American Housewife (4 page)

I vault over the seat barrier.

The Scientologist shrieks like one of his fans when I drop down in front of him, cutting him off at the door.

Ha HA! I’m the first one on land.

The dew smells good. I am running, running, running! But I slip. I fall flat-out, grass-burning my knees and the undersides of my wrists. I recover! I’m on my feet, charging the sale, maintaining my lead, clutching my purse like a football, fueled by the humiliation that when I fell my skirt flipped over my head revealing what the cameras will not lie about: beige cotton underpants with a waistband as thick and wide as a ruler.

The Scientologist and his wife easily overtake me, but Berkshire Theatre fans slow Lithgow, and the tennis player gets her heels stuck in the lawn. Mario and Verbena chug ahead and blend into the crowd. When I finish eating Mitzy’s dust, I catch up to find her lingering at the entrance to Main Street. She is stalled at the mouth of the yard sale just like she was when she was boarding the bus.

It’s the smell and sight of books that have her in their clutches this time. Books are everywhere: hardbacks, paperbacks, mass market, trade; books with leather binding, embossed gold-leaf titles; it’s a maze of spines. The bookshelves that the books are sitting on are for sale. One card table has a heap of paper grocery sacks with a sign that reads: “Pack a bag for a buck!”

Mitzy says, “Bitzy’s the reader.”

I nudge her forward into the thicket of yard sellers. For every yard seller, there are forty shoppers. While there are plenty of knickknacks (ashtrays, marble fruit, Grecian lady lamps), they are buffered by books. It’s hard to know where to dive in. Once again, Mitzy has clamped on to my hand. I wriggle free to point out an antique car and bike area at the far end of the market. Surely she knows from auto shows. I lock my eyes on a row of overpriced Nancy Drews. I try to get my gump up to barter, but Mitzy’s still a shadow.

She says, “Bitzy took three books to the hospital for her recovery. They’re supposed to be funny, but I don’t feel her laughing. When she laughs, I get the hiccups.”

F’in Tiny says, “Wouldn’t we all like to see that!”

I swear he must have tunneled here.

Mitzy asks him, “Have you heard from Hef? Is Bitzy okay?”

F’in Tiny brandishes his stopwatch. “The show, honey. The show.”

Mitzy shouldn’t be asking about her sister on camera. F’in Tiny is not going to answer her. Unless World War III breaks out and Bitzy’s been elected commander in chief, Mitzy and the rest of us signed contracts to Dumpster dive in the dark. She’s slowing our segment.

F’in Tiny says, “You’re working, honey. Get to work.”

From deep within the yard sale comes the fan-like shriek of the Scientologist.

F’in Tiny jerks in its direction. He tamps his hat on his head and elbows through browsers. Mitzy drags me along. It’s a middle-aged mosh pit. But then a cameraman gets in front of us, and folks clear a path as if he’s an ambulance.

The Scientologist is trying to contain himself. The booth he’s in borders the auto area and is run by a gentleman with a braided beard who sells spare parts. The man’s wife sits on a stool by a cashbox, where she’d been reading until the Scientologist asked to buy the book out of her hands.

The book is an Amy Madeline.

“Come on,” says the Scientologist. “You’re not even ten pages in. I’ll double your money. How much did you pay for it?”

The woman says, “Fifty cents.” She closes the book, saving her place with a finger. She studies the glossy rose-colored cover. She asks, “What’s it to you?”

F’in Tiny says, “Yes, tell us all. What
is
it to you?”

I know what it is.

It’s a rare first edition with a typo the size of Texas. A copy editor got fired over that typo. A hundred thousand copies were pulped because of that typo. Riding the surprise hit of Amy Madeline’s first novel, her rose-colored second novel was rushed to print. Her main character was a pastry chef, and an autocorrected joke wasn’t reversed, so that every time the nice lady stuffed her face with
cake,
she ate
cock.
Reprints were published with a lilac cover. Finding a rose-colored cover is as hard as finding a real-life sixty-hour-a-week pastry chef who’ll perform fellatio with the frequency and gusto that Amy Madeline’s character did.

The Scientologist wife tells the lady, “He’s just joking with you, girl.”

