Ask Anybody (6 page)

“I knew a lady, went to this yard sale,” Nell said in a slow and draggy way. “She bought this rickety old chair for fifty cents.” Nell paused, saw she had us, and continued. “She took that little chair home, let it rest some, then sold it at a yard sale of her own next week for five dollars.” When she reached the end of her story, her voice was a little whispery thing that barely had the strength to work its way up her throat and out into the room.

We all looked at each other.

“What's that got to do with the price of onions?” I said.

“I'm just telling you,” Nell said, very patient. “I'm a pro when it comes to yard sales. My services are very valuable. We been holding yard sales since I was no bigger'n a minute. My mama invented yard sales, as a matter of fact.”

“She never,” I said. “Nobody invented yard sales. That's stupid. People invent radium or electricity or the wheel, but they sure as shooting don't invent yard sales.”

Nell said, “You got some big mouth, you know that?”

Betty and Rowena sat like two bumps on a log, lacing their fingers in and out, acting like they were being hypnotized. Which, in a way, they were.

“I'm going to tell you another story,” Nell said in the same draggy voice, like she was a fortune teller reading your future in a crystal ball. “There was this lady who went to a yard sale, saw this terrible old chippy china dish. She took a fancy to that dish and said she'd give ten cents for it. Not a penny more. So the man owned the dish said, ‘Oh, shoot, all right, you can have that for ten cents. Go away and don't bother me no more,' the man said. And didn't that lady turn right around and sell that chippy old dish to some museum for around a thousand dollars.”

Betty and Rowena gasped, sounding like the air being let out of some old tires. I didn't make a sound.

Nell frowned at me. “Tell me how your mother invented yard sales,” I said. “I'd like to hear.”

“One day she was sitting there, not doing much,” Nell said, shooting daggers at me, “and she said, ‘Why don't we take a bunch of our old junk out of the attic and just throw it out in the yard and try to sell it. Simple as pie.' And that's how yard sales started.”

“You're full of hot air,” I told her.

That didn't seem to bother Nell. “Believe me or not,” she said. “That's the way it was. What do I care if you believe me or not? What's it to me?”

“All right, come to order.” Betty leaped to her feet, taking the reins in her hands one more time. “Now we get down to the nitty-gritty. We figure out what each one brings. I'm keeping a list of what everyone brings.”

“What're you bringing?” Nell asked Rowena.

“Why,” she said, “my mother's fur coat.”

“What besides that?” I said.

“Listen,” Rowena yelled at me, “that's a big item. How many times do you see a fur coat at a yard sale?”

Betty and I exchanged looks. A fur coat is a fur coat, and there's no way around that.

“Everyone will bring one card table.” Betty was writing fast now. “To display the goods on.”

“What about guards?” Nell asked.

“Guards?”

“To keep stuff from being ripped off. Yard sales are great for pickpockets to operate in.” Nell sounded like she knew. “Folks slip things into their pockets and take off. Either that or they say, ‘I paid for it back there,' and make off with anything they want. You need big guys for guards. Guys who look like they'd tackle you if you steal anything. You got to strike fear into their hearts if they rip you off.” She studied her fingernails. I'd told Betty and Rowena they were painted green. Today they were bare and pale.

“Whose yard we having this sale in?” I said.

“We haven't figured that out yet,” Betty said. “My father says we can't have it in ours. He doesn't want the responsibility. Somebody might fall down in our yard, he says, then they'd sue us. If they broke a leg they might sue us for a lot of money, so he says we can't have it in our yard.”

“Isn't that something!” Rowena cried. “My father says we can't have it either. We planted a new lawn last spring, and my father says if a mess of people tramped all over it, that new lawn would go down the drain so fast you wouldn't be able to see it disappear.”

“I'll ask my father if we can have it in ours,” I said. “He probably wouldn't mind.”

“We best have it in mine,” Nell said firmly. “That way we got my brothers to help us, and it doesn't make any difference what happens to our yard on account of it isn't ours.”

The logic of her statement was unassailable. “How about Old Man Johnson, your landlord? Won't he care?” Betty thought to ask.

