Thrift

by Jennifer Fliss

“Sunset in Manchester, CT” by Aidan Doyle

In a store filled with discards – the Goodwill on Route 22 – Rhiannon dragged her cart along the linoleum floor. It was one of those shopping carts you could carry or wheel – for when the load became too heavy to bear. Small enough that she wouldn’t feel the need to fill it with all kinds of discarded bric-a-brac the thrift store was selling, but big enough to hold the things she knew she’d find and wouldn’t be able to leave without.

Already in Rhiannon’s cart was a long sweater cardigan – she would cut out the shoulder pads – a well-seasoned mini cast iron pan, one of those ceramic Christmas houses, and a small Catherineholm enamel midcentury yellow and white pot – no chips.

Then she saw it. A framed item in the wall art section, hanging on a pegboard. It couldn’t be – this far from home – this long from home. But she knew it immediately and flushed. The easy-listening overhead faded out and the sound of her lumpen heart replaced it. The picture had stared down at her every dinner. She hadn’t had much affinity for it. Just familiarity. And, she was understanding now – as in right this very minute – that familiarity can sometimes bring affinity if you long for it enough.

It was a print of a clown on a mirror backing, a design trick popular in the seventies. To bring dimension, to bring yourself, the viewer, into the art. In her childhood dining room this mirrored clown piece of art had had hung about six feet up, so that when she was about ten, she was finally able to stand on the tips of her toes and see herself up close in the mirrored part. She never had a fear of clowns, unlike many friends through the years who said it was creepy, weird. She even named the clown Barry. This, she was later told after she confessed it to her only high school boyfriend, made it extra creepy.

Here in this Goodwill the mirrored clown hung crookedly between a very large amateur painting of a fruit still life and a poster of Jesus in the driver’s seat of a red Ford 150 that read “Jesus Take the Wheel.” There must’ve been others made, Rhiannon reasoned. Her mother had never said anything about Barry being one of a kind. She would have, Rhiannon thought. Her mother was always telling her to avoid certain delicate areas of the house. Don’t play over by the Limoges. No balls in the living room. We don’t want to break the Boehm birds, do we? Maybe we do, Rhiannon would say sotto voce, which only sometimes was heard and garnered her a whap across the buttocks or upper arm or, twice, the face. That is very rare, Rhiannon. Very rare. Rhiannon herself was treated as if she was factory-made, common, replaceable, and not easily broken.

Rhiannon’s mother died four months before this moment in the Goodwill store (her father died when Rhiannon was twenty-six – aneurism, devastating), and Rhiannon had spent hours upon days upon weeks cleaning out her mother’s house. The last car-filled donation drop at the Goodwill had been only five days earlier. Had Barry been a part of that drop? She couldn’t remember. At that moment, standing in front of the clown, that old friend, that old foe, it felt like a fresh wound, though she could have sworn it had already scabbed over.

Rhiannon reached up to take the framed piece down, but it had been secured with those wire things that held bread bags closed. As if this piece of kitsch was particularly vulnerable to theft. She unwound around and around, standing again on her tip toes to unwind a little more. Her arms grew tired, paused, almost breathless. She returned to her toes to finish unlooping the wire. Then, when the frame finally released, it nearly toppled onto her head as she fell backwards and knocked over her basket with a clatter.

A voice cut through the chaos. “Can I help you?”

Rhiannon turned. It was a blue-shirted, khaki-pantsed employee, hair pulled into a tight ponytail so severe it pulled the woman’s eyebrows up and away from her face. Her nametag read “Denise.”

“I’m fine,” Rhiannon said. “Just trying to get this down.”

Denise pointed to a nearby sign. Please ask for help with these items.

Rhiannon flushed. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t see that.” She held the frame in her hands, the metal cool in her palm. She wanted to study it. Was this one hers? She couldn’t remember where Barry had ended up. There were so many bags sent to donation centers. At a certain point she just filled the black trash bags up without noticing what she was putting in them. Like memories: throw them away and don’t look too closely. She had no siblings and no one to help with the onerous chore of discarding a life.

