I think about my brothers and wish they could be here to say good-bye with me. We share this history of longing for our dazzling mother.
Around the time Jamie, Eden, and I were old enough to leave the nest of our big yellow house, our dad’s financial situation had spun out of control. He was heavily in debt and in danger of losing the house and everything else he owned. None of us were ready to say good-bye to the house that had held us for so many years.
The day of the auction, I learned that the things that matter to people can so easily end up in the wrong hands. In our yellow house, the things all disappeared in a single day.
THEN
the cost of a blue chair
Downstairs, everything from our yellow house is neatly laid out in categories. Bidding numbers are attached like toe tags to each item. Grandma Rita’s china and silver have been moved out of the dark oak cabinet and stacked onto sale tables in Jamie’s room. Pictures and paintings have been taken off the walls and placed on upright easels. Smaller items have been organized into group lots. The powder-blue fish plates in Lot 49 are stacked high with their tails and fins going in mismatched directions.
“Those are Limoges,” I hear someone say behind me.
Pretending to be a shopper, I slide my fingers across each item and note its lot number. I stop in front of my grandmother’s dessert plates, each one hand-painted with a different kind of flower—red poppies, yellow roses, pink cherry blossoms, black-eyed Susans, white lilies, and blue forget-me-nots. A set of six. My dad told me once that those were his mother’s favorite plates. They were mine too. I thought that they would always be stacked there in the dark wood cabinet, waiting for me to use if I ever had a family of my own.
A trifold flyer for the day’s event has fallen to the floor, and I stare at it in disbelief. The auctioneer helped my dad design it. The bold, black print reads:
PUBLIC AUCTION. COMPLETE ESTATE OF
1735 CENTER ROAD. RAIN OR SHINE.
EVERYTHING GOES…TO THE BARE WALLS!
On the flyer are black-and-white photos of our furnishings—paintings, carpets, Victorian lamps, dressers, desks, the stained-glass windows, and the ice-cream-parlor table and chairs. Certain items for sale on the flyer have stars and exclamation points as if they are more important.
I should have been paying more attention. I should have taken my dad’s word when he told me that all he had left were the coins on the dashboard of his van. He said not to worry because he was going to work things out “no matter what,” and I trusted him. After all, he was my dad, and he had always stuck by us, always worked things out for us one way or the other.
I knew things were getting worse when the power and water kept getting shut off month after month. Whenever PG&E called to say our electricity was going to be turned off by 5 p.m. if the bill wasn’t paid, my dad would tell me to say the same thing: “Tell them to just put the check back through.”
I didn’t understand what that meant, but I knew it rarely worked. Sometimes eating dinner by candlelight with candles flickering all around us was magical. We argued less and talked more softly. When the power was restored, the spell was broken.
On the long table in Jamie’s room I notice Grandma’s set of fancy cordial glasses with the twisted stems. Each one is a different color—rose, lavender, and icy blue—the colored glass as thin as puddle ice in spring. Even Boris, the stuffed wild-pig head, is to be sold. Almost every friend of mine has touched his pink shellacked tongue on a dare.
Our 1965 Collier’s Encyclopedia set and the Great Books are stacked in two tall towers and numbered. I open one of the encyclopedias and flip to the color plates in the center. I look at “Birds of the World” and “Mammals of the Americas” one last time.
Then, from across the room, I spot her slender arms reaching toward the sky, her face still smiling. A number in bold, black ink dangles from her wrist. Item 152, the Good Fairy, the small metal statue my dad brought home from the antique fair so many years ago. The floor beneath my feet seems to shift as if I have missed a step. She is my favorite thing in our yellow house. Like me, she is a young girl cast in a single moment with her arms outstretched wide and standing on her tiptoes.
It’s not right to sell the Good Fairy. The first time I noticed her in the windowsill in my father’s room, I felt such hope—like I too could reach out beyond the borders of our yellow house. I wonder if anyone would notice if she went missing from the auction, if I shoved her under my coat and walked away with her. But that would be a stupid thing to do when my dad is trying so hard to get enough money to save our house.
My dad told each of us to set aside our “necessary” things from our bedrooms so they wouldn’t end up in the auction.
“Antiques can be bought and sold and replaced. It’s that simple,” he says.
My friend Rhonda, whose mother makes her bed every morning after she leaves for school, asked me if I was mad about my dad putting on an auction to sell all the stuff in our house. “What would you rather have? Your house or all the things in it?” I asked her.
“Both,” she said.
She just doesn’t get it. And why would she? It’s not a choice she has to make. I get it because I know I can’t change things. I feel bad for my dad. This is not what he wants; it is what he has to do to save our house.
Quickly, I turn away from the Good Fairy, bumping my hip against the corner of a table. Nothing is where it usually is. Overnight our house has been transformed into a crowded shop—not unlike my dad’s antique shop. In the living room, I sit in my grandmother’s blue chair—the big easy chair with its down cushions and deep, low seat that came to us the summer after she died. My brothers and I still fight over who gets to sit in the blue chair because it is, we have all decided, the most comfortable chair in the whole world.
