The State We're In

THE REPURPOSED BARN

“There are Elvis lamps at the auction,” Bettina said. “Also a collection of reptile purses. What do you suppose those are? I assume, alligator bags? There’s a parlor set, which you can bet is so out of fashion it won’t meet the minimum bid, which is fifty-five dollars. You couldn’t get two mani-pedis for that. Get this: there’s no minimum on ‘assorted kitchen implements from Italy,’ including brass measuring cups whose description is written out in Italian, so I can’t make any sense of it, and a chestnut-handle pizza cutter.”

Jocelyn’s mother and — beyond belief! — her boyfriend, Nick, were driving to Maine on Friday and would stay for the weekend at a motel (they had to have that much sex?) and take Jocelyn back with them to the house the bank hadn’t yet repossessed. He’d moved in. Her mother had been seeing this man for almost a year and had never once mentioned him? How was that possible, when her mother was home every night and hardly ever got a phone call? She was lying; she’d just met him. You just had to assume adults lied. Why not say she’d just met the guy? Nobody was going to faint if somebody old had a boyfriend. They were feeling each other up in nursing homes, steering their wheelchairs into each other’s to flirt! Ancient people who ran around the halls at night, jumping into each other’s beds. (She’d found this out during the summer from Zelda’s mother, who was a health aide and who would discuss really gross topics.) The one incentive to go to college was to get out of the house, which she still thought they might lose, because she’d overheard so many of her uncle’s phone calls and he never seemed reassured by them. It would even be better to continue living where she was — her uncle was a nice man now that he was no longer doing gross things for the government, and Bettina was definitely better after she was discharged from the hospital and stopped cramming food down her throat day and night. Jocelyn would have to go with her mother, but she’d be counting the days until she could be on her own. Angie had asked her mother if Jocelyn could live with them, and she’d said certainly not, she had a mother. If that was the kind of logic she was up against, then no: there was no one to save her. She wasn’t going to give the Nick person the satisfaction of banishing her.

Her uncle was shocked by the Big News; he’d phoned her mother way too many times since he found out about her changed situation. Maybe he was warming up to have a heart attack. Somehow he’d been arranging the refinancing of his sister’s house — then this! So where did Raleigh get the money, if neither of them had jobs? Though they tried to keep the information from her, she knew from overhearing Bettina talking to Raleigh at night that one of their credit cards had been canceled, which made Bettina even more haywire about money. Bettina said it would be fun to go to the auction because she’d limit herself to twenty dollars — he could keep it in his pocket; she wouldn’t even bring her purse — and anyway, it would be a pretty drive out into the country and they didn’t just want to sit around and be sad that Jocelyn was leaving. Bettina could be really smarmy when she decided to try to appear brave and heroic; actually, she was guilt-tripping you. They were sad that her mother had picked up some stupid guy and let him move into the refinanced house, that was what they were sad about. They never talked about their own daughter, never said the words Charlotte Octavia (who’d been named for E. B. White’s spider). Charlotte Octavia was living with her boyfriend L’il Co!MOTION in Seattle — and for that, she envied her.

Earlier that day her uncle had met with her teacher because (1) the bitch — which she turned out to be — was insisting that she rewrite the essay she hadn’t given a passing grade to or she wouldn’t graduate, and (2) he couldn’t understand why her grades alternated between Cs and Ds, since it seemed clear to him that her essays had improved. He had no sympathy for her dragging her feet about the final essay, though Jocelyn knew that he thought Ms. Nementhal hadn’t done a good enough job, if — according to her — Jocelyn’s essays never improved, but wasn’t it the teacher’s fault if she didn’t learn how to make them better? Aunt Bettina had made the appointment to talk to Ms. Nementhal; then, feigning dizziness, she’d sent Raleigh in her place. If she’d really been dizzy, it was because of what she’d just found out about her sister-in-law, who was having sex way too soon after a hysterectomy. Her mother had insisted on a time-out, no texting or calls while she was recovering and Jocelyn was in summer school, and now it was clear why that served her purposes so well. Who wanted to be interrupted having sex?

