rich person's basement," said Ollie, and Dorothy nodded. In a moment of pure picker's rapture or the hallucination of gambling fever, Jane hugged them both, then proceeded to use Dorothy's roll of paper tape from the medical supply room to seal off the space. Crisscrossing the tape over the door frame, Jane sensed something familiar in the scene. What did this remind her of?
Shaking her head at someone trying to duck around her, she said, "No. Sorry, I just bought the room." When she turned and glanced over her shoulder, it only increased her giddy delight to see Donna slinking backward over to a sales employee and complaining about a whole room being sold so early. Let her whine, Jane thought, it will only make the salespeople mad and less willing to bargain with her.
She finished taping from the outside, sticking a sold tag on the center of the tape. She nodded at Dorothy and Ollie, who were both surprisingly strong, more than up to the task of pushing the boxes to the doorway for Jane to haul. Looking back at the older women framed by the strips of tape, she realized what it all reminded her of: a crime scene. She had just bought herself a crime scene.
2
"Chocolate chips or bananas?"
"Can we have both?"
"Dad, aren't you supposed to be watching your cholesterol or something?" asked Nick.
Charley looked up from the student paper he was reading and adjusted his glasses. Why in the world would his twelve-year-old son be concerned with his lipid profile?
Nick stood in the door, wrapped in a vintage blue gingham apron with a red duck embroidered on the pocket and gestured with a red Bakelite-handled spoon. "I just read an article in the Science Times," Nick said, popping a few chocolate chips into his mouth. "You're entering those at risk years, Dad."
Charley turned around in his chair to study his son, the chef and newly minted nutritional consultant. Earnest, handsome, average height, solid, compact frame, lightly freckled, and blessed (or cursed depending on just how honest you were being with him) with his mother's deep brown eyes that bored into your own, demanding hard truth and no compromise. When had he become such a worrier, a fusser?
"The potassium in the bananas is so good for me that a few chocolate chips won't hurt," Charley said. "Besides, your mother says chocolate raises your good cholesterol."
"Right," Nick said, sighing, "haven't you noticed she makes stuff like that up depending on what we have in the house?" Nick headed back to the kitchen, calling over his shoulder, "Like when all we have is a box of Lucky Charms for dinner, she tells me they're made with whole grains and marshmallows are fat free."
Charley tried to go back to reading a freshman's description of igneous formations, the same paper he had read for fifteen years— not plagiarized, just the same old thing. Those igneous formations didn't change. He put the paper back on the stack.
He and Jane had to make some decisions. Their son was turning into their parent, and although Charley avoided reading books on child raising, he knew this had to be a bad sign. How often, he wondered, are they having Lucky Charms for dinner?
Even if he had read the books on child raising that Jane had suggested, he reasoned with himself, the authors probably wrote them assuming that parents were in a fairly stable state. He had glanced at the bookstore shelves that held those volumes, uniformly designed, Your Child at Three, Your Child at Four, etc. What about some truly valuable advice books, like, Being a Parent in Your Forties If You Were a Child in the Fifties? Chapters like "How Not to Look Bored at Little League," "Where to Look Up Basketball Terms If Your Son Likes Sports and You Don't," "How to Have Sex When Your Child Stays Up Later Than You Do," "How to Discourage Your Child from Early Experimentation with Sex When You're Preoccupied with Same," "How to Talk About Dru
g Use Before You've Had Your Required Twenty Cups of Coffee," and so forth, might have some real value.
Charley knew he and Jane had been pretty darn good parents when Nick was an infant and a toddler. They'd carried him everywhere, arguing over who got to cinch the Snugli pack around his or her waist. They rode bikes and picnicked and cooked healthy meals. Even when Jane put in long hours at the advertising agency or was out of town supervising a commercial shoot, they managed to work it around Charley's teaching schedule so that Nick's exposure to child care was minimal, just enough to teach him to socialize and just enough so that Charley and Jane could compare themselves to other parents and come out smugly on top.
Now he and Jane had entered some kind of bizarre second childhood. Only a year ago, they had watched some reality television show on MTV and been horrified at the twenty-somethings who whined and mugged for the camera.
"I hate these people," Jane had said, passing a bowl of popcorn to Charley. They had planned on watching a video but had caught this program flipping through the channels, and it had held them like a train wreck.
Blonds and red-haired beautiful people hugged each other and wept about their ungrateful boyfriends and Stair-Master addictions and their confused and empty lives. One olive-skinned beauty lamented the loss of her favorite moisturizer. "They took it off the market, do you believe it?" She was close to sobbing.
Charley and Jane had both looked at Nick, who was glancing back and forth from the front window to Sports Illustrated for Kids. Was it their fault, their responsibility as a generation of parents who overindulged their children? His father's Sports Illustrated had been good enough for Charley…. Why did Nick and his friends have everything specially scaled to them? Why did they get their own magazine, their own demographic consideration, for god's sake? Had they fallen into the trap of grooming their children to be these people, these made-for-TV, solipsistic, body-conscious consumers who now shared their deepest, darkest feelings only with each other and the MTV audience?
"No!" Jane had cried out when the commercial came on. It was one of hers. The same tribe of beautiful people, drinking imported beer and discussing the market and playing darts, whom she had coaxed into intimacy on the set, now mimicked the very set of players on the show.
Nick jumped up at the honk of a horn and waved. "Love you guys: see you in the morning," and threw the magazine down on the couch.
Jane and Charley nodded at him and waved, but remained in a horrified trance, watching this community of youthful mannequins play themselves out around a kitchen table, pointing fingers at each other for being insensitive.
