Object No. 97 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by (Six-Word Story Contest winner) Rob Agredo, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $27.]

“You lose,” she puffed.

True.

Again.

Object No. 92 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Sarvas, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $41.]

When I was seventeen, I was expelled from high school. My father, reasonably enough, gave me a choice: Get a job or get out. The only job for a 30-mile radius was the night shift behind the counter at an Amoco station on a deserted back road off the interstate. Scott, the owner, told me I probably wouldn’t see a customer most nights. He was chubby, hairy and, at 26, overly proud of himself for owning a gas station.

Back then, gas stations had no mini marts, no hot dogs, not even Gatorade. It was mostly candy bars and smokes, if you weren’t picky about your brand. Gas fumes mingled with the scent of cleaning fluid used to wipe down tools. I had an AM radio with lousy reception and, on his way out the door, Scott tossed me an Amoco yo-yo for entertainment.  Ahead of his time, he was branching out into branded swag.

Four nights into the job, Scott’s prediction had held up. I was fiddling with the yo-yo, which had become an obsession. There was something soothing about the bouncing repetition, and it helped pass the time. I was watching it travel up and down the string when I heard a girl’s voice.

“Walk the dog?”

A customer.  My age, perhaps a bit older. Her skin was red and flaky, her teeth gappy and her clothes sized for someone fifteen pounds lighter. But I was 17 and she was a female who talked to me and that was that. I looked up blankly. She indicated the yo-yo.

“Can you walk the dog?”

I shook my head and her disappointment was palpable. She bought some Bubble Yum and a pack of Parliaments and was gone.

I spent the entire summer practicing walking the dog. I wrote away to the Duncan Yo-Yo company and they sent me the instructions. Hour upon hour, not just at the gas station but at home, in the street, everywhere, I walked the dog. I knew she would come back.  I was right. When she returned to the station, I was ready. She nodded at me when she walked in, with the easy familiarity of old friends.

“Hey,” I said. “Watch this.”

I flicked my wrist and sent the yo-yo hurtling down the string, which chose that moment to come undone. I watched in horror as the hunk of black plastic rolled away and disappeared under a rack of motor oil, leaving a limp string dangling on my middle finger. I couldn’t bear the pity in her eyes so I busied myself with fishing it out, and it was only after I heard her leave that I emerged with it, dust-covered,  in my hand.

The next day, I learned that Scott, my fat, hairy boss, had slept with her. A week later, I left for New York City, mended yo-yo in my coat pocket.

Object No. 86 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by (Slate contest winner) Matthew J. Wells, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $54.]

Booth 106 was the regular table of Evelyn Nesbit — it’s where she was introduced to Charles Dana Gibson, who used her as the model for his famous Gibson Girl drawings; it’s where she met the young John Barrymore, who became her lover and got her pregnant twice (once in the booth itself and once in his apartment); it’s where she was introduced to architect Stanford White by fellow Floradora Girl Edna Goodrich; and it’s where she met her future husband Harry Thaw, who murdered White at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.

Originally surrounded by red velvet drapes, the booth is now open and unlit. On the wall is a photo of Nesbit from her Gibson Girl days and beneath it, on a small shelf, is a little jar labeled “BAR-B-Q Sauce.” The jar was originally purchased by Nesbit as a gift for White — whenever White would meet her for dinner, he would order ribs, and she paid the waiters to always keep the small jar full of sauce at the table for White’s special use. Very special, according to suppressed trial testimony after his murder — allegedly, the ribs weren’t the only things White covered in barbecue sauce behind those drapes.

After White’s death, Booth 106 was roped off as a sign of mourning, a RESERVED sign was placed on the table, and per Evelyn Nesbit’s wishes, once a week the bartender would refill the BAR-B-Q jar, as if in preparation for White’s eventual return. The table went empty for almost two years (not even Nesbit sat at it), until the afternoon of January 5, 1908, when Harry Thaw sailed into the Naughty Pine, plunked himself down at Booth 106, ripped up the RESERVED sign, tore down the red velvet curtains, draped them around his body like a winding sheet, and demanded a shave. When told that he was in a bar and not a barber shop, Thaw cried, “Then I’ll do it myself,” whereupon he pulled out a straight razor, stropped it on his leather belt, and taking the BAR-B-Q jar, proceeded to slop sauce all over his face as if it were shaving cream. Then, pretending to stare into a mirror, he gave himself a blood-soaked shave while humming “I Could Love A Million Girls,” the song that had been playing when he shot White in the face.

