Less

David is this month’s winner of $507.50 for his story on materialism and balance.

Bio: David Norling has published a number of stories in literary magazines, and is currently working on a novel. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Without further ado, “Less” by David Norling.

Henry Hickenbeamer spent the evening making signs. Sitting on the living room floor, he sliced open six large cardboard boxes with a razor, then cut the panels down until he had twenty-four squares, roughly equal. Roughly wouldn’t normally have been enough. He liked his world in exact dimensions. But there was a certain tradition of slovenliness associated with garage sales. A sign too square, too perfectly lettered, might cut into sales.

“Don’t you think that’s a few too many signs?” his wife asked. She knelt beside him and began tapping her finger down the stack.

“Twenty-four,” he said. “But one’s got peach juice all over it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to use it.”

She grinned. “Really plan to get the word out, don’t you? A few in New York, a few in Chicago. Are you going to do a spot on one of those shopping channels?”

“Go ahead and laugh. They’ll be climbing all over each other to get the good stuff. I plan to list a few choice items on the signs at ridiculous prices. As bait.”

As he spoke he drew arrows on the panels, arrows pointing left, right, up, and as he finished each one he slid it to the side with a satisfied little flip. He was enjoying himself.

“I’ll tell you, Margaret,” he said, “this sale is long overdue. Do you have any idea how much junk we have in this house?”

“We don’t have any junk in the house,” she said. “The junk is in the garage. That’s why God made garages, to put our junk in.”

He looked up at her, his pen frozen mid-arrow. “God made garages to park our cars in, and we are sinning. Sinning just like everyone else on the block. Just look out the window. Everyone’s got cars worth tens of thousands of dollars parked in their driveway because they have a few hundred dollars’ worth of crap in their garage. Suburban logic. But we are moving ahead of the game. By this time next week, our freshly waxed vehicles will be snug and safe inside the garage, where God meant them to be.”

Margaret was silent, and for a moment the only sound was the squeak of the felt pen and the hum of the high-tension wires strung above the housing tract.

“Do you know that we have twenty-eight places to sit in this house?” he said. “I counted them. Twenty-eight! And I’m talking legitimate places, not including the toilets. Hate to break the news, honey, but we’ve only got two butts between us.”

“Well,” she said, standing up, “half of our household supply of butts is going to bed. And I won’t be around for the big event. I’ve got ER duty tomorrow.” She kissed him quickly. “Just don’t sell the house out from under us, okay?”

He chuckled villainously and twisted the strands of an imaginary mustache. “Trust me,” he said.

“How much you want for this?” The woman in curlers held up an item, the red price tag peeking out from under her thumb.

“Fifty cents,” he said. He considered adding a surcharge because she was wearing curlers in public.

“Fifty cents,” she said dubiously. “What is it exactly?”

“I’m not sure, ma’am. If I knew it would go for a dollar.”

“Oh!” she said, and quickly dug into her purse.

A middle-aged couple stood at the edge of the driveway, huddled in whispers. Finally the man stepped forward, holding his wallet like a weapon. His wife smiled sternly behind him. They had achieved their bottom line.

“We’ll give you eighty dollars for the sofa. That’s our final offer.”

It was also their first offer. Henry was asking a hundred for it, and even then it was a good deal. It was a sleeper sofa and had been in the guest room for years, though Henry couldn’t recall anyone ever having slept on it. They’d had many guests over the years, but they’d always gone home to sleep in their own beds. Henry looked at the man now fingering his wallet nervously and wondered if his guests ever stayed the night.

“Okay, eighty,” Henry said finally.

The man turned and looked triumphantly at his wife, then flipped open his wallet.

A few minutes later, Henry waved goodbye to the sofa as it disappeared around the corner, then stood at the curb gazing around the neighborhood. Three boys were riding their bicycles in circles around the cul-de-sac. A few garage doors were open, and Henry noted with satisfaction that his neighbors’ garages were as crammed with junk as his had been the night before. Would his neighbors ever find their way out from under their own piles?

