The Last Studebaker. Robin Hemley
even slightly unusual, much less useful to her. While she sorted through the items, the World's Greatest Fisherman smiled and bobbed his head like a dashboard ornament. She tried not to look his way.
A dirt bike set out in front of the porch seemed to be the showpiece of the sale. From there, things got worse. A bowling trophy with a golden man swinging a ball stood in the middle of one of the card tables that had been set up for display. A “Peanuts” lunch box lay on its side next to the trophy, and beside that a set of three “Dukes of Hazzard” TV trays. Also, empty perfume bottles. Giant plastic cups from a convenience store. A plaster statue of a Chinaman with a coolie hat hauling buckets of water. A faucet. A vinyl pocketbook with a broken clasp. A green planter shaped like a frog. A telephone table with its varnish flaking away. Tragedy and tawdriness lingered in these objects. Nothing about them soothed Lois.
“If I could get a bottle and stop up today, I'd make a fortune,” the man on the porch told her.
She felt a rush of nonsense knock at her insides, hollering to be let out. She knew it was childish but suffered from some kind of moral or emotional defect that wouldn't let her stop acting like a fool, even when she knew better. Her kids had grown used to it. Willy had, too. But she hadn't. When this headlong foolishness overtook her, she couldn't do anything but surrender. A voice would say, “You don't really mean this,” but she always ignored the voice. Until it was too late. Things she didn't mean just burst out of her.
She walked to the porch and grabbed the railing. She put her foot on the top step and leaned forward. The man smiled from his folding chair.
She flipped her hair with her hand. Lois had frizzy and unmanageable red hair that she was forever flipping from one side of her face to the other. She'd sweep her whole arm across her forehead, a dramatic gesture like some vamp in an old movie. Her hair sometimes obstructed her view, but she didn't think of herself as a temptress. Tall and sturdy, she didn't go for much in the way of makeup or current fashions. Her only concessions were the earrings she wore, exotic ones from the Orient that jangled like wind chimes when she walked or swept back her hair. Her favorite earrings were a pair of brass frogs from Malaysia. Most often, she wore jeans and men's workshirts and sometimes an old vest. She also wore a silver locket with the initials SG on it. Inside were turn-of-the-century photographs of a boy about three years old and a girl about six. She didn't know who these children were, but sometimes she'd unhinge the clasp and study their sweet faces, wondering where they were now, if they were still alive, if their lives had been happy. She'd found the locket at a garage sale like this one.
She picked up a dish from the table on the porch. “My lawd, will you look at this?” she said. “It's a genuine JFK plate. My man is Kennedy crazy. Just loco. He must have three dozen of them plates by now. Won't eat off nothin' else. I set out some ‘I Like Ike’ china the other day, but Mac wouldn't hear nothin' of the sort. He starts hollerin', ‘I want my JFK and I want it now.' Lawd, sometimes he's just like a little baby with all his carryin' on.”
“You can't find that JFK ware these days,” the man said, pointing. “That's a bargain.”
“Sure is,” Lois said. “I ain't never seen it so low.”
She held up the plate to the sunlight and tapped it with her knuckles. She liked the idea of serving a meal on a JFK dinner plate. If you covered it with the right kind of food, say, mashed potatoes and gravy, you'd have a real surprise when you scraped bottom. There'd be Kennedy in full color, resurrected under gravy, leaning across his desk, come back to tell you something momentous.
She didn't think she was doing any harm putting this man on, slipping into his life, wearing him like a forgotten sweater with moth holes. He reminded her of her mother's brother, Uncle Chick. Lois's father had always made fun of Chick, saying, “When God handed out brains, Chick thought he'd said ‘Rain,’ so he ducked for cover.” True, he was slow, but he was Lois's favorite uncle when she was young. She didn't care about his brains. He'd talk about any subject under the sun, whether he knew anything about it or not. And no matter how young the person speaking, or how foolish the words being said, he'd listen patiently to whatever anyone told him.
“Where you visiting from?” the man said to Lois.
“Visiting?” Lois said. “How do you know I'm visiting?”
“Just don't sound like you're from around here.”
“West Texas,” she said. “Lubbock, to be exact. You ever been there? Best beef in the world.”
“No ma'am,” the man said. “Never made it that far. Amy and me sightsaw the Tennessee Smokies, but that's the furthest south we got. I sure would have liked to have sightseen Texas, but I guess I ain't gonna make it now.” He looked at Lois and smiled. “What you doing up this way?”
The nonsense kicked at her insides again. She bit the JFK plate, rapped it with her knuckles, then put it close to her ear.
“I come up for the garage sale-ing,” she said.
“No!” said the old man. “All that way?”
The man stared at her. For an awful moment she felt as though she'd gone inside him, that she'd entered through his open mouth and become trapped there. She flipped her hair back the other way.
She didn't know what to say. She'd carried this too far. She wanted to calm down now and sink back into her normal self. She hoped the man wouldn't say anything else to get her going again.
She started ferreting among the objects on one of the tables: an Avon bottle in the shape of a rearing stallion, a plastic outhouse with a little boy inside who turned around and peed when you opened the door. She ogled each object as though it was precious and one of a kind, holding each one up against the sun.
Then she noticed a doll that looked like a cross between FDR and Maurice Chevalier, with gray hair and a chiseled jaw. A geriatric Ken doll. The doll had absolutely no dignity, maybe because it had no clothes except for a pair of white plastic gloves that were inseparable from its hands. The doll had a smirk, the seedy grin of an exhibitionist, and seemed completely delighted with its spindly legs and enormous pot belly.
Lois had never seen a doll so odd. She started bending the doll's limbs in all directions. First, she stretched out one leg en pointe like a ballet dancer. She made the other leg do a high kick. Then she bent the wrist of the left hand as though extended for a kiss. The other arm dunked an invisible basketball. Meanwhile, the doll, which had a smooth rump and no genitalia, smiled divinely like the belle of the ball.
She looked back at the man on his porch and grinned, imagining what she must look like, a woman in her late thirties fascinated with an elderly Ken doll. The man smiled back and nodded. He seemed to think her behavior perfectly natural.
“I never been down to Texas,” the man said, his voice slow with wonder and wistfulness over that fact. “Amy and me sightsaw the Tennessee Smokies, but that's the furthest south we got.”
Lois wanted to use her normal voice again, but knew she couldn't without hurting his feelings. She'd committed to this cornball identity. To make up for it, she told him she wanted the Old Ken doll for her daughters.
He flipped the doll over in his hands, studying it like a jeweler examining a diamond. “I'll take a quarter,” he said finally.
“How about a nickel?” Lois said, her bargain-hunting instincts too ingrained to ignore.
“I have to get a quarter. How about I throw it in with the JFK ware? I'll give you the lot for five. The little naked feller and the presidential china.”
Lois had forgotten about the JFK dinner plates. She didn't want them, but felt obliged after all her foolishness. She gave the man five dollars and gathered up her junk. The man didn't do anything with her money, but just held it in his hand. “You have a pleasant stay in South Bend,” he told her.
Lois did not feel good about her purchases. Here she'd gone out to find a place to live and had been sidetracked into a garage sale. Instead of bargains, she'd wound up riding around South Bend with a stack of plastic commemorative plates and a nude