Erika Krouse: A Work of Ficiton • Cleaver Magazine

Erika Krouse
I FEEL LIKE I COULD STAND HERE WITH YOU ALL NIGHT AND IT WOULD BE THE WORST NIGHT OF MY LIFE

I work at Ye Olde Curio Shoppe downtown. We consign from the community—people bring in old family items and we split the take. It’s a good retirement job. They let me bring my grandbaby to work when my daughter and wife are at their own jobs or need a break, and I have my own section with the things I like to sell. I’m into Americana, especially from here in Ohio: family portraits, war memorabilia, old kitchenware and dental tools. Last weekend I sold a taxidermied great horned owl and a dictionary from an era when “digital” just meant “relating to the fingers.” I like to consign that stuff but I don’t take it home. I’m an old man with a cluttery wife and limited space in my life. So the Shoppe feels like it’s a little bit mine, even though I just work here.

Shoppe—even now I don’t know if I’m supposed to pronounce it “Shop-eh.” Everyone in town just says “shop.” There’s a heaviness in here that grounds me. All the items seem to have their own gravity from the years they put in. Beaded lampshades, arrowheads, snake oil bottles, Hardy Boys lunch boxes, antique sweepers from the 1950s, porcelain shoes with presidents and their wives painted on them. Everything means something, or used to. It’s different from outside, where I sometimes feel like I’m under a sky too empty and big for me.

So it was a Saturday—that’s my shift, Saturday—and I had my grandbaby behind the counter with me, fed and changed and tucked out of sight in his carrier on the floor. He had just fallen asleep when this African-American fella came into the store, in his late twenties or early thirties, good-looking, pretty tall. Taller than me. I thought he’d poke around, but he walked straight to the register without anything in his hands except for a go-cup of coffee. He pushed the coffee across the counter toward me, and two creams and two sugars tumbled onto the counter from his other hand. “I don’t know how you take it,” he said, glancing around the empty store.

Not even my regulars bought me coffee, and this fella was new to me. I thanked him, not sure what to do with the coffee, which was from the fancy place next door. I usually bring it from home. I like Folger’s. But the coffee next door is good, too. I poured it into my thermos, wondering if I should have kept them separate, how the fancy coffee would taste with my can coffee. Oh hell’s bells, I could hear my wife saying. It’s just coffee.

So the man said, “I was in here last week before one of my classes, looking for a gift for my niece’s birthday. I couldn’t stop thinking about some of the things you have here in the store.” His diction was stiff, with a nervous chug in this throat mid-sentence, like I get when I’m afraid to talk to someone new. The man was all tucked in and ironed, even though church wasn’t until tomorrow. I was wearing my Army cap and a T-shirt with baby spit-up on the shoulder.

“Which items interested you?” I asked.

“More like, they upset me. Like this stuff.” He grabbed a ceramic butter container from a display stand. Okay, that was a bad one. Not from my section. That section belonged to James, who retired here from West Virginia, and his section is not to my taste. James just set that item out the day before. The butter container featured the face of another Black fella, but kind of like a cartoon with big eyes and swollen red lips and like that. But fine craftsmanship, perfect condition, dated 1905 and signed on the bottom—probably worth too much to last the weekend before some collector nabbed it. There’s a demand. It had been part of a set, and we had one more piece, a ceramic depiction of a heavy Black lady in a head kerchief, fists on her hips, discounted because it was chipped. Meant to hold sugar. I didn’t take those consignments, and I told this fella so. Talking about it made my stomach twinge. It’s not my area. I resisted the urge to check on my grandson under the blanket.

“The owner’s not here,” I said, pushing over a pad of paper and a pen. “If you want to write down your—”

But the man interrupted, pointing at the wall next to me. “Also, the Nazi flag. You’re just hanging it in your store next to your counter like it’s normal.”

When we get an original flag in, we hang it low so people can touch it and inspect the stitching. You can’t do that in a museum. So he did just that, walked to the wall and touched it, and kind of jumped in a way that made him look like he was a kid, even in his fancy clothing. “Oh my God, is that real? A real Nazi flag? From Nazi Germany?”

His voice made the baby shift around, so I near-whispered, “It’s a historical artifact. From the war.” I felt proud for a second before I realized I shouldn’t.

“But it’s disgusting.”

Again, it wasn’t my section, but it would sound weak to say so. “History consists of good decisions and terrible ones.”

“Selling a Nazi flag in your store is a terrible decision.” He wasn’t angry, just factual in a lecturey way, from a man half my age.