It seemed strange to him. There were a dozen strangers poking through his things. If they’d walked into his garage yesterday he would have felt violated. Now he felt a rush of exhilaration, and in an expansive moment, he let a blender go too cheap to a woman who looked like she probably had a few blenders in her cupboard already. And as she stood hugging the blender like a small child, pity welled up within him. He resolved then to refuse no offer. Let them weigh themselves down, he thought, let them sink into the morass. He was on his way to the surface.

“I’ll give you thirty for the skis.”

“Sold.”

“Would you take a dollar for the vase?”

“I would, indeed.”

“Two and a quarter for the picture.”

“Make it an even two. It ain’t a Rembrandt.”

Business was brisk and getting brisker, and he realized with a growing disappointment that his driveway would be empty by noon. When his next-door neighbor came over to chat during a rare customerless moment Henry asked him to watch shop for a moment, then slipped inside the house to have a look around.

“Honey, where’s the toaster?” Margaret stood in the kitchen doorway, holding two slices of bread.

Henry was reading the newspaper. His feet were on the coffee table, ankles crossed, and one pink toe poked through a hole in his sock.

“The toaster?” he said from behind the paper. “I got five dollars for it at the garage sale.” He turned the page. She remained in the doorway, silent, squeezing fingerprints into the bread. She waited. After a moment he lowered his paper.

“You sold the toaster?” she said.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Now, just how important is toast to our lifestyle? Millions of people get along just fine eating plain old bread. And what is toast, anyway? It’s heated up bread, right? But bread’s already been heated, otherwise it wouldn’t really be bread. It’d just be dough. Now why is it that we heat up bread that’s already…”

“Have you flipped?” she said, taking a step toward him. “I don’t want philosophy, I want toast. I’ve always eaten toast for breakfast, and I’m not going to stop now, I don’t care what logical fallacies you find in the concept of toast. Now put on some new socks and go buy me another toaster.”

“It’s Sunday,” he said blandly. “The shops are closed.”

“Then go out and find a goddamn garage sale!” She went back furiously into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, pulled out a cereal box and bowl, then grabbed a spoon from the drawer. She shook a few flakes into the bowl, then set the box down. Tears began welling up in her eyes as she pulled a little plastic dinosaur from the bowl.

“The unexpected joys of cereal eating,” Henry said. She turned and saw him leaning against the door frame. “Ever find a dinosaur in a slice of bread?”

“I can live without the cereal toys,” she said.

He came over and put his arms around her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I was running out of stuff. Those signs really did the trick. There were cars parked all the way up the block. They just kept coming and coming, buying up everything, so I dashed into the house to grab some more stuff. You shouldn’t have left the toaster out.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault you sold the toaster!”

“No, no, it was just sort of there on the counter. I grabbed it without thinking.” He grinned. “I sold one of your hair dryers, too.”

“You what?”

“You had two of them. I got six bucks for it. You should have seen this lady snap it up.”

“Jesus, he sold my hair dryer,” she said to the cupboard.

“Come on, Honey, let’s not argue about household appliances,” he said and nuzzled her neck. She stiffened and tried to shove him away. He growled and nuzzled deeper. She elbowed him in the ribs, then relaxed and leaned back into his arms.

“You know, it’s crazy but I actually feel lighter,” he said. “I first felt it when the sofa went.”

She froze. “The sofa?”

“I let it go too cheap, but that doesn’t really matter. When they loaded it into the back of the truck I had this strange sense of relief. It was like that sofa had been weighing on me, like for years I’d been carrying this ten-pound sinker in my pocket and had gotten so used to it that I’d forgotten it was even there. And then suddenly it was gone. I was free of it. I could move naturally. Then with the other things, it was the same. Like the skis. I used those skis once, and they’d been collecting dust in the garage ever since. They’re gone. I never have to think about them again. All the other stuff, too. Gone. Even little shit, like spoons…”

 “You sold spoons?” she asked in disbelief.

“Do you have any idea how many spoons we had in that drawer?”

She pushed him away. “Go buy me a goddamn toaster,” she hissed and stormed out of the room.

“Yeah, I’m calling about the bedroom set.” The voice on the other end was big, a brawler’s voice, experienced in telephone shopping.

“The bedroom set?” Margaret said.

