TheBanyanTree: How to ReInvent Your Life in Twelve Weeks of Summer: a work of fiction

[TLW]

(continuing)

I got a wild hair last week to go to a garage sale.  I have a little
bit of padding of money, for the last time in my life probably, and
I've always wanted to go to a garage
sale in Beverly Hills.  I mean, what do those people throw out?  Last
season's Prada?  The Lamborghini that failed its smog check?
Tarnished tiaras?  I couldn't imagine there would be the usual Lego
sets with missing pieces and broken IKEA furniture.
It almost sounds like a reality show, doesn't it?  "Garage Sales of
the Rich and Famous."  Or "Yard Sale, 90210."

Anyway, last Friday I got an L.A. Times and looked in the Classifieds
under Garage Sales.  I checked Craig's List, too, but I had a feeling
the newspaper would be where I would find the best sales.  And, yes.
Estate sales galore.  Yikers.  I admit, I've always found estate sales
particularly fascinating, but they've also always made me feel extra.
. . mortal.  It's hard for anyone with a heart and conscience to go to
anyone else's estate sale without imagining what her own estate sale
might look like.
I really have to get to that garage out there.  Really.

One ad in particular made me dig in my Everything drawer for a Sharpie
to circle it.  And I did the thing I hate to do most on a Friday
night.  I set my alarm.
6:30 a.m.  Beverly Hills is an hour away from Hollywood.  Okay,
probably not that far, at this time on a Saturday morning.  I put on
the L.A. basic Lips and Shades face -- red lipstick and sunglasses --
and headed west.

There was already a line winding down the sidewalk when I got there.
I'm not kidding.  It's barely 7:00 a.m. and there is a long line
stretching down this quiet leafy street in Beverly Hills.  It's not
one of those mansion-type streets.  It's probably a small
three-bedroom house at the head of this line.  Two stories.  Nice
yard.  An older part of Beverly Hills, near Wilshire Boulevard.

The other people in the line all know each other.  That is.  I think
they know each other.  They all joke and chuckle and nod a lot.  But
it might just be the weird camaraderie that takes over with people in
lines for early concert tickets or midnight movies.  The "Holy crap,
we really are all crazy, aren't we?" kind of sensibility.  The same
sort of semi-euphoria one might find in a commune or cult, I reckon.

There are three types of people in this line.  The first are the
pro's.  Antique dealers, interior designers, consignment shopkeepers,
Hollywood prop people.  They were the least jovial.  After all, they
were at work.  They had very little interest in socializing.  I got
the idea that they would be returning to their beds at the earliest
opportunity.

The second group was made up of the non-professional collectors.  Hip
or glamorous-looking couples.  Reed-thin middle-aged women with red
bangs and three scarves around their necks.  Dark intense
European-looking men with very small eyeglass frames, their hair like
a flock of disturbed seagulls.  Listen, "tousled" is one thing, but
don't you think they're going to look back on photos of themselves now
and groan out loud?    This bedhead thing outdoes the mall bangs in
the '80's, and whoever thought we'd reach that new low?  Hullllllo?

The third group appeared to be people who actually needed things.
Young people new in town, who probably hoped to score some kitchenware
or cutlery.  Or books or bed linens.  they saw this as your basic
Goodwill hunting trip -- only at an ungodly hour.

I dunno which of these groups I belonged to.  I was just there to
watch, really.  With money in my pocket, a debit card, and the address
of the closest ATM.  One of the great things about being a writer is
that every experience is redeemable.  It's all grist.  So, even if I
didn't find any cool new stuff, I'd still have a fun time.  At least,
that's what I told myself. As I wiped snail fur from the inner corner
of my eye.

 The front door of the place opened at exactly eight o'clock, and a
guy wearing shorts and a baseball cap stepped out.  A murmur moved
through the crowd -- this was the "sale runner."  He was part
receptionist, part event planner, and part security cop.  And he let
people in the house only two at a time.  I rolled my eyes so far back
in my head, I could see hair grow.  This was like some weird
combination of Hollywood nightclub and Halloween spook house.  And, by
the way, you couldn't have gotten me out of that line now with a
forklift.

I finally got inside the house about nine o'clock.  The people in line
before me mostly made one swift trek through, eyes peeled for their
specific genre, and then scurried back to their cars to hit the next
sale.  Me, I intended to saunter.  And I did.  Awesome house inside.
Lots of books, in several languages.  Marble-topped tables and
antiques.  White statues with the kind of draped clothing that has
fascinated me since I was a child -- how do they sculpt such realistic
draping?  I love that! Upstairs, sturdy garment racks held custom-made
clothes, with the requisite dealers examining each item as if it had
magic up its sleeve.

When I reached the second bedroom, I stopped short.  In the middle of
the room was a waist-high pile of lingerie.  Really.  Waist.  High.
Silk.  All silk.  Charmeuse silk, china silk, peau de soie.  I adore
silk -- it's such a luxurious, feminine fabric.  And here were
slips and nightgowns and  Bed jackets and tap pants.  I fingered some
of the items, and pushed the outermost layer of the heap aside.  My
God -- it was all lingerie!  There must have been thousands of pieces
in the pile.  Most had never even been worn.  Never been worn.

Amazingly, none of the dealers were even looking at the pile.  Okay,
one did.  She wrinkled her nose and stepped around it, whispering "Ew.
 Underwear."

