What Remains

WORDS Allyson Roche VISUALS Keely Martin

My intense fascination with estate sales began two months before I started college. I spent those days consciously trying to store in my memory the affectionate touch of summer sun on my skin, the constant and imminent sense of discovery that lines each unexplored street of Los Angeles, the lazy rhythm of my daily drives, and the sweet tinge of freedom that bursts in my heart when these blend together; all of this in attempt to fıgure out what facets of home will be the ones I will long for when I’m gone. It was on my sister’s 14th birthday that all of these elements were put in line, when my family decided to follow signs that read “ESTATE SALE” into a previously unfamiliar neighborhood. While my dad mentioned taking me to multiple sales throughout my childhood, there’s only one that I can recall. At a neighbor’s house, a few homes down and across, I overheard a man talking about how he was dealing with selling his deceased father’s things. No details stick in my mind, but the situation itself lingered. I remember asking my dad if we could buy a Yahtzee board game and he told me it belonged to a dead person. He did not buy the game for me, and said it was because there were “probably pieces missing.”

Encino Hills, July 12th, 2019: The mass amount of wallpaper like flesh, breathing with green vines and leaves, yellow petals and rays of sun, blue seas and stars. Always matching eccentric pieces of furniture from the 60s, each room seemed to follow its own color-scheme. Every lamp, bench, and coffee table shouted the words“authentic” and “old,” taunting the truth and dignity of anything manufactured in the past 10 years. The backyard had no lawn, but was covered with tan pervious concrete and charmed by a simple pool defıned by sharp angles. Islands of trees cast bending shadows over scattered potted plants and lawn chairs. I wanted to drown in the layers of this home. I bought a book and a desk-clock.

But on this July afternoon, I entered a cottage-like, mid-century home in L.A.’s Encino Hills, and felt things for a house I had never felt before; I thought about a recent homework assignment where I was tasked with describing my dream home, and how I couldn’t come up with anything. No architectural styles pulled me in. No specifıc colors or shapes piqued my interest. In terms of favourites, I felt homeless because no suggestion or answer felt truthful. But when I walked into this radiantly yellow house tucked away behind a garden, this house that hung low to the ground, its roof like a clothes hanger attached to the crisp blue sky, I discovered my dream.

I became obsessed with Estate Sales because I felt like I got hints as to what could be through the process of sifting through. Far removed from the actual humanity that once inhabited the place, I could occupy a space that allowed for peaking and prowling, an act that felt invasive, especially when induced with melancholic wonder. In Emma Cline’s short story, Los Angeles, she writes about taking a walk and looking into each home in the L.A. neighborhood, “each one like a primer on being human, on what choices you might make. As if life might follow the course of your wishes.” It’s the same privilege, but with even more exposure, that I feel gifted when strolling carefully through a home. Gathering information about someone’s life through the items they own, where and how they’re placed, deliberating on what is performance by those producing the sale versus what has been untouched aside from the bright colored sale sticker plastered over it— all at the forefront of my mind when walking through.

Hollywood Hills, July 20th, 2019: A compact Spanish-style home, with a cream and burnt sienna facade like fondant on a carrot cake, lies charmingly stuffed along a winding, narrow L.A. road. I was DM’d the address from someone on Twitter, and was told that it was the home of a recently deceased Old Hollywood actress. Boxes overflowing with movie posters, theatre posters, and flyers spill out onto the floor, making it hard to move around the space. Playbills spanning decades of productions from Follies to Damn Yankees to A Chorus Line. Oscar campaign handouts for 1976’s Carrie, Father of the Bride 2, and loads and loads of dusty scripts. I bought two handfuls of rings, earrings, and bracelets.

While rifling through things on her desk during an interview, Florence Welch once said, “I like the past in objects.” This sentiment rings throughout my mind while meandering through that Hollywood Hills home, because everything in the space, knowing that it belongs to a dead person, becomes dead. It has transitioned to history and reads like a textbook about a time that was before, not even a time that was just yesterday, perhaps. The space no longer a home but a museum, a look into the past, a hint at how someone lived. The items, collectively, are imbued with the spirit of the person that lived there, but this spirit appears in a different way to me than to those in mourning. While the china

sets may have meant a lot to this particular stranger and her family, it’s the combination of Jewish Ways of Life, To the Lighthouse, Death of a Salesman and an antique edition of Little Women that speak to me. Why were the fırst two housed in a closet, while the latter were in the living room? Why were Kite Runner and a DVD screener of The Crown next to each other on the guest room shelf? There is a detachment in my understanding of this person who lived here and owned these things. The separation that comes from that ignorance can be comforting. It’s not my act of dehumanizing that person, but rather the act of piecing together a big person with little things; kitchen supplies, paintings, shoes in a closet, and china dolls. What is a lifetime besides just the act of collecting? Experiences, relationships, knick knacks and keepsakes. Each of these parts of life indicate part of our identity, and we imbue ourselves into these phenomena. But once the objects in our lives are given away, we don’t remain in our things anymore— not in the way we might have hoped. Walking through estate sales, people’s things are so exposed, but are their lives exposed? These symbols seem to say everything and nothing about us. Each indication I draw about the previous owner of these paint palette earrings and a series of porcelain knights

relies on assumption. Is it wrong to make assumptions about the dead? It’s fun until I see used plates left in the sink. The mundanity of plate settings becomes gut-wrenching. A 60ish-year-old woman asking about the price of half-empty cleaning solution makes my breath suddenly weary; something about the home abruptly feeling unfınished and incomplete always appears shocking because it seems hidden under the musty wallpaper, the linen, perfectly-made bed spreads, and curated garden plants, until it becomes explicit in something that seemed to be interrupted and curtailed. As I write this, one of my professors assigned the reading of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, a book I purchased at the estate sale that launched my fascination— back in that blissful, fleeting summer. I read the book the week after I purchased it, fılling it with notes and earmarks, post-its, and highlights. While revisiting it, I came across a passage that I dressed with messy scribbles and stars. It follows the death of one of the novel’s main characters, and, in typical Woolf fashion, addresses the intangible in the physical. “Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and

among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—”Will you fade? Will you perish?”—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.”