Bettina had gotten her own message and called Raleigh in the middle of his golf game, in tears. Her uncle had turned into an instant liar — though he hadn’t cut his golf game short. “I’m sure she’s got a good reason for having a relationship with him,” he’d said to Bettina as he came through the front door. “People have reasons we can’t always understand, but if we have faith—”

“Stop rationalizing!” Bettina shrieked. “She told me he’d completed a drug rehab program.”

“Well, for a time I was in AA,” he said. “You don’t hold that against me.”

“That has nothing to do with this,” Bettina said. “He was a landlord in New York City, and he lost his entire building, including his own apartment, and when he met her he was staying on a friend’s foldout couch in Queens, engaged to another one of the addicts.”

Raleigh winced. “We shouldn’t be discussing this in front of Jocelyn,” he said. “Another time, maybe you can tell me how you know that.”

“Another time, I’ll try to jump-start your brain, Raleigh.”

“I’m going to Angie’s to write my essay,” she said. “Is everybody okay with that, or would you like me to send flowers and a note of congratulations to Mom?”

“What if you grow up and you’re as ignorant as you are right this minute?” Bettina said. She answered herself: “Then it’s heredity, I suppose, and we can pity you. You’re not going to her house to write any essay. You’ll go down to the beach and smoke pot, or whatever you do. Probably hatch a plan to murder your teacher, or something that will ruin your life, as if your mother hasn’t done enough! What good did that shrink do her, I want to know. Maybe she met the drug addict in his waiting room.”

“We really aren’t the kind of people who talk this way, are we, Bettina? As if we’re better than people who address their problems?” Raleigh ran his hands through his hair. He said, “I think this news just has to settle in.”

“And when it’s settled in and bored a hole in your heart, what then?”

“It’s so pointless! You’re not going to be able to do anything about it!” Jocelyn said. “Do you think what you say matters? Do you?”

“This is very distressing,” Raleigh said. “We can only hope we’ve got the story wrong.”

Jocelyn noticed that his limp was more pronounced as it got later in the day. He went to the best chair and sat down.

“This is what people’s children put them through, not their sisters,” Bettina said. “This is bad for my health. You’re right. Let her mess up her life, but we’ve got to look out for Jocelyn.” There it was again! The noble, passive-aggressive bullshit.

“Like how?” Jocelyn said. “Adopt me? Go deeper into debt to send me to college so I can make Cs and Ds?”

“Your teacher has a strange perspective on what an essay should be,” Raleigh said. “I shouldn’t say this, but she referred me to an essay by Flannery O’Connor about peacocks. Let her admire whatever she wants, but this essay is no masterpiece, let me tell you. It’s slightly witty, but she goes on and on about some peacock walking around in her front yard.”

Jocelyn burst into tears. “Summer school was just about farming me out so she could have a good time,” she said.

“Let’s not give up hope,” Raleigh said. “Let’s drive to Myrtis’s and see her and try to talk this through. I think that’s what we should do tonight.”

“Why?” Jocelyn said. “She doesn’t want to see us, she wants to be with the drug addict.”

“Please don’t cause us more heartache,” Bettina said. “Jocelyn, if you go over to Angie’s, I want you to promise we won’t get a call from the police telling us you’re smoking pot at the beach.”

“I don’t do that! I don’t use drugs! How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Would we all like to go out and get some ice cream?” Raleigh said.

“Go out, in this state? I wasn’t this upset when they carried me away on a stretcher.”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down then, Bettina?” He turned to Jocelyn. He was looking at her, but she could tell he didn’t see her. “Do you—” His voice broke. “Maybe we could all go to that auction,” he said. “It’s like some reality show is going on in the living room. I feel like I’ve become a raving idiot in my own house. Worse things than this happen all the time. And don’t ask me what they are.”

Bettina whirled around and walked out of the room. The kitchen door did not slam shut because it was a swinging door. Water ran in the sink. Jocelyn looked at her uncle and his eyes met hers. Somehow, the worst of the spell had been broken. Jocelyn felt like vomiting. She went to the sofa and stretched out, kicking off her flip-flops. “Why did this have to happen?” she said. “I don’t want to see her. I don’t. And can you even imagine being in that man’s presence?” Raleigh said nothing. She could hear him breathing deeply. She said, “I don’t even care if you were CIA and she was the Torturer and you’re hiding yourselves like Nazis in Maine and don’t know anybody, because, okay, you know a couple of people, but basically you don’t know anybody. It’s really obvious.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand one thing you just said, Jocelyn.”

