by Helen Ellis
Everything for my sister and me was an opportunity to gamble.
Who could make their Life Saver last the longest on a road trip for a dollar? Who could fold and put away the TV trays blindfolded for a dollar? Could I get all A’s in high school for five dollars an A? This deal had a catch: one B and I got nothing. But one time, he surprised me. When I came home to collect for my first semester at the University of Colorado, Papa grinned and handed over a roll of bills.
He said, “College A’s are worth twenty dollars.”
My sister has adopted this tactic of positive reinforcement with her children. She bets her six-year-old son, Ellis Gustaf, a nickel that he doesn’t have to pee before they get in the car. He pees and he wins. But so does my sister because she doesn’t have to pull over in Los Angeles traffic.
When my niece fell off her scooter and was frightened she’d broken her arm, my sister tried to soothe her on the way to the emergency room: “Katy Belle, I bet your arm isn’t broken. If it is, I’ll pay you twenty dollars.”
Upon seeing her X-rays, Katy Belle asked, “Since I have two fractures, does that mean I get forty dollars?”
“Yes, baby girl.”
My sister was never so proud. And, despite her husband Stefan’s protests, she honored the deal.
To Elizabeth’s delight, her daughter is a born haggler. She teaches Katy Belle, like we were taught by Papa: “Haggling separates us from the morons.”
Elizabeth remembers buying her first Christmas tree with Stefan. They were living in Brooklyn and had gone to C-Town (a New York City grocery store as depressing at it sounds; as opposed to the Piggly Wiggly, which makes you smile just to say it). In Piggly Wiggly country, my family bought our trees from the Boy Scouts. Papa raised us to identify the easiest mark.
He said, “Look for the dopiest-looking scout who chews his neckerchief.” And then pressure that kid until he snaps a like twig strung with popcorn and medicine balls.
At C-Town, some random dude was selling trees on the street for ninety-five dollars.
My sister said, “I’ll give you forty.”
The dude said, “What?”
“Forty bucks for this dead tree.”
“Lady, the price is ninety-five.”
“Mister, you’re selling me a dead tree that’s only getting deader by the minute.”
“I can do seventy.”
“Fine, but you gotta throw in two wreaths.”
Dragging the tree through the snow back to their apartment, Stefan said, “I’m so embarrassed by what you did back there.”
“What’d I do?” asked my sister, with a fat wreath under each arm.
“Talked that poor man down from his price.”
My sister said, “That’s haggling! You’re supposed to haggle. And listen up, Stefan, you better learn this right now if you want to stay happily married to me: I will never pay full price for a Christmas tree.”
She never has.
Mama is not a haggler, which is one of the reasons she rarely participates in our garage sales. When she writes a price on a sticker, she’s already haggled with herself. She sets the absolute lowest price she’s willing to take.
Still, a Garage Sale Person will say, “This cat brooch ain’t worth fifty cents.”
And Mama will say, “Well then you can go to another yard sale and see if you can find it for a quarter.”
Mama’s feelings get hurt.
And she can’t bear the Garage Sale People’s children.
She says, “Nobody watches them and they run wild and break things, and you know your father’s policy. You break it, you bought it. And some of them break my heart. There was that one little girl, she was six or seven, who found a throw pillow I’d been sitting on, and she hugged it. She hugged it so tightly, and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve never had a pillow all to myself. How much is it?’
“I said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry that pillow’s not for sale, but I’ll get you a pillow.’
“And then I went into the house and got your father’s pillow.
“And the little girl asked, ‘How much?’
“And I was raised with the notion that you hurt someone’s pride if you don’t let them pay for something. So I said, ‘A dime.’
“And she fished in her pocket and bought that pillow for a dime.”
Papa says, “Yeah, your mother knows how to lose money at a garage sale. She always insisted we dry-clean clothes before we sold them.”
Mama says, “It’s a matter of integrity.”
Papa says, “It’s a matter of getting people to pay you to haul away your junk.”
But this summer, the Garage Sale People weren’t buying like they used to. The fishing gear, tools, and toddler bed went fast. But Papa’s library of poker books and casino baseball caps sat in the driveway because pickers weren’t going to admit to the sin of gambling in broad daylight. Nobody would buy grandmother’s furs in hundred-degree heat with 90 percent humidity. And if you weren’t a size 40 regular, Papa’s twenty-year-old sport coats weren’t even worth taking off the hangers.
At least, that’s what we told ourselves.
What the Garage Sale People told us was: “This is the most organized sale we’ve ever seen.” Translation: Y’all make it easy to see you ain’t got any good stuff.
But we did have good stuff!
I was shocked that nobody bought Mama’s Southern Living magazines, preserved in corrugated cardboard since the 1980s (I took four); or Papa’s rack of leather belts dating back to the 1960s (I took one); or abstract art (I took a small splatter painting, signed by some forgotten relative named Pearl).
The saddest collection not to sell was Grandmother’s dolls.
