Fall

FALL / Sam Pickering, Jr. FOR TWO WEEKS VICKI weeded the attic and raked closets, stuffing toys into boxes in the front hall and building a compost of clothes in the basement. Then for four days she washed and folded. FinaUy, though, faU and tag sale arrived. On October 5, I got up early and lined one side of the driveway with bookshelves. On them Vicki stacked clothes: children's shirts and sweaters priced fifty and seventy-five cents apiece and trousers from fifty cents to two dollars. Down the other side of the driveway were the furnishings of two rooms: lamps, chairs, tables, even two playpens. Against the garage door were toys: a one-cent box, a five, a ten, and finaUy a twenty-five-cent box. On the back steps were rows of shoes: Town and Country, Selby, Talbott, I. Miller, and Naturalizer. A rack of Vicki's dresses hung in the garage. Worn in the crisp spring before babies, the clothes were Ught and flowing, and whenever anyone touched the rack, they switched back and forth like the quick rippling step of a young woman. "Priced to sell," Vicki said, a change purse shaped like a hunk of watermelon strapped to her middle, "Bargains galore." She was right; things disappeared quickly. Vicki furnished plastic bags, and mothers bought seasons of clothes. To a grandmother she sold our baby carriage for twelve dollars and then for ten dollars the highchair that once cost a hundred. A slender girl in a red car bought six of Vicki's dresses. She didn't want a clothes bag. Folding the dresses over her arm she swished down the drive and out of sight. "She'll learn," Vicki said. "What will she learn?" I said. "That she'll need dresses with pockets," Vicki answered, "bulky pockets." "Yes," I thought, big enough for family and throbbing hopes and fears, big enough for the ache of guttering through closets and dumping one's youth and the childhood of one's children: the little red sweater with the yellow engine pulling a green train across the front, and the pink dress, balloons like lollipops lifting a teddy bear up through a blue sky toward orange clouds hovering near the left shoulder. By noon almost everything had sold, including both clothes racks and bookcases. What remained Vicki packed into boxes for WAIM, Windham Area Interfaith Ministry. After subtracting nine dollars for tag sale signs and an advertisement in the local newspaper, Vicki The Missouri Review · 262 made $304.35. Unfortunately during the morning I noticed Mark Roberts, a tree surgeon, working in the yard down the street. At the edge of the dell was a big sugar maple. Just above the ground the tree split, and the two spreading limbs resembled the wings of a green gull in flight. While one wing hung over the brush pile in the woods, the other swept over Mrs. Carter's driveway and blowing against her upstairs bedroom window made her nervous. For two hundred and twenty-five dollars Mark removed the tree, reducing the day's profits to $79.35, enough for a family dinner at Tony's Pizza in WilUmantic and afterward a trip down Main Street to Mr. Donut. Along with the success of the tag sale, we celebrated the end of summer and the beginning of fall: Eliza's last dose of amoxycillin, twenty-one days of pills prescribed for Lyme disease. The medicine had not sapped Eliza's energy. In late September and throughout October, she and Edward played soccer in a town league. Local businesses donated T-shirts, and Edward and Eliza wore numbers 34 and 35 on the team representing Mansfield Supply. The shirts were pink with white numbers, a combination which appealed to Eliza. Three nights a week Mansfield Supply played teams sponsored by Realty World, Marty's Service Center, Keeper Corp., the Eagleville Fire Department, and Brody, Prue & Parlato. The children played for fun, not victory, and whenever Mansfield Supply started to dominate another team, Coach Bohn shifted his best players from offense back to defense. In the last game parents played their children, and lost. Afterward the Bohns treated the team...