Nostalgia Sickness
written by: G. Rod Hamilton
There’s a strip of highway, U.S. 31, that connects Indiana to Michigan, where a grouping of antique malls operates as a point of interest for area tourism. Perfect for when vacation days are still plentiful, and retirees seek other pursuits than losing at our local casinos.
It’s also where I find myself from time to time as an admirer of vintage items and the history behind them.
As a marketing guy, I dig designs from bygone eras. Whether it’s advertising ephemera or stylized everyday items from any given era. I also like to collect vinyl records. Rock and New Wave are favorite genres, but I have grown to admire many others over time.
I used to drag my wife out with me to these places, but she is more the type to purge than collect. She had little interest in the quaint and sharp-cornered past I admired. Knowing this, I would just go by myself on occasion when I had a day off work.
I used to favor one antique mall known as The Antiques Peak, which featured a snowy mountaintop serving as the ‘A’ on its vacuum-formed sign. I found good records there several times before, but that honey hole has since dried up. Their product turnover is next to nil, and that is a problem for these places. Repeat customers must not be a huge part of the business model, but then there’s me. I’m probably the worst type of customer – I spend a lot of time and little money. If I see something amazing, I’ll just take a photo of it with my cell phone. I’ll admire it in 2-D and rely on my memory to fill in the rest. That maintains harmony at home as well.
I haven’t gone back to that antique mall for months, and I don’t plan to, not since that strange happening the last time I was there.
I remembered that gloomy February day very well. It was just above freezing, and icy rain peppered the windshield of my truck. The slushy parking lot was miserable to walk through and soaked the toes of my hiking boots. Upon entering, the soles squeaked on the tiled floor when walking past the front counter.
The elderly woman who works there greeted me with a smile, saying hello and squinted with some faint familiarity of my face.
Yeah, it’s me again, Rory. I’m just here hoping some new vendor might have popped up with something remarkably interesting.
I rounded the first row of booths and encountered a couple that discussed buying a wild mid-century art lamp, it being aqua blue with an atomic pattern on its shade. The woman bickered with the man over where in the house they would even put it.
I have that same argument with myself when coming here. I’ve always thought the art deco mantle clock behind the front counter would be amazing to own, but such a thing amongst our contemporary décor would be absurd.
As I wandered through each aisle, I’d glaze over items I had seen before. They’d give way to more obscure or partially hidden things I hadn’t noticed. I was starting to feel like I was in an old house of mine. The hexagonal end tables in booth #17 bore resemblance to the set we had at our Indianapolis home back in the mid 1970’s. I guess it wasn’t so odd that I found many things there that I knew while growing up. I saw a few more in adjacent booths. A Snoopy character bendy figure I had as a kid, I also had that Tony the Tiger bowl. I loved to drink the leftover sugar milk from the cereal, but the slope of the bowl made me dribble all over my pajamas. I had to smirk at that.
Throughout the mall, I’d see things my parents brought from special TV offers, among them an Elvis collectors’ plate of him in the famous white rhinestone jumpsuit. It hung on a lattice wall amongst other commemorative plates. These things provoked memories that resurfaced out of the blue. My trek there to admire design started to take a back seat to a viewing of my own past on display.
When I saw the Payday board game looking like the one we used to play, I recalled an ugly exchange about money my parents had when I was young. They went off on one another, and I heard the word “divorce” too many times that day. I remembered later my mother asked me in a hushed tone, “If you could choose – who would you live with, me or your dad?” I was stunned by the question as an eight-year-old.
I shook off that unpleasant memory when I saw a black velvet painting of a cartoonish girl and her white cat. She had large, sad eyes and played a tiny guitar. That one took me back many years to my grandmother’s trailer home in Georgia. Its copy hung over the couch I used to sleep on when visiting her. It still gets to me how much I miss her since she passed decades ago.
Collectively, these items had sunk something in me. Maybe it was catalyzed by the buzz of ages-old electric signs and piped-in AM radio songs, but I started to feel haunted. That feeling had fermented into a sort of sickness inside.
It made me question why the worst times must always stand crystal clear in my mind, while the good times blur like a cozy stupor.
I then heard a Carpenters song float from somewhere above, “…only yesterday when I was sad, and I was lonely…”
I felt churning in my gut. I should’ve gone home, yet I trudged on, thinking the feeling would pass.
I believed that the booth with the records was just around the next corner. Maybe it was the warm lighting affecting my eyes, but it seemed someone turned down there ahead of me – just a blur without distinction. Maybe he wanted first dibs on the vinyl.
As I rounded the corner, I found myself at one end of a dark paneled corridor where the tile gave way to a cement floor. No booths were down here, only a plain arrow sign pointing to The Bargain Room.
This is the place for items less collected, damaged, or scarred from overuse.
It was there that a nauseating mustiness reeked, and the quality of items dropped several notches. Even the lighting was less appealing with the industrial fluorescent tube fixtures.
One tube had a maddening flicker, casting a cold strobe on the entire room. That lent a sinister appearance to some dirty porcelain dolls nestled on a Naugahyde seat. There was some nasty mojo going on back there, and I could feel its underlying current ripple on my skin. It was as if misery pulsed through these items of doomed provenance. I knew I should’ve walked away, but something begged me to come and see.
