Hall and I bought a ping pong table at a flea market last summer but after a week in our basement it stunk up the room so bad we had to take it apart and haul it to the dump. We drove right past where we bought it, hoping no one would see it rigor mortis on top of the rest of our trash.
I always roll my eyes when a famous actor is the son or daughter of some sort of Hollywood person. Oh, so that’s why we’re supposed to care about you. It seems unoriginal and kind of embarrassing to continue in your parents’ footsteps, unless they own something romantic, like an Italian bakery or an auto shop – the kind of family business where you get stuff under your fingernails. But the fact that I’ve picked up so little from my mother, an absolute boss when it comes to mining the world of the secondhand, is pretty shameful. Of all people to have sniffed out and passed over the ping pong table, it would have been her.
Considering I spent a large number of Saturdays wandering the pregnant rooms of house sales with my Mom, you’d think I would have soaked her skill in. I blame the air. You know how Las Vegas pumps air into casinos to make people gamble more? House sales suck the air out. They’re stuffy and stale; they have cottonmouth after smoking a big fat blunt of mothballs. There is no season in a house sale. It’s purgatorial, perhaps mimicking its late owner’s state of affairs.
…..
It’s a Saturday after volleyball practice and my Mom says, “I just want to stop by this house sale real quick.” Which means we’ll be there for no less than 45 minutes. She turns the corner onto the street, designated by a poorly written sign with a sad balloon above it, eager to float away. We pull behind the other minivans, unsure yet of the specific house until we see the front yard covered in children’s toys and inflatable pool paraphernalia. And the unmistakable yellow and red of the Little Tikes Car. It looks like a McDonald’s logo, which probably isn’t a coincidence. They start our kids early these days.
House sales all smell the same. Like Coffee-Mate, dollar bills, faded bath mats and glass ashtrays. It’s where naps go after you wake up from them. The ideal setting for 4pm golf on television. If boredom had a smell.
My Mom looks for the old things, the finds, the things with character. Bonus if it’s a really good deal. She’s into delicately embroidered linens, handmade quilts, little bowls or glasses, or pieces of cool, functional furniture. And lamps. Big lamp girl. “Now isn’t this a nice lamp?” I hear her say. She only buys stuff in good condition. Occasionally a table runner or wool blanket has a spot on it, but after a quick inspection it’s never met with anything other than a “Oh I can get that out.” If the spot is brown, and spots often are, and if one of my siblings is with me we of course talk about how it’s probably poop. Children will find any excuse to talk about poop. “Psh,” my Mom says before waving her hand and spotting an antique trunk.
She isn’t there to buy anything plastic, anything new or anything you could get at Target. (Not like we ever go there. The only time I remember being at Target was to meet Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop but being too shy to stand in line, my fear of meeting my hero outweighing the fear of disappointing my Mom that her kid was a shy dud. Whatever. Everybody hates loud kids.)
Thankfully my Mom is never into clothes. That’s where the fights happen, when two women realize they’ve grabbed the same thing. Sinking their claws into opposite shoulder pads, they bark, “That’s my Isaac Mizrahi suit jacket!” My mom never bothers with random tchotchkes either – ceramic figurines or anything a cat would buy if it had to furnish a home. Stuff that there’s too much of and no one needs. I see a Deb on her way to the cash register with a Ziploc stuffed with costume jewelry and a My Little Ponies lunch bag. Like really, a Deb, that’s what you’re gonna buy? When someone else’s mom does something my Mom doesn't do it’s always like, “Huh. So that’s what that mom does.” Whatever a mom does that my Mom doesn’t do, it’s weird. Like in my case, cook fish or use Downy.
The women who work these house sales always stay in the kitchen. They are identical in appearance (fluffed brown hair, thick glasses, Mickey Mouse accessory, expressionless) and have the same temperament as the carpet. They wear sweatshirts in faded pastels with waist aprons tied around their paunches. Real adult girl scout vibes. They are all named Marjorie.
They conduct their business transactions on a cafeteria table, their rings so tight on their chubby fingers I wonder how they can move them. At the other end of the table are a couple pizza boxes – their lunch along with cigarettes. I catch a glimpse of the pizza – it’s too red, too tomatoey, with a hard floured crust. It comes in triangle slices too, not in the greasy patchwork of squares that all the good local places dish up. In Chicago, land of pizza, subpar pizza is inexcusable and confounding. I have no idea where they got it. Some type of house lady pizza, pizza from Indiana. That being said, pizza is pizza so I’m like, “Mom, can you please just buy a slice of that?”
The rooms go on and on. There is a room filled with Christmas stuff. A fake Christmas tree poking out of a heavy duty garbage bag, gasping for air. Sorry, tree, it smells like Marlboro in here. There is an unfinished basement too, that feels unsafe to be in. It’s where the old saws are, where one feels the presence of male. The ladies don’t even try to price stuff in these parts. It’s a dingy free for all, where daddy long legs run the streets. My Mom finds a cool old garden tool without a price tag and brings it up the register, where a lady glances at it over a sip of caffeine-free Pepsi, and says, “We’ll do that for 5.”
I wander around in a fog of beige contemplating the crap, trying to navigate to the exit for a breath of fresh cul-de-sac but I’m stuck in a maze of brown carpeting and narrow stairwells, trinkets and busted up exercise machines. Where is my mom? I’m getting dizzy, so dizzy, my sweaty volleyball knee pads around my ankles bumping into rickety card tables displaying porcelain bunny figurines and pewter baby spoons.
“Mom? Mom??” A million curly heads in glasses turn, but none are mine. My breathing becomes heavy from the weight of boredom and the envy that my friend had a Gatorade after practice and I had water fountain.
My Mom finally appears. “Isn’t this a cute candy dish? It’s 50 cents. I’m getting it.”
I always wonder about the death. You can’t have a house sale without someone dying. Who was it? What happened? The house sale ladies give nothing away, even if they do know. They have a job to do, cash to collect, rolls of quarters to bust open. They are clinical in their approach, social workers negotiating on behalf of VHS tapes, mold-freckled cabbage patch dolls, and drawers of crumbs and silverware.
…..
25 years later my Mom still remembers what she paid for anything she bought from a house sale. “I got this magazine rack for seven dollars. Seven dollars!” We’ll see a Pendleton blanket at some hip, modern store and she’ll lower her voice and say, “I got mine for 12.” She removed the little circular stickers from all her treasures as soon as she got home, but the price remains imprinted on her brain, next to the outfits she remembers wearing on every day of her life, childhood included. She’s a true sage of deals, while here I am, buying a cold brew with almond milk, swiping my card, having no idea what it cost and that I was just legally robbed.
The house sale had all the inner parts of a home, with furniture and appliances, people in and out, and conversations floating around, but had lost the people that gave it its identity, that had made Judas Priest call it a home.
My Mom made our home - with a green depression glass cake stand we used seven times a year for seven birthdays ($9), gold champagne flutes from the 1920s that we use to toast graduations and engagements ($30), checkered tablecloths she’d throw over picnic tables at rest stops on road trips (too many to price out but you know they were a steal), and a set of heavy wool blankets to warm us on the porch on cool evenings (time to say *priceless*). Home sweet home. Mom sweet Mom.