The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 40: July 23

Today I am not going to a yard sale. I have not been to a yard sale all summer, even though I am fanatical about yard sales. I am also very gifted when it comes to yard sales. I can case the tables of junk and instantly locate the four items that don’t immediately appear interesting — a pitcher, a raincoat, a jigger — but are. Seconds are all I require. It’s like what happens when I go to an art colony and I sweep the dining hall and identify the attraction threats. My body responds to people and objects erotically, and within a micro-span of time. When my friend, who suffered from strange food allergies, visited a holistic healer, she was asked to bring samples of the food she normally ate. The healer would pick up her jar of peanut butter, or her bag of jasmine rice, and hold it against my friend’s body, and pronounce, “The body likes this,” or “The body doesn’t like this.”

My body works this way.

But this summer I have sworn off yard sales. I see the handwritten placards—9AM — NO EARLY BIRDS — nailed to the electrical poles. I feel the rise in my pulse like a libido spike, and I say to myself: No. I am going to have a healing summer, one absent unnecessary stresses. Yard sales are stressful. I feel like the character with the superpowers who, after she uses these powers to stop a villain, collapses in a heap.

Also, yard sales are sites of potential confrontation. One year there was a yard sale at a house that was always perfectly painted and the lawn perfectly mown, but no one ever lived there, not even during the hottest weeks of August. Then a sign announced there would be a yard sale at this house and I knew: it would be a good one.

I was right. It was one of the best yard sales I’ve ever been to; the competition, as it can be in Maine, was intense. I had to double my usual speed of identification, because stuff was disappearing fast. I found an iron bed within two minutes of arriving. It could have come from an infirmary, or a Victorian orphanage. It was narrow and long, custom-sized for a serpent. The odd proportions and level of disrepair (not terrible) announced to me: this is the item you must stand next to, and thereby risk losing all other good items.

I stood next to the bed and tried to flag the person with the sales tickets. Meanwhile, a woman I know approached me. “Are you getting that bed?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “My husband was supposed to get here early to buy it.” She explained that there had been a preview of the sale, and that they’d gone, and they’d agreed to buy the bed for their small son.

I am usually the first person to cede to another — the more advantageous place in the checkout line, the last scone — I do this because I enjoy making other people happy. I enjoy the friendly exchanges that result from this kind of giving. But sometimes I give away things I want for myself. I do this because I hate social awkwardness and then afterward I hate myself for being such a coward.

This time, however, and maybe it was because we were at a yard sale, and because the rules of yard sales are understood and respected by everyone in Maine—I got here first, piss off—I did not budge. I said, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry that I wasn’t giving her the bed. I was sorry that she wasn’t married to a man who better understood the rules.

The story of this bed has become legion among our friends. Or rather, my “cutthroat” behavior has become legion. I put “cutthroat” in quotes because my friends are not criticizing me. They enjoy teasing me about my refusal to give away the bed. It was so out of character, my failure to cede the bed to a couple who would use it year-round rather than just during the summer, a couple who probably makes a fraction of the money my husband and I make. All these factors rendered the story even more delicious for my friends to tell and retell.

But my failure to give, in this instance, wasn’t a failure of generosity. It wasn’t a “cutthroat” desire to beat someone, or a crazy quasi-erotic need for an object. The truth was that I wouldn’t respect myself if I gave the woman this bed. I wouldn’t respect myself for being incapable of saying, “I really want this bed, I won it fair and square, and I am not going to give it to you out of guilt.” (I basically said this by saying, “I’m sorry.”) If I’d given the bed to the woman, I’d have done so passive-aggressively. I’d have done so to make her feel bad for making me do something I didn’t want to do, and that, by the laws of Maine yard sales, I didn’t need to do. But if I’d given her the bed, she wouldn’t have felt bad, not for a moment. And I would have felt like an idiot for giving up a bed to make a point that nobody got, not even me.