Disappointment flashes across the Scientologist’s face, but he masks it with a marriage chuckle. He must be a closeted fan of Amy Madeline’s: a Mad Hag. Only Mad Hags know about this particular book. I wonder if he knows that this book is dedicated to me. I wonder if the producers know. I wonder if they planted it for me to find. Judging by their interest in the auto area, where Mitzy is riding a rusty tricycle like a sexy toddler, they didn’t.

I am as invisible as I am at Amy Madeline’s readings, where I sit in the front row, holding her purse. In literary circles, I’m not known as Amy Madeline’s peer anymore. I’m her wing woman. As a Mad Hag, I’d think the Scientologist would know about her campaign to get me on the show, but he hasn’t mentioned it. Nobody else on this show had mentioned it either. To
Dumpster Diving with the Stars,
I’m just
the writer.
I could be any writer. I could be Amy Madeline. They don’t know
Portnoy’s Complaint
from
Pet Sematary
.
Cardinal Reality Rule #4: Appeal to a new audience.
I’m a novelty—like a disabled vet or a little person—cast as a new way to breathe new life into an old show.

I say, “I’ll buy it.” And I whip out my fifty.

The biker’s wife snaps up her quick hundred percent profit and hands me the book, which turns out to be worth six hundred dollars more than I paid.

Mitzy’s trike is worth seventy-five. John Lithgow suffers a thirty-five-dollar forgery penalty because Herman Melville never signed a book with a ballpoint. Mario Batali’s music box is worth a hundred. The tennis player breaks even with her “folk art” (three stuffed animals sewn together like a totem pole). Verbena comes in a close second to me with a cigar box full of Rat Pack–era casino matchbooks. The Scientologist wife comes in third with a musket.

She pouts about her loss but throws a tantrum about her husband’s low score. She demands that the local appraisers get a second opinion on his Harley Davidson bicycle crank. “I mean,” she says directly to the camera, “it’s a Harley.
We
know it’s got to be worth more than that.”

The Scientologist says, “Baby, let it go. Enjoy your own score. We’re cool.”

“We are?”

He says to the camera, “Hey, all we can do is buy what we like.”

What they’ve bought is extra camera time to show the world that the Scientologist millionaire movie star is just a “regular guy.” Just like a regular guy, he passed up six-hundred-dollar chick lit in favor of something he can slather in grease. But I know he’s a Mad Hag. And I know that he knew the value of the rose-colored book. So I figure, he threw this challenge. As he is going to throw every future challenge to look like a regular guy. No wonder his wife’s face doesn’t have a line on it. It’s not Botox that’s kept her young looking, it’s lying.

The Scientologists aren’t here to revive her career.
They
are here to disprove gay rumors about
him.
So, why would he come on a show that promotes the most stereotypically gay pastime? Easy. It’s like me writing a novel called
How I Murdered My Husband and Got Away with It
and then murdering my husband.

As a reality game show fan, I understand that I’m manipulated to root for certain contestants.
Cardinal Reality Rule #5: Play favorites.
Producers make nice people look nice and not-so-nice people look evil. You think you don’t have a foul mouth? Well, here’s a reel of the twenty-three times you called your wife a bleeping slowpoke. When my season of
Dumpster Diving with the Stars
airs, I’m guessing that the Scientologist will be cast as the handsome dope, his wife as the smother mother, Verbena as the hillbilly, Mario and Lithgow as good sports (aka themselves), and the tennis player as the bitch.

The tennis player is a lovely woman, but our entire cast is lovely, so our producers are scrambling. In my interviews they’ve asked me what I think about the tennis player’s four suitcases, one of which is entirely filled with red-soled Christian Louboutins. They’ve asked me to compare her loud voice to some type of machinery that is equally loud. When I answer that her shoes are her business and her tone of voice is fine by me, the producers are annoyed.

“We thought you were supposed to be the writer.”

“I
am
a writer.” My voice cracks.

Damn. I know this will be the audio clip they play over my ravine-water-stained face or big beige panties reveal every week in the opening credits.

I say, “There’s more to life than writing.” And wish they’d pick that audio clip. But they won’t. I feign traveler’s diarrhea and excuse myself from the interview before I start to weep and am cast as the premenopausal washed-up emotional wreck.

The thing is, we’ve got one more challenge (our tenth) to go and I’m winning—by a lot.

