My parents have been separated for twenty years. When it first happened, my dad moved into an apartment. He was allowed to return home once a week, on Sundays between noon and 5 P.M., to do his laundry; and was called on oc-casionally to fix things around the house. Kind of like one of those Rent-a-Husbands except that we actually owned ours. Regardless of the reason for his visit, however, my father, a chain-smoker, was no longer allowed to smoke in his own home. Instead, he would do what work needed to be done and then retreat to the garage, where he’d suck down half a pack of Winstons before returning to his apartment.

I found it fascinating that my father had agreed to this, given that the house was half his, so I asked my mom how she managed to get him to go along with it. “I just told him he couldn’t smoke in my house,” she replied. Your house? “Look,” she said. “If he can figure out a way to make the smoke only stay in his half of the house, I’m open to it. Otherwise, he can do it in the garage. I don’t care if that thing burns to the ground.”

Before long, my mom decided that it wasn’t fair that she had to clean a whole house and my dad only had to clean an apartment. So she moved into an apartment and he moved back into the house. But the no-smoking law stayed in effect, and he continued to abide by it. My mother returned to the house whenever she damn well pleased to do whatever she damn well pleased, and she often left her dogs there, too. They needed a yard to run around in, after all.

Every few years they’d switch again for one reason or another, and I guess twenty years of that would be enough to get any two people to agree to anything. The house had been sold. But I had already been living in California for a good fifteen years. It wasn’t like they were selling my home out from underneath me. I didn’t care. They could do whatever they wanted. Despite my indifference, I decided to go home, not so much out of duty, but because it seemed like it should be important. Plus, there was going to be a garage sale. This, I thought, was going to be something to see. My parents were sixty years old, they’d been married for twenty years, separated for another twenty years, and only now were they going to divide the stuff. Knowing what a nightmare it was when two people who’d lived together for only two years broke up and tried to figure out who owned which CD, I thought this might be the thing that finally drove them to divorce.

I arrived to my sold home on a Friday to find a FOR SALE sign still poking out of the front lawn. I wondered if I’d been tricked, but soon learned that my mom was planning to keep it there until the day she moved out to see if she could get a better offer. The fact that it was too late to ac-tually accept a better offer was, to her, beside the point. The garage sale was set for Sunday and prepara-tions got under way soon after I’d satisfied my deep, pain-ful longing for a real shrimp po-boy, the kind you can only get in New Orleans.

We dug through the attic, pulling out box after box and piling them up in the garage, which, after twenty years of chain-smoking and humidity, no longer smelled simply like smoke but like a wet ashtray. As we went through the boxes, each new discovery was more shocking than the last, but two stood out in particular—one because it so clearly indicated that my mother was a heartless beast, and another because it was the kind of thing one might ex-pect to hear about in a trailer park, but not in one’s own sold home.

The first was the discovery that my mother was intend-ing to sell my old Playskool people and the yacht and the school bus and the dog who barbecues. I was outraged. I insisted that her intention to sell was little more than confirmation of what I’d long suspected. “You never cared about me!” My mother held her ground, insist-ing that anything Playskool was only one-third mine, but if it meant that much to me I could just take it, adding chari-tably, “You don’t have to give me a dime.”

The second horror came in the form of a bag of old used underwear—mine. I never got a straight answer as to why they had been saved in the first place, I only re-member my mother telling me, “Some people, a certain kind of people, buy them.” What she didn’t seem to understand was that only some people, a certain kind of people, sell them—a kind of person I didn’t believe myself to be, a kind of people I was trying hard not to think the rest of my family were either. My mother, on the other hand, thought the whole thing was hilarious and could barely get through her laughter long enough to let loose with the fact that there used to be two bags until Blair threw a bunch of them off a Mardi Gras float a few years earlier.

Blair showed up a few hours later, not to actually help, but apparently just to tell me that if I wanted to make up for the loss of revenue from the bag of under-wear, I could always sell lap dances during the garage sale. Then he pulled my dad’s list—stuff he needed for an upcoming fishing trip—off the deep freezer, scribbled box of condoms at the bottom of the list, replaced it, and went home.

I asked my mom if she wanted to start pricing stuff, which is when I learned that we were going with a differ-ent system. We were just going to let everyone show up and ask how much things cost, then we’d give them the once-over, determining a price right there on the spot based on appearance and imagined income of customer, compatibility with item, need, desire, medical history, pro-jected life span, age, rank, serial number, general like-ability and whether or not their name added up to an even or odd number.

“There’s too many fucking variables,” I muttered.

“Stop overcomplicating it,” ordered my mother. “Just look at them, decide what you think and make up a price. And stop cursing.” How could she think that was OK? “What ever happened to not judging a book by its cover?” I screeched. “Oh, you can,” she replied.

