Object No. 88 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Kathryn Borel Jr., has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $16.]

Marc’s room smelled like half-open tins of chewing tobacco. He liked Skoal butternut, and I loved it too. Not to chew — I was only seven — but I loved the way its manky smell would tussle and fuse with all his other teen things: his gym bag with its tube socks and olive work shirt, the after-effects of a spritz from his Polo cologne. I’d sneak in there before he got home from Ramapo High, before he’d lay out all his textbooks with concepts inside that were so out of reach to my little mind they thrilled me to the point of terror. Everything about him was intoxicating — his creepy Grateful Dead posters of skeletons with roses for eyes, his silver record player with a thin film of dust between the buttons, the black woolen winter hat decorated with all the lapel pins he’d been collecting since he was younger than me.

One night I’d dared open his door, knowing full well that he was in there. My mother had warned me to leave him alone — Lovey was over. Lovey was his girlfriend, I think. It confused me, because my parents called us all “lovey.” So I turned that knob and let the door fade off to the left. There they were, Marc and Lovey, rolling back and forth on his single bed, their shirts hiked up to their necks. I stood there staring, distracted by the pin hat. It sat upright, stuffed with balled-up newspapers, on a stack of his Ramapo yearbooks. In the middle of the hat was a thin rectangular pin with a ribbon and medal hanging off it, all gorgeous and cyan and silver. My father had given it to Marc after very long business trip to Europe. I’d received nothing but a crummy pile of rocks he’d pick-axed off the Berlin Wall. Eventually, Marc noticed me in the doorway, leaped off the bed, punched me hard on my shoulder and slammed the door.

Marc got the medal because he was the oldest and my father loved him best. When I asked him if we could trade, he said, “Shut up, twerp.” Then he knocked me down and dragged me across the living room carpet for 10 solid minutes until my back was sore and red. I’d laughed all the while, trying to act tough. But late that night, my mother had to soak a bunch of rags in cold water and lay them on the raw spots to take away the pain.

When he left for college, I stole the medal from the pin hat. It was lying right on top of one of the moving boxes. I’d never touched it before, and it was far heavier than I thought it would be. I hid it inside the cavity of my sock puppet, Gaston.

During frosh week initiation, my parents received a call. Marc had been running barefoot through the quad and had stepped on a rusty nail. He had tetanus. For six weeks, he lay in the hospital. We packed into the car to go visit him. Before leaving the house, I looked hard at Gaston, who was sitting in his place in the middle of my bookshelf. For a flash of a moment, I considered giving back the medal.

Object No. 84 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Betsey Swardlick, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $26. This story is the third in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

Object No. 83 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Nomi Kane, here. Original price: 49 cents. Final price: $37. This story is the second in a three-part series produced in collaboration with The Center for Cartoon Studies. ]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Rachel Berger, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $5.50. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published, here.]

In the fall of 1991, Olivia Mendel was 27 years old. Her face held a small dreamy smile, and her hair smelled like crayons. She was beginning her third year teaching fourth grade at Schechter Elementary, and we loved her.

Ms. Mendel taught us long division: Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring-down. “Dad, Mom, Sis, Bro,” we whispered to ourselves. She taught us the days of the week in sign language and the months of the year in Spanish. Around Halloween, Ms. Mendel confessed to us that she was a “chocoholic,” and Ano Balakrishnan’s mother called a special session of the PTA to discuss his teacher’s drinking problem. During the long, dark winter, Ms. Mendel read us Where the Red Fern Grows, and when Old Dan and Little Ann came to the end, her eyes squeezed shut.

We offered Ms. Mendel seaglass, gum, a mouse skull, rice cakes, cherry tomatoes, friendship bracelets, baseball cards, bottle caps, paper cranes, daisy chains, four-leaf clovers, string cheese, Piccolo Petes, Pixy Stix, and pinch pots. She accepted them all with solemn grace.

***

In the spring of 1991 — and for ten years before and after — my mother was a pilot. She flew long haul night cargo flights between Baffin Island, Canada and Lima, Peru. She called home every afternoon and shouted cheerfully into the phone, “We’re in the same time zone, Hooky!” I remember her shoulder pads drying on a rack in the laundry room. My father called them her wings.

My father, a reserved man who was happiest on long, solitary walks, was uncharacteristically enthusiastic when I mentioned my idea for the gift. “Oh, she’ll be thrilled,” he said with curious force. And together we chose the wood, cut it down and sanded it, whittled out the round O and angled M’s, glued the pieces together. Our steady, quiet work was punctuated by his occasional musings, “Can you believe it’s May already?” and “It’s just, just lovely that you’re doing this for her,” and “I guess we might not see much of her over the summer.” He seemed to be speaking to himself more than to me.

The morning the gift was finished, the last hook in place and the last coat of poly dry to the touch, like magic, my mother appeared. Her uniform was soiled and shoulder pads deflated, but she wore an enormous smile. My father stood, his eyes glittering. She came toward us, her weary arms outstretched. “Oh Hooky, look at that!” she said, bending toward the gift. Lunging wildly, I knocked her arms away, snatched the # 1 Mom hooks up, and ran, down our front walk, across the street, and up the hill toward school.

