Forty-two was great. I went back to Goodwill to reclaim what forty-one stuffed in the bin, but I did even better. I got what thirteen, twenty-six, fifty-eight, and eighty-four planted there.
This was only possible because Floyd supervises the donation door. Floyd pays attention with interest. Floyd sits and waits on the Home Accents depository, swinging his legs. He is twitchy all the way to the grommets of his unlaced Chuck Taylors. I do not know where Goodwill found Floyd, but he is what my grandmother would call “a find.”
Floyd was there when I was forty-one. I had a doleful box the size of Belgium, filled with milk glass chickens and resin angels. I could not release them to the bin, because Floyd was sitting on it.
Goodwill volunteers are trained to take everything without question. There is a prohibition against breaking the seal of your story. Whether offered an unworn wedding gown, a marble bust of Leonard Bernstein, or an original van Gogh, the only answer is, “Thank you. Would you like a product donation receipt?”
Floyd has received a special dispensation to go off-script. Floyd jostled my chickens. Floyd demanded, “Why are you surrendering these?”
If his eyes were less kind, mine would have filled with tears. My tendons were already on the verge of gelatin. I felt like I was stuffing my own grandmother in the bin. Floyd’s question stood outside my burning building with a trampoline. Any answer would find a safe landing.
“Because I have too many.” I had not been granted authority to deviate from the party line.
“No one has too many.” Floyd held a chicken in each hand. “These are meant to come in galumphin’ hordes. Line ‘em up in the kitchen window. One by itself would be sad.” He unwrapped hen after hen. “Don’t give ‘em up. Get more. Assemble flocks and flotillas.”
“My husband says I have too many.”
“Tell him he’s wrong.” Floyd continued unwrapping chickens. He reached the angels. “Aw, dammit.”
“What?”
“You’re telling me you have too many angels, too?”
“We’re in a small condo.”
Floyd placed an angel on a chicken’s back. “What is space for?”
We were no longer talking about tchotchkes.
“I’ll take ‘em,” Floyd lamented. “On one condition.”
I contemplated grabbing my porcelain poultry and shooting down the road to the Salvation Army. Floyd had activated a forcefield, so I stayed. “OK.”
“Get some real angels.”
“Real angels?”
“You ever read about real angels?” Floyd cradled a chicken in his palm, stroking it like a gerbil. “Them Old Testament angels, they’re not pretty princesses with glitter eyelids.”
“My great-aunts would be so disappointed.”
Floyd shook his head. “Everyone who sees ‘em falls down like they’re dead. You think they’d cause that reaction if they were lilac ladies at a garden party?”
“Perhaps not.”
He tugged at his sideburns, enhancing his resemblance to a Jim Henson creation. “They’ve got six wings. They’re covered in eyes. Read about it. Everyone falls down like they’re dead. I’m not making it up. Get yourself some of those angels, and I’ll take these.”
I pictured a Terrifying Seraph Super Sale at Hallmark. I imagined giving one to my husband for Christmas. “I’ll check TJ Maxx.”
Floyd hopped off the Home Accents depository. “You know where to look.”
The next time I brought a box to Goodwill, Floyd was wearing a mask and scribbling on a yellow legal pad. I did not expect him to remember me. I did not realize I was dealing with Floyd.
He barely looked up. “Got your angels?” He sneezed.
“Are you sick?”
“I’m inconvenienced, man. I’m on a med that sounds like an Icelandic warrior. Moondoggavir or somethin’ like that. I won’t die, but I’m a gastrointestinal fiesta.”
I wondered what people were talking about at the Salvation Army. He finished what he was writing.
“What are you writing?”
“I got a running list.” Floyd adjusted his mask. “Every day I write ten things that aren’t terrible.”
“That’s brilliant.”
“There’s never just ten.” He lowered his strawberry thatch of eyebrows. “Whaddya got?”
I was not going to cry in front of Floyd. I was not going to cry in front of Floyd. I unfolded my green velvet dress, the one I bought as a surprise when I heard we had orchestra tickets. I cried in front of Floyd.
Floyd crossed his arms. “Nope.”
“Nope?”
“I’m not takin’ that. That is bangin’.”
I remembered my lines. “It will make someone happy.”