Fear flashed across his face when the bells outside the door jingled, but it was just the wind pushing them around. Who would he even be afraid of in our tiny town? So he’d feel more comfortable, I tried to make my voice friendly, but I overshot and sounded casual instead. “Think of the store as a kind of museum.”

“But this isn’t a museum. It’s essentially a tag sale. You’re profiting from this, and propagating it. These objects are really racist.”

“America is racist,” I said. I love my country, fought for it, but never lied about it. “That’s America, too. It’s reality. They took down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad. They should have left it up so everyone could see what used to happen there. You can’t change history by removing the evidence.” Like Vietnam. I’m not like other vets. I think we should talk about Mỹ Lai and the war and all of it. I would, but nobody ever asks. Never. So despite the discomfort, it was almost a relief to talk this way now to this younger man, the way I’ve always been able to talk to my wife since the very first night I met her, despite her lifelong habit of rolling her eyes at me.

The man said, “I think they took down Saddam Hussein’s statue because people didn’t want to look at the figure of a tyrant who tortured them and butchered their families.”

“Should pain be hidden?” Speaking of, my stomach was really hurting now. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, which had a strange tremor. They don’t usually. I shoved them into my pockets, out of my pockets, in. I wanted the man to leave before he woke up the baby, who had his knuckle in his mouth the way he liked to sleep. His soldier father had died in Afghanistan. I missed the first three months of my grandbaby’s life because my own daughter didn’t trust me. My Nicky. I changed half her diapers; I didn’t miss one softball game or ballet recital, but she still thought I’d reject her child. Now, he’s all I think about. I gave the carseat a nudge with my foot to get him rocking, and the baby sighed in his sleep.

“What’s weirdest for me is this racist crap right next to ordinary stuff, like this carrot peeler,” the man said, reaching over and picking it up. “Like, here I am peeling carrots next to my Nazi flag.”

“Well, now, I can see about the butter container. I’ll give you that one, for sure. It’s a bad butter container. But the Nazi flag, that’s not your business,” I said. “That’s for Jewish people to get upset about.”

“I am Jewish,” the man said.

“You can’t be,” I said. “You’re—”

He waited, his face blank. Was he screwing with me? He didn’t look Jewish. Maybe he wasn’t even Black. Human, human race, right? That’s what my daughter Nicky says. Even though I couldn’t categorize him, this fella seemed pretty comfortable categorizing me.

I said, “A Nazi flag is history. A Confederate flag is now.”

“You sell those too?”

I nodded. Not my section. You see them hung on yard flagpoles and painted on cars sometimes around here. Even at a car dealership, waving next to the Ohio flag. My wife said, “Keep driving,” and we bought her car in Mansfield instead.

“Don’t you ever wonder why people are buying these objects?” the man now asked.

“I don’t ask. But we have Black collectors, too,” I said.

“Well, even I’m tempted to buy up all this crap so nobody else has it. But I’m an adjunct professor; I don’t have the money.”

“Young for a professor,” I said, trying to flatter him, forgetting that young people hate being told they’re young. Most of the professors up at the college look like me. He sighed patiently. I hate that, the sigh through the nose, like I won’t notice. My wife does it every damn day.

The fella said, “Okay. So how would you feel if someone bought your Nazi flag and then hung it on their flagpole next to some nice Jewish family’s house?”

Now I was able to relax a little. This one I knew the answer to. “That would never happen in a million years.”

“Because there aren’t any Jewish families in town?”

“No.” There was one. “It wouldn’t happen because that flag is way too valuable to hang outside.”

He flinched. Like I hit him.

It was like I couldn’t stop talking. “You know what flag we can’t even keep in the store? The KKK flag. As soon as we hang it, it’s sold.” I didn’t know why I was telling him this, except that it was true. I had made one of those sales for James’s section, wrapped the flag up in tissue paper and laid it in a garment box for the customer because the owner told me to. That’s a survival habit from the military and marriage, doing things people tell me to do without thinking too hard on it.

The man wiped the sweat from his forehead and examined it on his fingers. The thermostat was broken again and it was hot in the store, even though it was brisk outside. My wife’s word, “brisk.” I wanted to reach for my handkerchief to wipe my own sweaty forehead, but my hands were still weird.

I met my wife at a Rotary Club mixer, right after I recovered and finished my tour, after my second purple heart. She was not at all my type, with her smirky pink lips and the way she rolled her blue eyes and talked every time I talked. I like my women quiet. Well, I’ve been married for forty years to a loud one, so I don’t really know how I like them anymore. Anyway, back then, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to see her again, so I just started yakking about the things that matter to me, politics and war and everything that’s wrong with America. Then she said, and I’ll never forget this, “You know what, Arlon? I feel like I could stand here and talk with you all night. And it would be the worst night of my life.” I fell in love with her right then, and told her so. She said, “If that’s what makes you fall in love with a woman, maybe there’s hope for you.” I had no idea what she meant, and still don’t. She won’t tell me.

