Alison C. Powell

A Reluctant Inventory: Six Lots to be Sold After My Mother Died

1. Item #685: Three Boxes Costume Jewelry—c. 1933-2022

Ivory, Bakelite, Paste. I am wrist-deep in my mother’s necklaces, bracelets and even a tiara. Pendant, rope, choker, chain, and locket. Gifts received in Oregon in the 1930s, in California in the forties and fifties. Enamel is in vogue. Bijoux bought in London in the 1990s; boredom forestalled in the 2000s. Totems of America, Canada, and England, all of us following my father’s jobs (and jobs and jobs) in advertising. Advertising, like baseball, will break your heart.

The box in my hands is like the end of a life, an extravagant mess. Clasps ancient and modern, some broken, a few still firm. One or two too tiny to fasten with my fumbling fingers. I’d sat for six weeks by her side in one hospital (bum kidneys and Covid), and by my father’s side at the other hospital (hip fracture and Covid), twenty-five miles across the Las Vegas Valley in winter at the very tip of the tallest Omicron icicle. She’d died in her sleep at 3AM (a blood clot to the lung—Bam!), the call from the rehab facility jarring me awake. I felt sure it was my watch, and I’d fallen asleep.

Well, mourning can wait. My father is alive, but he can’t stay here, not with that hip, so I have a job to do. Touch what she touched, cherish what she cherished, and arrange the sale. The box is a lot within a lot, a private inner inventory of sketches. Here’s an amber pin she wore to parties, affixed to a cream, wool Courreges cocktail dress bought on the trip to Paris in 1968, a dash for the chrome of the city, while my brother and I rusted at camp in the rainy English countryside.

A mid-century woman of clubs, committees, and commerce, she wore suits with ease. The names may have no valence now, but specificity is my religion. Her russet hair is smoothed into the current style, Vidal Sassoon, bubbled up in back like a helmet. The modernity of the era appears from here to be as new as the Boer War, Flanders Fields, or the Treaty of Versailles. Time moves with a hesitant foot, and decorum demands a caution: depending on where you look, the universe expands at different speeds.

The seventies, the eighties, gold and chrome, lacquer, and bronze. Tight chokers, Lucite pendants, jade-green medallions. Her soft hand at her throat, making a point with a knowing look. In her prime, in her thirties, in her oats. Ah, the green glass choker she wore on her seventieth birthday. She despaired of her neck, calling it “crepe-y” at thirty-five. But it too was a magnificent possession. The stick pin from a Celtic brooch pricks my finger. Bone bangles and a ruby dinner ring. Jesus, the woman could shop.

I save a few for me: turquoise pendant, jadeite chain, a Chanel monocle on a gold rope. I can’t carry off the size or substance, but that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve them. Closing the box, I say, “Take it.” I can’t look again.

And then, at the bottom of my third glass of cheap, but dry, Prosecco, clarity: “Thank God I was born to a mother who wore a monocle.”

2. Item #365: English Victorian Sideboard, Mahogany; circa 1850

Description: Three-piece wooden sideboard, comprising two cabinet-style pedestal bases with original keys in locks, lead-lined wine drawer; wooden top with four narrow drawers. Heavy as hell.

The most burdensome family heirloom was the one I most hoped to hold onto. Sheer madness, given the size, like introducing a freight wagon into a one-room apartment. My parents bought the sideboard, their first antique, at a market in London sometime in 1969 for fifty pounds sterling. The day it was delivered, that thing was already 120 years old. I was seven, and I thought it was mine.

On the surface, my mother fashioned still lives. Tea caddy, cruet set, cut flowers, ceramic bowls, ruddy grapes. Bottles of “drink” in the cabinet, amber, tawny, chestnut. Lowballs arranged on a silver tray. Brassy parties roared in the adult cut of the house—a living room arranged for conversation. Music. Scotch. Bottoms brushing, knees touching, hands grazing. Girdles. Chalk stripes. Dad’s elbow leaned onto a corner, drink in hand, while my mother opened a drawer of silverplate coasters. She never knew that I collected cocktail napkins stained with her pink lipstick, admiring in private the neat stamp of her kiss.

Condition Note: Large chip to veneer at base of one cabinet door.

Shorn section at the base feet, one corner exposed. “It’s way more than a chip. Should we say so?” (I’m afraid of the Bulgarian estate sale manager and his wife.) “What did this?” “Oh, shit,” I answer, “Mom’s wheelchair.” A fall, a wound, a recovery, and finally, a giving up. One day, she just wouldn’t walk. We rolled her slowly, the wheels heavy as manhole covers, pushing with force, as if to open sluice gates. Real workingman’s blues. In one drear mood, I thought, “If only it were literally all downhill from here.” Bolts and knobs jutted out, lying in wait to nick her skin, which they did, the curs, even though I’d padded them the best I knew how. Steering through the straits of the room proved perilous, and we were inelegant pilots. Inconsiderate steel planed the wood, whittling away the purity of the finish. Well, that’s that for the value. Honestly, I don’t care. She left her mark. That makes me proud.

3. Item # 168: Oil on Canvas: “Apple Trees at Sunset” by Jim McVickers, (dimensions 60” x 66”)

Large, semi-important oil by regional American artist. It’s the size that makes it. The canvas fills the family room, and we lounge around in our own orchard, imaging we’re Isaac Newton and lousy at farming. Still the soil appears nicely irrigated and the yield is anything we say. For a year, my mother slept in a brown chair underneath those apples perpetually ripening, red and gold in the waning light, the green leaves thick with brushstrokes, dreaming, perhaps, of her youth in Oregon, spending summers during the Depression on the family fruit ranch. Prunes, as it happens.