“No?”

“Did you mean that we had no friends?”

Now it sounded stupid. Before the golf game, one of his golf buddies had come in for an iced tea. That same morning, someone named Hedda Rae, or something like that, had called to invite them to dinner, and Bettina had lied her way out of it. She admitted she had. “I can’t spend an evening with somebody that boring,” she’d said. Still, Jocelyn thought there was essential truth to what she’d said about their isolation. Truthiness, as Colbert would say. Colbert, who was selling out. How could he? But you weren’t supposed to think about individuals, you were supposed to worry about the planet. The Earth was so fucked. She went into the bathroom and tried to choke up something that wasn’t quite in her stomach, but not in her throat, either. She splashed cold water on her face. She felt horrible.

Music? When she went back to the living room, Raleigh was standing with his hands in his pockets, jingling change and listening to music: more classical sludge, like whale shit, seen blurrily underwater. Hey — that was pretty good! She gave herself a thumbs-up with her yet-again-gnawed cuticle and sank back into the sofa. Her uncle stood with his back to her, looking out the window.

“Will anyone come with me to the auction?” Bettina said. She must have gotten different clothes from the laundry room adjacent to the kitchen. Her baggy slacks were wrinkled, but earlier she’d been wearing a skirt. The T-shirt was also different: dark blue, which accentuated her blue eyes. Raleigh looked blankly at his wife. “Sure,” he said quietly, shrugging. “What about you, Jocelyn?”

This was what was happening? They were going to go to some stupid auction and try to distract themselves, when he no doubt wanted to have a drink and Bettina probably wanted to eat an extra-large pizza? They were so old, so worried all the time, though they tried to make it appear they were in control. “I’ll go,” she heard someone say. She was the one who’d said it.

“Good,” Raleigh said. Her aunt said nothing. She picked up the section of newspaper that gave the address of the auction. “We would’ve been able to inspect things for the last half hour, and what have we done but miss our great opportunity?” Bettina said.

Jocelyn and Raleigh, avoiding looking at each other, got their jackets from the coat hooks in the hallway. In Maine, you learned to always carry a jacket, no matter how warm the evening — and shuffled out of the house with Bettina behind them, making sure the door was locked, pulling the handle three times. It was a signature gesture, as Angie would say. One of Angie’s mother’s signature gestures was to put her face in her hands and cry for several seconds, after which she’d stop abruptly, take eye drops out of her pocket, and tilt her head back, flooding her face with liquid. The day before, Angie had also let drop a convincing detail about her make-out moment with T. G. She said one of her earrings had gotten caught in his arm hair, and she’d cried out, and he’d stopped immediately. Oh god. It was all so ordinary. There was no discharge date for T. G. that her uncle knew. She’d asked him that morning. The youngest son, Ted, was bouncing off the walls, and the parents were going to cave and let him be put on meds, they were so stressed out.

“The Queen Anne’s lace is blooming,” Bettina said. She turned to Jocelyn, who sat curled in the backseat with her legs tucked to one side. “They often have a little black insect right in the center,” Bettina said. “Did you know that?”

Did I know I was fucked? Jocelyn wondered, re-forming the question. She lied about having noticed the flowers; she nodded yes, but Bettina rushed on, wanting to overwhelm everyone with how much information she had. She said, “And roses attract Japanese beetles. That’s something everyone knows.”

The sky was starting to darken. What would it be like to have her own car, to already have been through college? What would it be like to live in Seattle, where you could go on hikes and not always be sitting around some living room, being miserable?

Bettina told Raleigh he was about to miss his turn, and he said, “Sorry about that. Right.”

When they got to South Berwick, Bettina showed him the map. He said the auction was right where he thought it was. The road had potholes that made Jocelyn a little sick to her stomach, but she was feeling better, which was good, because it would have been really bad to feel worse. An auction. She wished it was a movie. She was the only person who hadn’t seen the 3-D movie. Or it would be great if she’d been able to go to a play. Imagine seeing real actors, instead of having to sit for hours watching that kid Emmet Thornton, who lisped, playing Puck? That guy who’d OD’d — the actor in New York. It would have been great to see him in something before he died, though he wasn’t cute. He looked like one of those big-headed dolls people put on their dashboards to wobble their heads. He’d been a father. He had kids who lived with the mother.

