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5 0 Y T H E W E D G E W O O D , T H E W A T C H E S B E N J A M I N S . G R O S S B E R G Wedgewood didn’t matter, my mother says, speaking to me in a dream. The little vases and ashtrays, the boxes littering the house, I ask, they didn’t matter? No, she says, swirling ice cubes in a tumbler of vodka, no, though haggling for them at yard sales, watching people wrap them in newspaper, then shoving them so-wrapped into my purse, that mattered. She takes a drag on her cigarette like she used to at Bingo when I was five, six, seven years old and she sat across from me, smoking cigarette after cigarette to the drone of numbers in a hall so dense with smoke you couldn’t make out blue hairs five seats away. What about watches, I ask, knowing my mother’s predilection for watches: a Hamilton! she’d cry. A Seiko! It still works! Winding its gear between the long nails of her thumb and forefinger and thrusting it right up against the side of my head so I could hear the tick. Watches, she says now, so ghostly in my dream that she flickers as hazy and insubstantial as cigarette smoke – smoke generating smoke – didn’t mean shit, she says, slicing the air with the edge of her palm like she did when she was alive, her face, her jaw set firm. But showing you, showing dad the watch after I came home from the auction, holding it out and watching for the tick 5 1 R to register in your eyes, that, she says – then she mentions dad, how he’d snatch the watch from her hand and hold it up high and say, ‘‘It ticks! It ticks! She got a real bargain, a real matziah, a Hamilton that ticks!’’ Then he’d parade around the kitchen a little, do a kind of strut, and she would grab the watch back from his hand and strap it on her wrist and wear it the rest of the day and say, ‘‘I know! I know!’’ as if there wasn’t any irony in his pronouncement and who knows maybe there wasn’t. That, she says, mattered. And now, because it’s a dream, she grabs my wrist and zap! we’re in the house where he still lives, watching him bend over a drawer with nine or ten Seikos and Hamiltons, with his forefinger stirring them around as if they were morsels of frying meat. He’s speaking in a low voice: ‘‘She liked watches, your mother.’’ So I ask her, if the watches don’t matter but this matters, doesn’t that mean that the watches matter? She swirls her tumbler and we look up from the kitchen counter at my dad who continues explaining about watches, but soon all we hear is the ticking of out-of-sync gears. Tick, tick, tick. ...

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