For we were once a people of jam jars and pie tins, stove-top coffee pots and flour sifters. When our fortunes rose, my mother spent her money on precious artifacts that recalled the trees, crops, vines, stems, and blooms that made her proud when there was nothing else but a new pair of shoes at Christmas. In the old house, the one we lost in the Crash of ‘08 (let me tell you, there’s nothing great about recession), the painting hung above the fireplace that my mother said screamed at her to “Get out!” She was psychic, and the house was pissed that we blew it.

The morning my mother went to the hospital, catching us all unrehearsed, I awoke early, troubled by something I couldn’t name. She too was awake and sitting up discreetly in the brown chair under the apple trees at sunset, the dawn breaking through the window. She was in a mood to talk, no hint of the trouble to come only hours later, and the topic was ghosts. This, I thought, is what comes of living in old places, in old cities, with ancient air trapped in the walls. Together, we catalogued each ghost—a lot within a lot.

There was the woman in a shabby red taffeta dress, threatening water damage unless my mother wrote about her. My mother didn’t write, and the damage came. Then there was the force that chased me down the hall in London, a feeling of hands on my back, and the “entity” that cranked up a Victrola, while I stood across the room, alone. And then there was one she said she could see from her chair that morning as we spoke: “A man is standing on the dining table.” But, Mom, you can’t see the table from here. “He’s there.” Later, she said she saw her father at the foot of her hospital bed. I shivered because I believed her.

Now, I wish she would haunt me.

4. Item # 778: Women’s Ice Skates, Size 7.

White leather boots supple with age, soles firm. Sheffield steel blades sharpen up fine for carving a basic 8 into fresh ice. Durable goods were expected to last for eternity, which may explain why the past weighs more than the present. A California bride carried away to Canada, where she greeted the north with crisp efficiency, my mother tucked skating, along with canoeing, lake swimming and driving a farm truck into her hope chest. She was no nonsense, my mom, designed by and for the West. Her durability found its match in these instruments of speed.

In a still-bright photo she stands center ice, surrounded by pines in a pair of slim wool trousers and brown sweater, a white collar “setting off her face” as they used to say. Her feet point towards her future in precise angles. These are my mother’s skates, her only skates. In our time, once your feet stopped growing, you bought sports equipment once. I ran a finger along the blades and considered permanence. My mother had a spine of steel, yet these blades will outlast us all.

5. Item # 561: Highboy Dresser, American, 1960s; Thomasville, Cherry, Queen Anne Style

Condition: Remarkably Unblemished

Viability: Not great. “No one wants brown wood anymore,” said my father. And it’s true, the weight of unfashionable articles seems intolerable. “Your articles are nice,” said the Bulgarian estate sale manager, being nice himself for a moment. Standing over me, pressuring me to “Add more, add more, how will we make any money?” he is intolerable. But stop and consider the other side of old stuff. Listen to the idiom of the house as its contents converse. Cherry and brass dresser drawers make paired sounds: Wood against wood, sliding, a whisper of friction announcing a new beginning. Metal against metal, dropping, a click click click of delicate handles tapping against the plate on the face of the drawer, life springing into action. Nine drawers. Eighteen handles. Sixty-four syllables bouncing down the hall in a sequence never to be repeated.

I don’t remember when it started, but whenever I heard the handles click or clack, I thought: “There are parents.” And in that thought was embedded the mystery of adults playing out in the bedroom down the hall. Parents in their private world, a series of scenes I can’t picture, cast as a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, where the important dialogue was delivered offstage. Wood whispers against wood. Metal strikes against metal. In a small house, you can know everything.

Packing up, I make the sounds myself, pulling out drawers, admiring the workmanship. Selling old brown wood feels like a crime, and out there is someone rich enough to buy an eleven-room house and keep every damn stick.

No decisions today, okay? The largest drawer is filled with my mother’s costume jewelry. Everything out, dumped into a cardboard box, which is portable, ephemeral and issues only passing sounds: the screech of the tape dispenser as I strap the box shut meets the snap of aluminum teeth ripping the tape. This is the dialogue of endings.

Click, click, click, please, click.

6. Item # 24: Moorcroft “Pomegranate Bowl,” 1920s, silver rim, repaired crack.

For collectors of English pottery, this pattern is often the gateway drug. It was for my mother. For a start, the pomegranate purples and reds and blues are pretty and easy to take. The silver rim lends a modish touch. In the forty years before it came to land on the mahogany surface of our “new” sideboard, there had been a Roaring Twenties, a somber Thirties, and then The War. But the 1960s finds it glowing beside our chrome chair, my Jujyfruit Lucite toys, and the Scandinavian barware of my parents’ parties. Time is told by its materials.

My mother’s Moorcroft collection had grown vast over the decades, the bowl joined by deep blue vases, parrot-green jardinieres, ginger jars in cream and coral, basins glazed with sunflowers, most of it displayed in a glass-front cabinet no larger than the Houses of Parliament and lit by two dozen dim bulbs. I’d never counted the pieces, believing they were infinite. When my mother was taken to the hospital, (her “incarceration,” she sniffed) I left the cabinet lights on until the very last each night, letting the glow hover above the horizon of our life together as long as possible. In the morning, my first act was to light the pottery, forcing, the sun to rise on another day with you.  

Later, when it was all over—the hospital, the funeral home, the certificates—my brother and I sat looking at the bowl, all on its own in the center of the dining room table, its beauty distinct from the cacophony in the cabinet. My father said we could keep it out of the sale, “the piece that started it all,” but I chose not to. I imagined it breaking under my care and I felt safer selling it, turn it over to CPS—Ceramics Protection Services. If the bowl slipped from my grip, I’d never have forgiven myself. I’d dropped too much already.

Alison C. Powell is a critic, essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in Interview, Oxford American, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Guesthouse, The Guardian, Typishly and Inverted Syntax, among others. She lives in North Texas and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College.