They passed Dunkin’ Donuts and followed the road to where it turned at the bend. She’d never been to an auction. In spite of what her aunt had said, her purse was in her lap. She heard her unzip it and take out her glasses to look at the map a second time, then put them away.

“Here we go,” Raleigh said, turning onto a lawn where a teenager with a white flag waved him forward. They bounced through deep ruts, Raleigh holding the wheel tightly in both hands. “Ridiculous,” he muttered. “What do we get for our tax dollars?” Another car in front of them bumped into a parking place, and Raleigh turned in beside it. “Close up the hole!” the boy said, pointing his flag at the other car.

“There’s about three inches between us,” Raleigh said, rolling down the window. “If I parked closer, we wouldn’t be able to get out.” He put his window up again. “Idiot,” he said, under his breath. The boy had walked away and was waving his flag at the next car.

“Are we going to get the parlor set for Jocelyn? And keep it as her dowry?” Bettina asked Raleigh, but he was walking too far ahead of her to hear. Jocelyn slapped a mosquito that was either trying to or had succeeded in biting her ear. “Shit!” she said. “Language,” her aunt said. A young man and his blond girlfriend walked through the space between Jocelyn and Bettina, hurrying across the field toward the auction barn. They joined hands once they’d passed by, and the girl flipped her long blond hair over her shoulder. “Alex!” someone shouted. “Hey, Alex, you’ve got to come see our puppies!”

Alex hollered, “Hey — you don’t care that my mom’s moved to London? You think I care about your puppies? I’m one of those puppies now!”

“What?” the girl said. “Where did she go?”

“She rode off on a coach like Cinderella, only it was C & J. Next auction, we can clean out her room and make money! My dad would totally appreciate help in emptying the house!”

Jocelyn killed two more mosquitoes before they got to the barn, and Bettina gripped the thick handle of her big purse. Jocelyn had rummaged in the purse, but only when her aunt told her to; she wasn’t a creep like some kids who were always stealing money. She’d opened it to get Bettina a Kleenex when she was driving, to see if her lipstick was in there, to fish around for quarters for parking. The purse was nothing but a bag of disappointments. It was stupid to carry things like that. Only old people did it. To the side of the building was a concession stand, and Jocelyn thought, meanly, that if Bettina hadn’t made it clear to her that she shouldn’t spend money on things like overpriced Coke, she’d like one. Her mouth felt tingly; if she tried to throw up now, she’d probably be able to. A big man whose leg had been amputated above the knee rolled himself along, a bright yellow fingerless glove on one hand. The American flag dangled from a pole attached to the back. He wore one slip-on shoe and a black sock. You could see his stomach where his shirt was missing buttons. A little girl was tugging her mother’s hand. “Stop it!” her mother said, pulling her along. “You behave.”

“Hear that? That’s the warning women have gotten through the ages, isn’t it?”

Jocelyn didn’t answer. Inside, the space was divided into two sections with a low wood fence blocking off the area where the auction items were on display. You could tell from a distance that nothing was very special. The building smelled of hay and mildew. Metal chairs were set up in rows. Right now, it looked easy to get a seat near the front. A man came in with a cane, and another man tried to strike up a conversation. The first man kept poking the cane tip toward the closed-off area. Finally he walked away and left the other guy talking to himself, cigarette cupped in his hand. The amputee rolled himself in front of all the chairs and put on his brake. A ceiling fan blew the flag, but otherwise little air circulated in the barn. Why couldn’t they be at a movie? A vampire movie? The mother and child she’d seen earlier moved around the fence and looked but didn’t enter, as if standing behind a rope, waiting for a bouncer to wave them in. One night she’d gone with her friend back home, Rachel, to a disco, but they’d never made it in, and finally they’d gone to a diner and split a foot-long hot dog. Rachel had a bottle of scotch in the car, but of course they couldn’t bring that in. Wouldn’t it be great not to be carded and to be able to afford to eat and drink in a restaurant?