On our third challenge, when F’in Tiny sent us to treasure hunt in Tori Spelling’s convoy of moving vans (to coincide with the start of her new reality show in which she and her husband try to get their kids into private school in Manhattan), I picked the oil painting of her mother Candy in a Halston dress because I knew the frame probably once held a Renoir. On our fourth challenge, when we spent the night in a colonial house, I bagged the porcelain doll that wouldn’t stop staring at Mario. Sure, I lost later challenges to Verbena’s thousand-dollar bill that she fished out of a cuckoo clock, and John Lithgow’s Confederate sword, and we were all shocked that the Scientologist’s motorized Barcalounger was worth fourteen hundred, but my profits have put me way out in front.

The producers aren’t happy about it.

Looks like, unless we’re raging drunkards, writers are boring. Who’s going to root for me, a woman who, in her downtime, reads fat Russian tomes under the low lights of B&B sitting rooms?

Mitzy, a much more desirable champion for the show (little girl lost turns family-friendly decorator, and think of all those tank-topped running shots), had an equal chance of maintaining our original rocking horse lead, but her enthusiasm has waned. She’s left a trail of press-on nails along the Atlantic seaboard. She is the youngest among us, but she lags behind. She stoops. She’s put on weight. She has night terrors about contracting Legionnaires’ disease in the Playboy Mansion grotto.

She tells me, “It happened to Bitzy. She says you feel like you’re a hairless dog in a mohair sweater trapped in a car.”

I say, “That’s so specific.”

Mitzy says, “My sister’s smart like that.”

I say, “I’m sure she’s okay.”

But I’m not.

Producers still haven’t told Mitzy how Bitzy’s surgery went.

If it were my husband who might be lying somewhere comatose from anesthesia complications, I’d have quit this show a month ago and risked a lawsuit to find out. But I’m a grown-ass lady with savings, mutual funds, and property in my name. All Mitzy has is a room and her looks.

For our final challenge, which takes place at the Pennsylvania estate auction of Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III, F’in Tiny saunters into the dead woman’s crowded ballroom wearing a smoking jacket and an ascot. He (or the costume department) is under the impression that old money dresses like Professor Plum. He holds his pipe to his face like a monocle.

Over the din of hundreds of antique dealers, interior designers, mom bloggers, and looky-loos, F’in Tiny says, “For this challenge you will have
FOUR
hours and
FOUR HUNDRED
dollars to bid during this small
AMERICAN ESTATE AUCTION
. The
WINNER
’s find will have the
BIGGEST
difference between what you pay for it and market value. Currently,
THE WRITER
has the lead. But an estate auction like this is full of surprises. Any one of you could pull ahead and win. Even you, Mitzy. Mitzy! Hello?”

Mitzy is huddled in a back-row auction chair. She cups her stomach as if her belly button might pop out like a turkey timer. The girl is sick with worry about her sister.

We contestants are sick with worry about Mitzy. We sit in front and to the sides of her protectively. If there is such a thing as twin sensory perception, it is radiating off Mitzy like a third-degree burn.

“
ARE. YOU. READY?
Dumpster divers?”

We are not ready.

“
I SAID
—”

From the front of the ballroom, which is packed to the stained-glass Tiffany windows (each available at starting bids of $150,000), the auctioneer taps his gavel. He directs his gaze at F’in Tiny.
Dumpster Diving with the Stars
is a guest in Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III’s palatial country home. The auctioneer is the gentleman with his name in the catalog, which means that he is the host, not F’in Tiny. With his tap, the auctioneer is giving F’in Tiny and his band of interlopers one and only one do-over to get what will surely be our bridled fervor on tape.

F’in Tiny clears his throat and slips his pipe in his pocket. He ignores a boom microphone that a producer has ordered to be dangled above his blond highlights. He asks, “Are you ready, Dumpster divers?”

We nod like a secretary’s desk edge of bobbleheads. Out of respect to Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III and for Mitzy’s sake, we are not going to whoop it up.

The auction begins.

Verbena is the first Dumpster diver to raise her paddle. She thrusts it up like the Day-Glo flag she waves to signal worm pits in the woods on
Nightcrawlers.
She wants Mrs. Giles Everett Preston III’s mismatched sugar bowl, and I think she may go so far as to stand on her chair and jockey across the heads of other bidders to get it.

The auctioneer says, “Do I have a hundred? One-twenty-five? One-fifty? Two?”

He most certainly does. And how. The sugar bowl is snatched from Verbena’s grasp and sells for three thousand, two hundred and twenty-five bucks.