Stoop Sale

They sit in hollow steel framed lawn chairs, green and yellow straps crisscrossing under their weight. Near her right shoulder the frayed edge of a torn strap dangles in the wind, blowing in the same direction as some loose strands of her frizzy red hair.

“Looking for anything in particular?” he asks, somewhat excited, ready to jump up and bring me into this world of oddities that’s thrown, quite absent-mindedly, onto the sidewalk. I’m instinctively afraid to engage him in conversation because he has that look of someone who isn’t necessarily crazy, but just a little strange, ready to tell you a life’s story interspersed with long tangents that don’t make much sense. I have things I need to do. Time-consuming, important things.

“I think I’m OK, just passing by.” I say it and then regret that it’s true, because I’m always just passing by, passing through, never ready to ground myself in anything more than a moment’s consideration, afraid of the bonds that make this sort of place a neighborhood instead of just a City.

His breath escapes from a mouth outlined by the graying speckles of three-day stubble, and he sinks deeper into the law chair.

The sound of scratching paper draws my attention to the bottles of alcohol with labels coming unglued from brown and green and clear glass growing crusty and yellowish. Half-consumed at parties and during holidays, they look as if they sat in some dark cabinet, perched high enough so that the kids couldn’t reach them. The joys of situational consumption for moments that merited celebration gave way to the secluded storage of moments no longer blessed.

I eye the sad bottle of Manishewitz with the dried wine congealing near the cap. Long, wiry slivers of red run down to the base, with packed on dust that scatters the light from the sun. Maybe it gets better with age, I wonder to myself, trying to rub off the stickiness on my fingers against the warped fold-out table. But then, I don’t really think it works that way.

And there are toys here, stuffed animals with saliva stains, plastic building block sets in watermarked boxes, missing-arm action figures from the 80s, all well-used relics. I have an “Antiques Roadshow” complex that makes me daydream of finding something of value where I least expect to. But I just can’t imagine this stuff being worth anything, not even the amounts written out on the hastily scribbled Post-Its that haven’t been carried off by the wind. I spy one pressed up against a green chain-link fence, as if levitating and being held in place by a ghostly hand.

“That’s real silver,” he says suddenly, trying to engage me once more as I pick up a serving tray with fading Hebrew lettering. His voice is now a tempered whisper projected generally out onto the Park Slope street, this sidewalk in front of a brownstone that I assume they live in.

She looks on stoically, her eyes framed behind glasses much too big for her face. Tortoise shell style and slightly horn rimmed, but not too much, not too over the top, just enough to make it something a hipster might look for in a thrift store.

I flip the tray over in my hands, running my fingers over the disappearing markings. I still remember some things from my Hebrew school days and strain my eyes to try to decipher what it says.

“It’s the Ha’Motzi,” he whispers again, this time looking at me with purpose, searching for understating in my eyes, for a connection through time and place that ends here with us, maybe much too late after it should even matter but somehow it still does, at least to him.

“The prayer,” he continues, “you say over the bread.”

A smile that’s a memory, a life, a people.

It’s a little embarrassing, admitting that I might just know what he means, me still afraid of the story that might follow. So I smirk, look away, and put the tray back down into the pile of stuff, the things a world is made of, selling for the lowest price.

He looks disappointed, a missed opportunity for a sale perhaps. To his right, he reaches out his hand and takes hers, fingers tightening around fingers grown slightly blue and chapped in this November weather that has brought the cold sooner that anyone expected. There’s no reaction from her, just a limp wrist. The past plays on her parched lips, looking ready to mouth something that she has just forgotten or never seems to remember.

A couple shuffles past, laughing at nothing in particular. They turn their heads toward us in unison.

“Junk,” one of them whispers loud enough for me to hear as the tapping of their soles carries them away.

I look back at him holding her hand and drift back towards the tray.

“The prayer,” I say, my voice drifting off into silence. “I haven’t heard it in a very long time.”