Inside, amid the clutter of tables and chairs and equipment and bolts of upholstery fabric, a lot of people were taking notes or laughing and talking to one another. At a card table near the back, a woman had you fill out a form attached to a clipboard. For a second, Jocelyn remembered her aunt’s flip-out at the eye doctor’s. At least there had been a medical reason for it. Her mother was just plain crazy. The woman handed out white cards with big numbers written on them with black Magic Marker when you returned the form. The girl Jocelyn had seen earlier — Alex? — was fanning her face with her card while her boyfriend rummaged through tool boxes. He was black-haired, with a tattoo of a rifle piercing a skull on his bulging bicep and sagging pants. He wore unlaced red high-tops. “You gonna bid on the King?” the woman sitting behind the card table asked the guy wearing a cowboy hat, who was standing in front of Alex and her boyfriend. “They all came out of the same house, which I heard belonged to the ex-husband of Lisa Marie Presley!” she said. “Her mother, Priscilla, got to be married to the King, and she ran off with the yoga instructor!”

“Well now, you slept with the King, yourself, in Las Vegas, didn’t you? Wasn’t that what you was telling me the other night, about all that hot sex?”

“Go on!” the woman said, laughing, handing him number 38. “One thing’s for sure, and you’re the living proof of it: we won’t see the likes of him again.”

“There it is! Look!” Bettina said. “Such beautiful green velvet. And notice the delicate carving on the wood. I believe it’s a real Eastlake parlor set. We should get it for you, Jocelyn.”

“I don’t want that shit,” Jocelyn said.

“Language,” her aunt said halfheartedly, walking off to get a number.

“I’ll bet you’re sorry we came,” Jocelyn said to Raleigh. “But hey: it’s a distraction, right? We can try to forget the Nick scumbag exists. And it’s what Bettina wanted to do.”

“That’s true,” he said. “It pleases Bettina. She grew up in Michigan, you know, with her grandfather and grandmother. Her grandmother taught her to love old furniture.”

Raleigh stuck out as not belonging in this crowd. She hoped she did, too. Bettina fit right in. She waved her number at Jocelyn and began to inspect the things close to where she’d gotten her bidding card. Jocelyn hung back, making sure to keep a distance between herself and her uncle. “Loving you, loving you!” the cowboy sang, gesturing toward a dozen or so Elvis lamps, hand over his heart as if he were saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The lamps had no shades. All of them — and there were a lot — were arranged on a long table. A few lampshades lay on the ground behind it. A small bird sat on top of one; it took off quickly toward the top of the barn when people approached. “Light switches work? Can we get some of those Dairy Queen swirled ice cream lookin’, energy-savin’ lightbulbs to come out of the King’s head like snakes do you think?” Cowboy asked.

“I’m going to sit down,” she said to Raleigh. He’d been watching the man who was infatuated with his own voice. He nodded. She took a chair five rows back from the podium, trying to ignore the man in the wheelchair, but the flag kept drawing her attention. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the beach, Cassiopeia, the stars, how really black the sky could be. Her one little thing with T. G., after which Zelda arrived and acted really pissed off about something. Who knew what. That they were sitting in the sand holding hands, just the two of them? Big deal. When she opened her eyes, the guy with the tattoos was pulling out a chair on the opposite side of the aisle, though the girl he’d been with never did join him. Jocelyn stared, more or less because she didn’t know where else to look. The image of the rifle that curved because of the way his muscle bulged was sort of riveting. BLT kept rising up on her toes, trying to wave her over. Jocelyn just wanted the auction to be over. In school, she wanted class to be over. On the beach, she wanted to be back in her room. In her room, she wanted to be in her house — her mother’s house. What was that going to be like, sharing space — sharing her mother — with the drug addict?

She slid back farther in the chair, her butt already numb from the metal. As she shifted her weight, she looked over her shoulder and saw her. Ms. Nementhal was several rows back, talking to a pretty woman. She saw her in profile, but Ms. Nementhal didn’t realize she’d been seen. She was busily conversing. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and, with the same hand, slid her arm around the woman’s shoulder. The woman looked at her with a little wry smile, her mouth lipsticked red. It was one of those mouths that seemed to have been delicately placed on someone’s face, like a flower tucked into a lapel. Jocelyn felt a jolt. A real jolt, like what it must feel like to be hit by lightning. That was an exaggeration. It was a tingle, and a simultaneous numbness — so that her butt wasn’t the only thing without feeling. She got it. She absolutely got it. But what were they doing at this stupid auction in the middle of nowhere? How could it be? What could she do to make sure Ms. Nementhal didn’t see her, since she was supposed to be writing her stupid fucking essay? Well, but wasn’t Ms. Nementhal supposed to be preparing for the next day’s class?