“What he don't know won't hurt him, that's for sure,” Nell answered.

That was how we decided to hold the yard sale in her yard.

Then Nell took charge. “We can use our old pickup to travel to the dump in, pick up some stuff to sell,” she said.

“Who'll take us?”

“If my Uncle Joe's not home, I'll drive,” she said, fixing us with her steely glance.

“You drive? You're too young. They'd catch you for sure.”

“I best steer clear of the main road, or they might,” Nell said. “There must be a back way to get there.”

Even I was overcome by the idea of Nell Foster driving the pickup to the dump. Rowena tiptoed halfway up the cellar stairs to make sure her mother wasn't listening at the top of the stairs, which she had been known to do.

“Wouldn't you be scared?” I said.

Nell lifted her shoulders and turned up her hands, as if to say, “Of what?”

“It's easy,” she said. “I did it plenty of times. Me, I like to see the sights, keep moving. I don't want to be a stick-in-the-mud. Not me.”

She stood up and pulled on her rusty old coat with the saggy bottom.

“I got to go,” she said. “Yipe!” she cried, picking at herself. “I'm full of cat hairs. My mama'll have a fit. She's buggy on keeping a place clean. She will just have a plain old fit”

“Why, hello, Mother!” Rowena cried. Rowena's mother stood there, her face purple. From the expression on her face we knew she'd heard what Nell had said. Nell knew too. She licked her lips as if tasting something sweet.

“I'll just wash myself off real good when I get home,” she said. “That way I'll be sure of no germs.”

Rowena's mother whirled and thundered back upstairs, slamming the door behind herself. The cellar stairs, the walls trembled from the force of her blow.

“Refreshments are served!” Rowena's mother roared through the closed door. Nell said she couldn't stay. And all the time we were eating the freshly baked bread and drinking the cocoa, we heard pots and pans crashing around the kitchen. Rowena said her mother was out of sorts, probably due to what Nell had said about her housekeeping. She said not to pay her mother any mind, and we tried not to. It was sort of hard to hear ourselves talk with all that racket going on overhead, though.

11

Today we all got postcards from my mother. Even my father got one. Mine had a picture of a warthog on it. It said, “This reminds me of you. Ha-ha. See you very soon. Love and kisses, Mother.” She always signs herself “Mother” when she sends us postcards. I like that: Mother. It's a nice word. We don't call her that, though. The boys call her Mama and I call her Mom. Daddy calls her Mary. He used to call her Hon. Sometimes he forgets and still calls her Hon. But not often.

“How will we know when she's coming home?” I asked him.

“She'll cable us,” he said. “I'll drive to the airport to meet her.”

“What if she brings
him
?” I didn't want to say Angus.

He looked at me, his eyes very bright and slick-looking. “Why, I'll bring him back with us. What did you think I was going to do, dump him off in the weeds by the highway?”

“No,” I said. “I didn't think you'd do that.”

“It's an idea, though,” he said, and we both laughed.

I went around the house looking at everything with an eye to how much it might bring at our yard sale. When I asked my father if he had anything he didn't want that we could have, he rummaged through his drawers and came up with some shirts with frayed collars and a muffler with fringe at either end he said he'd never liked. It was a perfectly O.K. muffler and should bring a dollar easy.

The boys got into the spirit of the thing. Tad gave me a box of hardly used crayons, and a plush dog wearing faded overalls and a ratty old straw hat. “I hate him,” Tad confided. “He smiles all the time.” That seemed as good a reason as any for hating someone, and I didn't argue with him. Sidney chipped in his outgrown Donald Duck slippers, and, not to be outdone by Tad, he also threw in a set of plastic measuring cups and an old toothbrush.

I counted on my mother's going through a wild flurry of housecleaning when she got home. She has fits of clearing things out. Often she throws out a lot of stuff she wishes later she'd kept

“Oh, dear, why didn't you stop me!” she wails when she goes looking for some treasure before she remembers she's given it away to some thrift shop. Or, sometimes, to me. I'm a pack rat I never turn anything down. If she's given whatever it is she's looking for to me, I offer it back. She always says, “No, I'm not going to be an Indian giver. You keep it.”