The summer after Papa’s sophomore year in college, he’d traveled around Europe and bought his mother a doll from every country he visited. To display the dolls, Papa’s father built a cabinet: three shelves with glass doors, painted dusty blue to match the guest bedroom where I stayed when I visited my grandparents as a child. If I was very careful, I was allowed to take the dolls out of the cabinet one at a time. There was a milkmaid from Sweden. A bobby from England. A little boy in a cable-knit sweater from Ireland. They were not dolls to be played with, they were dolls to be admired. And that suited me just fine.
When my grandparents died, the cabinet was the first thing to be sold at a garage sale, but my parents kept the dolls, which, like Mama’s father’s medicine bottles, had lived in boxes ever since.
I’m not sure why the dolls hadn’t been on display in my parents’ house. Maybe because they made Papa miss his mother or his youth. Maybe because there was no worthy spot to exhibit them to “do them justice.” Or maybe my parents were never the kind of people who personally liked living with dolls out in the open like some people live with houseplants or deer heads. Case in point: for my husband, the chance of dolls in a bedroom is the reason he refuses to stay in B&Bs. Which is also why Grandmother’s dolls have never come to live with us in our New York City apartment. And my parents haven’t given them away or thrown them away because The Velveteen Rabbit, which they read to us as children, taught us and every other kid in the world that stuffed animals have feelings. God, I hate The Velveteen Rabbit. The Velveteen Rabbit is why we all hoard.
So I smoothed their costumes and lay them faceup on a card table. All morning long, the dolls beamed up at the Garage Sale People and felt the sun warm their skin. But nobody gave them a second look.
And Papa didn’t push them. The Garage Sale People or the dolls.
Those dolls would have been perfect to put in a Mystery Box, but Papa wasn’t up for playing that game. It was sweltering, and his patience was shot. The Garage Sale People weren’t appreciative, and my sister and I were chasing them to their cars to sell them stuff behind his back. Papa looked tired. It had been a long time since his he
yday of Let’s Make a Deal. And my sister and I could see that the moment had finally come, as it does for all game show hosts, when he wasn’t having any fun.
And neither were we.
Papa said, “We’ll get ’em next time.”
I said, “Papa, the next time I put your stuff in the yard, you’ll be dead.”
My sister encouraged him to count his cash and call it quits.
Papa agreed and retired for his afternoon nap.
My sister and I packed an SUV with books nobody bought, drove to a library, and dumped them like a person we’d shot at an emergency room. I am quite sure we are the first people in history to peel rubber out of a library. We repacked the SUV and drove clothes to Goodwill. We gifted Grandmother’s mink stole to my friend Hannah, who wears it as part of her Day of the Dead costume.
But Papa couldn’t let go of the dolls.
Maybe because there’s still part of him that believes you can put a price on memories. And Papa dreams of one more chance.
My Kind of People
At a party, our friend Stacey introduced us to a man wearing a barbershop quartet vest and a drop earring. Stacey said to my husband, “You’ll like him fine, but he’s really for Helen. He’s a master puppeteer! He’s her kind of people.”
It’s true.
I like people who do things I don’t.
I have a friend who plays the saw. I have a friend who paints a demon a day and a friend who draws a tree a day. I have a friend who retired from radiology and now volunteers at a zoo. Last week she sent me a picture of herself giving a sloth a sonogram.
My kind of people answer questions like “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen at your job?”
A plumber answered, “Naked grandpa.”
He’d gone to fix a sink, and there was an old man sitting at the kitchen table bare-ass nekkid. The old man’s daughter told the plumber, “Just ignore him.” As if a naked octogenarian was no more disturbing than a 160-pound rottweiler dry-humping his toolbox.
I met a locksmith who cracked a safe and found a baby in a jar. I met a contractor who found two mummified women behind a wall.
An exterminator told me, “If you renovate your apartment, you got to tip your super to keep an eye on construction. People come home and their kitchen looks great, but contractors will put appliances in front of holes. I pulled back a fridge in one lady’s apartment and walked inside a hole that was behind it. Another lady’s cat got sealed up under her new floors. It meowed for three days, and everyone was like, Where’s the cat? They had to break through the new floor, and I was there when it came flying out. The cat was fine, but it was mad!”
Then there was the air-conditioner repairman who knocked on a door on Riverside Drive and was met by, as the air-conditioner repairman described him, “a dude in Jeffrey Dahmer glasses.” The dude’s lights were out, his windows open, and his floors were carpeted with leaves. It was freezing. And there was a smell. The repairman said it was the only job he ever did looking over his shoulder.
I asked him, “You didn’t get the hell out of there?”
He said, “I’m a professional, I do what I’m paid to do. But it is the only place I told my boss I’d never go back.”
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ER doctors are always willing to share, and yes, the first thing they share is what they found up someone’s butt. The best story I’ve heard is of a patient who stuck a light bulb up his butt. No, not a newfangled coiled energy saver, but a good old-fashioned GE “We Bring Good Things to Life” light bulb, the likes of which you’d see over a cartoon character’s head when he thinks, “Hey, I’ve got an idea!”
The ER doctor didn’t want to pull out the bulb for fear the glass would break. How did the patient get it in there without breaking it to begin with? The ER doctor didn’t ask. He had his residents sedate the patient, put him in stirrups, saw off the screw, and fill the bulb with plaster. Fifteen minutes later, it came out like a chicken egg.