People seated around her immediately turned toward the fenced-off area as the lights suddenly dimmed and the Elvis lamps started flashing. Somehow, the bulbs were turning on and off in unison, the retarded cowboy singing another song and flipping a light switch, or using a remote, or whatever he held that made them flash. He was gyrating and singing “Jailhouse Rock.” It was a pretty good imitation. It really was. Her uncle stood there, clapping his hands above his head.

She patted the seat next to her when Bettina appeared at her side. It wasn’t likely, but maybe, maybe she could get out without Ms. Nementhal seeing her. Was she going to say anything about that to her aunt? No, she wasn’t. In a few minutes Raleigh came and sat next to them, stepping over their legs to get to the third seat. Bettina was chattering away, obsessed with her parlor set. “Is it like something you’ve seen before?” Jocelyn said, just to be polite and to have something to say. “What do you think I’ve been saying to you the last five minutes? Do you listen at all? It’s Victorian. It’s almost the exact duplicate of the one my grandparents had when I was much younger than you, if it had rose-colored velvet instead of green!”

The auctioneer took the stand, two younger men with their arms dangling at their sides, wearing overalls, flanking him. He greeted the man in the wheelchair by name, though Jocelyn couldn’t hear what he said. The yellow-gloved hand went into the air to make a gesture somewhere between hello and dismissal. After saying something to the auctioneer, the man started coughing. One of the auctioneer’s assistants looked at him nervously. The coughing went on for quite some time. Then the auctioneer introduced himself: “The auctioneer who needs no introduction! The warm-up act for Mr. Elvis Presley!” He started to speak into the microphone, a maddening, jammed-up sequence of words that crashed like bumper cars, after which everything sorted itself into some kind of sense again, and after the fact you could understand most of what he’d said. He held the microphone like a Popsicle that had started to melt. The words tumbled over each other, the sounds dipping and rising. He joked that people were there for “the head of Elvis,” but that he was going to offer sacrifices galore before they got to “the main body of the auction.” He stood behind a rickety podium. The men at his sides stared straight ahead over the crowd, shoulders back, feet a certain distance apart, hands clasped behind them like soldiers at ease. One of the things Jocelyn remembered about her father was that he’d shown her the positions soldiers took: attention, at ease. She’d liked to stand beside him and copy whatever he was doing. Now, she thought that was an unfortunate thing about men: they were always posturing when they were young, and if they went into the Army, they taught them not only postures but attitude. Like guys needed more attitude.

The assistants only cracked up once, when the auctioneer tried to pronounce a lot of words she finally realized must be Italian. They punched him in his arms and one went down on his knees and raised his arms to the barn roof, in some exaggerated, silent prayer. You could read his mind and understand basically what he was praying for. A lot of people laughed. “And who’s gonna bid, who starts the bid, who’ll give me fif-ty dollars?” he said, holding up an old doll whose hair was a mess, wearing only a top, no bottom. “And who says forty, over there: thirty-five? How can you be so pretty and be so mean? Do I hear thirty, what about twenty? She’s got to go to a good home, who’ll give me a quarter? Over there. And fifty cents? Thank you kindly. Seventy-five. Who’ll go a dollar? Try to buy yourself a hot dog now for only one dollar! If you’ve been to Fenway Park, you’ll know they cost five times that, am I right? Next year, mustard’s sure to be extra! We’re talking small potatoes here, folks, but don’t break my heart and make me think I’m sellin’ potato chips! I see a dollar. There and there, thank you, ma’am, and now we’re at one dollar twenty-five cents. Look at this lovely dolly. Looks to me like she might need a good home. Brush her hair and she’s good to go. One fifty. And one seventy-five. Going once, twice, one dollar and seventy-five cents? Number sixteen.”