The baby woke up and started crying, but I didn’t want to pick him up around this man. Instead, I dabbed a little honey onto his paci from a plastic honey bear the owner keeps by the register for his morning oatmeal.

“You’ve got a baby back there?” The man got on his tiptoes to try and peer behind the counter, but I had already covered up my grandson’s carrier again with the blanket, and he calmed down in the dark with his honey paci. The man said, “You can’t give a baby honey! It’s unpasteurized.”

“It’s natural,” I said. “From bees.”

“Seriously. Honey can make babies really sick.”

I didn’t believe him, but the man seemed so distressed that I plucked the paci from my grandbaby’s mouth, and he wailed again. I felt like he was crying because he didn’t like the store, either, that I needed to get him out of there to somewhere he’d be comfortable. But that was ridiculous, and I had four hours left on my shift. I wiped off the paci on my shirt, doctored it with one of the sugar packets the man had given me, and plopped it back in his mouth. He smiled at me, and we both quieted down. I still had honey on my fingers, and tried to wipe it off on my pants before I remembered my handkerchief. Now my pants and my shirt were sticky.

“I don’t know what I can do for you,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.” The man frowned. The front of his shirt had a crease from where the iron had hit it wrong. “Trying to walk my talk, I guess. I teach social change.”

I almost laughed. “This is an antique shop. Nothing changes here.”

“You can change.”

Could I? This time I did laugh, nervous as hell. The fella said, “Or at the very least, you could stop consigning this garbage so customers like me stop complaining about it.”

“I’ve worked here ten years, and nobody’s ever once complained about it before you.” And that’s the truth.

“Nobody?” This seemed to bother the man even more than the butter container or the honey.

“So what do you teach up there at the college?”

“Sociology. And I write books.”

“What do you write about?”

“Racism,” the man said.

“Well,” I said. “I hope you have a lot of paper.”

By now the baby was crying again and spitting out the pacifier. He wanted a hug. I would have to pick him up. I pulled the blanket off his carrier and picked him up, his body wriggling in my hands, kicking hard against empty air until his strong legs found my belly to push against. I shushed him and he melted into me, cooing. I hoped the man would leave, but instead, when he saw the baby, his brown skin, the fella’s mouth fell open. He said, “What the—?” He looked at the two of us and his gaze flattened. He turned and walked toward the door without saying goodbye.

But now I didn’t want him to leave. Not like this, like he was giving up on me. I followed him, carrying my whimpering grandbaby. Even though I didn’t know this fella, it felt important that he not leave before he understood me. But I didn’t understand me.

“Listen,” I said. “Pick out something you like. For your niece, right? Just watch out for lead paint. Anything in the store. It’s on me.”

But the man just waved at me and my grandbaby with a helpless gesture. His shoulders slouched now, like mine did. I had done that. I had made him feel like me.

The man said, “I know that this”—he waved in the direction of the flag and butter container—“is reality. I teach reality; I understand it. I just don’t quite understand you.”

I said, “I’m sorry you’re offended.”

“No,” he said. “I’m hurt.” And then he left.

The man was gone, and the Shoppe was empty. It wasn’t a relief. It was the opposite. The weight of the place settled again, but this time it felt too heavy, the air choked with old skin, long dead.

I dug my face into my grandson’s shoulder. He smelled like baby. They all smell the same. I patted the springy, coiled hair he inherited from his dead soldier father. I liked the baby’s hair. I liked his dark skin, even. I liked everything about him. But just then I realized someday, too soon, he might not like me.

The baby nuzzled into my chest, but even that couldn’t save me. I was shaking again, wondering why the hell my eyes were watering. Two purple hearts and not one tear, now this? I thought, I am losing my fucking mind.

Someone else entered the store, a white lady collector who stops in every couple weeks to scoop up the valuable stuff for resale. I resettled my grandbaby in his carrier behind the counter and blew my nose good and loud, like I had a cold and that’s all. Then I sold her a Monarch typewriter and that infernal butter container and nobody complained about a goddamn thing.

Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the forthcoming collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, out with Flatiron Books in January 2025. Erika’s memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and winner of the Edgar Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Housatonic Book Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire.com, and other places. Erika lives in Colorado and mentors for the Book Project at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.