Object No. 5 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Dan Reines, has ended. Original price: $.50. Final price: $12.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

I think it was Ted Spain’s to start with, though I’m not sure. He used to take it to meetings, and on Fridays before the all-staff I’d see him filling it with gin from a bottle he kept in his second drawer.

No, serious! He knew I knew, too — he looked up once and I was staring at him like you’re looking at me, and he just sort of, you know — you want some? With a big smile on his face. I didn’t take him up on it, but sometimes I think I should have. I mean, pretty much that whole year before you got here, I should have.

Anyway. So Ted had it, and he did that pretty much every week for five months until he got laid off when they got rid of the design staff. Remember? Right before Easter, too. And when he left, on his last day, he walked by my cube on his way out and set it on my desk, and it was full, and he winked at me and that’s the last time I saw him.

So that’s kinda how the Death Mug became the Death Mug. When Lara got fired, her and Manny and me went to the parking lot and did about five tequila shots each from it, and then when Sharon left to go take care of her mom in Seattle, she brought in some box wine and a bunch of us went over to the Piper and sat on the patio and drank it, and she drank out of the mug. And then she came back after her mom died, and they laid her off about six weeks later, and we did it again, only me and Tracey brought the wine this time and we made sure it was good wine.

“Nothing pink!” That was Tracey’s rule. Good rule, right? For wine? “Nothing pink!” Only he said it the way Tracey would say it.

So I don’t know. I guess it’s a, a thing now. It’s the Death Mug. We break it out every time this happens, or whatever. Three rounds of layoffs, plus Lara and then Tracey. And when Bette left to marry Evil Eye — God, she drank like half a bottle!

Anyway. I was wondering if you’d want to meet me outside. I have some gin in my car. It’s been there since Easter.

And then, you know. I figured I’d leave it with you, right?

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. 72 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by William Gibson, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $101.00]

In 1969 my friend’s dad was a Pentagon technocrat. My friend said that when his dad came home with a new tie-tack, it meant there was a new weapon in the works. Not that there would be a new weapon, but that there was now a coterie of guys in the building who thought the idea was cool enough that they’d wear the tie-tack. It started with the tie-tack. If you couldn’t get the über-geeks to wear your tie-tack, your project wasn’t going to get off the ground. You had to demonstrate that your weapon had fans, and these guys didn’t wear t-shirts. My friend said that Soviet spies should hang out at malls and supermarkets in McLean and take micro-telephoto pictures of tie-tacks. Because it was all there, revealed, this utterly top-secret quadruple-classified shit, on a background of plaid madras. And you could be sure that the weapon of mass destruction depicted there was really the very latest thing, because, he said, it was uncool to wear them once they became a done deal, just as it was uncool to wear them if they definitely weren’t going to happen. What you wanted to demonstrate was that your tie-tack depicted something that was liminal, something still in the Dreamtime.

I imagined that David, my friend’s dad, had one of those ’50s dad boxes on his dresser. Where he kept his doohickeys. Cufflinks. Whatnot. And in David’s box was a fistful of tie-tacks, their little anchor-chains hopelessly tangled, a secret history of Pentagon blue-sky imagination.

He was a good guy, David. In 1969 he told me that what was going to happen with the Soviet Union was that it was going to go bankrupt. He said they were cooking the books, fooling themselves that their economy worked, that their system made sense. He wasn’t talking politics. He was an engineer. He was absolutely right, though I confess I didn’t buy it. I couldn’t imagine a world without the Soviet Union. He called it. The only thing he got wrong was the food riots. In the end, they weren’t necessary. In the meantime, he said, we just had to hold them at bay. With tie-tacks.

This ashtray, I imagine, came from somewhere further along the Hawk missile system’s developmental span. Ashtrays aren’t liminal. When you’re passing out ashtrays, you’ve actually got a product. When they passed a little spring-topped jewelry box, closed, to one of the über-geeks, that confidential “check this shit out” moment, it wasn’t a product, it was a glyph, something there but not there, half-juggled from the Dreamtime.

A fossil from a future that you knew might not even happen. Dashing, enigmatic, unworn. Not yet tangled in the darkness of history’s dad box, with the dead boys and the lost stupid war they died in.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Todd Levin, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $50.]

Have you ever hated someone solely for her dumb benevolence? For bland and witless good cheer? It’s the lowest of unfair acts, I know, but as soon as a smile crosses Mary Eileen’s lips, my jaw tightens and my hands instinctively ball into fists.

I honestly have no idea what Mary Eileen does for this company. Benefits manager or creative resources or consumer metrics or birthday announcement committee co-chair or some other marginal department for which no award shows exist. A career path that dead-ends inside a grim cubicle squatting in the middle of a complicated floor plan. That is Mary Eileen’s daily existence, not that it bothers her any.

I always guessed she was a Christian nutjob, with no real evidence to support that theory. Maybe I just assume anyone who likes Cats: The Musical enough to have a varsity jacket from the Broadway production draped over her desk chair like some kind of trophy for outstanding achievement in the field of mediocrity must be right with Jesus. So yeah, I associate Cats fandom with chubby born-agains, and I associate Phantom with closeted gays; sue me.

On her desk Mary Eileen kept a clear glass bowl filled with M&Ms. The bowl had a lid, held in place with a heart-shaped Ziggy paperweight. It was an elaborate contraption — really, more of a trap.  The time required to get at that candy — removing and replacing both the paperweight and lid — guaranteed you would be held captive for at least a fleeting social interaction.