Half an hour passed while he sold one piece of junk after another: Crock-Pots, vacuum cleaners, a mirror frame with broken glass held in place with duct tape, a pair of stilts, a board game said to have all the pieces. Things kept going for fifty cents or a dollar. The auctioneer held up what he said were “cast-iron elephant bookends. They say an elephant never forgets, ain’t that right, boys? Well, if it’s only half an elephant I guess it’s already forgotten half its body, but give me your finest bid. Who’s in at thirty dollars? Is that a bid? Twenty-five for these fine elephant fellows, or maybe it’s Mr. and Mrs. and eventually that might get you a third elephant. What will you bid? One dollar? And two! Two fifty! And three! Now we’re rollin’. Four dollars. Don’t quit on me now. Four it is, thank you kindly. And five. The lady with the pink sweater. Five dollars I’ve got, now six. Six? Going for five dollars? Number forty-nine!”

The lights dimmed and the Elvis busts flashed again, though this time some lit up while others stayed off, and for at least the third time, the guy in the cowboy hat did his Elvis impersonation, singing with the microphone almost in his mouth, wiggling his hips and unzipping his fly for a grand finale. You couldn’t see anything. Not even his underwear. Bettina was startled. She reached for Raleigh’s hand, and he took hers, but he was grinning and didn’t look at her. He didn’t want to miss anything.

The Elvis lamps, held up one by one beside the auctioneer as he took bids, did better than anything that preceded them. A man in a tweed jacket one row up rarely lowered his number. Eventually both other bidders dropped away. He didn’t bid on a few of the lamps, but the rest of the time he held his card steady, every now and then jabbing it upward. Once he almost left his seat like a streamer following the ascent of a kite. On the beach, T. G. had flown a kite and she’d liked that he was really into it, he wasn’t trying to be cool. What happened, sometimes, that guys just stopped trying to impress you — or was even that a way of trying to impress? The man with the raised card won almost every lamp, and the auctioneer joked that “there’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!” “Las Vegas, Nevada!” some woman yelled, putting two fingers in her mouth and giving an earsplitting whistle. A child started to cry, and there was some shuffling of feet and concerned glances as its mother carried it outside. “So that does it for the King, the final curtain,” the auctioneer said. “Iddn that right, boys? Happens to the best of us. Who were those boys in their glitter suits that their lion turned on one of ’em and he never worked again? That great, great act under the big top. We all remember that. Can’t think you’ve made friends with a lion! And now we move on to the piece of resistance, as the Frenchies say. Some mighty fine courtin’ might go on if you get yourself this furniture set, comfy cozy as a La-Z-Boy, and my boys are here to prove it. Sit yourself in that chair you’re bringing up here, Donald, and tell us how comfy it feels. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. Wheels on the legs, in case conversation gets borin’ and you need to make a quick getaway! And who’ll start us off at five hun-dred dollars?”

Bettina was riveted. Jocelyn was biting her bottom lip. Good god, was her aunt going to bid on it? No one was bidding. The set was already down to two hundred dollars. Jocelyn looked at Raleigh, who was looking at Bettina. He was clutching her hand so she didn’t raise it. It was at one eighty. Bettina’s card flew into the air. “Thank you kindly, and who gives one-ninety? One ninety? One ninety-five! Thank you, sir. At one ninety-five. Going once… thank you sir, two hundred. And two ten, yes, ma’am, lovely furniture — you got yourself a sweetheart, you plunk down on any of these pieces and it’ll be a memorable evening… two twenty’s the bid I’m looking for. Hold that chair up, Donald. I’m at two ten. Who’ll make it two twenty? Real velvet upholstery. Going once, twice.” The gavel came down.

Two hundred and ten dollars was the final bid, from someone behind them. Jocelyn’s stomach turned over. It was Ms. Nementhal, she knew it. How could it not be? It was too perfect. Shit! Her aunt was craning her neck around to see who’d won it, but she’d never seen Ms. Nementhal, Raleigh had. Oh, please let me get out of here without having to speak to Ms. Nementhal, she prayed, and she didn’t even believe in God, though what could you lose by saying a prayer? For weeks, she’d been thinking silent prayers. Her mother often talked about the Hand of Fate, which was even more ridiculous than believing in God.

A brass bed sold, and a chamber pot got a surprising number of bids. A birdcage with bird toys still in it went to the man in the wheelchair, who unlocked the chair’s brakes and wheeled away to pay for it immediately. A floor lamp sold, its lightbulb still working. When the gavel came down for the last time, she turned to her aunt and said, “I don’t feel so good. Can we leave?”

