Alicia Costello

The Garage Sale

A Short, Sarcastic Masterpiece

I climbed in the passenger seat of our car with pretty much the most sour look on my face ever.  My face curled up with anger and my eyes shut the light out.  The longing for sleep overruled any proper etiquette drilled into me during the molding years. “Whoopee.  Getting woken up early on a weekend to go look at other people’s crap.”   Sarcasm, that killer of words, flowed out of me without effort. “You’ve really done it this time, Susan.”

“Liz,” snapped my mother, “Don’t call me Susan.  Call me mom.  Get that?  I’ve never seen such a disrespectful child in my life.” 

My eyes opened. “Yes, Suzie.”

“And DON’T call me Suzie! It’s Susan…but it’s not, it’s Mom to you!”

“Whatever, Susan.  I’m not a child, Susan.  I’m seventeen, for God’s sake.  I’m a senior. If I was a character in a movie, I would be played by a twenty-seven year old.”

 She ground her teeth.  “Well, you still live under my roof and you’ll learn that going to garage sales is fun.”  

“Your level of ‘fun’ musta severely diminished with your old age, woman.”

“Now, now, Elizabeth.”  I never understood why she said that.  Like that was supposed to subdue my distaste.  I didn’t answer her back.  Feeling as if she had won the argument, she started our Ford SUV and pulled oh-so-carefully out of the driveway.  

I settled into my seat, focusing on the deep blue vastness of the sky. I let it hypnotize me, surround my whole world. Susan’s typical babbling and the steady vroom of the car melted into one constant sound, and my eyes pleaded to close.  I didn’t fight them.  Darkness.  So sleepy.  So desperately wanted to get out of this stupid car and go back to bed.  The constant vroom pulled me deeper and deeper away from the reality of the morning.

My mind drifted back to before Susan woke me: a dream I’d been having.  It seemed so real.  I found myself in my old elementary school, standing in the doorway of my third grade classroom.  All my classmates sat obediently coloring pictures of America.  Mrs. Koch, my teacher, with her crazy blonde hair, sat at her desk, grading.  I went to my desk—my third-grade self had left it empty—and took my seat.  “Metal-Mouth” Tamra Johnson, smiled at me, her braces shining.  Her little hand held an extra blank picture. I took the assignment and I, too, began to color America.  Life seemed so at peace.

The car stopped, a door slammed, and I jerked awake again.

Susan made me stand there while she stupidly fawned over dusty cobwebbed junk.  The stuff looked like it hadn’t escaped an attic for thirty years—almost twice as old as me.  Boxes of picture frames never used, worn-out clothes, I looked at the cluttered masses of crap and then back at our SUV—my ticket home, back to bed, and back into a dream world where yard sales existed only to find undiscovered Picassos and sell ‘em for record cash.

“Do they have an art section?”

Susan’s eyes brightened.  Poor idiot, she thought I was having fun.  “That’s the spirit!  I think it’s over there,” she said, pointing to a corner of the garage blocked by a massive teenage boy. 

He hid himself on a fold-out chair in a dark spot of the garage, away from any main action of the yard sale.  His sour visage hidden beneath dark hair and dark eyes, and his hairy crossed arms instinctively drew me back, like a bear guarding his cave.  He stared.  I diverted my eyes to convey non-threatening body language; if he wanted to assert dominance, I would freely comply.  My eyes returned to the haphazard piles thrown on old tables, like the house threw up on the lawn. I looked back to him on several occasions.  I recognized a small look of frustration beneath that anger.  He wanted to go back to sleep as much as I did.  His eyes drooped in the same exhaustion as mine, and he looked murderously sleep-deprived.           

I compared the statistics of actually finding a Picasso at a junky yard sale to the statistics of returning from that corner of the garage with one of my arms broken.  Bear Boy didn’t look like he would play nice just because I was a girl.

Susan noticed me still standing next to her.  “Well, go over there and look at the art.”

“On second thought, I’ll stay here.”

Susan’s fingers strangled the table clock in her hands as she placed it on the table.  “Liz, I swear to God, I didn’t bring you here so you could have a bad attitude.”

“Then maybe you’ll learn for next time to leave me at home.”

“Don’t be like that.  Yard sales are so much fun.” she said, holding up a clear plastic bowl designed to look like crystal, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure!”

I looked once again at the heaps of dust covering each ugly item.  “See, Susan, we have to talk about your definition of things.  I, for example, would not place that plastic bowl in the category of ‘treasure.’ This is America, woman.  If you need something, you go to an overcrowded mall, and buy what you need at an overpriced store filled with incompetent salespeople.”

“But this stuff is so cheap!”

To my own surprise, my fist tightened a little with frustration.  I quickly grabbed the ugliest item within reach—a telephone carved in the shape of a mallard duck.  “Twenty-five cents for this is overcharging the consumer.”

We stared each other down, each trying to win the argument by sheer will.

The host of the garage sale waded over, squeezing in between two tables.  Her hair was gritty, dry and forced to wear an ugly hue, which made it in no better shape than her fingernails.  She wore cheap clothes and she puffed on a cheap cigarette.  She must have smoked for years, for the nicotine had turned her skin a cheap yellow color.