Mary Eileen’s supply of M&Ms was seemingly bottomless. She even found M&Ms in special colors around the holidays — an act in which I’m sure she took some kind of near-erotic pleasure. And whenever — seriously, whenever — you’d swing by and grab a few pieces of candy on the sly, Mary Eileen would unfailingly say, “Treat yourself!” That word — “treat” — from her lips was like an iron file dragging against the edge of my front teeth. The works, from Ziggy vaguely threatening me to “have a lovely day!” to the pink and red M&Ms on Valentine’s Day, to Mary Eileen’s matronly invocation, all seemed calculatedly designed to make me feel infantile.

And I guess that’s why I stole that Ziggy paperweight. I emptied the bowl of M&Ms into my backpack, too. An appropriately infantile act I suppose. But why should she have that power over me? And why can’t Mary Eileen find a means of happiness that’s, I don’ t know, grown-up? She never once complained — not formally, anyway — and it’s been stashed in my desk, M&Ms and all, for I don’t know how long.

Life goes on here, pretty much unchanged, except for a few details most people around the office probably wouldn’t even notice. Mary Eileen has stopped putting out M&Ms, and I’ve been walking in wide, inconvenient arcs to avoid passing her desk. I even switched my printer from 3-DEATHSTAR to 3-DAGOBAH just to avoid her. And this Ziggy paperweight? I just can’t keep it anymore. Maybe you can. I can’t even remember the last time I had a lovely day.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Katharine Weber, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $10.50.]

Thirty-two years ago I was sent by the Smithers Employment Agency to interview with the worst client in the history of the agency. Four other girls had been rejected that same day, each one of them returning within an hour, in tears (poor Rose O’Brien couldn’t stop sobbing for the longest time and Mary Casey went home with a migraine and never returned). Although I had very little experience as a personal secretary, in fact, none at all, having sold gloves at Saks for ten years until I was replaced by someone prettier though thoroughly unqualified, and even though Mr. Smithers had commented unfavorably on my unfortunate tendency to blush and stammer when flustered, which he said would make it hard to place me, I suppose he had run out of prospects to send.

So over to Dr. Marjorie Grimstone’s I went, on the cross-town bus, wearing my three-button dove-gray cashmere gloves with my navy suit. Dr. Grimstone showed me her office as if I were a mental defective (“This is my office”). There was a small desk (“This is where you would sit and do your work on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons”), bare except for a telephone, a plastic-hooded adding machine, a large, gun-metal tape dispenser, and a tiny stapler (“I prefer the smaller staples for my patient notes and billing files; if operated precisely it won’t jam”). Next to the desk loomed a massive IBM Selectric typewriter, shrouded in plastic, on its own typing table.

Dr. Grimstone sat me down on the hard stenographer’s chair which rolled around on a plastic mat protecting her Turkish carpet, and then she sat across the room on a small tufted armchair at the end of her analytic couch and tried to intimidate me by asking all sorts of rude personal questions, which she explained she was entitled to ask because she was a “shrink,” as she put it. I came to see over time that Dr. Grimstone treated everyone this way, as if she had a special privilege to regard all of humanity as her research subjects. I don’t really know why, but I stood up to her and I didn’t cry like the others, or blush or stammer, even when she asked me if my orgasms were clitoral or vaginal. Instead I looked her in the eye and said Dr. Grimstone, I am your last chance at hiring a part-time secretary from the Smithers Agency, and even though I am not very experienced, I believe I can do the job, and you seem like someone capable of being kind, so why don’t you just hire me and stop being so unkind, and she did.

By the time she died, Dr.Grimstone had a very organized estate. She was meticulous about the tiniest things: the Chinese porcelain, the Tupperware, the Turkish carpets, the extension cords, the family silver, the finger bowls, the Murano glass animals, the psychoanalytic journals. The shredding of patient records we had done together once she had become deaf as a post and couldn’t keep asking patients to repeat their deepest secrets, to shout them out from that scratchy olive green couch under the Durer woodcuts which had been her father’s, which she left to the great-niece she liked best.

She left me an annuity for less than I had hoped, though it was generous, and also, in a touching failure of imagination, as if Dr. Grimstone could only envisage my future in my studio apartment in The Bronx (which she bought me twenty years ago when the building went co-op), sitting at that desk from her office, continuing my  routine of those thirty-two years, she left me the desk and the stenographer’s chair, along with the IBM Selectric typewriter, the adding machine, the plastic slipcovers for both, the heavy, gun-metal tape dispenser, and the tiny stapler, which, frankly, often jams.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sean Howe, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $20.51.]

It’s difficult work, wooing Donna. For one thing, the rhythms of my courtship are constantly interrupted by the lustful swarm of others, many of whom clumsily flirt with her. I’m impressed with the way she puts up with their transparent designs. She smiles, returns their jokes, and fleeces them of their tip money. Then she pivots, floats to me, and tells me about her dreams. Sometimes we discuss literature. I’ve been trying to get her to read Eliot’s Romola, but she says “it’s too intellectual for me.” She doesn’t give herself enough credit.

The hardest part is how to keep myself occupied while she’s busy. I’ve found that it’s best to set myself up at the end of the bar; it curves around, which provides me with a view of potential interlopers. Sometimes I can see, out of the corner of my vision, Donna glancing my way. Maybe it’s just to see how I’m doing with my drink, or maybe she’s stealing a look at my face. But I fix my eyes on the top shelf of liquor, looking busy. Sometimes I can feel my face vibrate, and my heart beat faster. Like when you lie to someone and try to look them in the eye.

She was smiling at me Thursday night, when I followed her to the stairs and I realized she was already drunk. She dropped the bottle opener through the slats, so we just smoked and listened to the rain. When I said goodnight I tried to find the balance between slurred speech and an overly enunciated farewell. I don’t want to give away my feelings until the time is right.