“You must be a lunatic,” said one of the waiters. Thaw just smiled at him. His first trial for the murder of Stanford White had ended in a deadlocked jury; but the next day, when his second trial began, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

***

NOTE: This story was also published at Slate.com. Read more about this winning entry, and the runners-up, here.

Object No. 85 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Meg Cabot, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $108.50.]

So Brandon was going to Cabo for spring break and I saved up all my tip money for a year to chip in for the rental car to go with him.

But then at my last cleaning Dr. Jones said if I didn’t get my wisdom teeth pulled out right away my incisors were going to overlap, and I might never get my dream job as a television news journalist like Katie Couric.

“When was the last time you ate?” Dr. Jones wanted to know.

And I was all, “At my shift just now at Señora Mexicana.”

“That’s okay!” he yelled.  “We can use a local!”

I tried to say no but Mom was all, “It’s much better this way, sweetie,” because I could recover during the break and not miss any classes.  “Besides, Novocain is cheaper than anesthesia!”

Plus, I don’t think she’s ever liked Brandon.

I couldn’t even reach him in time to tell him what was going on. I could only reach my best friend Kara, who was still at her shift at Señora Mexicana.

Kara was like, “Oh, don’t worry, hon, I’ll find Brandon and take care of everything.” Which made me feel a little better.

And then the next thing I knew this nurse was jabbing needles into my gums and I heard this crunching sound and even though Dr. Jones said it wouldn’t hurt, it hurt a lot!

And then Mom was going, “Don’t worry, sweetie, you can do Cabo next year” as she helped me out to the minivan.

But the whole time I was lying on the couch in front of the TV, trying not to get dry sockets, Brandon never called.  He never once called, or even texted.

The funny thing was, neither did Kara.

And then when he finally did show up, he was all, “I thought of you every minute, babe!”

And then he gave me this authentic wooden cow, or snake, or whatever it is.  Real Mexican villagers carved it, he said.

But if so they must know Kara, because it looks exactly like her.

Especially the empty space where its heart should be.

Because it turns out Brandon found someone to take my place in the rental car.

Not to mention in his bed at the hotel room.

But I had a lot of time to think about it while I was waiting for the swelling to go down, and I decided it’s okay. I’m going to go back to school, and back to Señora Mexicana. I’m going to save up all my tip money.

Only not to go to Cabo. To go to New York City. To get an internship with Katie Couric, or some other empowering woman who knows the pain of betrayal and getting all your wisdom teeth pulled out with just Novocain.

And someday when I am anchoring my own half hour national news show, Brandon and Kara will turn on their TV and see me and go:

“Wow.  I used to know that girl.”

Object No. 65 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Laura Lippman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $45.01.]

Her husband saved everything. He had a box, for example, of cigarette lighters, useless plugs taken from every car he had ever owned. He saved ticket stubs and playbills. He had three hand-knit sweaters from an elderly aunt, long deceased. The sweaters were scratchy and unattractive; he had never worn them and never would.

So a motel key, here in his cufflink drawer, didn’t necessarily mean anything. Yet she thought it might. And she knew that she that could, and would, make herself crazy about it. Or she could simply ask him. Why not ask him? She hadn’t been spying. She had been putting away his cufflinks, the ones that went with the tuxedo, which he wore more and more often these days, to events where he said she would be bored.

“I wasn’t spying,” she said. “But I have to ask – why did you save this?”

“Well, look at the name,” he said. “Perkins hotel.”

He waited, smiling broadly.

“I don’t get it.”

“Remember the movie Psycho?”

She did. Taxidermy, shower, mother issues. “That was the Bates Motel.”

“Yes, but the actor was Anthony Perkins. Isn’t that cool?”

“And what took you to Laconia, New Hampshire?”

“A road trip with a bunch of guys in our junior year of college.” He held the key, ran his thumb over it. “Drop in any mailbox,” it said, but he hadn’t.

