Paul Maliszewski – on a moving sale.

Syracuse, New York
September 8, 2000

Dear Paul,

My girlfriend Monique decided we had to have this yard sale before leaving Syracuse, and I went along with her bold scheme. It seemed like a good idea to sell a bunch of stuff for a little bit of money instead of taking that same stuff, packing it carefully in boxes with crumpled-up pages from the local free entertainment weekly as padding, loading them into a truck and transporting them nearly seven hundred miles south, then carrying each box down a ramp and up a flight of stairs, when we both knew, and would admit if pressed, that we had no need for a bagel slicer, a cappuccino maker, a salad bowl as big around as a tractor tire, a back-up wok, a spare set of knives (with sharpener, all in the original box), a tiny, toy-sized meat-tenderizing mallet (origins unknown), assorted accumulated record albums (neither of us has a phonograph), a couple of heavy winter coats, a walkman with headphones less the walkman part, a silverware organizer, and, among much else, three sets of slightly old, slightly battered headboards and footboards, embarrassing, bulky reminders of an ambitious, never-realized plan from years before to refinish old chairs, tables, and beds.

Monique gathered together the stuff to sell, down in the basement. I made several lame, less than half-hearted attempts to scare up possessions of my own that were both something I could part with and something that could be sold to another human being. I found little of the former and less of the latter. I did rediscover two candlestick holders (with candles!) and then lost steam. Monique called them my bachelor-pad candles, and held them up, one in each hand, asking me for a price.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A dollar?”

Monique shook her head. “Too high.”

Most of what I thought I could part with, Monique did not think could be sold, so she marked them with “Free” stickers. My free junk would, in theory, be vaguely akin to the free hot dogs or baseball caps that you see given away at openings of new grocery stores. People would come for the free stuff, but Monique’s items would be what buttered our bread. I have no idea if this business model holds water, incidentally, on any larger scale. As I write this down, it doesn’t sound all that convincing, but then again she was right about those candlestick holders: they didn’t sell, even at fifty cents.

Here’s how we represented our junk in a classified ad that we placed in The Syracuse Post-Standard:

GIANT MOVING SALE
Old & new! All nice!
Kitchenware, furniture,
milkglass, so much more!

You probably want to know what milkglass is. I will tell you, just a bit later.

A month or so before our sale, the aforementioned free entertainment weekly, a publication that never proved more indispensable than it did when I wrapped our dishes in it, ran a series of articles titled “You Know You’ve Lived in Syracuse Too Long When…” Each article featured at least a hundred reader-submitted and staff-generated indicators of recognizing if you’d lived in Syracuse for too long. Most of them were beyond obscure, describing events, people, and places that had occurred, passed on, or been razed long before we entered the central New York picture. Really arcane local minutiae. For example, if you remember when the movie house that used to be on James Street (not the one that’s there now, the other one, down by the place where the Big M used to be before it moved) had those cardboard popcorn cartons that were colored red on the inside instead of plain old white, you know you’ve lived in Syracuse too long. I exaggerate, but only barely.

Anyway, Monique and I had one such too-long-in-Syracuse shock when we recognized the woman who stole a piece of costume jewelry while we weren’t looking and got away.

Our sale was supposed to start at eight, but at least an hour before that, people were milling about on our lawn. Some were sitting on the hoods of their cars, smoking. Some were trying to decide whether it was a better strategy to cover the front or the side door. This was around seven, and these people were either antique dealers or junk-shop owners. It’s hard to tell the difference at that hour. Suffice it to say they were dealers of some sort. I had foolishly counted on an hour of peace and waiting around before the first rush. Instead I already felt my patience withering. I put the first few boxes on the lawn, the pros hurriedly picked through them, and Monique collected the money. It was hardly light out. I could make out shapes of people, but no discernible details.

The dealers snapped up most of Monique’s milkglass, some of which she had picked up over the years at yard sales, some of which her mom had bought for her. (Monique’s mom doesn’t and can’t know Monique sold milkglass that she bought her.) Milkglass is exactly what it sounds like: glass that looks milk-like. There are milkglass cups, goblets, plates, platters, bowls. Milkglass is very grandmother-esque. I picture bowls overflowing with individually wrapped butterscotch and menthol candies. One shopper who saw the milkglass said, “You-all are too young to own this stuff.”