One year later, Charley thought, and twenty years older than those pretty boys and girls, and now he and Jane were sounding like those twits. Jane's trying to figure out what will satisfy her and make her happy, and I'm trying to figure out why it wasn't or isn't me, Charley thought, taking off his glasses to clean them.
* * *
"Breakfast is ready, Dad," Nick called.
"Why three settings?" Charley asked.
"Mom loves pancakes," Nick said, expertly flipping stacks of three onto the plates.
Was Nick so upset by their quasi-separation, their selfish searches for their real selves that he was fantasizing family meals? Charley knew he had to handle this delicately, so he gently picked up the third juice glass and turned to put it back on the counter.
"Thanks, Charley," said Jane, taking it from him and draining it in one gulp. "These pancakes look fabulous, Nick."
Jane had carried at least twelve boxes into the mud-room, but Charley had been lost enough in his work and his thoughts not to hear the truck, the door, the thuds of the cartons being stacked.
"Are there more?" Charley asked, pointing toward the garage.
Jane smiled and nodded. "Let's eat first. You're going to need all your strength."
Jane, flushed with both the thrill of the hunt and her room-buying victory, told them all about Dorothy and Ollie and Mary and Bateman. Charley interrupted only once, to ask where the Shangri-La had been.
"Howard Street, east of Western," Jane said, wiping her mouth after finishing every bite of Nick's pancakes. "Dot said the whole building's gone now, burnt to the ground years ago."
"Dot?" asked Charley.
"She insisted. We're buddies now. They want to take me to see Mary."
"Wouldn't that be weird? I mean you bought her old stuff and everything, and then you go to see her in a home?" asked Nick.
Jane nodded. It would be weird. Once she had left a house sale, carrying a great tan leather bag that had been stuffed into a basement closet. It was weathered and worn and stunning, and Jane couldn't believe anyone would have left it. The man running the sale had shrugged and asked for three dollars, which Jane handed over gladly. Walking to her car, Jane ran into a couple who stopped her, admiring the bag.
"That's the Crate & Barrel bag I could never find," the woman said, poking her husband in the arm.
"Isn't it great?" Jane said, gushing with house sale good humor, hauling it and another paper bag filled with dishes and weaving supplies to her car.
When she opened her trunk, she turned around and saw the couple arguing on the sidewalk, and it hit her. They weren't idle shoppers who remembered when the leather bag had been in the window, new stock, at Crate & Barrel. They were the owners of the house, the former owners who were moving and leaving all the old trappings behind. But they hadn't meant to leave that bag. Jane was relieved she hadn't bragged about the three-dollar price she had gotten, but that relief didn't make up for the guilt at carrying off something they hadn't intended to sell. She debated over offering it to them, but the man got into one car, the woman got into another, and they drove off in separate directions. Were they moving together or splitting up entirely, Jane wondered? Giving the bag back might have stirred up more trouble… one more object to divide fairly and squarely. Maybe not, Jane thought. Maybe they're just moving somewhere, leaving the old beloved house, and tensions are running high. Whatever the truth, both were gone, and Jane had an incredible piece of luggage for three dollars.
Would meeting Mary in the assisted-living facility leave her feeling guilty and more than a little dirty, coated with the scavenger dust that so many of her fellow pickers wore standing in line, sizing up houses, garages, Dumpsters parked in alleys?
* * *
By the time Jane, Nick, and Charley had unloaded the van, it was nearly noon. Usually, Jane wouldn't even be home yet from her Saturday round of sales, but she had blown more than her weekend budget on Bateman's storage room. Her plan, atleast before she opened the boxes and fell in love with everything there, was that she would pack up most of it to send to Miriam in Ohio, but keep the really cool tavern paraphernalia to transform the EZ Way Inn. Tim, her best friend, was also a dealer and lived in Kankakee. He had a weakness for glassware. Tim would love to take this stuff off her hands… if she decided she could let him.
"I have to meet with a few graduate students this afternoon, Jane, so I…," Charley said.
"Will you look at this adding machine?" Jane said, carefully lifting the heavy metal model from a box and setting it on the table. The black keys, rows of numbers were fat and solid and satisfying to press, the handle pulled down with an efficient ratcheting sound. The graphics on the machine were underlined with a deco style, and Jane traced the raised print with her long, slim fingers: VICTOR.
"Dad had one of these." Jane looked at Nick, who looked totally clueless. "It's an adding machine, Nick. He added up bills or checks that he cashed on this. Punched in amounts, then pulled down the handle, and it prints up here, see?" Jane asked.
"A precalculator," explained Charley.
"I'd hate to sell this. Someone would buy it and take it apart for the keys," Jane said, fingering them lovingly. "They're all solid Bakelite and would end up dangling as some cheap-ass ear wires in a craft show."
"Watch the language, Mom," said Nick, entering 999.99 and pulling down the handle.
Charley offered to empty one more box before leaving. He heaved a heavy carton onto the kitchen table and ran his fingers under the tape to loosen the flaps.
Jane reached in and wiped dust off a jar lid. She pulled out the wavy, pale blue glass, half-gallon jar and smiled. In raised capital letters, it read, THE QUEEN.
"That'll hold a lot of buttons, huh, Mom?" Nick asked, elbowing Charley to join him in poking fun at his mother's chief obsession. Both of them appreciated many of the things she brought home. Even if they didn't share her desire to own the objects, they understood and appreciated cool stuff when they saw it. Neither, however, could quite comprehend her lust for buttons. She couldn't explain it herself. Jane feared that her button and Bakelite lust was somehow linked to middle age and too close an identification with women in sensible shoes and fifties housedresses and didn't want to probe it too deeply.
Dead Guy's Stuff Page 3