As I entered the room, the abuse of those objects was evident. Desperation clung to each rustic tool and plaything. The furniture seemed fouled with lost hope. I stepped past an archaic set of golf clubs, rough with patina that echoed business outings fueled by alcoholic dealmaking. This was a trait of my own father.
One of the porcelain dolls seemed to mock me with its maniacal grin, I could visualize a pale girl gripping it with cold fingers in a forgotten post-mortem photo. I sensed her bitter end sewn inside its flimsy little body.
A headless mannequin slouched in a corner, wearing a faded blue housecoat. All I could think of was how similar it was to the one worn by my mother in an old Polaroid, blurred by poor photography and caught in a weary expression.
Among the items stood a battered kitchen hutch. On its shelf sat a yellow cookie jar of a three-dimensional smiley face. It peered blankly at me, numb to the sadness around it. I froze in my tracks; this is what pulled me in there. I knew that piece well, I ate plenty of mom’s homemade cookies from one just like it. At the base of the ceramic jar, just under the face, it read, ‘Have a happy day.’
Although mass-produced, the misshapen letters gave it an amateurish feel. Something about it made me question, “It can’t be, can it?”
When I walked toward it, I stepped on one handle of a two-man crosscut saw leaning against the wall. That swung its six-foot band of rusty teeth down on me with that blade flex whine. It barely missed my face, and I yelped like a shot coyote. The saw snagged on my jean jacket collar, thankfully without lopping off my ear. I pushed it gently back in place against the wall, not even considering the next shopper that’ll have to dodge it.
Maybe it is no accident that it acted like a sentry to the Bargain Room secrets.
I then proceeded carefully to the smiley face jar.
I thought hard about when I last saw it in my family’s possession, and an unpleasant memory came flooding back. That cookie jar broke one night when dad came home, ripped after a day of golfing and drinking at the clubhouse lounge. My mom later told me Smiley was accidentally bumped and fell off the counter, but I was awake that night and heard the quarrel between them get contentious.
I’d bet she threw it at him, but I can’t say for sure. The cookie jar was in four pieces, so dad glued the thick ceramic chunks back together. Its smile looked a little off after that.
In knowing what I knew, that once source of joy had lost its magic. My mom soon replaced it with a tall orange Tupperware container.
I made it over to the hutch and got a closer look at the jar. I saw glue brown with age filling the obvious crack lines, and that slight mismatch of pieces at Smiley’s mouth. Despite growing up a few miles east of here, the odds of this coincidence seemed like a lightning strike. We parted ways with this thing over forty years ago at a garage sale.
I removed the lid and heard a faint weeping, sounding not unlike my father did on the night Smiley was broken. I lurched back into a shelf of mildewed books, stirring a putrid breath. I quickly placed the lid back on Smiley’s head.
Dad sat on our couch, audibly upset that night for hurting my mom the way he did. I saw her that night rush past my bedroom door, crying, “No – no!”
My heart pounded; the sickness was unbearable. That place had vomited up my childhood, and I had to get the hell out of there.
I knew what had to happen. Smiley had to be smashed beyond any repair.
For a mere eight dollars and tax, it was worth it. I hurled the wretched thing to the floor, sending fragments skidding across the room. I’m sure I heard a screech in the depths of my ears, so I dropped it a few more times until Smiley smiled no more. Coincidentally, the annoying flicker in the fluorescent light ceased.
I scooped up Smiley’s pieces and put them in a plastic Wal-Mart bag that I had intended to use for record finds. I bashed it a few more times in the bag to render it rubble. Soon afterward, I could breathe easier.
***
After apologizing to the clerk for my pretended clumsiness, I handed her Smiley’s price tag and gave her a ten-dollar bill.
“I picked up the pieces,” I said, scrunching my lips. I showed her the lumpy bag.
“Oh, honey, my middle name is butterfingers. It happens all the time.” She replied with a warm, wrinkled smile.
Deep in those gentle blue eyes, I saw she, too, was rattled by something here but won’t fight it, she’s resigned to its power.
I left the mall with my gut still knotted.
I then realized that I hadn’t eaten anything for several hours, so I popped in a convenience store on my way home. Only one thing looked good among the many unhealthy snacks…cookies.
Once in the truck, I started to drive home. My tongue glided through the dopamine sweetness of the chocolate chips even as the cookie itself tasted stale. I munched defiantly while I glanced down at the Walmart bag.
Did it just move?
I dropped the cookie and peeked in the bag as one intact black eye stared back at me. It seemed like the shards around it were formed into jagged rows of teeth. I thought I heard a dreadful voice say, “That won’t work.”
I grasped the bag to toss it out the window, and a ceramic shard caught my finger. I winced as blood oozed from my knuckle.
I shouted, “This will work,” as I launched the bag out into the roadside woods along the state line.
My concern is that if I go back to the Antiques Peak and visit that Bargain Room – Smiley will somehow be there with an even more off-kilter grin.
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