I left the gift on her chair, didn’t think a card was necessary. The object spoke for itself: “To Ms. Olivia Mendel, My Number One. Love, Hooky.”

It was the only gift I ever gave that made somebody cry.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sara Ryan, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $15.50.]

Anne Cole writes:

The summer when I was nine, Mom bought boxes and boxes of popsicles on sale, lemon-lime, some discontinued brand. They looked like fluorescent jaundice on a stick, but they tasted sharply sour-sweet, and I loved them. The first time I ate one, or two, actually, since they were the kind you can break in half to share, but I didn’t, I did what anyone would do: tossed the sticks into the trash.

Mom fished them out, rinsed them off, and said, “They’re perfectly good.” “For what?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

Our house was already swelling up with things we might need, things we couldn’t possibly throw away, things Mom couldn’t believe were just sitting out on the curb.

I took the sticks into my room and stared at them. I needed to turn them into something that made sense to me, but I didn’t know what.

Soon, it became a ritual. Eat, rinse, take sticks to room.

They were drumsticks until there were too many and Mom said it was too loud when I played.

They were bookmarks until they cracked the spine on a library book.

I threw them on my floor and tried to use the patterns they made for divination, but I couldn’t make up my mind about what they meant.

I had more and more of them, clustered in a jar on my dresser. Once I dreamed they all came to life like the brooms in that story.

One day when she had to work Mom took me to the Boys and Girls club. The computers and the swings were full, so I went with some lady who said we were going to do art.

First thing, she got out a huge box of popsicle sticks — at least, that’s what the box said, but it was clear that no popsicles had ever been attached to them.

At least my sticks had served one useful purpose. What was the point of a box of sticks with no popsicles?

I was going to leave, but you had to stay once you chose an activity. I wouldn’t do it, but I watched her and the other kids, and it finally gave me the idea for what to do.

Of course we had glue at home. Of course there was a piece of wood to use for a base. I glued and glued, making up the design as I went.

But when I looked at it when I was done, all I could think is that I’d made a way to perpetuate the cycle, the empty space inside the bowl calling out to be filled with more things. Like the ever-shrinking empty spaces in our house.

I waited until school started, smuggled it out of the house in my backpack, and abandoned it in a kindergartner’s cubby.

It was a start.

[Anne Cole is a character from a forthcoming graphic novel by Sara Ryan.]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Matthew De Abaitua, has closed. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $15.50]

My Daddy shouts at me when I go near the piggybank, and he screams when I turn it upside down. So l leave the piggybank alone and tell my baby brother and sister to leave it alone too. The piggybank is the family curse.

One day a week my Daddy is good to me, and he teaches me that words that sound the same can mean different things. Like were and wear. Like sentence and sentence. He listens to me as I read my stories and when I am finished he tells me how talented I am. I like those days. But on working days he is mean and tells me to shut up, before he has even heard what I am going to say. My Daddy’s working days are hard, so hard. You wouldn’t believe how hard they are.

Because of Grandad, our family has to keep the piggybank with us always. Grandad met the devil coming out of his wardrobe and the devil promised him death, death right there and then, and Grandad said no, and so a deal was struck. If the piggybank goes out the back door, death comes in through the front door.

On pay day, one half of all the money that crosses the doorstep goes into the piggybank. Daddy comes back from his job making safe the gas in the iron lungs that rise and fall across our town, rise and fall like the valves of the trumpet he plays on our birthdays. He takes out his pay packet and pinches half of the notes between his fingers and hands the money to Mummy, without looking at it. It is Mummy’s job to place the tribute into the cursed pig.

Daddy gets angry so suddenly, it makes it hard to breathe. I know he doesn’t mean it. I tell him not to be so angry with me and he stops, and he looks sad. I’m a big girl. I know how hard the days of grown-ups can be, so hard you wouldn’t believe.

Saturday is shopping day. Mum and I look around the shops. In the toy shop Frank, my little brother, plays with the train track, and he screams when the time comes for us to leave. None of the clothes fit Mummy right. There is nothing for us to buy. I see the scooter I want, the one with the special wheels. I go to the pig to see if there is money in it but the pig has eaten all the notes and left only coins.

Once I walked into the living room and found the piggybank choking on our money. Greedy piggy. I slapped it on the back and the money rattled back into its belly. When I turned it upside down, the money had gone.

This is the family curse, the same thing every week, the same for my Daddy as it was for Grandad and the same it will be for me, when I am older. Mummy looks for the bad hairs on her head and pulls them out. Daddy rolls moaning in his bed. I take a deep breath. The pig swallows and winks.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Lizzie Skurnick, has closed. Original price: $1. Final price: $11.50.]