“The ad in the Flea Market. ‘Five-piece bedroom set, mahogany, mirror. Like new, $750 or best offer.’”

“Seven hundred and fifty dollars!”

“Now that’s what I want to talk to you about. There’s really a glut of bedroom furniture out there. People upgrading, manufacturing techniques racing ahead. I’ll be frank, ma’am, I’ve never seen a piece of used bedroom furniture that was like new. Now I haven’t seen the items in question, and I’m willing to pay top dollar, but…”

Margaret hung up. The phone rang.

“Hi, I’m calling about your ad, about the bookcases.” It was a woman’s voice, southern, a sympathetic drawl. “Just how big are they, hon? See, I’ve got this little nook and I’m hoping the bookcases can just slip right in, but if they’re wider than forty-four inches they’d sit a little kitty wampus and I don’t know…”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but they’ve already been sold.” Margaret hung up, then picked up the receiver once again and looked at it. What was happening? He was selling their world out from under them. Was he leaving her? Did he have another woman, one who didn’t eat toast in the morning? The dial tone buzzed deep in the wires. She dialed Henry’s office, but when his secretary answered she hung up. The telephone rang.

She snapped up the receiver. “Henry?”

“Hello?” The man on the other end paused, then continued a little timidly. “Um, I saw this ad in the paper for some tools.”

*     *     *

Miss Wiggins was smartly dressed, as usual. Margaret always found it a little unsettling visiting her husband at work. Miss Wiggins would look over the rim of her glasses and scrutinize her, smiling of course, friendly even, but it would have been nicer had she looked through the lenses. She was on the phone now, and while Margaret could have just walked into Henry’s office, she waited for the ritual of the intercom.

“I’ll see that he gets the message,” Miss Wiggins said, then pressed another button on the phone. “Your wife is here to see you.”

Margaret looked at the chrome furniture in the corner of the reception area. She could see her image shrunk to rodent size on a table leg. She was on all the table legs. There were really too many of her, and they were all much too small. This was a mistake. She should have waited until he came home. And then pounded a garage sale sign through his heart. When she looked up, Miss Wiggins was smiling.

“You can go in now.”

Henry was standing behind his desk. On the desk was an open cardboard box, and in his hand the framed photo of her that always stood beside his electric pencil sharpener.

“What a nice surprise,” he said, putting the photo into the box.

She strode forward in disbelief. The top drawer of his desk was open. And quite empty.

“My God, what happened?” she said. She put a hand on the desk to steady herself. “Were you…were you fired? Did you quit?”

“Huh?”

“You’re…you’re cleaning out your desk.”

He grinned. “You wouldn’t believe what a load of crap I had in this desk. I had correspondence in here from clients that died years ago, and enough rubber bands and paper clips to start an office supply warehouse. What do I need paper clips for? Everything is on computers now.”

She pulled her photograph from the box and thrust it under his nose. “And I suppose this is crap, too?”

“Whoa,” he said, taking a step backward. “What’s eating you? Take a look at that photo. It’s about fifteen years old. A client asked me today if that was my daughter. My daughter! I didn’t know what to tell him. If I say yes, I’m an old fart; if I say no, I’m a cradle robber.”

She looked at the picture, taken before they were married. She had a glow of love in her eyes that made her look about sixteen. She set the picture onto the desk.

“I like this picture,” she said weakly.

“So do I. It will look wonderful in the photo album.” He walked around the desk and took her into his arms. “What is this, honey? What are you so upset about?”

She stood there helplessly, caught between rage and confusion, and suddenly she began sobbing onto his lapels.

“You’re going to leave me, I know it, you’re…”

“What are you talking about? Whatever gave you that idea?” He slipped his hands onto her neck and tilted her head up to look into her eyes.

“You’re getting rid of everything, you’re selling everything. People have been calling all morning. The tools, the furniture. You’re selling our bedroom, Henry!

“Is that what this is all about?” he said. He pulled away and ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t have enough hair to run a hand through, and the gesture struck her as nervous. He suddenly looked very tired.

