Kountry Klutter

Ever since my hair turned white, my store has been doing ever so much better. I believe that people are just more comfortable buying antiques from somebody who looks antique herself, someone who may have very well owned the items they are now purchasing. A little silly, perhaps, but such is the way of the world. Everything these days seems to be about appearances over truth, veneer over substance.

I should not complain, I know. In today’s uncertain economic times, a woman should take whatever help she gets. Why should it bother me if I am selling better due to a quirk of pigment, rather than any special technique which I have concocted? I am grateful for the extra business, I truly am; until the appearance of my wrinkles, the store was on the brink of financial ruin. Then I took up knitting, and sales really picked up. I don’t know what I would have done had I lost the store—I live upstairs, where I have lived since I was born. While I was not permitted in the shop during business hours until I returned from graduate school, I remember wandering through it at night, luxuriating in the heady scent of dust, leather, and furniture polish.

My father always ruffled my hair when I complained about not being allowed in the store. “They come here as much for the atmosphere as they do for the things they buy, Caroline. And while of course I love you dearly, customers don’t associate children with ‘antique’ or ‘sophisticated,’ and so your presence would not be helpful. I know you would not wish to hurt business, darling.” Then he would spend the rest of the night showing me how to tell whether silver has been artificially darkened to look older, how a straight line instead of a curve made a beautiful piece of Chippendale into a cheap imitation, how to pick the real Ming vase out of a dozen fakes. I loved those evenings, sitting in my father’s lap, wearing cotton gloves to prevent oil getting on the more delicate pieces.

Small wonder that I studied art and its history; my professors said that I could have gone far as an artist, crafting new priceless antiques for another generation. But my father was ill, and I was needed at home, to help him as the fake glasses he affected to look intelligent turned into real ones and his hands began to shake too much to do the accounts. Business picked up then, too; his aloof demeanor, born of a fading mind, was seen as the arrogance of the affluent.

Of course, that was some time ago. It is probably different in larger or more modern towns, but here people are no longer interested in sophisticated; I sell more rooster-adorned tea towels than I do authentic Shaker dressers. No more am I intended to represent some mysterious enchantress with secret knowledge. Indeed, many out-of-towners delight in tricking me, buying seemingly worthless items which I later discover as priceless. I look like an archetypal grandmother—sweet but dotty, a little fuzzy on details such as which price tags I put on which item—and quite easy to fool. They snap up everything, eager to show off their knowledge of hand-blown glassware and American masterwork paintings. They are certain of their ability to separate treasure from trash—certain enough not to mind when I am too forgetful to locate the papers of provenance for the genuine baskets woven by real Osage Indians in the late 1800s.

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The week before my father died, he asked me what I was going to do for contacts. Women couldn’t get into the antiquing business at that time; it was strictly an “old boys club.” We were running out of inventory and he was simply too sick to negotiate for new.

I just smiled, thinking of the purchases I had made at the hardware store that day, and promised him that I’d manage.