“I don’t know why I let it get away,” Bettina said. “It hardly went higher than the first bid. Why didn’t I try harder?”

“You won’t even remember it tomorrow,” Raleigh said. “What would we do with furniture like that, Bettina?”

“I’ll see you outside,” Jocelyn said, forcing a smile and standing. It was true; she felt queasy. The smell of popcorn stung the air. They must be selling it at the concession stand. The salty smell was revolting. Okay, she could do it. Up and out. Head down. Ms. Nementhal would never know.

Except that Ms. Nementhal, bare feet in her clogs, arm linked with her girlfriend’s (were they crazy to do that in a place like this?), looked up with her mouth full of popcorn as Jocelyn walked by, and her eyes widened with such shock that it was clear her girlfriend was worried. Her girlfriend stood there holding the bag of popcorn, Ms. Nementhal’s fingers searching inside, the half-naked doll in her other hand.

“Hi,” Jocelyn said.

“Maura, this is one of my students,” Ms. Nementhal said. “Some popcorn, Jocelyn?” She was trying to pretend everything was cool. Her girlfriend was extremely pretty, a lock of hair falling forward. She was holding the doll’s arm as if it were a specimen of something she’d picked up with tweezers. Its messy, golden hair went in all directions. “Nice to meet you,” her girlfriend said in a friendly way, with what might have been an Italian accent. Jocelyn exhaled and thought she might live through the moment.

“See you tomorrow,” Jocelyn managed to say. She made it far enough away that she didn’t think Ms. Nementhal saw her gag, though nothing came up.

What was it that made Jocelyn revise her essay that night? It could be fiction, so that was what she wrote, though she thought journalism was cool and fiction was sort of retarded. She wrote about someone who went to an auction with her husband, and they came home with (she couldn’t do it; she couldn’t say it was the doll) two Elvis lamps and had an argument about whose was better. The flash-forward part (which was required) was that five years later, when they were still arguing about the Elvis lamps, which they drove around in the backseat, they died in a car crash (please; enough of the Rapture!) and went to Heaven. God, who was sort of a joker, at first said he wouldn’t let Elvis in, but then the lamps started singing and God relented, and decided which Elvis was better, then twerked with the winning Elvis like an actor at the end of a Bollywood movie. Jocelyn wrote the transition from the car crash to Heaven this way: “What they didn’t know and wouldn’t for some time was that they were dead, and that meant they could have what they wanted. Not what they feared… not what they said silent prayers hoping to ward off… but anything they wanted.” Jocelyn wasn’t sure about the three dots for punctuation, whatever they were called, but she’d tried a colon first and that didn’t look right. She continued: “So they decided on Heaven and before they blinked they’d arrived though it took them years to realize it because time goes very slowly there, and God did not at first appear.” She knew the last comma was correct because it was a compound sentence joined by the word and. It got her a B.

Here’s what the Hand of Fate wrote: Jocelyn had to go forward, she couldn’t look back. Not even at the indentation in the sand where they’d had sex. The sand wouldn’t look different, and if you bothered to turn around and look, who wouldn’t want what met their eye to be worthy of their hesitation, their double take, special? Sand was ordinary. So was the face of her friend Zelda, who’d shown up that night, running down the beach, trailing her scarf, sensing something was up. She and T. G. never talked about having sex that one time. He wasn’t her first. Not long afterward, he tried to kill himself, though the two things were unrelated. She went to an auction with her aunt and uncle when she was seven weeks pregnant. The auction was a sad affair, and all the time she sat there, she had a feeling that she knew what was wrong. Not just what was wrong with her but what was wrong all around her, with people bantering and wasting time, sitting passively in a converted barn that denatured everyone who entered, because it wasn’t a working barn. It was repurposed — there’s the word of the age — and the goings-on inside were hectic, because hectic equaled fun. That was underscored by the auctioneer’s kidding about things that weren’t really funny. Summer was almost over. The auction ended. Money was spent — maybe money that shouldn’t have been — and prayers and worries lifted up to the rafters and got stuck there like a dust mote, or a bird feather. The night started one way and ended another. Jocelyn became Everywoman. That’s where the story ends.