Object No. 9 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Lydia Millet, has ended. Original price: $0.50. Final price: $49.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

I’ve always wanted to be good at a bar game. Pool would be my first choice, but no hope there. Darts was an option, once, but the first time I tried to get real instruction, in a pub in a dreary English town called Wokingham, I bloodied the ear of a man. It was the ear of the man I was seeing at the time, a small-time drug dealer, if I’m going to be honest, who liked to watch sculling on weekends while drinking himself into a stupor. He had almost nothing to say, yet many nights I would take the train from Bayswater, where I lived, to Wokingham and we would sit on his beige couch in his carpeted, bland living room and watch television in an awkward silence. There was a vague idea of sex, but that rarely occurred and when it did I found myself missing the television with a pitiful urgency.

And finally there was bowling, which isn’t a bar game per se but can be practiced in the evening over a cluster of tabled beer bottles. Don’t get me wrong here — I’m not a big drinker. I do like a social beer, though, on a night out, or three or four, or a few glasses of wine. Or I can do frozen margaritas, or maybe vodka with a strong mixer. So there was bowling, but I never made much progress and the round things kept veering into the gutter. Still the realization took years to settle in fully: I would never be a good bowler. And by good I only mean the kind of bowler who doesn’t draw laughs and jibes from onlookers. I would never be passable. With billiards it was my natural gracelessness that hindered me, but with bowling it was mostly a case of laziness. I wanted to be a natural, that was all. I had no interest in effort.

I found myself at a bowling alley, one night, while other people were rolling strikes and spares and I had nothing to do for a while but wander. At the shoe-rental counter they sold accessories — the shirts, the shoes, the bags — and a number of knickknacks. In the glass-fronted display case I noticed a small object, red, black, and white, in the shape of a minuscule bowling bag; it turned out to be a salt shaker without a pepper mate. It struck me that this was something I could own. I could buy the salt shaker, and I would own it, and at the same time, true enough, I would never be a good bowler. Those other bowlers, those casual bowlers of strikes and spares, might have their talent, their grace, their lovely affinity. But I would have my laziness. And the salt shaker.

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lydia Millet, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $22.72.]

I went with my friend G to her great aunt’s house a few weeks after the aunt passed away. G had been called in by the family to pick out one or two keepsakes. Because she lived in a cramped studio in Hell’s Kitchen she didn’t want anything, a, and b, according to G’s mother every item of value had been carted away five minutes after the old lady died, by a daughter-in-law no one liked. By the time G was called in to make a selection they’d already held the estate sale, so all that was left were the sale rejects. “Harsh,” said G, but she decided to go anyway because it was June and New York City was hot and humid and stank. The aunt had lived in one of those nice little towns on the Hudson, green with a pleasant breeze, and the train would let us out about three blocks from her house. Also there was a good diner in the town that G, who was a part-time food critic with a specialty in burgers, wanted to try.

So we got in the train one Saturday afternoon and we went to the house. It was a modest fake Tudor place, pretty much empty now except for a few dusty boxes of trinkets. G’s second cousin R was there, who she hadn’t seen since they were fourteen, went to summer camp together, and ended up making out. (She told me that later.) Now he lived in Jersey and had a lot of tattoos. They sat on the stoop smoking and talking while I rummaged around in the boxes, just for something to do. They were mostly ceramics of chickens, cows, and other livestock, the kind of cheerfully painted ones some ladies like to keep in their kitchens. Beats me why they do that. Maybe they want to feel their kitchens are farmhouses. Anyway, no one wanted these things. Some had been thrown into the boxes carelessly and were already chipped.

I’d never met the great aunt but as the sun sank low outside, G and R’s laughter floated in to me, and shadows crept over the bare living room floor, I started to feel bad for all those abandoned barnyard animals. I picked through the pigs and roosters with a kind of sadness until finally I found Chili Cat. Ugly as sin, there was no getting around that. No reason at all for the cat to be festooned with red chilis. There was a Mexican motif, I guessed. Maybe Tex-Mex. Chili Cat was supposed to be festive.

G never picked out anything, herself. We went with R to the diner and afterward we sat drinking and looking out at the river. Because she was homely, and all those boxes were full of the homeless, I took Chili Cat home.