Frames For Sale

EARLY THAT DAY sunlight splashed over the hillside like a spilt Mai Tai. It gathered in Charlie and Amanda’s room and cast a golden-orange tone over the whole thing. The two of them stirred in bed.

“What time is it?” Charlie said, blinking. His eyes were puffy and red. He was a bag of booze. They both were. They called it being over served, even though it was their party, their serving themselves. Amanda turned over on her side of the bed, facing away from her fiancée. She wasn’t awake enough to answer his question, nor did she have any better way of knowing what time it was than he did. It was too early. They both knew that much. Charlie burrowed his boozy head under his pillow, and the newness of morning passed into the bright heat of day.

***

Charlie got out of bed first and went into the bathroom adjoining their bedroom. He leaned over the sink and stared at himself in the mirror. Thick brown shocks of hair stood up in random places on the sides and back of his head. A few wrinkles gathered around his soupy eyes. He was reminded of the glass of gin he poured for himself as the last of their guests were saying goodbye the night before. He remembered stirring in the ice cubes with his finger.

Charlie cupped his hands, brought water to his gin-blanched lips, and faced the doorway that connected to the bathroom to the bedroom. He looked to see if he’d taken his glass upstairs with him when he went to bed; it would be on the bedside table, one of the few furnishings they’d brought with them on their move. He had.

Amanda lay diagonally across the bed with her hands and feet dangling over the edges. She had on a heather grey t-shirt and light-blue underwear. As she twisted around, corkscrewing and moving out of her starfish-on-a-rock position, the sheets bunched together underneath her and she pushed the pillows down beside her waist. Her bum stuck up like a robin’s egg in a nest. Charlie’s brainpan buzzed from the bathroom. He thought of all the men Amanda had woken up next to before him. Their names, the ones he knew anyway, sputtered around in his head like deflating red balloons. For a moment everything around him seemed to disappear completely. He didn’t know why he was thinking about Amanda’s exes again, but he couldn’t help it. Charlie looked into the mirror, splashed his face with cold water, rubbed his eyes with wet hands, turned the dial on the radio, and then got into the shower.

***

Downstairs in the kitchen Amanda sat at the table with crossed-legs. A half-full glass of water sat on the counter near the bottle of gin her friends had given them as a housewarming gift the night before.

“Morning,” she said, without looking up from her magazine. She raised one arm and pointed to the half-full glass, then gestured toward the sink to be clear she didn’t mean the gin. She was suggesting hydration, not more housewarming.

Charlie took the water and opened the windows on the south side of the kitchen to help air the place out. A woman’s voice came in with the warm breeze. It was an hour before noon and the temperature was rising.

“Yeah I didn’t advertise or anything, just kind of decided.”

She had the voice of a humming bird—quick, cutting, and nasally. It was their neighbor. They hadn’t met any of their neighbors yet. And although Amanda had grown up in town none of her old friends lived nearby. Charlie and Amanda only knew the surrounding houses and residents peripherally. On occasion they heard them.

“What are you looking for, anything in particular? I have some nice stationery cards that I got and some fun hats in the back if you want to try those on.” She was having a yard sale.

Charlie gathered the empty bottles on his side of the kitchen and listened. The woman’s voice only carried so far.

“I had this concussion recently that really messed me up. Forgot who I was, who I knew, my address—this address, everything. I felt, like, abducted. Like a movie or something.” She laughed a little. Her laugh was imitable. Whoever she was speaking with, if she was speaking with anyone, couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.

“Anyway, I got laid off so I’m trying to sell some stuff so I can move on.”

Charlie and Amanda’s kitchen was still spare. A teapot sat on the stove and a few pots and pans hung in the pantry. They had plates and bowls and silverware and glassware, but no art on the walls and not many spices in the spice drawer. A porcelain rooster sat alone on the plot of counter space that jutted out beside the sink.

Charlie said, “I think I’m going to go to that yard sale.”

Amanda didn’t look up from her article. “You’d better drink more water than that,” she said.

Charlie moved across the kitchen toward the recycling bin.

“There’s a yard sale going on next door,” he said.

“A yard sale?” she said.

“Yes. Next door.” He tossed a beer bottle into the bin and it broke.

“Jesus, Charlie.”

He tossed another. “Sorry.”

“I don’t want to be stepping on glass for the next week.” Amanda stood up  “Be careful.” She brought a dirty wine glass to the sink. “I think we should clean up a little before going out today.”

“We?” Charlie tossed a third bottle.

