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Atomic Mod and Wildflower Mural(continued) Her work, she explains, isn't all shopping and sitting back while
the money rolls in, as most people think. "It's nice because I make my own hours," she admits, "but
it's not as glamorous as it seems." She gets to shop, yes, but she also spends the bulk of her time doing
extensive listings on eBay, preparing items to be shipped (which involves
frequent trips to the post office, sometimes hauling two or three loads
from the house to the car to the mailroom), organizing an exhaustive
inventory ("It's always a conflict," she tells me, "between
picking up a great deal, or thinking: I value my peace of mind and the
ability to turn around in a four by five foot space too much to buy
this right now"), and dealing with, as she describes them, "assholes",
all day long. "Sometimes if I'm really pissy — and I do get pissy with
people," Jaime confides, leaning forward with a surreptitious smirk.
"I take as long to ship things as they take to pay me. Some people
should just be put down. They shouldn't be allowed to use eBay. They
should just get on with their lives and forget it ever happened. "But I love it. I do," she says. "Mostly because I hate
paying full price for…pretty much anything." Jaime has been doing business on eBay for four years, but her father,
who sold his first Redware jar when he was thirteen, gave Jaime her
real start. "I think it's in my blood," she muses, flicking open a handkerchief.
Yellow-orange pears march along its sepia-toned border. "Sometimes
I wonder why I wasted all that time in grad school." She has a psychology degree from Cedar Crest College, and an MED in
elementary school counseling from Kutztown. "I've been looking
for a job in my field. I would still like to work as a counselor, but
it's hard when you're finding positions that pay, what, eighteen dollars
an hour? Which isn't awful, but I can make three hundred dollars a night
doing this. I go to yard sales; I buy textbooks for a quarter and sell
them for ninety dollars each." Brushing an errant strand of hair
from her face, she sets the handkerchief down and shrugs. It's clearly not just about the money, though. In between modeling
a pale pink pill box hat and digging furiously through a large cardboard
box jammed with track jackets, Lacoste polos, and worn-in graphic tee
shirts ("I don't know what I did with something. This is not a
surprise"), she slips casually into the story of her family. "My grandmother was a very progressive lady, and she drove a trash
truck," Jaime says, straightening, hands on her hips. She scans
the room before moving on to another box, and explains that her grandparents
owned a beer distributor in Doylestown for years. "Jessie and I,
we'd go in there when we were little and sit in the cooler. Back then,
A-Treat soda came in these little glass bottles — man, I sound
like an old person right now, but they don't bottle them like that anymore.
Or we'd climb up on the boxes and watch the cars come in." She smiles around the story, and I can see in my mind miniature versions
of Jaime and her little sister Jessie, with their matching Cheshire
cat grins, giggling on top of boxes of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Budweiser;
and then she continues, matter-of-factly, to tell me about her grandmother's
alcoholism, her grandfather's death, and the strain on her own family. "She remarried, conveniently enough, another alcoholic, so they
could proceed, for twenty years, to drink the profits." These revelations are uninhibited and unaffected; she
speaks comfortably as she tosses impeccably folded clothing back into
boxes, pausing only to eyeball a bolt of butter-colored fabric, embellished
with an atomic pattern in deep russet and slate, for any imperfections.
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