“Listen,” he said, bending back an index finger to count. “First, the tools. I bought them years ago when I thought I should be manly and do my own auto repairs. Remember that little episode? Remember what that cost us? I’m no mechanic. I can take things apart just fine, it’s putting them back together that baffles me. I’ve got a toolbox full of tools, and every time I try to fix something I break it broker than it was when I started. So I’m selling the tools. It’s a gesture of humility to the god of mechanics.”

Margaret lowered her eyes to the grey carpet. She took in the logic of it, nodding and lost, but in her mind the phone was still ringing, strangers still haggling down their lives.

“Second, the bookcases,” he continued. “Have you looked in them recently? We haven’t put a new book there in years. And do you know why? Because we don’t read anymore. They’re full of books we read in college, back when we cared about books, back when we had time to read. You know something? Every week or so I pull out one of those books and I look at the cover and I think, wow, this was a great book, I should read it again. And then I slide it right back into its slot. Books are made to be read, and if we’re not going to read them we should box them up and give them to some charity. And if we don’t need books we sure as hell don’t need bookcases.”

“You could have told me,” she said. “You could have asked.”

“And you would have said ‘I read all the time.’ And just to prove it you would have marched over and pulled out a book and plopped down on the couch and pouted your way through a chapter or two…”

“That’s not fair,” she said. “You go and sell my real books on the basis of one of your hypothetical scenarios.”

“I wasn’t going to sell them, I was going to give them away.”

They were both silent a moment, looking at each other uncertainly.

“What else are you getting rid of?” she asked finally.

“I don’t know.”

“The bedroom furniture?”

“You hate that furniture. My mom’s wedding gift. You thought she was trying to curse our…”

“How about the bed?” she said. “How about the house?”

“Margaret, I just…”

The intercom buzzed. He let out a slow, hollow breath, then reached over and punched the button. Margaret was already walking toward the door.

“Mr. Tanler from Digital is here,” Miss Wiggins said.

“Okay.”

Margaret opened the door, then spun suddenly to face him once again.

“I don’t get any of this, Henry,” she said. “What are you doing? What do you want?”

Henry picked up the box and set it on the floor behind his desk, then looked back up at her with weary conviction.

“Less,” he said.

When Henry got home that evening, the house was dark. He called Margaret’s name as he always did, still fumbling to pull his key from the door. There was no answer. When he turned on the living room light, fear shot through him. The place had been ransacked by burglars. But no. The bookcases were gone. By the look of things they had simply been tipped over to be emptied, and the books now lay in a pile in the center of the room. The old armchair was also gone, as well as an oil painting that used to hang in the entryway. He hadn’t put an ad in for the painting. Perhaps his wife was just being helpful: a free painting with every purchase.

On the kitchen table he found a handful of crumpled bills, twenties and tens, and a note:

I don’t know if we still have a marriage or not, but we don’t have a bed anymore. I’ve gone to my brother’s for a while. He still believes in beds. He said I could use the one in his guest room. I hope you figure this one out. Soon.

Henry walked down the hall and into the bedroom. It was empty, except for a pile of things dumped from the dresser and night tables. He hadn’t intended to sell the bed itself, just the ridiculously massive frame and the ugly matching nightstands and dresser. But it didn’t matter. They would buy a futon, something minimal and functional. They would live close to the earth. They would weed out their wardrobes until all their clothes fit into the walk-in closet. They would have simple, soothing art on the walls. They would park their cars—no make that car—in the garage. They would be free.

He went into the study and called his brother-in-law.

“Yeah?” on the other end. Margaret’s brother was not a man to speak on the phone. For him, a phone was used to arrange conversations, not have them.

“Hi, this is Henry. Is Margaret there?”

“No.” Silence.

“Um, did she go over there tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“So…where did she go?”

“Got called in to work.” Then in a burst of loquaciousness, “Said it would be an all-nighter.”

“Well, tell her I called, okay?”

“Sure.” He hung up.

Henry held onto the receiver for a moment and looked around the room. It was much better without the couch, but it was still cluttered. What did you need in a study, anyway? A desk and a chair. Maybe a few reference books. A laptop. A picture to look at when you were procrastinating. Better yet, a calendar to remind you to get back to work. If you don’t want to work you have no business in the study. He replaced the receiver. He would go through each room methodically. Analyze, organize, purge. He pulled off his coat and threw it over the back of the chair. He unbuttoned his cuffs, loosened his tie.

