ARAGE SALE #4

My father wants to sell an exercise machine for $100. It is a strange and awkward contraption, like a rowing machine and an exercise bike in one. When I was in high school, my friends used to jump on it and pump away, making ridiculous sex noises just to annoy me. My father bought it for $250 in 1991, after watching its wonders advertised on an informercial. We haven't touched it in eight years.
My father wants to sell my old television for $50.
"It's brand new!" he says.
Except I remember watching "Welcome Back Kotter" on that television set, watching "Good Times" and "Oprah" and "One Day at a Time" in the afternoons, contorting the antennae to get better reception, since we never had cable.
"Okay," he asks me, "what would you charge?" .
"Five dollars," I say.
My father looks at me like I just flushed a kitten down the toilet.
I admit it: I'm lowballing. It's just that I've been through three of these garage sales already this summer, and I'm familiar with the stages -- early morning overpricing and indignation followed by the late afternoon scramble to unload. At one garage sale, I started giving away one item for every item purchased. "You look like you need dish towels," I said to one guy, who didn't look like he needed dishtowels at all, who looked more like he needed a 28-sided die or someone to play silversmith to his shopkeeper in Brittania. But at some point, you just want a home for your things -- you want them to have nice people to play with, you want them to be taken out and stared at or cooed over or sold at another garage sale for a profit. Whatever. Just something. Anything but sitting in a garage.
At 8am, the old ladies from the neighborhood come over. There's Ivelda, who keeps returning all day long -- loading up candles and vases and perfume and then going back to her house to get money, and then coming back and finding new things and bringing homemade ice cream for everyone (peach), and then going back and then returning. There's Annabelle, who buys the sweater I've priced at $1, saying, "Don't be ridiculous. That's $2." Annabelle has this amazing skin full of creases that I want to touch. When she asks how much the television is, I panic and tell her $15. My father is angry; we had settled on at least $25. But I want these ladies to have everything. By 2pm, my mother is telling them to take whatever they want for free. They deserve it. They are the day's best customers.
Meanwhile, my dad preoccupied with mowing the lawn, I am selling everything for a dollar, for 50 cents, for a quarter. It's infectious, it's liberating -- everything must go, go, go -- and soon, my mother catches on, hauling crap out of the house and placing it on the lawn: ugly floral pitchers someone gave her as a gift; camp stoves cobwebbed and rusty; cracked beer mugs.
"Nobody will ever want this," she says each time, and each time someone does.
"How much for this thing?"
A dollar. A quarter. Whatever.
Just before noon, I find a bag in the garage I forgot. It's a huge Winnie the Pooh bear that my high school boyfriend gave me on my 16th birthday. A decade ago.
"How much?" asks a little girl standing nearby.
"Fifty cents?"
And she is so excited, carrying the bear almost as big as her, and then it is just too big, so she drops it and drags it by the ear.
We make $240. I'm sure other people probably make scads more money at their garage sales, but I'm impressed. So is my mom. The only person disappointed is my father. He's mad at my mother now, for selling an old, broken Apple computer, the kind they stopped selling parts for in the late Nineties.
"We could have fixed it!" he says. "Do you know how much we paid for that thing?"