Up and down the block, one power mower after another roared a welcome to the beginning of spring, to the obligations of taming a lawn. Settled on my living room couch, I listened to the wavering intensity of each mower’s back-and-forth growl. Before me on the coffee table sat Preston’s catalog for his showing of my objects. I hadn’t paged through it since the opening—an event successful enough that almost nothing remained of my collection. Now those mowers outside sounded like an army of hungry creatures, and I found myself reaching for that glossy-paged, full-colored book, for what I already knew would be the last time. I turned the pages to Preston’s Introduction.
Virtually no object included in this catalog has any particular value in and of itself, yet each was once the center of a complex attachment, thereby accruing to itself a psychic patina, a glaze of significant drama that offers significant value for the collector.
There were pages and pages of this sort of prose, so I skipped ahead and stopped at the sight of an ordinary key chain. The color photo magnified the cheap plaster mold of a miniature bouquet and emphasized its one flaw: a dark orange petal, slightly chipped.
This object belonged to a woman who learned to drive a car so she could leave her husband, the text began, though this wasn’t precisely true—at first she hadn’t known what she’d end up doing. I could still see her surrounded by cartons of yard sale bargains in her front yard, watching me examine the key chain. Kate and I had just divorced, and that woman must have sensed my hidden rawness. Now remarried, she told a tale about an object she needed to let go. “But at one time,” she’d said wistfully, “I thought if I lost this thing, I’d lose myself.”
Her brief story often left me inventing my own details, beginning with the day she sat by the window of her apartment and listened to the steady whoosh of passing cars, an engine starting up on one of the side streets, the occasional car horn, or the squeal of tires. With eyes closed she imagined herself in a driver’s seat, hurtling down avenues and weaving among reckless cabdrivers. But she never envisioned a destination in any of these private travels—the driving itself was the main pleasure.
When she decided to take lessons her husband mocked her: they lived in the city, he said, they’d never need a car, they couldn’t afford one anyway. This time the familiarity of his arguments—yet another series of no’s—made him strangely unfamiliar, and even as she nodded in habitual agreement she knew that she’d take the lessons anyway, behind his back.
Throughout those lessons she clung to words she shouldn’t forget—ignition, clutch, accelerate—and each successful parallel parking, each left turn accomplished against traffic at an intersection must have become a declaration of her independence. She always drove with that key chain of small flowers hanging from the steering column, and as she followed the instructor’s terse commands, those flowers gently swayed as if in the wind.
Though the woman never told me this, I’d always felt certain it must be true: when she came home from the Motor Vehicles Bureau after finally receiving her license, an odd emptiness blossomed. With no car, what could this piece of paper offer her? It was simply physical evidence supporting her husband’s arguments, and all those lessons had been nothing more than a childish act of defiance. She hurled her key chain across the room, but when a piece snapped off, her anger broke too, transforming to regret. Picking up the key chain, the woman saw the chipped petal, the plaster interior revealed, and she tentatively scraped at it with a fingernail. A faint white cloud rose up. She sniffed its dusty dryness—the inside of this bouquet was as desiccated as her marriage. After scraping another wisp of plaster and watching it mingle with motes in the air, she then—with surprisingly calm steps—approached the telephone. The receiver nestled against her chin, she flipped through the Yellow Pages for car rentals, prepared to drive off to a new life.
*
The next object in the catalog was a car antenna with scratches down nearly the entire length of its silver surface to the jagged base. Preston had taken great pleasure in arranging the catalog’s order of objects, making each one the segment of a larger story. “What we’re offering is a Thousand and One Tchotchkes,” he liked to joke.
The former owner of this antenna was a retired man who stood outside in rainstorms as often as possible, soaking one old business suit after another. He held this antenna high in the air; as if attuned to stations no one else could hear, hoping that lightning might strike him.
Every thunderstorm his family searched for him, driving down side streets or along the edges of fields, and whenever they found him his two teenage grandsons had to chase him down. Despite the family’s increasing precautions, he still managed to slip away sometimes in a downpour, patiently waiting for his great moment. He was never struck, though once a nearby tree split into two giant slices by a sudden bolt. This near miss must have embittered him, for soon after he developed pneumonia and passed away.
