All Adults Here(12)

August’s mother, Ruth, had long brown hair and blunt bangs, like a 1970s teenager. She wore tight jeans and had charmingly unorthodontia’d teeth and had always, always been popular. August often watched her interact with people—ice-cream shop employees, friends, random strangers at the grocery store—and wondered what life would be like if he could be like her. Every year, she told him that it would be the year that he would finally find his people at school, not just at camp. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was about as likely as being struck by lightning while juggling bowling pins. There were people at school whom he could tolerate, people whom he could call for the homework assignments if he’d been out sick, but they weren’t friends. They were colleagues in the business of surviving junior high. In August’s best and dearest fantasies, he would get his GED by age fifteen and go straight to college in New York City or San Francisco and be a camp counselor in the summers and only come back to Clapham on holidays. But he couldn’t tell his mother that. She was under the mistaken impression that he was still a child.

“I know,” August said. His dad rubbed his beard.

The ice-cream parlor was packed, and their table sat right underneath a large community board covered with tacked-up homemade signs about dog-walking services and guitar lessons, photographs of cats that had gone missing.

“Ooh,” Ruth said, pointing to one about an estate sale. This was August’s whole childhood, trailing his parents around dank old houses filled with a dead person’s belongings.

“Absolutely,” John said. He’d fallen in love with Ruth first, then old things. When he’d gone to Clapham High, he’d been the captain of the tennis team, as preppy as they come, with hair that swooped like a cresting wave. Slowly, his mom had transformed his father’s closet of pastel staples into earlier versions of the same, and now he was just as bad as she was, in short-shorts that dads would have worn to pick up their children from camp in 1980. Somehow, even when his parents bought new clothing, it still looked old.

“Do you mind, honey?” Ruth asked. But she wasn’t really asking. This was what the Sullivans did. They bought old things by the bushel and, through their touch, transformed them into something desirable, something new. August wished that his parents could work their magic on him too.



* * *



—

The house was small, a sun-bleached blue, like a boat that had been sitting in salt water for decades. A few lookie-loos were standing outside the garage, but it wasn’t crazy the way it sometimes was, in fancier neighborhoods, with lots of pickers like his parents craning their necks to find expensive things to put in their shop windows. This was just a little house in a small town that had to empty itself out, one way or another. August followed his parents through the front door. He knew the drill.

They looked for furniture first, because it was worth the most, and something valuable (a midcentury credenza, antique mirrors, milk glass light fixtures) would sell fast. Then they looked for objects and clothes and art, in that order. You wouldn’t believe how much someone would pay for a hand-carved wooden duck. His parents split up, one upstairs, one down, their eyes trained at knee level. August followed his dad upstairs and ambled into one of the bedrooms.

August had described this process to his friends at camp, and they had unanimously pronounced it creepy AF. They loved to talk about it on the nights when bunks took camping trips, sitting around the fire, marshmallows on sticks.

“So, like, the people are dead, right?” his best friend, Emily, had asked.

“Super dead. At least I assume so. I mean, otherwise it would just be a garage sale, and they’d be sitting there with a fanny pack, telling you how much their juicer costs.”

“Why don’t their husbands or wives or kids do something with all their stuff? It just seems so sad, to open your doors and be, like, have at it.” Quinn shook her head.

“I think that is how they deal with it. And some people don’t have husbands or wives or kids, you know? Or maybe they live far away?” That settled everyone into a shared silent paralysis.

“Damn,” Emily said, finally.

“But they find cool stuff?” Quinn asked.

“Sometimes. Sometimes weird dolls with one eye. My mom loves those, actually.”

Emily smacked him and then buried her head in his stomach. “Oh my god, you’re going to give me nightmares!”

The bedroom that August had wandered into was mostly empty, with washed-out pale pink flowery wallpaper. There was a small bed with musty piles of quilts stacked on top—his mom would want those. There was a large homemade dollhouse on a ledge beside the window, and August knelt down next to it. His mom would want this too—it had a miniature roll of toilet paper in the miniature bathroom. She loved that kind of thing, something that someone’s grandmother had made. The small people had vanished, but that didn’t matter. Small people were easy to come by. He pressed a finger against a tiny swinging door and watched it flap back and forth. August rocked back up to standing.

There was boarding school, but those places were worse. August had read books: drugs, eating disorders, murder. There was home school, but neither of his parents could do math. And high school was bound to be better, right? Teenage rebellion had to help, right? And there were a few more artsy places in the Hudson Valley, private schools that his parents could afford if they sold a thousand dollhouses a day. One girl whose blog he liked had somehow convinced her parents to buy a Winnebago and spend her junior year of high school driving across Mexico. His mother poked her head into the room and squealed with excitement. His parents only drove around looking for more stuff to anchor them down. August pulled the dusty curtain back and looked out the window. At camp, he could be himself, and people loved him for it. At school, costumes were required.