Here it is, she thought. Here’s the moment where you choose to believe, or not to believe. A marriage is a kind of religion, defying rational thought. The idea that someone could love you – the idea that someone could love her – was about as plausible as water into wine, or reincarnation, or seventy-two virgins waiting in heaven. You believed or you didn’t. In or out.

The key is old, she told herself. All the motels have those electronic cards now, even in Laconia, New Hampshire. It holds a memory, and it’s something that occurred years ago, although probably not with a group of guys. Did he lie for her sake or for his own, to keep the story for himself, to enjoy the private thrill of whatever happened in Room 3?

Maybe she should stop putting his things away.

Object No. 60 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stephen Elliott, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $4.24.]

I bought these Hawaiian utensils, a wooden spoon and fork, while living in Alaska in the mid-eighties with my first wife. We were living outside the Eskimo village Wales on the western edge of the state, three miles outside of Tin City Air Force Station. The Air Force station was the location of a long-range radar for air surveillance. It was originally built in the 1950s but Reagan gave it a serious upgrade during his successful bid to destabilize the Russians. From the top of a snowdrift you could see boats pulling into ports larger than many football stadiums, carrying steel arms more than a mile in length.

We didn’t think that was any of our concern, though in retrospect it was the most important thing. It was a cold place and a cold time. The wind would whip off the Bering Straight at more than a 100mph and one day in the middle of winter, counting the wind chill, the anemometer read 160 below zero.

I could say we were there to teach English and Christianity to savages, but that wouldn’t get very far towards the truth. And I don’t have the time, or the bandwidth to get into those stories. We got these utensils from the “village younger,” which is what they call the first son of the “village elder,” believe it or not. How the utensils migrated their way from those warm pacific islands to the furthest outpost of civilization is beyond my knowing. And when the military men showed up in their snowcats and my wife climbed on the back of one of their vehicles, that was beyond my knowing, too. At least then.

I will say, I’ve made great use of these little souvenirs. Good for making salad or stirring hot liquids.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Thomas McNeely, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.]

As a mug, it was useless: pot-bellied, so whatever we drank, herbal tea, cheap whiskey, cheap red wine, dribbled down our chins, as if we were children; the pouch behind the cat’s head, a promise of tidy convenience, worse than useless, good only for planting cigarettes like flags after we’d given up on it as a mug.  Its only redeeming aesthetic feature, the patina of mold we were never able to wash from the right side of its nose, at least offset its louche, ridiculous, wall-eyed gaze.

We found it on the back porch, a screened-in box tacked to our apartment atop a treacherous flight of stairs. Down the street, at one end, the last bus stop to the university between two liquor stores, at the other end, a park that looked dark even at midday, always deserted. We took boxes of junk by bus from our dorm, the tail end of our freshman year in college, both of us barely nineteen years old.

The day we found it: Late afternoon, early evening, scraps of cloud like red satin blankets, surcease of summer heat. We lugged plastic milk crates from the bus stop up the vacant street, past the liquor stores, trying not to talk about what your mother had said, that you were on your own.

As I put the key in the lock, my hand shook, thinking how flimsy it was, how easily it could be broken. It was our first time there without the landlord, a tidy, soft-spoken man whose sex life we speculated upon; everyone was a character to us, then.  I thought I should carry you across the threshold; maybe we did this, ironically; maybe I’m only imagining it.

I remember how our footsteps echoed, how doors creaked across bare wooden floors.  We roamed the house tentatively, as if it wasn’t really ours.  In the kitchen, you jimmied open the back door, which I’d forgotten, a surprise, a secret passage.

Outside, the wall of maples above the creek you had yet to discover had already darkened to shadows.  I started to speak, to warn you not to step through the hole in the porch; but you’d already turned, holding the cat mug like a prize, plucked from a cobwebbed corner, straddling the gap in the floor.

“It’s hideous,” I said.

“It’s wonderful,” you said.

“It’s wonderfully hideous.”

“It’s hideously wonderful,” you said.  “I like it.”

We washed it as best we could in the coughing sink. Tiny spiders erupted, scattered ahead of the rushing water.  We put it on a windowsill, saying we would clean it later, when we had soap.

On a curio shelf, we found a roach the landlord had left, and smoked it, and made love quickly, clumsily, on a sleeping bag on the bare wooden floor.  Sometime that night, I woke to the platting of distant gunshots outside.  I lay on the narrow strip of fabric, holding you, imagining our empty apartment, the cat on its windowsill watching us, the vast, encompassing night sky above.