She should’ve been more careful, and at first she was, wrapping breakables in newspaper, placing them in boxes. Eventually she gave way to a recklessness that would’ve destroyed her mother. It felt freeing, though.

Her mother had had a love of collectibles. The kinds that are prized at one time and then scoffed at later. Rumors of value, promising online auctions, Craigslist, eBay. This was the transactional milieu of Rhiannon’s mother’s life. Everything had a face value and a market price, everything constantly assessed for flaws.

Rhiannon looked at Denise, who she could tell was deciding whether she should be kind or surly. “You could have broken something,” Denise said.

“But I didn’t.”

“Well, next time –”

“There won’t be a next time,” Rhiannon said and bent to sweep up the items that had fallen from her cart. After getting it all in, she placed Barry on top. His large eyes shrouded in white bore into her. His painted-on eyebrows were thin and dagger-like. Orange hair emanated like a lion’s mane from his face. Alabaster skin, the red globe of a nose. The lips, painted well past his lip borders, were, inexplicably, gray. It was not quite the clown from It, but it could’ve been a cousin. A happier cousin, perhaps with less of a chip on his satin shoulder.

“Please ask for help if you need it again,” Denise said as Rhiannon left the aisle and turned into the next: wicker and wood. Key holders, baskets that once held wine, birdhouses made by children. She stopped, pretending to study a collection of woven baskets as she caught her breath. It was as if she’d just gone for a run. She flitted her eyes around and saw Denise’s ponytail pass in the next aisle and head toward the front of the store. Rhiannon put a basket down, relieved.

A man in several layers of clothes shoved her from behind. A toddler ran while his bedraggled mother called to him from several aisles over. Rhiannon had no children. It seemed horrible, to be honest, but she looked at the boy, cable-knit sweater, soft brown scarf tied at his neck. Cute. He was cute, and he turned to look up at her in that moment. They shared a conspiratorial smile. Would it be that bad? she wondered.

“Clown,” the boy said and pointed. She returned her gaze to Barry.

“Yes, that’s a clown,” she said. He opened his hand. In it was a small panda figurine. He threw it at the framed clown.

“No!” Rhiannon shouted. It hit Barry with a bounce and clattered to the floor. She picked up the frame. A tiny nick graced the clown’s chin. She glowered at the child. He sped off.

Anyway, she had no partner and she was too old for children now.

She rolled her way down the aisles. Over the P.A., employees were called to the cash registers, to the phone. When there weren’t announcements, eighties and nineties easy-listening issued through unseen speakers. Chris Isaak, Air Supply, Stevie Wonder. She had already done the kitchen supplies, the women’s clothing. She generally bypassed home linens and did so again. She ran her hand along the glass case that held jewelry and sunglasses. Atop the case, the supposed less desirables hung from a display. The cheap, the costume, enamel, and beads. Though enamel was coveted by many, she wanted to tell someone. Weaving through the beaded necklaces, her hand stopped on one. She freed it from the tangle of necklaces.

Could it be the same one?

She pretended to wipe her mouth, cough into her sleeve, and as she did, she placed the necklace in her mouth. To feel the beads as she did as a child when they hung from her mother’s neck. Not a toy. Not for you, her mother had said and had gently taken it from her daughter’s mouth. Less worried about choking, more worried about the beaded necklace breaking, scattering beads all over the floor. These beads, to Rhiannon, nearly forty years later, tasted like dust. But there was one note almost out of reach, but the feel on her tongue was the same. A hint of astringent lavender – her mother’s perpetual scent.

She heard a squeak and found Denise standing beside her again. Discerning potential trouble was Denise’s job and Rhiannon couldn’t fault her that, could she?

Rhiannon pulled the beads out of her mouth, rubbed her fingers along them like a rosary.

“You’re going to buy that?” Denise asked.

“I was thinking about it,” Rhiannon said.