I sink down into its soft cushions and set my elbow against one of its big arms as I study the faces of people milling about. They look greedy, every one of them, a flock of magpies flapping from room to room, circling over our stuff. What do they really want with our things anyway? Do they understand that no one has died here but that they’re taking from us as we watch them scavenge?
A man in a corduroy sports coat looks down at me and smiles broadly. “How’s that chair? It sure looks comfortable,” he says.
“No, not really,” I reply.
I stand up and walk out on the upstairs balcony. Down below, beneath the big oak tree in the yard, are rows of folding chairs, red and white balloons, free beer, and strangers clutching lists of the items they will bid on. I feel transparent—a ghost girl, wandering from room to room in a house I once skipped through.
The auctioneer who my dad hired wears a constant smile as he watches the steady stream of people arriving. More people, the “right” kind of people, mean a bigger commission in his pocket. My dad must be relieved about the turnout as well. The auction is his last card. He recently had to rescue our yellow house from being auctioned off on the front steps of City Hall.
He’s explained that he has a debt to pay, and if he sells everything on the inside of the house, he might have enough to pay the bank off before they try to take the house from us again. I don’t completely understand the details, but I know that my dad has been borrowing money from a lot of people to get himself out of this mess.
“Don’t worry, Melissa. I’m not going to let you down,” he tells me this time.
I don’t know what’s going to happen if we lose our yellow house. Jamie dropped out of high school to join the marines, so I don’t see him much these days because he’s in training camp. Eden comes and goes between our house and different friends’ homes. My mom is back living in Washington with a new boyfriend. Last I talked to her, she said that my dad ought to set the house on fire and collect the insurance money if he truly wants to get out of the situation.
When all the folding chairs are filled, the auctio
neer takes center stage on our front porch. He’s a slick cowboy with snakeskin boots and a black-and-brown-plaid shirt. His stomach bulges over the ledge of his silver belt buckle. As he takes command of the crowd, his voice booms into the microphone. His way of speaking is slippery and fast. I spy Eden standing in the back row with his arms crossed. The bidding begins in a frenzy, cardboard numbers jumping high over heads of buyers like determined salmon spawning upstream.
I don’t expect Eden to be upset once the bidding begins because he is the one who has always complained about the “stupid and useless antiques” in our house. “What good are things you have to be so damn careful with?” he always says. He hates the fact that our dad sells antiques to make a living. He likes things new and modern—and he reminds us of this all the time. Yet, when the bidding begins, Eden is the one who is desperate. He runs between the rows of folding chairs.
“Dad, what are you doing? You can’t sell all this…It’s going too cheap!”
I can see it in his face. He wants to save everything, but it is all happening too fast.
Eden marches to the back row of chairs and holds a bidding number high in the air for the small Maxfield Parrish painting of the lady standing in the bright, blue water. The auctioneer ignores his number and gives the Parrish to the high bidder in the first row. Standing behind the people, Eden begins a rant.
“Can you believe this shit? This is my grandma’s! And that is my dresser and my desk. And those are our family heirlooms. Jeez, how can you even watch this? This is not right.”
There are times when I wish I had the guts to be bold like Eden—to rant, to yell, to call it like it is. But I turn inward and go silent. I am the watcher, the one whose voice is still tangled in her throat.
My dad marches across our gravel driveway and pulls Eden out of the crowd. “What are you doing, being a smart-ass out there? Since when are you interested in antiques?”
Eden yanks his arm away. “This is a circus, Dad! And you’re the clown here, man.”
My dad doesn’t yell. Instead, he calmly looks at Eden while his hands twitch close to his sides as if to say, What can I do? He sighs. “You can’t bid on anything unless you have the money to pay for it, Eden. People here are going to get angry, and you need to start saving money to live on your own.”
Eden stares straight ahead at the stage as if he’s going to charge the front porch. “I got some money to get a few things.”
“Please, sit down or else you need to leave.”
At that moment, I look away from Eden’s face, so I don’t know why he suddenly chooses to stop fighting. I want to focus on what’s coming and going on the front porch. I need to watch the things go so that I can remember them. A familiar sadness creeps inside me. How do you say good-bye to things you love? You don’t really. You just watch and hope they will come back someday.
Eden and I sit in fold-up chairs and watch everything disappear, lot by lot. Two smartly dressed men sitting a few rows from us bid on almost every item and pay top dollar, which makes me feel oddly grateful but also hate them. It’s like they are going to furnish a whole house to look just like ours.
An antique dealer hurries away down our gravel driveway with a tea set and a box of our grandmother’s silver. My favorite painting of the cowboy in his yellow hat is gone in less than sixty seconds. The 1940s calendar print of the starlet with bare shoulders and candy-apple red lips brings more than a hundred dollars.
When the Good Fairy comes onto the porch, I turn away from the house. I don’t want to know what price she brings. I tell myself that I don’t care—that I’m being too girlish in wanting to keep a fairy. When I look back toward the porch, I only see her outstretched arms as she is carted off in a flimsy cardboard box.