Maybe, but I couldn’t live with her system. It was so im-precise. “But Mom,” I said, “it’s all so subjective and . . . gray. I hate it. I like black and white. What if I acci-dentally charge someone twenty-five cents for something and later find out you wanted fifty?” She just pulled my Lite-Brite out of a box and said, “I trust you.”

Saturday, we picked up where we’d left off. Only my dad was there. When I arrived at 7:00 A.M., he was in the back-yard, smoking a cigarette, drinking something orange (and suspiciously on the rocks), and lining up all his tools against the fence. He was in the process of figuring out how to display his sander, turning it this way and that, try-ing to determine its best side. Everything was perfectly spaced out and he had signs clearly marking the nonnego-tiable price of every item. It brought a tear to my eye. “Dad, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

My dad turned, saw me, stood up and stated unequivo-cally, “Presentation is everything, Tidbit.” Two inches of ash tumbled down his chest and onto his stomach, which was bursting through the bottom of a shirt whose buttons had abandoned ship long ago. He was wearing high-water polyester pants and slippers that he had bought on a trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, when I was six. Presentation is indeed everything.

Two barking dogs—one, the love child of a poodle and a brick, the other a jackal/gremlin mix—announced the arrival of my mother. “What’s that bamboo screen doing in the living room?” she wanted to know. My dad piped up, telling her that he’d put it there to remind himself to take it back to his place when he left. My mom claimed that is was her screen, but she offered to sell it to him for $20. My dad told her to go to hell. A fight ensued with her calling him a cheapskate, thanking God that she wasn’t married to him anymore (even though, technically, she was) and telling him to take the damn thing. He called her a bitch and said he didn’t want it. She said he had to take it. He told her that if she could get $20 for the fucking thing she should sell it. She insisted that it was no longer hers to sell and he said something back to her, but I don’t know where it was left because I was already on my way to get coffee and beig-nets.

The day was long and ugly. Blair returned for another three-minute visit, during which he again did nothing. When I pointed this out, he simply responded, “Stephen’s not doing anything either.” And while it was true that Stephen wasn’t doing anything either, I never really ex-pected him to do anything. In fact, I think the last time I saw him he was driving away in a car with the words JUST MARRIED painted on the back windshield.

At the end of the day, I was informed that the garage sale would begin at 9:00 A.M. the following morning. I told my mother she was crazy, that a garage sale had to start way earlier than that. She told me that we had to wake up at 5:45 A.M. to get things ready and I quickly decided that arguing for an earlier start time wasn’t really in my best in-terest. I comforted myself with the thought that it would all be over soon and slipped under my favorite strawberry sheets for a few hours of sleep.

At 6:00 A.M., I found my mother dragging a seventy-five-pound cement planter across the lawn and my father sit-ting in a lawn chair flipping through cruise brochures. It seemed strange to me, but what didn’t? When I asked my dad why he wasn’t helping, my mother answered, “Be-cause he’s got a pain in the ass,” an ailment more com-monly referred to as sciatica in the civilized world. My mother and I did all the work.

Nine A.M. rolled around to find my entire childhood up for sale, my father still glued to his chair, my mother applying lipstick in front of my old Barbie vanity, and me, with a ba-nana in one hand and a pair of clackers in the other, clack-ing away, as I looked up and down the street for any sign of life.

My mother joined me on the sidewalk looking perplexed.

“I wonder why no one’s here.” Did it really warrant won-der? “I don’t know, Mom, maybe because all the people who shop at garage sales have already gone back to bed?” Then she told me to go put on a bikini and stand at the nearest intersection with a sign, but really, now that my teenage underwear had already been distributed to half the population of New Orleans, why even bother with a bikini? Our first customer, an obvious garage sale junkie, arrived at 10:15 A.M., and with him came the realization that not only was our pricing system whacked, my mother’s value system was, too. He made a beeline to my old turntable and my mother promptly screamed out, “One dollar.” I couldn’t believe my ears, not only was it my old turntable—not one-third mine, but all mine, a birth-day present—it was also one of the few items of real value. The thing looked like it had been purchased yesterday. My mother still had all the original packaging, an extra pack of needles and the yellowed receipt. I had no idea what something like that was actually worth, but that didn’t stop me from calling the guy a thief and my mother a fool, insisting that she could have gotten at least $50 for it on eBay. My mother just smiled at me and said, “Well, we’re not on eBay, we’re on the front lawn.” Then the junkie hightailed it to his car with my turnta-ble.