May, 1987, Austin, Texas, two bedrooms, half a house, $225 a month; signs and wonders were everywhere, then: runes, tarot cards, the harmonic convergence, though we didn’t believe in any of that.

I wanted to call you, to tell you I’d found the cat, unpacking boxes in another house.  But it was late, and I didn’t know if you would answer.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sari Wilson, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $31.]

It’s incongruous. The buttery finish, the fluted spout, the air hole in the back of its head offering a peek into its ceramic innards, a glimpse of the thick cream that no one is supposed to have anymore. The torso pitched forward, the nubs of wings lifting, ready to employ itself in the service of our morning coffee. Except that neither of us drank coffee. No matter. We kept that creamer on our table for years. When we did start drinking coffee, we bought it at Starbucks in tall cups and we didn’t even take milk in it.

Where did the creamer come from? Neither of us could remember. Maybe one of those estate sales we sometimes drove out to on Saturdays? For whatever reason, we adopted it. A Balinese sarong covered our rickety table. Then a Crate and Barrel linen cloth. Then we bought a new fancy table—an eight-seater, tavern-style.

Through all those years—our ambitious, job-hopping 20s—the creamer was like a mascot. When we were both promoted to v.p, we bought it a general’s cap. We put sake in it. We treated it with the scornful irony we began to feel for each other. The creamer sat there,  this patient, eyeless homunculus, watching us as we began to argue about stupid things like who would take out the garbage, how much to tip the delivery man, then louder and more forcefully, about real-like stuff. What we wanted. The future. It turned out that I was a Republican and wanted a bunch of kids. He was a Democrat and didn’t want any. One night he grabbed the penguin creamer off the table and said, “What the hell is this?” As if he’d never seen it before. I almost said, “It’s our baby.”

When I moved out I took that orphaned creamer but left everything else. It sits on the red-checked oilcloth covering my bistro table. My new boyfriend pours cream from its spout and says, “Cute little guy.”

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jessica Helfand, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $24. This story was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

Harriet squeezed the last flecks of lemon pulp into her Diet Pepsi and thought about all the men who had loved her. She counted chronologically, beginning with kindergarten, and moving forward year by year, class by class by class. In kindergarten, Steven had given her penny candy sticks — a whole box of them — lemon-lime and tutti-frutti and root beer, which was called sarsaparilla and made her gag. There was Robert in middle school who baked her muffins, and Danny in high school who spiked Harriet’s seltzer with miniature vials of vodka he’d swiped from home. (His mother was a flight attendant on Aer Lingus.) In college, there was Luke, who smiled at her in the library stacks and read her sonnets. Later, he broke up with her over shrimp cocktail. “I don’t have room for you in my life anymore,” he said to her casually one evening — as if he were discussing something mindless like the menu or the weather or her shoes.

She’d hated shrimp cocktail ever since.

Harriet associated each man in her life with a word — tall, skinny, bald, funny — and each of these words with a taste — bitter, sour, herbal, sweet. Flavors were personality-specific, each a connection to a particular face, or voice, or an experience she couldn’t possibly place without a cue. Lavender, licorice, popcorn, pesto — the list was long and as time wore on, largely interchangeable. Like so many things in life.

But not chocolate. Chocolate was Elvis: Harriet’s most guilty pleasure. She loved that Elvis was an anagram of Lives — his lives, her lives, did it even matter? Harriet prided herself on being the farthest thing from sentimental, but where Elvis was concerned, all bets were off.

She’d met him once as a child. It was Valentine’s Day at Graceland, and Harriet had shuttled down with her family. At five, she was by far the youngest, and her older sister had bought her a milkshake to occupy her hands and keep her quiet. Wedged in among legions of fans, she stood quietly between miles of grownup legs, nursing her drink, when suddenly — the crowd parted.

Harriet felt the ground tremble, heard the click-buzz of the Polaroids, and held her breath. And there he was: the King himself. She gazed up at his massive face, framed by that huge mane of black hair, thick and shiny as an oil slick.

He grinned, pointing.

“Chocolate?”