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m fine.” He was annoyed.

“Look, I was too tired and too drunk last night, Charlie. What are you pissed?”

“We need stuff don’t we? Is that okay?”

***

On his way over to the neighbor’s house a couple of teenage girls rode past on bikes. They wore shorts and bathing suit tops. The sun was hot. Charlie wished he had a swimming pool; wished he were floating at its edge in the green water with his arms crossed over the pool deck, someone wearing a two-piece bathing suit approaching him with lemonade.

His neighbor—he found out her name was Sherry—had a few folding tables set up and a quilt laid out at the back end of the driveway. Two leather jackets hung from the lattice that separated her place from Charlie and Amanda’s. Most of her stuff was in the open, but she had a few boxes for digging through too. Sherry was excited to see Charlie. She would have been excited to see a snake.

She went on and on about the stationery and the hats, her concussion and the spontaneity of the whole thing. All the while, Charlie, who interjected with the occasional mmm hmm and okay, fixed his attention on the framed pictures of Sherry. One captured a family picnic, Sherry eating corn with stray kernels and salty butter all over her lips and chin. Another showed her waterskiing on a calm lake. Some of the pictures were small, for placing in the back corner of a work-desk, and some were big enough to hang along a stairwell wall. In them, Sherry looked young and healthy, with all her long blonde hair, her skin smooth and her eyes alive with youth, like an immortalized actor in her first big film, frozen in that role forever. It took Charlie a moment to realize that people would not buy the pictures, but rather, the frames.  They’d buy them to put their own memories and lives in, to highlight the good parts and leave out the bad ones the way Sherry did. The way everyone does.

He continued to peruse, picking up and putting down Sherry’s things, half-listening to her stories, half-reconstructing the night before. He was surprised at how many names he remembered. “I must have made a good impression,” was the thought he had.

All the heat that had accumulated on Sherry’s driveway during the morning was now being released, making the air wavy and viscous. An old-looking sword caught Charlie’s eye. He took it from its sheath. The blade was as dull as dishwater, no longer able to slice, stab, or cut anything, no longer able to catch and release light the way new swords do.

“That was my ex-husband’s,” Sherry said with sober sharpness.

She walked out from behind her cash-table and took the sword and the sheath from Charlie’s hands. Reminiscence rushed over her pale face, like water over the edge of a tub–an act of displacement from her current moment. Sherry was a stout, no longer fit for water skiing, woman with thinning, brownish-blonde hair. Charlie tried to imagine what her ex-husband, who didn’t appear to be pictured in any of the frames for sale, must have looked like. Maybe she burned the pictures of him under a star-splattered desert sky in an emotional cleansing ceremony. Maybe they were in a shoebox inside collecting dust.

“I don’t know where he got it, but I’ll sell it,” she said, returning to the present moment. “You can make an offer. You can make an offer on anything if you think my price is too high.” Her eagerness shared a border with desperation. “A dollar for anything on that quilt!” She pointed with the sword, like a Colonel leading the charge.

Some time passed and Charlie had seen everything there was to see, which included nothing he needed. He pretended to take an interest in her stationery cards.

“We just moved in next door,” he said, holding a box of the cards, on which red and yellow Chinese lanterns were strung across the top. “Me and my,” he hesitated, “fiancée. She grew up here,” he added proudly.

Sherry stood with the sword in one hand and the sheath in the other.

“What’s her name?” She said.

“Amanda. Amanda Hotchkiss-George,” he said, George being his last name.

She slurred her words together to make one sound. “Don’t know her.” Then she went into rapid detail about her experience with the neighborhood, how much it’s changed, how the people in the area have all changed so much, how people change in general. “All like the weather,” she said, “Some days it feels like June, the next it’s January.”

She would have kept going, finding endless things to say, Charlie was sure of it, but a man driving a wood-paneled station wagon pulled up and stopped at the end of the driveway. The man got out of the car and left the motor running. He looked like he’d been painting. Charlie tried to determine whether Sherry knew the man or if he was there for the yard sale. He didn’t recognize him from any of her pictures. Sherry tidied the table with the stationery on it, and Charlie prepared himself to hear about it for the third time.

He knew how these things worked. When you’re around someone long enough you know all their jokes and stories, all their exaggerations and omissions. Some you like. Some you’re bored by. And some you wished you’d never heard in the first place.

The man wore shorts with frayed ends and sped around the driveway in dirt-white sneakers. Sherry told him about Charlie and his fiancée.