The other side of this coin was my old pilgrim costume. My mother made it for me one Halloween. At the time I was about eleven, and while I don’t remember exactly what I wanted to be instead, I do remember that I definitely did not want to be a pilgrim. My mother, knowing that I remember virtually nothing about my childhood, maintains that I very much wanted to be a pilgrim and asked her to make the costume, but I know it’s a lie. You don’t always remember details, but you remember feelings, and I remember feeling like a complete loser. There’s nothing spooky about pilgrims unless you’re a tur-key or an Indian, and, more importantly, there’s nothing cool about pilgrims. Everybody knows that, even eleven-year-olds, especially eleven-year-olds. There’s no way I wanted to be a pilgrim and yet, I was. I seem to recall the words “I made the damn thing and you’re wearing it.” Oh how I hated that pilgrim costume, and oh how it floored me that someone in the world actually wanted to buy it now.

“Don’t do it,” I warned the misguided fool. “Your daugh-ter will only hate you for it.” She asked me how much it was. I laughed. “A nickel, but it’s nonreturnable.” My mother heard me laughing, spotted the pilgrim costume and was at my side in a flash, telling the woman about how many yards of fabric went into the thing, what kind of thread she’d used, how many hours it had taken her to make it, how cute I looked in it. The woman laughed. “All that for a nickel? Fine, I’ll take it.” My mother glared at me as she snatched the pilgrim costume out of the woman’s hand. “A nickel? Are you crazy? It’s $95.” The woman turned to leave. “And you’re calling me crazy?”

Other people came and went. I watched my Snoopy Sno-Cone machine leave in the bicycle basket of a cute little black boy, my Easy-Bake Oven take off in a truck with a Mexican family and my mother disappear into the house with a strange redheaded woman who appeared to be of Irish descent. I figured she was going to try to sell her the staircase, so I just plopped down in a lawn chair next to my dad. He still hadn’t moved, and he was still reading cruise brochures. “Where ya going?” I asked. He had it narrowed down to two: a thirteen-day Alaskan cruise or a seventeen-day cruise through the Panama Canal. “Alaska’s too cold,” I said. “I’d go to the Panama Canal.” He put the Alaskan brochure down and started showing me pictures of differ-ent cabin configurations on the Panama ship. “I was favor-ing the Panama Canal, too,” he said. “It starts in Miami and ends in Los Angeles.” What!?! “I figured Mom and I would just stay out there with you for a week or so after that.” I was dumbfounded. “You’re going with my mom?” He gave me a curious look and said, “You know any other moms?” I just shook my head. “Great!”

Blair swung by shortly after that to give our setup a quick once-over and tell us we were doing everything wrong. I leapt up from my lawn chair. “Is that all you came to do?” I demanded. He then gave me a quick once-over and said, “No. I came to see if there were any cute girls here, but there aren’t.” “Bite me!” I screamed back at him, as I stomped into the house to see what the hell my mother was doing. What she was doing was having tea with the strange redheaded woman. “This is Mary Jane,” my mother blurted out. “We haven’t seen each other since third grade!” How these two recognized each other is a mystery to me. My mom looks exceptionally young for her age, but not that young, and Mary Jane looked like exactly what she was—a sixty-year-old woman with flames coming out the top of her head. I stared at my mother and said, “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s a ga-rage sale taking place on your front lawn right now.”

“It’s not my front lawn anymore,” she replied.

“Mom!” I screamed, “Why are you doing this? I don’t know how to price this shit.” She gave me the evil eye and said very calmly, “I told you I trust you.”

“But why?” I screamed back. “Why now? You never trusted me when I wanted you to!”

She gave me an eviler eye and said, “You can go now.”

As I stomped out, I heard her say to Mary Jane, “She talks like a sailor and I can assure you she doesn’t get that from me.”

Then I slammed the damn door shut.

My mom finally emerged as I was selling off Stephen’s old Nintendo set to a young couple. I’d instantly recognized the guy for the nerd he was and told him it was going for $60, pointing out that it was still in its original packaging and insisting that it had barely been used. “It was pur-chased in the hopes of improving my brother’s hand-eye coordination, but he showed no improvement after a week so really, what was the point?”

The nerd had negotiated me down to $30 just about the time my mom appeared. She saw what was happening, grabbed another box and dashed over to the nerd. “Did you see these?” she asked. It was a box containing every single Nintendo game ever made. The nerd’s eyes lit up as if someone had told him he’d just won an all-expense-paid trip to the Star Trek convention, and I guess my mother liked that because she followed up her question with a quick, “You can have them. Lagniappe. The set’s no good without the games.” The nerd looked like he was going to wet himself. He opened his wallet and handed over a $10 and a $20. My mom looked at the bills and said, “Oh, that’s too much,” as she handed him back the $20.