When Pamela came for supper last night, I asked her if she had anything she'd care to donate to our yard sale. She just looked down her nose at me. I always thought that was just an expression, but with Pamela it's-true. She has the nose for it. She sort of sights down the barrel of her nose as if it were a rifle. And gives you this icy glance that's calculated to put you in your place and keep you there. It doesn't work with me, but I can see it would with some. Anyway, she looked down her nose and said, “Yard sales are
so
depressing. And so tacky, somehow.” I said ours wasn't going to be either depressing or tacky. She looked at me and smiled a disbelieving smile. I could've smacked her. If she'd been my age I probably would've.

Nell said she could read bumps on people's heads and it might be good if we had a head-reading table at the sale. Betty and Rowena said that sounded more like a carnival than a yard sale and turned down the idea. I happened to mention it to the boys and they were thrilled. They began horsing around, feeling each other's heads.

“I got no bumps on mine,” Sidney said. Later on in the evening, however, Tad belted Sidney with a small red fire engine. After the ruckus died down, I ran my hand over Sidney's head and told him he had a huge bump at last. Sidney was quite pleased and kept touching his bump, although it was tender, and saying, “I got a bump, after all.” At that age, it takes very little to please them. That's one nice thing about being a little kid.

On Sunday I checked our attic. I found a box of linen napkins and tablecloths my mother had decided were too much trouble to iron, and a pile of old magazines. Then, to my delight, I discovered a ratty old chair pushed way back under the eaves. It was made of some scratchy fabric the color of dried blood. I sat in it for a while to get the feel of it. It didn't collapse and was, in fact, quite comfortable. I went downstairs to ask my father if he'd help me carry it down to the garage to put aside for the yard sale. He was on the living room floor drawing pictures for the boys.

“Dad,” I said, “there's a terrible old beat-up chair in the attic. Can I have it for our yard sale?”

“No,” he said, not even taking time to think about it. “No.”

“Why not?” I asked when I'd gotten over my surprise. I was sure he'd say it was all right.

“Well,” he said, sitting back on his heels, “because that old chair holds many pleasant memories for me. It's the chair your mother and I were sitting in when I asked her to marry me.”

That chair wasn't big enough for two people, I thought.

“Was Mom sitting on your lap?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, she was, and her head was resting right here,” and he put his hand to his shoulder to show us where our mother's head had been. “She wore a pink dress, and she cried when I asked her. She said she wasn't sure she loved me. She thought she did, she said, but she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure what being in love felt like. She'd never been in love. Well, I had, once or twice, but never like this. I was afraid if she spent more time trying to make sure she loved me, she might change her mind entirely, so I said, “Of course you love me,” and I was so sure, so positive I was right, she agreed to marry me the following week.”

The boys and I were in some kind of trance. Sidney plugged up his mouth with his thumb and crawled into my father's lap, what there was of it. A real lap is possible only when a person sits in a chair or on a couch. My father was sitting on the floor, so his lap wasn't what it should be. Still, there was room for Sidney. A tiny smile worked its way around his thumb, and Sidney settled back as if he were getting ready to listen to a new story, a fairy tale he hadn't heard before.

Our father had never told us such a romantic story in his whole life. He couldn't have made it up. He was our father, and we didn't think of what or how he'd been before he was our father. Everybody is somebody else before they're a father, don't forget. The idea of my mother and father sharing the chair, the wonderful way they'd shared it, was quite overwhelming. If we all sat very still, maybe he'd forget we were there and his story would continue. It was as if he were talking to himself.

“I've often thought,” he said slowly, “that I shouldn't have pressed her. I should have let her think it through. She was young. She wanted to see the world, taste things she'd never tasted. I'd been in the army and I'd seen the parts of the world I wanted to see. I was ready to settle down. I made her think she couldn't live without me. If she'd done what she wanted and then settled down, maybe she'd be happier now. Not so restless.”