“Oh, the duck phone!  A delightful item!”  We continued to stare at each other with full concentration, even though Mama Bear blew puffs of smoke in our faces.  “My father had it for years!  Instead of ringing, it quacks!”  She giggled as if it was the funniest thing she ever heard. 

Fed up, I turned my face towards her, not losing any seriousness. “Go. Away.”

Her eyes widened and her mouth opened slightly, her cigarette nearly falling out of her mouth.  She walked away, smashing her foot into a weathered red wagon.

Susan’s livid face changed to disappointment.  “Despise me all you want, but don’t be cruel to other people.”  She quickly plucked an old fuchsia lamp with an egregious crack down the side from the table, and waved desperately at the woman.  “We’ll take this lamp!”

Mama Bear turned and, noticing the prospect of a few more dollars.  She said, “That’ll be ten dollars.”  What a rip-off.  She barked in the direction of Bear Boy, “Matthew!  Come over here and wrap this base in some paper so it doesn’t break.” 

Bear Boy rolled his eyes and reluctantly trudged over in our direction.  His reaction to the sun resembled how I’d always imagined a vampire to respond.  The huge dark circles under his eyes, probably from playing numerous hours of some online game, only furthered the vampire suspicion. A bear vampire.  A bear-pire! That would make an amazing movie.  They could get Bruce Willis to play the small-town cop who tracks down the bear vampire.  It could premiere in the summer and make tons of money!

I spent the next few seconds dreaming what a big-budget action movie starring Bruce Willis chasing an animal vampire would be like. Of course, it would be called Search for the Vampire.  Pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.  I wondered what bear vampires would eat.  Probably the blood of other bears or something.

An excited gleaming in Susan’s eye brought me back to reality.  I felt a little sick to my stomach, knowing what would exit her mouth next.  She could never leave things alone.  She always had to argue, to get her way, even just a little bit. “I’ll give you five dollars for it.”

Mama Bear sighed, shifted her weight, and placed her elbows on a tall, dilapidated dresser serving as the cash counter.  “Sorry, no haggling.  Ten dollars.” She put her face in her hands, yawned, and looked at Susan with an angry stare. 

“I’ll give you six dollars.”  God, the woman seemed to think she possessed some form of genius accounting mindset because she took an upper-level economics class in college.  She studied Business before she lost her will entirely and dropped out three weeks into her junior year.

“Ten dollars.  Please stop wasting my time.”  Mama Bear sank her yellow face deeper into her hands, desperately wanting to fall asleep at that moment. 

Susan pushed her hair back and straightened her posture.  Acting like a business woman must have given her some kind of pathetic high.  “Eight dollars.  I’ll give you eight dollars for this lamp.” 

“Lady, I already said no haggling.  It’s ten dollars. I’ll let you have it for ten.”

Business failed to work.  Susan tried the nice approach. “Look, Mrs…”

The woman didn’t answer her, taking the last long drag of her cigarette instead.  She threw it to the ground, and crushed it with a fat foot.

“I’m Susan.  So nice to meet you.” She held out her hand for the woman to shake. 

Mama Bear just stared at it and barked, “Are you going to buy the lamp or not, lady?”

Susan put her hand back down.  She gracefully ignored the rudeness and continued to address Mama Bear in her annoyingly soft high voice. “You know, this lamp isn’t really worth ten whole dollars.  Look, there’s a crack here and it’s so old and the color isn’t fashionable anymore.” 

I wondered whether I should publically note that haggling only proved my point of garage sales overpricing used junk.  I decided to keep my mouth shut, let Susan continue acting out in her dream world, creating this ridiculous charade.

“If you actually thought that, you wouldn’t have picked it up.  Ten dollars. Pay up.”

“I don’t know that I’m willing to pay more than eight for it.”

“See my son here, lady?” She jabbed a fat thumb over at her son, who stood behind her, dumb and confused. “He’s got diabetes.  He needs insulin.  Just give us the extra two dollars so we can buy medicine.”

“Oh, alright.  Ten dollars.” Susan plucked a bill from her purse, defeated, her fingers grasping tightly on Hamilton’s face like she was trying to squeeze him to death. 

Bear Boy began to speak, but Mama Bear kicked him lightly in the shin behind the dresser.   She retained her poisonous frown and tired face, and said insincerely, “Thank you.  Have a nice day” as she wrapped her grubby hands around the ten dollar bill.

As we walked back to the car, hideous lamp in hand, Susan deemed this as an appropriate time for a lesson in world culture.  “You know, Liz, haggling is a cultural staple of economics in India.”

“You’ve never been to India.”

Sliding into my seat, thankful to go home, I could swear I heard Bear Boy say to his mother “Mom, what’s diabetes?”

We rode home in silence.  I looked out the window, perfectly content to watch the business signs as they sped by, and my favorite game: counting the number of huge SUVs, driven haphazardly by women talking on their cell phones, and kids flailing about the back seats.  Somewhere around Mom On A Cell Phone # 24, Susan tried feebly to start a conversation with “so how did your science project turn out?”

“Stuff blew up.”

“Oh no!  Well I will call your teacher and beg for you to have another chance.”

“Stuff was supposed to blow up.”

“Oh.”  She drove without saying anything further. A few blocks later, she loudly exclaimed, “Oh my God! Another one!”  From the left lane, she made an illegal right turn.  I rolled my eyes.  Not again.