A Vintage Addiction: The Life of A Flea Market Child

We bought merchandise at an auction and yard sales. In the kitchen, we’d sit cleaning the dead bugs and dust out of bowls, the dried up perfume and powder out of dead women’s vanity sets and we detarnished stainless silverware with a murky, gray polish and old socks. Mom sat at the table pricing everything and packing it away in boxes. My little brother, Jamie would take the boxes and some tables out to whichever gray or blue van still worked and pack them each Saturday night. Sunday morning, at about four or five, I’d wake up, get in the car with Mom, and drive anywhere from twenty minutes to three hours.

Mom drove in the muffled sunlight, rattling on beside me about how the Bush administration was going to kill my older brother in a draft any day. How Rush Limbaugh was out to kill the poor. How Dick Cheney was the anti-Christ.

Trying to imagine the slightly chubby, freckled, seventeen year old Mike fighting on the front lines always pushed me into waking naps as the morning just snuck over the windshield.

After pulling into an assigned spot, paying twenty dollars, and unpacking, we’d spend the day together in the hot summer sun.

“Just sit here, I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Mom said. Handing me a pile of money—ones and fives—she began to walk away.

“Don’t disappear for the next hour.”

“I won’t.”

Mostly she talked to Steve, a younger man with dark brown hair and circular John Lennon glasses. They discussed history. His two table booth always had old pewter and train memorabilia while Steve always wore a shirt about beer.

Sitting alone, bored and sweating down the spine-indent of my back, I couldn’t care less about what she was doing.

A man walked up to our U-shaped tables and began fingering things slowly and meticulously. Leaning on his cane to admire a carnival glass bowl, unnaturally sheer orange and speckled in the bright sunrays, the baldness of his scalp revealed splotches of brown skin. Age appeared in the most disgusting ways.

I looked away into the distant crowd of elderly woman with carts and sewing bags, the families moving around in oversized groups. Each young couple pretending not to be antique dealers caught my sight. They whispered to one another, tan skin and straight black hair, about whether or not that ceramic figure was real Lenox or some cheap reproduction. Mom still hadn’t come back.

The old man slipped buttons into his pocket. Small, red glass in the shape of little roses—they’d been in a box marked five for a dollar. The elderly man’s blue coat had a gigantic hole in the back, exposing his fraying belt. Out of all the things, the expensive Roseville pottery, or the blue and white Dutch tiles, he chose three dollars worth of buttons.

Leaning heavily on the plain, wooden cane, he walked in front of me.

“Hello,” he said. Ruffling in his pocket, I could hear the clinking of glass as the buttons collided.

“Hello.”

He wobbled away, his leather shoes tan and brown in splotches.

About an hour and a half later Mom waltzed up in her over-sized cat t-shirt, a dozen bags of chipped and dirty pottery weighing down her lanky arms.

“What is this shit supposed to be?”

“This shit will buy you food so don’t complain.” She dropped the bags next to me in the van.

“Seriously, what did you buy?”

Opening the bags, I saw small trinkets: a copper Washington Monument thermometer that had long ago stopped telling the real temperature, a bag of dark, wooden frames with swirling floral designs, and dozen different marked and unmarked German and California pottery pieces. A deep brown Hull creamer and plate set sat carefully wrapped in thick layers of sepia newspaper.

“This was only a few dollars, I figure I can double it,” she said lifting out a mud-caked creamer in the shape of a cow.

“It’s homely?”

“No, but if I had the sugar bowl, it would be worth about thirty dollars instead.”

“Mom, but you don’t.”

“It’s a good piece.”

Behind her thick, rimless glasses and topographic map of wrinkles, I trusted my mom’s knowledge about antiques. Out of all the people I’d yet to meet working flea markets and auctions, she had the best understanding of purchase to sale value of an item.

She bought a perfume bottle for a dollar at auction and sold it to a man in France for $1,500. Apparently a famous actress’s museum needed the empty bottle, shaped like a small rose leaf, so her favorite fragrance could sit on display.

For a dozen summers I lived weekend to weekend. As Jamie got older and taller, he grew out of helping. I never could. Each Saturday I’d pack the van, go to bed, and wake up Sunday morning to head where ever Mom had decided to sell that summery Sunday.

Eventually Mom found a winter flea market in Owego, New York.

The ceiling stretched littered with 64 yellow lights. When I waited for Mom to finish talking to a customer, I’d sit back and squint my eyes, trying to pretend each manila light bulb represented a star. The yellow walls and ceiling never quite looked like a night sky though.

Sitting two Sunday afternoons every wintery month in the New York Lion’s Club building, I learned how to tell clear glass from the cheap stuff. About thirty old couples, my mother, and I set up rickety tables and sold only the best of the antique world. Mom called it, in the strictest sense, “antiquing, unlike that summer stuff.” The people willing to set up in the winter were the real dealers. Not just people emptying out garages—not just retired couples trying to corner the market on old McDonald’s toys or Precious Moments. Owego meant the big time, where pictures went for a grand and dolls for a few hundred—where big spender’s like Mr. Mike shopped.

“Now don’t cash this until Friday,” Mr. Mike said. His smile always rounded sincerely at the edges, while green eyes squinted joyfully beneath gray hair and orange skin.

“No problem, but first thing Friday morning, and I mean first thing,” Mom replied, handing me the check. $78.00 was an odd amount for Mom to charge, but Mr. Mike had probably picked out $200 worth of items and talked her down.

“You know me, I’m good for it.”

“I know Mike.”

For the five years I knew him, Mr. Mike amazed me.

“My father has a garage full of hundreds of cars. It’s practically the museum of the automobile industry out in Detroit. Now that he’s getting up there in years, I’m hoping to have it someday and maybe do that, open a museum or something.”

He said:

“I have a big investment coming in—should be only a week or so and I’ll be set for the rest of my life.”

And:

“I just won another lawsuit about the car accident, the one that hurt my neck. You don’t remember? Yeah, well, this is the third one, and I’m looking at multi-million dollar settlements on all three combined.”

He had the look to be the big man on a yacht. I could see Mr. Mike as executive, his gray-white hair being blown by a slight, warm breeze as he swung his nine-iron high overhead. Of course, every time he bought more than twenty dollars worth of merchandise, he had to make Mom promise not to cash the check for a week.

The Owego flea market didn’t last long. While other elderly couples made high-class exchanges, Mom only invested in small items. Driving for an hour and a half and making a hundred dollars wasn’t enough to live on. As a teenager, I demanded pay.

As the summer came on, and I reached the age of eighteen, the truth finally dawned on me. Although the history and wonder still lingered somewhere in the patterns of my soul, reality had caught up. The minimal profits and time consuming labor didn’t match up. From setting up to taking down the booth each Sunday, to cleaning, packing, and pricing, we barely made minimum wage for one person.

While walking through houses, I survey the small jars and glasses, the pottery and milk jugs. I try not to care. Summer Sundays, I walk the outdoor markets and watch children run around one another.