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Commercial airplane pilots are over-sharers. When they make in-flight announcements, they don’t say anything anyone remembers, but when they get on an airport gate mic during delays, they’ve said things I’ll never forget.
In Dallas, a pilot announced that our plane was struck by lightning. In St. Louis, a pilot said our plane was being cleaned because a passenger threw up in her seat. Upon boarding, all I could think was: Was it my seat? Did I just win the worst lottery in the world? In Asheville, a pilot said that a dog had “had an accident” in first class.
A southerner shouted, “What kind of dog crap are we talking about, Captain? Great Dane or chee-wah-wah?”
The pilot admitted, “A shih tzu.”
We all laughed.
Good-natured southerners are my kind of people.
One man yelled, “Hell, we all got dogs! Roll down the windows and let’s go!”
But we didn’t go. Our flight was delayed for seven hours; 3C and 3D were paged to the desk and rebooked because their seats were being removed from the plane.
In the meantime, I’d formed an alliance in the rocking-chair section of the airport with a passenger whose name I can’t remember, so I will call her Isbell Hornsby Juntila.
Isbell Hornsby Juntila told me to email the airline and get frequent-flier points for my trouble because earlier she’d identified me as her kind of people when she’d asked: “Are you a believer?”
Now, I am sure that Isbell Hornsby Juntila meant “Are you a believer in Jesus Christ, our lord and savior?” because she’d already told me why she’d spent the long weekend in Asheville. She’d been there for a Christian retreat of seminars and music at the Biltmore Estate. But there was a 2 percent chance that she could have been asking if I was a UFO conspiracy theorist or a die-hard fan of the Monkees—you know how their song goes: “And then I saw her face, now I’m a believer!”
So I said, “Yes.”
Her next question was “Did you vote for Trump?”
Here, I couldn’t fudge it. I said, “No.”
She said, “It’s okay, you’re from New York.”
And then she forgave me as if I’d admitted that I couldn’t help but kick the backs of airplane seats with my bare feet and howl at the drink cart because I was raised by wolves. I’m just a victim of circumstance. That, and I’d already endeared myself to her by telling her I was a writer and that I would surely write about all of this.
Isbell Hornsby Juntila was a platinum-medallion-level lady, which meant that she flew first class all over the place all of the time and had a special customer service number to call, which she did, and got 17,500 points right then and there. I am a silver-medallion-level lady, which means I get to check my bags for free. I’d never think to ask for more than this perk because my pain and suffering amounted to eating kettle corn while rocking in a rocking chair, but I went ahead and wrote that email. Two months later, the points were deposited in my account.
A platinum-medallion lady who tells me, a silver-medallion lady, how to get what could be coming to her is my kind of people.
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My kind of people reveal themselves with such acts of solidarity or humor, and can forever after do no wrong in my eyes because of that one thing they did.
Twenty-five years ago, on our first date, my husband ordered chicken, and I ordered fish. The fish came with a tail (which came with scales) and a head (which came with eyeballs). Until then, all my fish had come in stick and square form. I remember feeling the color drain from my face, and then, without a word, my husband switched our plates.
Seven years ago, my friend Dani and I went to a movie theater that was completely empty except for one old lady, who sat dead center in the middle row. Dani breezed past me and sat
in the seat directly in front of her. Yes, she moved, but I remain astonished by the prank.
Three years ago, I hosted a game-night fundraiser and had a dare bag for extra points. For a hundred points, two of the Bridge Ladies, Terri and Jean, went into my bathroom and swapped outfits. Skirt for slacks, sweater for blouse, jewelry for headband.
Now, I get that not everyone would find it fun to come to my apartment and be dared to swap clothes for a hundred points, or put on red lipstick and kiss people’s cheeks for two points a kiss, or wrap your arms in toilet paper casts for five points, or eat whatever another team player puts on a spoon for twenty points, or let someone give you a tattoo with a Sharpie. But people who do are my kind of people. And everybody else can RSVP no.
Because I know that my kind of people are not everyone’s kind of people.
And neither am I.
At the 2016 Perth Writers Festival in Australia, it came out over drinks with folks from my publishing house that I am a poker player. Folks who don’t play poker think poker players will bet on anything (which I won’t), so a wager was made (which I wouldn’t have taken unless I knew I could win). The bet was: on my next panel, I’d say a word of their choosing for twenty bucks.
“Easy money,” I said. “You’re on.”
The word was debated and voted upon.
And the word was: butt plug.
Yes, I realize this is two words, but this was a sure thing, so I wasn’t going to argue.
Parameters were set. I couldn’t say it as part of a list. As in: “I went to the grocery store and bought apples, bananas, and a butt plug.” I couldn’t admit to the bet. As in: “My publisher dared me to say butt plug. Butt plug!” I had to say it as a natural part of a sentence.
At the event, everyone onstage with me was a man of some serious acclaim who I’d never met. The crowd in the sold-out auditorium was gray-haired and highbrowed, and after two days at the festival had bought six of my books. My publicist sat sober in the front row, shaking her head.