Harriet nodded, then held out her hand to offer him a sip of her milkshake. He smiled and leaned over, sending this astonishing aroma — a hypnotic blend of Tareyton and Brylcreem — cascading into the air, and kissed her on the cheek.

It was her first kiss.

Strolling through a flea market some years later, Harriet had spied an old Russell Stover chocolate tin in the shape of a heart, a youthful portrait of Elvis on the front. She’d bought it instantly, and had then misplaced it, only to rediscover it sometime later through a random online search. Lives indeed: unlike all those boys who broke her heart, Elvis could not, would not disappoint. And neither, it appeared, could chocolate.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Kevin Brockmeier, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $41.]

I was more or less in love with this girl, and her name was Samantha. I thought I was ugly, and she thought she was, but the truth is she was beautiful from every direction you could name, and in bed we made each other feel like astronauts. I had a way of entertaining her with the most common phrases, like “I’ll read you the riot act” or “Mum’s the word.” She used this lavender face soap, and I always said that kissing her was like chewing on a flower, which made her laugh, and that was the main thing, but I meant it, too, so what can you do?

She liked to tell me about her childhood, all the buzz and adventure of it, and every so often she would ask me to share a story from my own. “It was just your ordinary childhood,” I would say. “I seem to recall there was some upbringing involved, and then, all of a sudden, I was upbrought.”

And she would stroke my wrist and say, “Nothing about you is ordinary. Not to me.”

So I would make up something about the day I got caught trying to climb onto the roof of my school or the time I adopted a stray dog and hid him in the basement. The truth is that I didn’t remember my childhood, or at least not much of it. It was as if I had reached puberty, taken the first twelve years of my life, and stuffed them in a sack. I was one of those people.

Samantha was always coming home with these trinkets she would pick up at thrift stores or flea markets. One day, on the kitchen counter, I found this little rope and wood figurine, about the size of a saltshaker. It looked exactly like a toy my dad had bought for me at a garage sale when I was a kid: the same spoon-shaped ears, the same Chinese hat. I had named him Mickey the Drum, I remembered. I had a vivid recollection of looking at him on the shelf above my dresser and feeling this bottomless sadness that he didn’t have a mouth.

All of the weight in me seemed to sink to the floor suddenly, as if some plug had been popped loose and I was being tugged down out of myself. That was the beginning for me.

A few nights later, when Samantha asked me for a story from my childhood, I obliged her. I told her about the time I woke up and it had snowed and I stood at my window eating maple and brown sugar oatmeal and watching the flakes tumble from the sky. The next night, I described the sock fights I used to have with my cousin, the two of us whipping each other with these athletic socks that had tennis balls stuffed in their toes. And then there was the day I wore a temporary tattoo to school that said “Lawyers do it in their briefs.” And losing my walkie-talkie at the grocery store. And making the lion at the zoo roar by yawning at him.

My childhood was fine, it was nothing, and before long a funny thing happened. Samantha quit asking me about it. There was no mystery to me anymore, and I think she realized that. Now, in the evening, when we watch TV, I might say “He gives me the willies” or “That really gets my goat,” and she will pinch out a smile but she will not laugh, and I can see her wondering if I might not be ordinary.

I remember what it felt like to wake in the morning with her hands holding tight to me and my pajamas already half off. There was a time, and not so long ago, when the days rang out like coins.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sheila Heti, has ended. Original price: $4. Final price: $77.51.]

I never thought of leaving Cape Cod. I imagined I would live there my entire life long. But then Jack and I busted up — when I finally got the courage to leave — and I thought the smartest thing to do would be to start up a whole new life elsewhere. But where? Where was as beautiful as the Cape?

I figured I’d bring a little reminder of home with me, wherever I ended up, and I looked in newspapers and called people I had known from long ago, trying to figure out where to settle. I ended up in Denver for some reason. Basically, an old friend from grade school encouraged me to come.

I bought the shoe a few days before leaving home, and it came with me in my purse. Now I keep it on the mantle of my white-walled apartment where I placed it after unwrapping it from the Kleenex that first night.

But I haven’t settled in here. I long for home; the smell of the sea. Was I wrong to leave? Perhaps I was a coward. If ever that jerk moves out of town, I’ll head back there at once. But I’m afraid of being there in the same city with him. I too much liked sleeping with him every which way. I’d fall right back into his bed, where it was always so good. But there was misery in every other part of our lives together.

