Dead Guy's Stuff (3 page)

"Doctor up the bathroom plumbing and bring the electrical into the twentieth century,
mid
-twentieth century. Don't even consider the twenty-first. Any bigger improvements might prove disastrous."

"Hell, Don, I believe my electric drill could knock a wall down," said Eugene Smalley, a customer and cabinet maker. "Let's put in some bigger windows and add some lights so a guy can see if he has trump when he's playing euchre and leave it at that."

Nellie had told Jane last week that the carpentry was done and they were planning on having a grand opening next month.

"After forty years in this place, your dad's acting like a teenager with a new car," Nellie had said.

When Jane asked how it looked with bigger windows and improved lighting and bathrooms, her mother had snorted.

"All the better to see the dirt and dust with. We was better off when it was dark so you couldn't see where the walls don't quite meet or the cracks in the ceiling."

"Is Dad going to paint and redecorate?"

"Has to. Plaster cracked all over the place when they did the windows. I haven't been able to make a pot of soup in a month because of the dust."

By next week, the painting and plastering and pounding would be finished, and Don had promised Jane that she could come in and decorate. That is, she could decide where the beer distributor's big calendar and the bulletin boards where Don posted the golf league standings and the bowling league scores would hang.

"Same place, if you ask me," said Nellie during their "conference call," which meant Nellie was listening in on the bedroom extension while Don called Jane from the kitchen.

Jane had been planning some surprises though. She had found some great vintage signs, old beer advertising trays that could be hung, even an old high school trophy case that she figured could stand in the corner for a display of Kankakee photos and tavern memorabilia. She had collected Kankakee postcards for years, made inexpensive copies, and enlarged them to make a Kankakee River montage that she couldn't wait to show her dad.

And now she was smack dab in the middle of a tavern memorabilia collector's dream. It was only twenty minutes into the sale and a small-enough house that the first twenty or thirty shoppers were her only competition. Because the other basement rooms seemed to be filled with vintage tools and a radio workshop— she spotted some great looking Bakelite cases sitting on one of the shelves and another room had racks of spotless vintage dresses and hats— most of the dealers were keeping busy and out of Jane's way.

There were several neighbors, Jane now realized, milling around the basement, whispering about Mary and Bateman. Her two new friends from the medical supply storage corner had followed her, and one of them now pointed to a group photo, framed on the wall.

"That's Dorothy and me right there, the year our bowling team won the league." The more talkative of the pair took down the photo and held it close. In it, twenty women were grouped around a huge trophy. They wore silk bowling shirts, with individually sewn letters spelling SHANGRI-LA across the front. The black and white was so clear and well-preserved that Jane could read DOROTHY stitched over the pocket of the laughing woman with blonde curls and OLIVIA over the pocket of the much younger version of this now gray-haired fount of information.

"You're Olivia?"

She nodded. "Ollie, honey, just Ollie. There's Mary." She pointed to a voluptuous blonde in the front captured forever waving a cigarette and vamping for the photographer. Bateman, maybe?

"She looks like a movie star," Jane whispered, all notions of the plump, kindly nurse sending extra medical supplies to Third World countries disappearing and being replaced with a bad girl, B-movie starlet pouting in front of her martini at the Shangri-La.

"Mary was a beauty," said Dorothy. It was the first time Jane had heard her speak in a voice louder than a whisper. Ollie was clearly the talker.

"Still is. I bet she gets a husband by Christmas," Ollie said, and they both giggled.

Jane had found a kind of laundry cart or wooden dolly, a crate on wheels, and was loading it up while they talked. When she saw that they didn't want the bowling photograph— both said they had copies at home— she stuck it into the crate and kept filling. Boxes of old advertising shot glasses, Bakelite ashtrays, and a motherload of dice, decks of cards, and coasters.

"A husband?" Jane asked. "She isn't… she didn't…"

"Nursing home. Fell and broke her ankle and Susan, a visiting nurse and her own granddaughter, thinks she ought to live somewhere other than her own house," said Ollie.

"It's an assisted-living apartment, Ollie, and it's very nice," corrected Dorothy. "Susan can't care for her full-time, and she wanted her to be safe."

"Holy Toledo!" said Jane, using just the kind of archaic exclamation that her son, Nick, was trying to eliminate from her vocabulary, at least around his friends, and just the kind of expression that endeared her to Dorothy and Ollie.

"Punchboards," she told them. "There must be a dozen in this box. All sealed with their keys in the back."

The peaks and valleys of a childhood spent waiting in the tavern for your parents to end their day when the bartender arrived at six are few and far between. Waiting was mostly a plateau. A dry, arid, flat stretch of boredom and whining. Don would need a few more minutes to count out the register, leaving only a small bank for the night bartender. Nellie, roped into a euchre game as a fourth after all the soup bowls were washed and put away, all the ketchup and mustard bottles wiped clean, needed a few more minutes to win one with her partner. Jane wandered on the desert plain of waiting, reading, for the three hundredth time, the bowling scores posted on the bulletin board. It was a happy day when the jukebox man had been there in the morning, removing the nine-month-old hit songs and replacing them with three-month-old hit songs. Carp or Joe or Vince would flip her a quarter and tell her to pick out five, and she would take her time, drawing out the luxury of having new titles to read. Maybe if she took long enough, her parents would actually finish whatever they were doing and ask
her
when
she
was going to be ready. Maybe she would be able to shush them, hold up a finger, and mouth a patronizing "a few more minutes, that's all, just a few more minutes."

But the highest point, the peak that defined a mountaintop, was the day Don set out a new punchboard, a one-inch-thick piece of pressed particle board punctuated with a grid of foil-covered holes waiting for you to insert a key punch and push through a tightly rolled cylinder of paper. Was there ever a more satisfying activity? Pay your quarter, study the board for clues, cross your fingers, choose your spot, push the key hard through one of the holes, puncture the foil, force the paper out onto the bar, unroll, and read the numbers. Jane remembered that fives were usually lucky. A sequence with fives or multiples of fives was a winner. A box of chocolates, usually chocolate-covered cherries, was the prize, and there were few customers left at the EZ Way Inn by six o'clock who had anyone waiting at home who they wanted to surprise with a box of candy.

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 Drug 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.

She preferred to explain it away as a need to find and replace the buttons her grandmother had let her play with when she was young, her only toy at Grandma's apartment. The wooden sewing box, filled with the beautiful buttons, had disappeared after her grandmother died. When Jane had come home from college and asked about it, Nellie had shrugged and said Grandma hadn't sewn a button in years. Jane knew from experience that it was all the explanation she would ever get.

"Go ahead and laugh, boys," Jane said, "THE QUEEN is worth a pretty penny."

"Where do you get those expressions, Mom? 'A pretty penny'?" Nick said, again trying to get Charley to join in on the teasing.

"They're not all canning jars in here. Looks like some lab stuff, too." Charley pulled out a beaker and some glass measures. "Looks like Bateman might have brewed some of his own."

"This is promising," Jane said, pulling out two jars with black screw-on lids. "These lids are Bakelite, I'm pretty sure." She walked over to the sink and ran hot water, preparing to dip the lids in and give them the sniff test.

"What's in that jar?" Nick asked.

Jane looked at the one in her right hand. "Markers, maybe? Little disks with numbers. Maybe they played bingo or something." Jane shook the jar and held it up to the light. She dipped the other lid into the hot running water and held it up to her nose.