“They’re new to the neighborhood,” she said, pointing at Charlie, “but his fiancée, she grew up here in town.”

Charlie nodded over a box of books, but it was clear the man was not interested in conversation. He barley said hello. He combed over the quilt and the tables as if he were looking for something he’d seen a thousand times before, something he’d lost. He didn’t find it, but Sherry couldn’t help that any more than she could help the weather.

On the way back to his car the man stopped and turned and looked at Charlie. He slid down his dollar-store reading glasses so that they pinched the fat end of his nose.

“Just moved in did ya?” Charlie was surprised he’d been listening. “There’s an estate sale up the road you know. Over on Downing St.” Charlie didn’t know Downing St. “Should go all weekend too. If you want something, they’re selling everything. Even the hard stuff.”

The sun passed over the neighboring houses the way the short and long hands of a clock pass over the twelve.

***

The dishes were drip-drying in the drying rack next to the sink when Charlie walked through the kitchen. The whole room smelled like lemon. Amanda had cleaned. He walked into each room of the house, a glass of water in each hand, but he couldn’t find his fiancée. He called for her, elongating the last syllable of her name, but she wouldn’t answer. Eventually he went outside and walked the perimeter of the house. In the swelter of early afternoon, Charlie’s water glasses began to bead with sweat.

“Hey,” he said, finding her along the west side of the house, “what are you up to?” It was obvious she was gardening. The garden hose steadily trickling water: the soil drinking it up as fast as it came out. Amanda wore green gloves. She was tilling the damp soil with her fingers.

“Will you shut that off please?” She said, referring to the hose. He did.

“I heard there’s an estate sale going on over on Downing,” he said. He handed her the glass of water. “You know it?”

She took one glove off and drank the glass in four thirsty gulps.

“Thank you,” she said, exhaling. She wiped her mouth with her forearm. Some dirt smeared across her lips.

“What do you think? Should we go?”

Amanda let go of the glass and it fell into the upturned earth like a spade. Her hands went to her hips.

“Those over there,” she said, “are going to be sunflowers, tall and simple. And over there I’m doing zucchini. Batter-fried zucchini flowers.” Her mind’s eye looked forward to homegrown meals.

“I remember getting those at that place in Missoula,” Charlie said quickly.

“Marco’s,” she said.

“Yeah. Marco’s.”

A gentle breeze blew past the empty beds and over the two brick-colored planters reserved for tomato plants.

“I think we should go to that estate sale,” Charlie said, “Try to find a record player, or a carpet or something. We need a carpet.”

“We need a bed frame.”

“They probably have one! Some guy in a station wagon told me they’re selling everything.” Charlie grinned. “Everything including the hard stuff.” He raised his glass of water so that it was level with his eyes. His toast was a truce, and Amanda knew it. A smile bloomed out from her rosy pink, dirt-chapped lips and she dropped her gloves into the beds below.

“Let me get cleaned up,” she said.

***

The inside of the car was hotter than hell when they got in, the leather seats stinging their thighs. A neon-orange sign pointed them in the direction of the estate sale, and they made it there without any trouble. The house was cardinal-red, a split-level with hunter-green panel shudders and a row of shrubs lining the driveway. A few cars were parked along the sides of the driveway leading up to the house. Charlie and Amanda parked on the street and walked.

As they entered the house, a man with a whisker-framed face and brawny shoulders greeted them. He gave Amanda a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Charlie introduced himself, sure to include the part about being Amanda’s fiancée. The two men shook hands.

“Nice to meet you, Charlie,” he said, looking first at Amanda, then to Charlie, then back at Amanda. Despite his stature, the man’s eyes were tired, like he’d been crying, or rubbing chlorine out of them all day.

“Charlie, this is David.” She motioned with her hands. “We dated in high school.”

The invisible hairs on the back of Charlie’s moist neck struggled to stand on end.

Amanda continued. “David, it’s been,” her eyes went to the ceiling as if the last memory between them had been frescoed there, “years. How have you been? What are you doing here?”

“This was my folks house,” he said gravely. “They bought it about six years back.”

A silence swelled in the humid air. Charlie blurred his vision on the brass-amber carpet fibers below. He saw no reason in asking about what had happened. So his silence remained.

“Not the one you knew from high school,” David added.

“Right,” Amanda said. She reached for her fiancée’s hand without reciprocation.