When I look at the shoe all I can think of is the glass slipper that finally fit Cinderella’s foot. Cape Cod fit me like no other place in the world, until Jack, that irritating grain of sand; that erotic burr, as I called him to Martha.

For thirty-two years I gazed at that sky, uncomplaining. I gazed at the sea through all different windows; windows in whatever place I’d rented near the shore. In Denver, I have no home among people. I am a stranger to the entire world; to this Denver sky.

The longer I stay here, the more lonesome I become. I really took my life on the Cape for granted. I experienced the beauty of life there without even thinking about it. Who knows? Maybe that is true happiness; to be made happy by something and not even be conscious of how happy it’s making you. Maybe you have to not know it’s acting on you in that way to even feel it in the first place. And you don’t even know you felt it till it’s past.

Sometimes I leave a penny in the shoe, those days when I’m feeling a little better about my life here in Denver; a little less displaced. But those days when my entire soul stretches toward the Cape, I take the penny out and leave it near the shoe. I tell myself, You are the penny, Doreet. You will now forever be at a distance from that really simple thing that held you loosely, but securely, with love.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Curtis Sittenfeld, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $17.50.]

It’s not that I think I married the wrong man. Because really, how can any of us make a decision except as the person we are in a particular moment? I met Larry and Ronald less than two weeks apart, when I was nineteen. After high school, I’d moved into an apartment with a couple girlfriends from St. Agnes Academy, and we all thought we were very sophisticated, living on our own like that; Bernadette used to grow alfalfa sprouts in pantyhose in the tub. This was in ’68, and I was working as a switchboard operator at a bank downtown. I met Ronald through a girl from work — he was the girl’s cousin — and Larry I met on the bus riding home one day. I was carrying an orchid plant I’d bought for the apartment, and he asked if I considered myself a flower child.

I dated them both, but not in a loose way if you know what I mean. That’s how it was then — my girlfriends all dated more than one man at the same time, too. I liked Ronald better because he was taller and because it was harder for me to guess where things stood with him; I had to work to draw him out. Larry just flat-out adored me. He’d always compliment my outfit, and once when he said my perfume smelled nice, I told him in kind of a haughty way that I didn’t wear perfume, it was just shampoo. At the movies he’d take my hand even before the trailers had ended. When he picked me up for a date, he’d mention whatever he’d seen or done since we’d last been together that had reminded him of me — a song he’d heard on the radio, for instance, or these spotted dogs, which he gave me after we’d been going out a couple months.

Part of the way I got Ronald to propose was by hinting that Larry might do it first, and that I’d say yes if he did. If I’m being honest, I can admit that while Larry did sometimes angle toward the topic of marriage, I’d always change the subject. I didn’t want him to propose, maybe because I really wouldn’t have known what to do but accept. Ronald and I had been married about three years when I heard that Larry and Bernadette, my old alfalfa-sprout-growing roommate, were engaged. I was pregnant then with Jenny, our second daughter, so this news didn’t register much with me. Well, time passed — almost forty years, which just floors me to think about — and last spring Larry and Bernadette moved into a house one street over from ours. They’d been living in the western suburbs, so I’d hardly laid eyes on either of them all those years, and suddenly, at any hour of the day I can now see into the back of their house from the back of ours — they’re not directly behind us, but they’re only two lots down, so it’s impossible not to notice if their lights are on or not.

Back when we lived together, Bernadette was so weight-conscious that she wouldn’t lick stamps or envelopes because she said it was wasted calories, but she’s gotten hefty since then. This is the thing, though — she and Larry sometimes stroll around the block in the evening, and I can see out our front window that they’re holding hands, that when he turns to talk to her, the expression on his face is of pure devotion. Why didn’t I understand when I was young how rare his kindness was, why was I so intent on shoving it out of my way?

Ronald and I have had a perfectly fine marriage, and he’s a responsible husband and father, but we’ve never had much to say to each other; we eat dinner watching the local news. It’s clear enough now that what I thought was a mystery in him worth teasing out is just a kind of flatness.

Again, it’s not that I’m unhappy, but I will say that when I open the drawer of the dressing table where I keep these little dogs, they’re such an unsettling reminder that sometimes just seeing them, my breath catches.