“It will make you look like friggin’ Isabella Rosellini. That’s your dress.”
It was plush between my fingers, soft as the stuffed animals who had found asylum in my parents’ attic. I had been going for Audrey Hepburn. I had emerged from the bathroom in full regalia, foolish enough to twirl. I gashed my forehead on the edge of contempt. I staunched the bleeding during the speech on age-appropriate attire. I reconstituted myself in black pants and a button-down.
"It’s rather dramatic. It might be a little young for me.”
“You don’t believe that. What are you, thirty?”
I perceived that Floyd was either a prophet or suffering from end-stage retinopathy. “I’m forty-one.”
“I’m not taking your dress. Shove it in your trunk if you have to.”
Floyd always took my books, but he didn’t like it. “They’re old friends, man. They’re gonna cry alphabet soup all over me if you ditch ‘em.” He flipped through a cranberry hardcover. “Look at this. This is written by Ingleborg Huhn.”
“You know Ingleborg Huhn?”
“No! But he’s your home slice. Look, you highlighted nearly every paragraph.” Floyd turned Eudaimonia and Resistance in my face. “You loved this book.”
“I highlight everything. It’s stupid. It defeats the purpose.”
“I disagree. What the hell is eudaimonia?” Floyd’s shoelaces jiggled like linguini.
I attempted to sit on the lid of the stiff voice. It said I had abnormal interests. I had an ego the size of Asia. I should never flaunt my vocabulary in public. I was overly inclined to highlight. “It means well-being.”
“Ingleborg, my dude!”
The jack-in-the-box was too strong, and it hurled me off my seat. “I’m a giant dork. Kind of embarrassing.”
“Stop the ventriloquist crap. And everyone should highlight everything.”
I reconsidered the book. “Alright. I’ll take that one back.”
“No, I’m taking these.” Floyd closed the box. “I wanna know what Ingleborg knows. I got a lot to learn. I was born yesterday, man.”
“Me too.”
“Pity the bastards who weren’t.”
Goodwill would not take the fluorescent parka with the faux fur collar, not even when I adduced evidence that “only someone who wants to draw attention to herself would wear this.”
“But don’t you?” Floyd had been reading a book called The Untold History of Cola when I arrived.
“Don’t I what?”
“Want to draw attention to yourself? Isn’t that the toot?”
I found myself incapable of disagreeing with a proposition ending in “the toot.” “I think that’s why my Mom got me this silly coat, actually.”
“Crap, it’s from your mom? No way am I taking that.”
“I’m running out of room in my trunk.”
I was also running out of forty-one. I attempted to come up with ten things that weren’t terrible but petered out after two. I read the book of Ezekiel and dreamed of skyscraper seraphs with kind eyes. I fell down like I was dead. I got up. I bought legal pads. I produced legal documents. I changed locks. I repatriated stuffed animals.
Floyd knew when I turned forty-two.
“This trash, I’ll take.” He had barely evaluated the box.
“How do you know what’s—”
“—these are someone else’s.” He lifted a doleful cardigan as though hazmat should be notified. He sneezed visible droplets over a congress of beige items. “These were never yours to lose.”
“Well, I was born yesterday.”
“We’ll sell ‘em for twenty cents.” He scowled at a photograph of cacti. “This is depressing. You should get some iridescent trippy peacocks for your walls. Flamingos and shit.”
“That’s a great idea.”
The unburdening took a year. Beady winter beanies and framed reprints of thunderstorms kept turning up. Even a few of my own acquisitions had to go, like the nightgown with fingerprints no detergent could dissolve. I befriended the choir in the rafters of my ribs. I counted on Goodwill when a placemat or a soap dish dealt out memories. My mother and my boss both observed that I looked younger. I bought tickets to a lecture by Ingleborg Huhn.
I asked Floyd if any of the chickens and angels were still around. “Naw. You know they got snatched up.”
“I hope they make someone happy.”
“Go buy new stuff.” Floyd gestured with a swoosh of his long arms. “Get headbands with cat ears. Get a music box with a ballerina. Get old lady puff paint sweatshirts. Go friggin’ crazy in there. Someone just donated some freaky hand-carved baboons.”
“I want it all.”
“Eudaimonia, dude. Goodwill’s gotcha.”