The doorbell rang. 

The man at the door was thin and balding, and stood hunched to one side to escape the moths that swarmed around the porch light.

“I’ve come about the tools,” he said.

“Tools?”

“Your wife said to come by after six.” His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, and this gave him an air of nervous diffidence. He wouldn’t haggle about the price.

“The tools!” Henry said, throwing the door open. “Come in! Come in!” The man stepped inside and stopped, glancing about, then fixing his eyes quizzically on the pile of books.

“We’re a family that loves to read,” Henry said expansively. “Love books. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Those are the ones we read last week, and they’re on the way out. No sense keeping them around once you know how they end, eh? Go ahead, help yourself. Plenty more where those came from.”

“We already have some books,” the man said, then after a moment added, “on a shelf.”

“On a shelf! What an idea! I trip over this pile of books once a week easy. A shelf! Have to broach the subject with the missus. But you want to see the tools, I reckon.”

He led the man to the garage. Here too disarray reigned. In his rummage to find suitable items for the garage sale, Henry had uncartoned just about everything, and now it was just a massive pile in the center of the cement floor. He realized suddenly that it was order itself that lent an air of usefulness, of indispensability, to things. Dump everything you own into a huge disorganized pile and it would be revealed as the junk it really was.

Off to the side of the garage was a work bench, and this too was cluttered with junk, with just about everything but tools. The tools themselves were stored neatly in the large red toolbox they had come in. The man squatted and looked through the tools. He seemed to be counting them rather than evaluating them. After a moment he stood and took out his wallet.

“They look like good tools,” he said, handing Henry forty dollars, his asking price.

“Do you mind if I ask what you plan to do with them,” Henry asked.

The man smiled, slightly embarrassed. “I’m…I’m having a little trouble with my car right now, and I thought, well, I’d get a manual and, you know, see if I could…”

Henry put a hand on the man’s shoulder and wagged his head in compassion. “God help you, my son.”

The next morning, he called the office and took the day off.

“Tell the Big Cheese I’ve got hemorrhoids.” He could hear Miss Wiggins giggle through the receiver. “Tell him I can’t sit, can’t stand. They twitch when I phone, they throb when I write. When I tighten my tie, they swell up like an inner tube.”

“I’ll just tell him you’re out sick,” she said.

“Thanks. You always know best.”

He started with the garage. The garage was the great offender. It was a great gaping maw that swallowed everything too seldom used to keep in the house and too useful to get rid of. Well, the old concept of useful was the first thing to throw out. The new one would be sleek, streamlined, ruthless. If you don’t use it regularly, and with satisfaction, it isn’t useful. It’s in the way.

He rolled his bowling ball onto the driveway, still in its vinyl case. It bumped and thudded its way to the edge of the concrete slab and came to rest. Strike. He wheeled out the wheelbarrow and parked it beside the bowling ball, then filled it with rakes and shovels and gardening tools. Out with the mower, too. A truckload of landscapers rolled in once a week to do the yard work. What was he keeping this stuff around for? Brooms. He counted six. How had they ever acquired six brooms? He threw five into the wheelbarrow. He opened boxes of winter clothes he and Margaret had brought from back east. When had it last snowed around here? Out with the overcoats. He felt a twinge of guilt throwing out Margaret’s clothes, but this was war. He was defending his home against a relentless invasion, an invasion of things—useless, vegetative, all-consuming.

An hour later, with half the contents of his garage now on the driveway, he stopped. This was going nowhere. He briefly considered calling the Salvation Army, but knew what they would tell him: There will be a truck in your neighborhood next month. But he was on a roll, he couldn’t lose momentum. He had to get it off the property quickly, into other people’s garages where he knew it would wind up anyway. He pulled his stack of garage sale signs from the workbench, where he’d stored them in anticipation of his next sale. No time for selling now. He flipped the signs over and wrote on the back of each: Free Stuff, Great Stuff, Free Free Free! and below this his address and an arrow.