There the catalog entry ended, though again there was more to this man’s story that I kept to myself. After he died, his family found a newspaper clipping in his desk drawer, a daily science feature reporting that when lightning strikes a person, the victim’s clothes are almost always torn off from the blast. Perhaps he hadn’t sought only death but some sort of unmasking—the business suit he always wore in the rain exemplified a life of deals and payoffs that he wanted blasted away. Though he often stood only a moment away from a terrible flash, redemption proved elusive, as if his desire had created a magnetic field that repulsed its satisfaction.
*
A few glossy pages ahead was a dark green plastic figure I’d found in a box brimming with old toy soldiers—a pioneer pointing his rifle at some unseen threat. His shoulders were hunched in concentration, the tail of his coonskin cap dangled down his back to a crossways slash that had nearly cut him in two, twisting him enough so that he couldn’t balance on the flat, undamaged base. Another cut had nicked off a tip of his cap.
This plastic pioneer belonged to a boy who owned many such soldiers: gladiators, Revolutionary War combatants, the Civil War’s Blue and Gray, medieval knights, the doomed defenders of the Alamo. But this pioneer had been his particular favorite. So no one understood why the young man threw the figure into the front lawn one day and then, for the first time in his life without being cajoled, pulled the mower out of the garage and cut patient swaths through the grass.
I suspected the reason. The man who’d sold me the figure was the father of that boy, now grown and living far from home. “He should have chopped up the rest of them,” the fellow laughed. “He was nearly in high school, much too old to be playing with toys.” As the man voiced his approval of the way school bullies had teased his boy out of a bad habit, I’d barely listened, wondering instead what liberating battles that son had fought with his soldiers, what inner violence he’d organized into play.
*
Finally, I lingered over the last photo: a silver serving plate, its surface embossed with flowery filigree much like an Oriental rug that Kate had drawn so long ago. That’s why I’d stared at it so closely as it gleamed in the afternoon sun beside the yard sale cash box.
This serving plate once belonged to a sleepwalker, an elderly woman living with her son’s family. Though once a devoted and accomplished cook, she was barely able to make a pot of tea. But at night, in a dream-like state, she set places for her family in the dining room. This silver plate was always in the middle of the table, always empty and yet, in her eyes, filled with delicacies she tried to serve to invisible guests until her son or daughter- in-law led her back to her bedroom.
As with all the other objects in this catalog, there was more to this story: one night, the family decided to attend one of those midnight feasts. Three generations sat together, passing out portions that weren’t there from the serving plate, praising the grandmother’s descriptions of what they ate. They all willingly entered her dream, and she sat at the head of the table, transfixed with pleasure.
I closed the book and thought of some of the other people inside: the woman who let her teakettle howl its shrill whistle whenever her husband was late from work; the girl who filled the drawers of her toy cash register with shredded photos of her prettier cousins; the man who, continually afraid of losing his place, kept a bookmark in everything, even the television guide. They had once been my own extended family, passing another sort of sustenance along a secret table.
I returned to Preston’s Introduction, to the sentence he’d included despite my initial protests: Those collectors who wish to purchase one of these objects should be aware of its potential as well as its past. For who is to say that one of your own stories won’t someday attach itself to your new possession?
My collection belonged to others now, no matter what remaining secrets I’d withheld of their stories. I set aside the catalog and gazed outside: no mowers in sight, yet still that restless keening continued. A jaunt through the peace of a nearby park was what I needed. I passed through the living room, pausing at the hutch and what few objects I’d kept to myself: half a scissors, its single blade dulled with age; an earring in the shape of a straight-back chair; a tiny toy TV, its plastic screen painted bright blue with an airplane soaring in a corner; a nest of interwoven twigs and leaves with a child’s clay version of a bird nestled inside; and that old, battered tape recorder and, still inside, its tape of that doomed man that had both saved and cast me adrift.
Extended family or not, it was finally time to let all these go, just as I’d let go of my father, my brother, my sister. I hadn’t seen the Zombie Twins since my wedding day, couldn’t bear the thought of visiting them, and wherever Laurie might be, she no longer sent postcards. As for Kate, Kate was a husk in my heart.
I considered the remains of my collection, and picked up the deceptive lightness of the nest with its clay bird. This would be the first. I’d take it along to the park, and leave it behind on a bench when I left.