“I’m glad to have done it. You should have seen me; I turned merciless, really.”
“Do not tell me that,” Lizzie said, half laughing. “I don’t want to know.” And it was the truth, she didn’t. She felt a sludge of panic. “The masks, for Rose Downes? They were put aside?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, of course I’m sure; we put them downstairs,” Sarah said, doing little to disguise her irritation. “Along with everything else that we’re keeping.”
Lizzie nodded, but she was having that familiar sinking feeling, without edges or borders, that she had lost something again. She had written Rose that postcard, and she had never heard back. “You know, maybe I’ll just go up there and check things out. The sale doesn’t start for another hour, right?”
“That,” Sarah said, “is a terrible idea. Everything is fine. And Perkins said owners should stay away.”
“I’ll go in and out. I just need to make sure.”
Sarah shook her head and pulled her hair back, tying it up in a knot in one clean sweep, such a familiar gesture, Lizzie felt her stomach contract. “Because no one else can do it right but you.”
“That’s not true,” Lizzie said, but she could barely get the words out. Their mother used to do that with her hair, in the days before she got sick. Lynn would pick them up from school in her banged-up Dodge, the radio turned up too loud, and she would be lighting a cigarette in one moment and tying her hair up in the next, her skinny freckled arms in motion, yelling at the girls to sit down, sit down and stop arguing! Lizzie saw it so clearly: the sticky black vinyl interior, the brown-orangy shine of her mother’s lipstick, Sarah’s tiny perfect feet.
“It would be so much easier if you simply admitted how controlling you are,” Sarah was saying. “If you just acknowledged it, it would be much easier to take.”
Lizzie heard her sister, but her words echoed like faraway street noise, worlds away.
Her father’s short driveway was thick with cars. A string of bright blue flags stamped with Westside snapped in the wind. Inside, the rugs were already gone, as were the Barcelona chairs and the leather couch and the mahogany side tables. The air carried a slight candied smell. There was space galore, great empty pockets, yet the house looked smaller, not her own.
Come back! her father used to call her to say in college. Come back. But once she left, she left; she never lived here for more than a few weeks again. Sophomore year, her boyfriend at the time, an econ major from Montreal with a penchant for pot, landed a summer job in the William Morris mailroom. “We should spend the summer in L.A. together,” he’d said. “I can’t believe you’re from there and actually choose to live here.” It’s too much, she’d said, describing the artwork, the glass-and-steel house cantilevered over the canyon, Joseph’s cars. “He has more than one?” he had said. She’d simply sighed.
Now a slight guy with thick sideburns in a Westside Estate Sales T-shirt approached her. “Can I help you find anything?”
“I’m looking for Miller Perkins,” Lizzie said. “I’m Lizzie Goldstein. This was my house.” And it was only then that she realized she was shaking.
“Oh,” he said, his face more alert. “He’s downstairs. I’ll get him for you.”
“Actually, I want to find something down there—”
“No, no, please.” He touched her forearm, a light touch, but clear enough. “Let me.” A braided velvet rope cordoned off the stairs. He ducked beneath it, disappeared down the stairs.
Lizzie waited. She had talked to Miller Perkins on the phone a week earlier, but she began to nurse an odd, dislocated feeling that he wouldn’t appear. Maybe the estate sale was a ruse—she and Sarah wouldn’t see a cent. She watched a squat woman inspect a trio of sea-green metal canisters: Flour, Coffee, and Sugar, each stamped in a skinny midcentury font. She remembered that her father had brought them home from a flea market in Pasadena years ago, and filled them with the flotsam from his desk. “The veneer of organization,” he would say as he lobbed another uncapped pen into the flour can. “It’s all that matters.”
She had always liked those canisters. She should have claimed them. She could picture them on the shelf above the stove in her kitchen, or in her bathroom, maybe, one holding makeup, the other a jumble of hairbands.
Near her was a sturdy oak jewelry case, courtesy of Westside Estate Sales, inside of which was a cache of cuff links and a Hamilton watch that Joseph had worn for a time years earlier. Her father’s Rolex was squirreled away in her nightstand back in New York. Wasn’t it? A man with a bulbous nose tried on the Hamilton and she stifled an urge to grab that too.
The day remained cloudy, but a steely light streamed through the enormous windows. Lizzie watched a little girl squirm and dance. A lithe woman in a sundress grabbed the girl’s hand, hissing, “Not here, Zoe!”
The mother returned to shopping. The girl made her way to the windows. She gazed down into the mouth of the canyon, pressing her palms against the glass. Lizzie had done the same thing when she was younger. She remembered pressing hard, testing the strength of the glass, testing herself, when all the light and airiness flooding this house only seemed to add insult to the fact that such a world could exist when her mother had been taken from her. She had been terrible to her father then. And now he was gone too.
Lizzie returned to the kitchen canisters that the short woman had left behind. She picked up the sugar can and slipped it into her leather shoulder bag. Her bag was big, but not that big. The leather bulged with effort.
“Is that you, Ms. Goldstein? Miller Perkins, at your service.” A short man in a flash of color headed up the steps, hand extended, an exuberant smile on his broad face. He wore a navy vest with big silver buttons, a lime-colored shirt, bejeweled rings on numerous fingers. “I am delighted to meet you, of course, but—” His voice was silky, Southern smooth. He wagged a playful finger. “What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you and your sister to stay far, far away?”
“Yes, I know, I’m sorry. But a pair of masks is supposed to go to a friend of my father’s, and I wanted to make sure they weren’t inadvertently sold.”
“Oh, my dear, you’re worried. Of course, you’re concerned. But you know you shouldn’t be.” He steered her by the elbow, away from the others. He had a surprisingly strong grip. “The masks are downstairs, sequestered away, as we had agreed. I myself have been keeping a careful eye. I can handle things. You know, I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years.”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted to check. It looks like it’s going well.”
“Oh, it is, it is! It reminds me of the Thomas sale, last year. Did I tell you about it? Frank Thomas, one of Disney’s most renowned animators? Really, I was so honored to be a part of it. I was just telling Max—”