The nerd and his wife left looking like two Lotto winners, and my mother turned to me. “Why’d you do that?” she snapped. “What?” I asked. “Try to make money at a ga-rage sale? I have absolutely no idea what came over me.”

My mom settled down in a lawn chair next to my dad, and started looking through his brochures. “What time is it?” she asked. It was 3:00 P.M. Closing time. All my dad’s stuff was gone, but most of what my mom had for sale was still on the front lawn. “What are we going to do with all this stuff?” I asked. My mom got up and said, “We’ll just pack it back up. I’ll go call Salvation Army.”

Pack it back up? Hadn’t we just unpacked it? Why was this happening? What was the point? Was she trying to do me in once and for all?

As I was throwing things back into boxes, I heard my mom say, “Be careful with that stuff.” The crap you’re giving away? I didn’t even bother to respond. A few minutes later I looked up to find my mother wrapping something in tissue. She looked like she was handling Tutankhamen’s treasures. “Can’t you move any faster than that?” I asked, completely annoyed.

Her voice came back whisper soft, as she said, “No. I can’t.”

That’s when it dawned on me that maybe this was some-thing important.

We continued packing boxes in silence until the Salva-tion Army truck arrived. The driver lifted the back door. My mother slowly walked over and very carefully placed a box in the truck. The driver picked up another one and pitched it in on top of an old washing machine. There was a dis-tinct crashing sound. I looked up. And that’s when my mother lost it. Tears came streaming down her face as she grabbed the driver and started beating on his chest. “Do you have any idea what’s in those boxes!?!” she screamed. And then she just crumbled to the ground. The driver didn’t know what hit him, or maybe he did. Maybe he’d seen it all before, but I hadn’t. And in that moment, I silently retracted every mean thing I’d ever said to or about my mother. I no longer cared what she did to me, what she hadn’t done for me, what she was or what she wasn’t. She was my mother, and our family, the family I’d complained about my whole life, meant everything to her. My dad was off his lawn chair and at her side before I regained command of my motor skills.

My mom and dad went inside the house. The driver of-fered to come back first thing in the morning with an empty truck. He said we could take as long as we needed to pack it up. I began carrying boxes back to the garage, and as I did, my mother’s value system started to make sense. My mother didn’t want to price anything because my mother didn’t want to sell anything. She had to get rid of it be-cause there was nowhere to keep it anymore, but the ga-rage sale was just a cover. She wasn’t interested in mak-ing money. She just wanted to see where everything was going. The stuff I was carrying may have looked like junk to anyone else, but to my mother it was priceless. If she thought you were going to give her son’s Nintendo game a good life, you could have it. But if you weren’t going to give her daughter’s pilgrim costume a good home then she’d have cut off her own arm before letting you buy it for any price. It wasn’t the nickel that offended my mother. It was the fact that her memories were being laughed at. Mary Jane was just a cover, too. The minute she was gone my mom said the woman talked too much. My mom wasn’t interested in catching up with Flame Top. I guess in the end it was just easier than watching her life disappear be-fore her very eyes.

When all the boxes were safely in the garage for the night, I started walking toward the sliding glass doors that led into the kitchen. My mom and dad were sitting at the table, fighting. I slid the door open and quickly learned that my father had managed to sell the bamboo screen for $30! My mother insisted that it was her screen and she wanted the money. My dad insisted that she gave it to him, which made it his money. Things went on like that for some time, with my dad ultimately offering to put the $30 toward dinner. My mother wanted Italian food; my dad wanted Chinese. “What do you want, Tidbit?” he asked. I told him all I really wanted was something that tasted like home. “Fine,” said my mother, as she grabbed her purse, “Let’s go to Acme.” And that’s exactly what we did. We ate fried oysters and gumbo.

I left two days later, and as my mom was dropping me off at the airport, she handed me a paper bag. “Here,” she said. “I saved you something.” I looked inside the bag and saw the Playskool dog, his barbecue, a table with an um-brella, two lounge chairs and two little Playskool peo-ple—a blonde and a redhead. “Hey,” I said, “It looks like you and Mary Jane.” I kissed my mother good-bye and boarded my plane.

It used to be that every time I went home, I went home hoping and praying to find that my family had somehow magically morphed into the kind of family I wanted and thought you were supposed to have, like the Waltons. My prayers were never answered. I was disappointed again and again, and my return flight was invariably spent crying under a cheap blanket.

My family still wasn’t the Waltons, and I still cried under a cheap blanket, only this time it wasn’t because I was disappointed. “No one is safe from her pen…a sharp eye for comic detail… a fresh and funny first book.”
—Library Journal

“Written in a distinctive voice and with incredible sexual frankness...a lot of laughs.”
—Times-Picayune

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