4. Flea Market

The Maybrook Flea Market was held on the second Sunday every month at the Maybrook Drive-In. Anyone who wanted to could just come in and rent a drive-in space and sell stuff from the backs of their cars. There were some dealers selling antiques or new clothes, but it was mostly people clearing out their attics or garages and putting out as much of it as would fit into their cars. It was the next step to the junkyard, and people knew it, and priced their things accordingly.

We went almost every time they had the Flea Market, and never didn’t buy something. Often, we’d end up with our own car nearly full. My father and I would go through all the books: my father bought mysteries, and I science fiction. We had different shopping styles. I could spend an hour going through a few boxes, looking at each title, trying to decide which two or three I wanted to spend my dime each on. My father would quickly scan the titles, establish the box held mostly mysteries, and make an offer on the whole thing. If someone resisted, or seemed unwilling to bargain, he’d just walk away. I would have been too worried about missing out on a treasure, like the Theodore Sturgeon I needed to complete my collection, to ever do anything like that.

My father also liked to buy electronics: old TV sets, radios, record players. “We could use an extra record player in the basement,” he’d say, or “This TV, we could take when we go camping.” Sometimes these electronics worked, but mostly they didn’t. It didn’t matter: my father never spent more than a dollar or two for them. Buying a working television for a dollar was something he couldn’t pass up, even if he had to go through a lot of broken ones to get there.

My mother liked antiques. Not real antiques: we couldn’t afford real antiques. Old-looking things: a rusty watering spout handle one time, some metal lattice work another. A beat-up bureau someone had painted dark-green even inside the drawers. Whatever my mother bought, there were always paint chips to be cleaned up from the backseat that afternoon.

My brother bought stuffed animals. I think this made my father a little uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like my brother went home and played with the stuffed animals or slept with them in his bed or anything. I think he just wanted something to collect, the same way the rest of us had.

 It was just a matter of time before my mother and father got the idea that we should try selling at Maybrook. I think it was my father who first said it aloud. “Next time, let’s load up the car and sell some of our own stuff.”

We had two weeks to get ready. We cleared out a space in the garage for a pile of all the stuff we wanted to get rid of. I got some of my old games, or ones that were missing pieces. My father put in some of the electronics he’d bought for a dollar. “Someone could get these to work,” he said. “All you need is a soldering iron.” My mother collected up all her pre-pregnancy clothes that she didn’t fit into anymore, some old suitcases, a few “make your own crafts” Christmas gifts my father had given her that she’d never opened. My mother really wasn’t all that interested in making crafts. My brother sold mostly books, which killed my father and me—we would never part with our books—but most of the books he wanted to sell were babyish ones that had been passed down to him from me.

We got there early, arranged our stuff on a blanket and in the trunk of the car just like we’d seen everyone else do. It was a different experience having to stand in one place, having to really look at the people walking around. They were a lot scarier, rougher, kind of hillybilly-ish—nothing like the people around our block. I hadn’t really noticed this before.

They looked hard at our stuff. We had no lack of people looking. But no one was interested in buying. “That TV work?” someone asked my father.

“Not at the moment,” he answered. The guy drifted away before my father could explain about the soldering iron.

We made a few sales: a few pieces of my mother’s clothing, a couple of my brother’s books. But nothing like the big bucks we’d been expecting. After three hours we were bored and disappointed, hot from the sun. “Maybe we should just go home,” my father said.

“Let’s take a quick look around first,” my mother said. “Just pack up the car and lock it.”

“I’m not sure we even have to lock it,” my father said.

It was one of our best days at Maybrook. I didn’t find the Theodore Sturgeon I was looking for, but I found another one I’d never even heard of before. My brother found a rabbit stuffed animal—rabbits were his favorite stuffed animal, which again was a little strange, since he had no interest in real rabbits—and my father came back with a portable eight-track player, white with black sides, that he swore the guy he’d bought it from had tested out for him.

My mother, though, she got the best thing. She found an old sewing machine, one with old-style pedals on the bottom. She eventually put it out in the backyard, made it the centerpiece of a small garden. A couple of years of rain and snow pretty much destroyed it, but for that couple of years, it looked great.

“I have no idea how we’re going to fit that in the car,” my father said when my mother made him drive around to pick up the sewing machine. But he was smiling.

Nobody wanted our junk. But we still wanted theirs.