Charlie didn’t appreciate the insinuation David was making about his fiancée. He remembered how that stuff worked: an afterschool movie that you only-ever watch the first fifteen minutes of, a lap-blanket to cover up whatever playful mischief goes on below the waistline. Or the stereo playing just loud enough to mute the moans and zipper-sounds, but not so loud that you can’t hear someone coming up the stairs. Charlie remembered. He pictured Amanda at that age, and then he imagined David’s sweaty hands all over her. A fist formed in his stomach.

“It’s all pretty hard,” David said. “There’s no script for this kind of thing.”

“I’m sure.” Amanda sympathized.

Charlie ran his thumb across the dusty console table near the front door.

“They got suckered into these timeshares in Florida,” David said, “that I don’t want, but keep getting the taxes and maintenance fees for.” There were pauses in between everything he said. “And probate court. Who knows what to do about that? The estate sale was my uncle’s idea. Did you ever meet him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“He’s a funny guy. You would have liked him. I mean you would like him. He’s still alive.” David looked around the room. “I’ll hold onto a few things, I think. Family pictures, my dad’s watches, wedding rings, stuff like that. Congratulations by the way,” he said, pointing at Amanda’s engagement ring.

“Thanks, David. God, I’m so sorry. What happened?”

“It’s okay.” David deflected. “It’s good to see you.”

If he had gone in for another hug and kiss, Charlie didn’t know what he’d do.

“You too,” she said, reaching out, touching his arm. “We’re going to look around a little. We just moved in up the street. Still furnishing!”

“Cool,” he said. “Nice meeting you, Charlie.”

Charlie smiled at him from the doorway, but didn’t mean it. David walked into the kitchen.

“So sad,” Amanda said.

“Yeah,” he said.

The room was slowly disappearing. White rectangles stamped across the bisque-colored walls where paintings and pictures used to hang, while round and rectangular furniture-leg divots dotted the carpet. Sales were going well, but over on the mantle the fireplace clock ticked away unnoticed. It was nearing four thirty and the sun’s rays were beginning their slow, horizontal decent on the rest of the day. Room by room, Charlie and Amanda made their way around the house until they stopped in the master bedroom.

“Look, Charlie.” It was a queen size bed and burgundy frame, complete with a headboard and footboard. “Let’s ask how much?”

The fist that had formed in Charlie’s stomach tightened. He shook his head no.

“Let’s just go to IKEA or whatever,” he said.

“They don’t have IKEA here, Charlie,” she said. “We came for a bed frame,” she put both arms out, “this is a bed frame.”

“I don’t like that style.”

“I’m asking.” She moved toward the door. He stepped in front of her.

“No,” he said.

She gave him a look as if to say, “Yes, I am.”

“You’re not asking him.”

Sunlight angled in through the window, brightening the room.

“What’s your problem, Charlie?”

David walked past the doorway. His steps were slow and sad, but he kept on walking. He, and Charlie and Amanda were the only ones left in the house.

Charlie stepped closer to Amanda, backing her against the bed. “It’s your ex-boyfriend’s dead parent’s bed frame!” he said in a whisper. Charlie thought about his fiancée and David romping around in it while David’s parents were away on vacation or out for a couple hours at a dinner party. Her on her knees, gripping the footboard with David behind her.

“Jesus, Charlie,” she said.

“We’re not asking. We’re not buying that thing!”

“You’re unbelievable,” she said, and sat down on the bed, her feet over the edge.

“Get off that thing,” he said.

She didn’t budge. He moved toward her.

“Get off it,” he said louder.

“Get away,” she said, tucking her legs underneath her, “Get out of here!” She backed up across the bed.

Quickly Charlie moved toward her and grabbed her ankle and tightened his grip.

“Off!” He said, tugging at her.

“Let go of me!” she cried, truly frightened now, “Get away from me!” She was kicking at him. Her voice sounded heartbroken. “You’re hurting me.”

Charlie, red-faced, worked to get a good hold on her other ankle. He would have her. His fingers wrapped tighter as he yanked his fiancée off the bed. She thudded against the hardwood floor. Her head snapping back, it bounced off the sideboard below the mattress, and she lay slack-limbed and still.

David’s steps came hurriedly through the house until he stood in the doorway. After a few tense minutes Charlie found himself outside on the lawn, looking back at the cardinal-red split-level with green shudders, wondering what he had done, and would happen next.

***

At exactly seven o’clock the sun set the clouds on fire. They burned brightly, from orange to purple, before turning the color of cigarette ash. The bright heat of day had finally turned to the dark of night.

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