By late afternoon many of the bidders are gone. With the less valuable pieces remaining, the prices begin to drop. Despite my dad’s wishes, Eden starts bidding again, but he mainly throws up a number to “up” the prices so things don’t go so cheaply. It’s not legal to do this. He claims he’s got a stash of money from selling pot at school.
Then the blue chair is carried onto the porch, the blue chair that came to us after Grandma Rita died. The blue chair that we all agree is the most comfortable chair in the world.
The bid opens at eight dollars.
“Eight dollars!” says Eden. “Shit, that’s nothin’.”
My dad is nowhere in sight.
I don’t really think it through. I raise my hand, even though I don’t have a number.
Then Eden’s hand shoots up. And then the man’s hand in front of us goes up. We are all bidding on the blue chair.
“You don’t even have a number,” says Eden.
“Eden, please let me use your number just this once. I’ll get the money and pay you back,” I say.
“But I want that chair,” he says.
“Do I hear twelve dollars?”
“Who will give me fourteen dollars for this cozy old chair?”
I grab Eden’s number and keep my hand raised high.
The price keeps going up.
“Twenty-two? Can I get twenty-two?”
The man in front of me turns to his friend and says, “Just let the girl have the chair.”
When the auctioneer says, “Sold to the young lady,” I think he’s joking.
For a second, Eden gets mad at me, but then I catch the corners of his mouth turning slightly like he is glad.
“That’s alright,” he says. “I got the painting of the swans when Dad wasn’t paying attention.”
Was it really this easy? Why hadn’t I bid on other things—like the Good Fairy?
I paid twenty-two dollars for our grandmother’s blue chair.
My dad doesn’t mention anything about my purchase but I know he knows about it. He and the auctioneer celebrate the success of the auction over a lot of rum and red wine. They have good reason to celebrate. The auction was a success, which means my dad can probably pay whoever he needs to pay.
I wake up later in the night and find my way to the blue chair, which has been pushed to the far end of the porch. I drop myself down into it and pull my legs up close to my chest. Everything is quiet except for the wind that rustles through the leaves of our giant, old oak tree. The first time I skipped across the porch of this yellow house, I knew it was a good house. It was the one solid thing beneath my feet. A nest, a mother, a yellow house. I remember what I said to Jamie the first day we were here.
“Isn’t this the greatest place we ever lived, Jamie?”
“I think it is. I think it is,” he said back.
He was right. Even with almost nothing in it, the house still feels like our castle.
There are some things I instinctively know. I can’t always explain, but it’s as clear as can be: we will lose the yellow house after all.
It is only a matter of time before we will say good-bye. We will lose the barn, the blackberries, the pink tea roses, the garden, the lilacs, and the very earth that we have traveled across every day.
What would you rather lose? Your house or everything in it?
Neither.
Someday I’m going to find the Good Fairy in the back of an antique shop, and I’ll buy her no matter what she costs. I will seek out all the treasures that left our yellow house. I will frequent antique stores, curiosity shops, and flea markets where I will look into silver teapots in hopes of seeing my grandmother’s reflection. I will rummage through boxes of sterling in hopes of finding a copy of her Victorian cranberry spoon. I will line a cupboard with hand-painted flower plates. I will not forget the way my favorite painting of the cowboy always hung slightly crooked in our hallway.
I sit in the blue chair and tell myself one more time that things aren’t supposed to matter. People can be unreliable. People leave. But the things were supposed to stay.
NOW
&nb
sp; a thousand places at once
I keep rereading her letters. I am the fool still searching for something that will give me some fragment of closure—that one sentence that tells me why she left. I come across a letter she never sent to Bill, the horse trainer from Texas. Her love affair with him almost broke my parents apart the first time. And there were many others along the way too. Perhaps she left because she loved another man.
Dear Bill,
Whatever prompted me to call? Perhaps it is because the day I spent with you made me realize exactly what it is like to be free and single and twenty-one. And how I long to be free! Maybe I just want to avoid all responsibility. I don’t know. But I am so full of desire to be a thousand places at once, to do exactly as I feel—to be exhilarated by my life instead of bearing with it. As to what I’m going to do now? First of all, get away from the complete chaos around me.
By hook or by crook, I’m going off by myself for at least two weeks of thought and rest. Something has always come up to show me what a compensation I am living. Except always in the past I’ve turned up pregnant and have had to stay—and pregnancy is a panacea for all ills. No babies going now though—I should add “unless it’s yours” and scare you half to death, but jacks are jacks and I’m as good as sterile.
In actuality you are the very nemesis of my soul—whatever nebulous thing that may be—saturated and suffocated by a love that really has no right to be. So what to do? Somewhere there is a place for me, a time when I can be happy with myself.
Later—So running off to Texas with you would be the most God-awful step I could take—though it certainly wasn’t very nice of you to tell me so.
Oh Mom, I think your heart never knew which way to go. Why was it so hard to stay in one place, or even if that was too much, to be a reliable presence in your children’s lives? I too long to be in a thousand places at once and do exactly as I feel—“to be exhilarated by my life instead of bearing with it.”
Pieces of My Mother Page 21