When I was four I thought it was a periscope, or what I thought at the time was called a periscope. My father in fact owned a number of such items — tooth-stained daguerrotypes, box cameras with their fussy, pleated collars, 3-D twinned images propped on a lorgnette that drew into focus as you set it on the bridge of your nose. This last was of Paris, or what I thought at the time was Paris. It may have been Versailles. In the wavy back and forth a river masses in front of a low building stretched through the entire frame. Each window winnows back as well; I don’t know how they did that. My parents’ spare room was a jumble of such items: company pens, campaign buttons, tax statements, plastic nameplates from companies that haven’t exist in a quarter of a decade. I think such things become valuable over time. When I was five I found a black pen abandoned from another desk pen stand and spent significant time attempting to fit it into this one holder. It was a fat pen, dulled on its golden tip, and it was a constant frustration that it would not descend, that the modern ballpoint rattled loosely, a spoon on the side of a coffee cup.

When I look at it now of course I remember these faces, though I haven’t seen them for years. If I sat with the jumble of my father’s vintage photographs in my lap, flipping through, I might remember them as well. Perhaps I would merely think I was remembering. How quickly one becomes familiar, how the present slides into focus set against the past, propped to the bridge of your nose. And which building was that? Maybe it was a park. I see the dust remains its gummy, unliftable film. I would flip it on its back, hold the cold wood to my forehead, trying to see backwards through to them wherever they were, their strange eyes to my strange eyes.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jonathan Goldstein, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.25.]

Twenty years after the man’s death, I still can’t rightly say whether my uncle Dwayne was a benevolent old-timey Grandpa Walton type or a secret sadistic performance artist. By the time I met him, Dwayne was a retired concierge with shaky hands. He claimed it was because of the heavy vibrating machines he employed to polish banisters. When he affectionately placed his large hand on your shoulder, it felt like a gentle shower massage. Another thing I still remember about Dwayne was that he always had for us a pocket full of tiny unwrapped butterscotch candies that all stuck together, we suspected, because he’d begun to suck on them and had stopped half way through.

Every year, for each of our birthdays, Dwayne presented us with a toy made to mimic some common household appliance. On the occasion of my cousin Bernice’s birthday, he presented her with a toy hot plate that pretty much looked like a regular hot plate to the last detail— except for the fact it didn’t work.
“Why not just give a real one,” asked Bernice. “It’d be fun to bring it to school and make pancakes for lunch.”

“Real hot plates aren’t for children,” he’d say. “Besides, toy ones are more fun.”

She conceded the point, but really, there was very little that was toy-like about his gifts. One year he gave my brother Charlie a “toy” vacuum cleaner. It was exactly like a real one, weighing about forty pounds. Thing was, it didn’t work. To make it more child-friendly, Dwayne had drawn tremulous polka-dots all over it with his palsied hand. Charlie loved it. Over the years, Dwayne presented us with, among other things, a toy coffee maker (the pot filled with all white gumballs), a toy toilet plunger (wrapped in colourful tinsel), a toy mop (that smelled of real sewage), a toy caulking gun (in a little toy holster he’d made out of red electrical tape), and a toy steak knife set that we used to eat make-believe cutlets.

The toaster, pictured, was given to me for my seventh birthday and it was always one of my favourites. On the day he gave it to me he asked several questions:

“How do you spell ‘roast’?”

“R-o-a-s-t,” I said, proud of what a good speller I was.

“How do you spell ‘coast’?”

“C-o-a-s-t.”

“And how do you spell what you put in a toaster?”

“T-o-a-s-t.”

“Wrong!” he said, the word sounding like an electrical buzzer going off. “B-r-e-a-d. Bread goes into a toaster. Toast comes out.”

But the thing with a toy toaster is that bread goes in and bread comes out. There’s something refreshing and unexpected about that. I remember many afternoons spent gazing into the slot and really hoping that I might see the inside slowly growing orange with heat. So think of this as a kind of exercise machine — not for the tightening of your buttocks or the growth of your biceps — but for the strengthening of a more childlike muscle: your capacity for hope.

Maybe Uncle Dwayne was trying to teach us that things have a value that transcend what they’re actually able to accomplish. But more likely than not, he was unloading junk he no longer needed.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jenny Davidson, has ended. Original price: 12 cents. Final price: $3.58.]

I blame it on the book: a pocket-sized lined notebook with a black matte cover, bound at the left-hand margin and with a band to hold it shut. I used to tuck a pen inside, a pen whose nib was narrow enough to inscribe my tiny Brontë-like lists of calories consumed and exercise taken. It came to be the case that I could no longer eat unless I had documented it beforehand — I remember the first day I noticed that physical reluctance in my esophagus, that hand-dependent hypergraphic inability to eat without having written.

As a child, I loved Beatrix Potter’s story of the two bad mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, who broke into the doll’s house where “the dinner had been bought ready-made, in a box full of shavings. There were two red lobsters, and a ham, a fish, a pudding, and some pears and oranges. They would not come off the plates, but they were extremely beautiful.” Tom and Hunca Munca smashed dinner when they found it could not be eaten; I keep the hot dog to remind myself that food does not have to be beautiful.