The thief arrived just as we were recovering from the initial wave of professional sale-goers. The thief was this older woman who we’d seen around town at a bunch of church and library book sales. At the DeWitt Presbyterian Book Sale she cut in front of us and about a half a dozen other people waiting for the church to open its doors. She just waltzed up to the front of the line and then stood there clutching her purse to her stomach and chewing the side of her mouth. When she showed up at our sale, I remembered the way she had stood at the church, looking at the locked door inches in front of her face, and pretending to ignore every single one of us standing behind her, looking at the back of her head.

The thief struck up some idle conversation with Monique – where are you moving, honey? Do you have any dolls for sale, honey? Any jewelry, honey? Only in retrospect did the conversation sound stilted, tinged with nervousness and calculation. Monique showed her the bit of jewelry she had, and went off around the side of the house to get another box.

In a fit of inspired marketing, I was leaning one of the bed sets against a tree, by the road, when the woman suddenly left, bolting for her car, and I remember thinking, She left pretty quickly, and then thinking, I bet she stole something. And almost as soon as I thought that, I thought, You don’t know that, you didn’t see a thing. I frequently find that I think things and then a moment later think the exact opposite. The woman floated by in her raft of a Lincoln, turned the corner, and was gone. Monique came back around the corner and happened to glance at the jewelry. A junky little watch was gone.

By ten o’clock it seemed we had nothing good left to sell or have stolen. Monique started telling anyone who showed up that all our good stuff was gone – “cleaned out” – and all that was left was junk. I heard her tell several people, “We really got picked over this morning by the dealers. All that’s left is the dregs.”

We were sitting on the front stoop. The people she warned wandered off after a few minutes. Maybe someone bought something small. Ahead of us stretched at least another two hours of waiting. “Monique,” I said, “do you think you should be telling these people that what they’re looking at is junk?” It didn’t seem like the very best sales tactic to me.

“They know it’s junk. It’s a yard sale.”

“But what if they get mad? What if they say this isn’t a giant moving sale?” I asked her.

“Tell them we meant it’s a moving sale for a giant.”

Our tables looked empty. Monique was worried. We were getting a lot of drive-bys – people stopping in front of our apartment and surveying our goods without getting out of their cars. Some drive-bys barely slowed. Monique and I took this personally. How could we not? We felt like poorly-lit figures in a natural-history-museum diorama: Late Twentieth Century Yard Sale.

Monique told me, “I’m going to find more crap to sell,” and went inside.

When she returned with assorted doilies and place mats, two vases, a handful of books, all moldy oldies, and a wooden spoon, I momentarily got caught up in the spirit of our enterprise and considered selling a bunch of old cameras and flashes. I had found the cameras – a Kodak in its Bakelite casing, a few early Polaroid Land cameras, an odd little British number, and a light-metering device of German manufacture – at some of the same yard sales where Monique bought her milkglass.

I went so far as to bring the cameras out on the porch. For several minutes I opened them all, fully extended the collapsible bellows, and tried the shutters and winding mechanisms. I can’t be sure now what I even liked about these cameras or why I started to buy them for a few dollars here and there. Maybe it’s something about their bulkiness and heft; nothing this small is this heavy anymore. The fronts of some of them are tricked up to look like locomotive engines. One camera has a two-piece viewfinder, one part a lens you look through, the other part a pair of thin wires that unfold into a perfect rectangle, a rectangle that becomes, for the eye looking through the lens, the frame of what will become the photograph. I have a hard time explaining the affection I feel for that wire rectangle, but I realized then I couldn’t sell the cameras, not one. They’d come with us.

All told we made nearly $200, which is a lot when you’re making it mostly in change and one-dollar bills. The giant moving sale will pay for our goodbye meals with friends and our food as we pack the truck. The money should last through Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and into North Carolina.

Paul