“We don’t eat the inventory,” she said.

“I wasn’t. I –” Rhiannon felt the heat rise in her neck.

“You eat it, you bought it.” Denise laughed at her own joke and Rhiannon forced a smile that she saw, when she glanced in the mirror on the counter, looked like a grimace. “I’m going to get the manager,” Denise said.

“No. Really. It’s fine. I’m going to get them.” Rhiannon looked at the tag on the now-slick beads. $3.99. It was a red tag, on sale that day. Lucky. She tucked them into the fold of the cardigan, so they didn’t fall through the slits in the cart. “Thanks for your help,” she said, breezy. She felt almost asphyxiated in that moment and tugged at her collar.

She should leave. She should, truly, leave her cart and go back through the automatic doors, get into her car, and drive home. She didn’t need anything more, anything to add to her household clutter – physically and mentally – and she definitely didn’t need to be spending her money on things that had been hers. Things she had willingly gotten rid of only days before.

Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” came onto the radio. It had been a favorite of her mother’s. After dinner, before her father would return home from work in the city, her mother would turn up the radio that had been playing all day at an almost inaudible volume, and Rhiannon and her mother would dance around the kitchen as they cleaned dishes. Rhiannon had always said that she would do that with her own children one day. The only thing of her mother’s that she’d pass on.

She bounced down the garden and vase aisle, which was also the office and school supply aisle. While studying a terracotta vase in the shape of an angel, she sang: …with somebody who loves me… She could take this item home; it had not been her mother’s. It would be hers alone, and this thought made her feel strong and also lonely.

“Denise says you’ve been needing some help?” Rhiannon looked up to see a beanpole man in beige pants and an even beiger shirt. His face was the same color, his hair only slightly darker. He wore a tan necktie and altogether he looked like a crate of farm eggs.  Despite this, she found him attractive and quickly, very quickly, mentally ran down a future with this man. She in her ivory dress, he in his beige suit. He cleared his throat in that phlegmy way and she shook the image away.

His nametag read “Chip,” but she could’ve guessed as much. Beside him was Denise, fists predictably on her hips, eyebrows still taut.

“Denise is wrong,” Rhiannon said, placing the vase back on the shelf.

“She seems fine,” he said to Denise.

“She put a necklace in her mouth,” she said.

“Really?” Chip asked Rhiannon. It seemed he was pleading to Rhiannon to refute the claim. Denise, Rhiannon guessed, was a thorn in his side.

“It’s not what you think,” Rhiannon said. “I know these.”

“You know that necklace?” Chip asked.

“Told you she was a weirdo,” Denise said and turned to Rhiannon. “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”

“I’m wearing shoes and a shirt,” Rhiannon said.

“What?” Denise asked.

“Look, I’m sorry. I think these were my mother’s beads.”

“So you decided to put it in your mouth? What kind of relationship did you have with your mother?” Denise asked.

Not a good one, Rhiannon thought. Why would she want these souvenirs of her former life? Of her mother. Rhiannon was just one piece of her mother’s collection. Only to be kept displayed, dusted occasionally, and eventually, they both knew, she’d end up elsewhere – sold or given away as a gift.

“That’s not of your concern,” Rhiannon said to Denise. To Chip she said, “I’m fine. Sorry for the misunderstanding.”

What else had been donated in those bags? Rhiannon racked her brain. Her mother had a collection of brass baby shoes – none of which were Rhiannon’s. When she was a child, she would imagine these were the shoes of her friends, imaginary friends: Patty, Harry, Jessica.

Rhiannon moved to the figurine section. There amidst the Precious Moments dolls and commemorative state plates were several brass shoes, all soldered together and mounted on cheap wood. Would she recognize them? She picked one up, testing its heft. It felt right. It went into her basket. Another one, held up to the light. Without checking the rest, she gathered up the remaining three and added them to her basket. Her basket was almost full. She would need a bigger cart soon.

No. She would not let it get that far.

