Object No. 39 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Martha McPhee, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $20.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

My grandmother gave me the piggy bank when I was four, for Christmas, wrapped in a box with bows.  She said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”  She said, “Find a penny pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.”  She wore a beehive of blue hair, had piercing green eyes, dressed in expensive-seeming clothes.  “A lady of quality,” she said.  She sold Avon door to door and from the living room of her two-bedroom ranch on Lover’s Lane in Heather, Illinois.  Her house smelled like honeysuckle.

Only good-luck pennies went in my piggy bank.  It was the kind you had to smash to retrieve the coins, so as I accumulated them I had no idea how many pennies I had.  By the time I was in my thirties it was gathering dust and heavy, substantial with the weight, but I could jiggle it and feel there was still room.  I’d look at the feathery tiara and the jewel between the brow and think of all the luck the pig held.

I almost got married: here, in Heather, to a handsome guy who’d been the star of the high school football team.  I hadn’t known him then, but through his smile I could see him as a teenager—gleaming white teeth—driving fast in cars with girls excited that it was their turn.  Later, after we broke up, I realized those  had been the best days of his life.

“I want to see how many pennies are in the jar,” he said to me that afternoon: cold, the world covered in a thick snow.

“I’m not breaking it,” I said.

“With all those pennies, there’s one worth something.  There’re pennies worth thousands, you know.  We could get out of here.”  And he pointed out the window of my condo.  I owned from the walls in, but was proud of the views—vast expectant fields.

“I’m not breaking it,” I said.  “My grandmother gave it to me.”

“Your grandmother’s dead.”  He picked up the pig.

“I’m not dead,” I said, hiding my worry, that he’d drop the pig to have his way.

“You’re gonna wait ‘til you’re dead to find out if you’re rich?”

“Put it down, Jimmy.”  I shouldn’t have said that.  He lifted the pig higher, beautiful pig.  There are some people who just want to take what you’ve got.  Just then he dropped it.  You know the crush in your chest, its weight?  The pig’s mascara eyes, they were my grandmother’s looking at me still.  I lunged.

My grandmother once said to me, as I was pushing her up a hill in a wheel chair, “Amber, if we put our minds to it, we can do anything.”  I soared, arms out stretched to catch it, realizing, no matter what, that pig, its luck, would always be mine.

[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 piggy bank, and he screams when I turn it upside down. So l leave the piggy bank alone and tell my baby brother and sister to leave it alone too. The piggy bank 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 piggy bank 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 piggy bank 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 piggy bank. 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 piggy bank 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.