She made her way to the furniture section. The store was getting busier. It had been open for over an hour now and old people in holiday sweaters and young people with architectural hair filled the space and created din and the music was no longer audible, which she lamented. The white noise of humanity held no interest to her.

Among the lamps, side tables, and busted rocking chairs was a couch – emerald green leather. Maybe pleather. Rhiannon tucked her basket between two wicker magazine racks so as not to trip other customers. She allowed her body to fall into the couch with a puff of dust. This would not be a bad place to rest. She closed her eyes.

Rhiannon’s own thrifting wasn’t borne out of necessity. She had grown up upper-middle class, wanting little beyond a Barbie Dream House, a second pair of Jordache jeans. Later, a higher trim level for her car and one more bedroom in her house.

But she remembered most fondly the thrifting trips with her mother. It was during these moments that their relationship felt like something real, something tangible, in not being in their own home, in searching for new items. They’d explore thrift stores and antique malls, estate sales and classifieds. Her mother always wore a smile, always sang to the music, and always seemed to seek out her daughter’s opinion on such matters as teapots and tapestries. She almost always purchased a soft, old t-shirt for her daughter. Rhiannon still owned many of them and slept in the ones from her teenage years.

She wanted to stay out on those trips forever, never coming home, but they always did, and in the cabinet of curiosities that was their house, her mother again would only look at her daughter as if appraising her.

“Hello again.” It was Denise.

Rhiannon opened one eye. “Hello.”

“Are you considering this couch?”

“As a matter of fact I am.”

“Why don’t you lick it?”

“Denise. I’m not trying to give you shit.”

“Sure seems like it.”

“Why?”

“You’re just not someone who likes to listen to rules, are you? Social norms, that kind of thing.”

Was that true? Rhiannon wondered. Thought back to so many arguments when she was a teenager. Always breaking curfew, even if it meant waiting outside her house doing nothing just so she could break the rule her mother had put in place.

“My mother died,” she said instead.

Denise blinked. Lowered her eyebrows a centimeter. “I’m sorry but I just don’t see –”

“A bunch of this stuff was hers.”

“This stuff.” Denise motioned to the entire store. “This stuff all used to belong to someone.” Rhiannon swallowed that truth. “Divorce. Moving to a new house. A baby outgrowing stuff. Death,” Denise said. All of our inventory. And it usually comes with sadness.” She shrugged. “That’s our business.”

Rhiannon thought Denise might be coming around. “So you do understand,” she said.

“What I understand is that your story is the same as everyone else’s. Those things you’re buying, no different from this –” She held up a lamp. “Or this –” She kicked a kid’s easel.

Rhiannon closed her eyes again.  

“It’s just stuff,” Denise said, softened.

When Rhiannon opened her eyes sometime later, Denise was gone. Across from her were a pair of folding mid-century chairs, woven rope. Vaguely Ikea-ish, but with a sturdier-looking weave. Hans Wegner, she guessed, and was surprised at her recall. She pulled out her phone and searched for them on eBay. They’d go for a pretty penny, if she’d be able to part with them.

She sat there on her phone for another ten minutes. Searching, adding things to her virtual cart, assessing.

She heard the rattle of a wonky shopping cart wheel.

“Thought you might need this,” Denise said and pushed an empty shopping cart toward her. “Those are great chairs.” She pointed to the rope chairs. “Someone brought them in yesterday.”

“Yeah, they are,” Rhiannon agreed.

“Anyway, you want this?” Denise motioned to the cart.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. Thanks.” Rhiannon began to move her things from the small basket into the cart, able to balance the chairs on top. She held onto them as she clattered through the store toward the register.

So they wouldn’t fall.

She was, she knew, just like her mother.

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is the writer of the story collections As If She Had a Say (2023) and The Predatory Animal Ball (2021). Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.

Aidan Doyle is an art hobbyist from Tolland, CT, painting since 2022. He uses acrylics and is mostly inspired by his love of nature (particularly skies). You can find some of his works on Instagram @aidan.paints.