Meanwhile, my heart began beating like a tennis shoe in a clothes
dryer, .  There were some astonishing pieces in that pile.  The
original owner must have had some kind of  obsession with lingerie.
Or silk.  Or keeping her dressmaker busy -- her three dressmakers, I
came to find out.  And, bless her heart, I loved her for it.

"Tess.  Honey.  Back away from the lingerie," I told myself.  "Stay
calm, and act as if everything is perfectly normal."

 I moved casually out of the room to the stairs.  I didn't know what I
was going to do with it all, but I was abosolootly certain that, like
me, there are plenty of women who poo-poo Victoria's Secret who would
go ga-ga over this stuff.  And there were desperate housewives in tiny
towns in America -- in villages all over the world -- who need to know
that such beautiful things exist.  Girls like me, who grew up ordering
from the Sears catalog.  Who look at fashion magazines knowing there
is nothing -- nothing -- in those pages they could ever hope to wear
or afford.

Come-Clean Confession: I have history of rescuing things.  For a while
I rescued men.  My advice: Don't do it.  Ever.  Total waste of time.
Then I rescued animals.  My advice:  It's a slippery slope.  Too hard
on the heart.  Rescue every animal you come across, but if you start
going out to look for them... well, as I say, there's what we call a
slippery slope.

And here I was, determined to rescue... a pile of underwear.  What bad
result could possibly come from this?  It seemed like such a good idea
at the time.  It really did.
Once I was safely out of the room, I spun around and pounded down the
stairs.  The man in the baseball cap was doing some kind of standup
routine for the people still in line.  I waited to get his attention.
He was really into his act, though, so I finally touched his elbow.

He looked at me.  "Yes?"

I swallowed hard, trying to push my heart deeper into my chest.  So he
wouldn't hear it slamming against my ribcage.  "How -- how much do you
want for the lingerie upstairs?"  Dammit.  I should have called it
"underwear."  Underwear is much cheaper than lingerie.  Everybody
knows that.


The man looked me up and down.  He thought I was talking about a
certain item, I realized.  He thought I wanted to buy one piece of
lingerie I had found upstairs and that I had brought downstairs in my
hand.

"Depends on what it is and what kind of shape it's in."

I shook my head.  "No.  I mean... all of it."


The people around us casually chatting shut right up.  Their ears grew
points, I swear.
The man in the baseball cap raised his eyebrows.  "All of it?"

"Yes.  The whole pile, please."

His eyes shifted slightly, and he pressed his lips into a half-smile.
He pointed a few feet away and said, "Stand right over there for a
second, okay?"

I moved to the side.  He finished his standup routine, then beckoned
to me.  I followed him upstairs, sure that the pile would now be
rifled through, certain I was out of my mind, sleep deprivation having
made my (mostly) good judgement utterly WACKO, and yet I was panicked
to think that someone else upstairs might insist on have exactly the
thing I craved.  I had to concentrate hard to breathe and not think.

To my relief, the pile was still there, unmolested and totally
ignored.  Baseball Cap Man squatted next to it.  He lifted an armload.
 A couple of the delicious pieces dripped to the floor.  There were
many, many more armloads still in the pile.  Pieces continued to slip
out of his arms, as if the surfact tension had been broken and the
lingerie was brimming over the edge.  Baseball Cap Man reconsidered
his strategy, set the load down, and started to go through the pile.
A minute later, he realized the immensity of that task.  He stood up.
He toed the pile genttly with his sneaker.

"How much do you figure is in there?"  What, was this a test?  I have
no gift nor wish for haggling.  Just tell me how much.
"Honestly? I have no earthly idea."

"I estimate there are easily several hundred pieces here."

"Perhaps."  Breath.  "Probably."

"All silk.  She was allergic to everything but silk."

She sounds like a high-maintenance drama queen to me, but never mind.  "Yes."

"Some beautiful work here."

I nodded.

"All hand done, looks like."

"Mostly.  Not all."  See?  I can haggle.  "And did you notice  the
pieces held together with safety pins?"

He smiled.  He liked me.  Okay, he liked my red lipstick, but in my
experience men can't always make these subtle distinctions.  He knelt
and counted out some slips, then measured his hand next to the pile.
Finally, gestured me into the next room.

"Sixteen hundred dollars," he said.

"I'll give you a thousand," I said.

"Sold."

And that's how I had ended up with a thousand dollars worth of vintage
silk lingerie in my not-at-all-roomy apartment.  And it came out to
about seventy-five cents a piece.

This woman must have had at least one new piece made every week for
about 25 years.  Her husband was a doctor -- an allergist, actually --
and she emplyed three fulltime dressmakers.  The pieces range in size
from fitting her in her slim mid-thirties to her post-menopausal plump
days.  Some of them show strain at the side seams around the bust and
hips.  Many of them, her favorites, which were the simplest designs
for the most part, had safety-pins with tiny scraps of paper pinned to
them where she had scrawled "GOOD.  Repair and Let Out."

I smiled all the way home -- bursting into giddy laughter a couple of
times.  Sure, I had just spent a thousand dollars on somebody else's
underwear.  Yes, I would probably never again have that kind of money
to blow on an "impulse buy."  But something had come over me.  It was
so vital, so crucial that I become the steward for this woman's silk
treasures.  I tried to puzzle it out as I drove.  Something about
rescuing things.  Something about recognizing the beauty in something
others fail to see. ("Ew.")  Something about all the girls in Texas
who could never, ever hope to wear any garment even remotely like
these.  I had been that girl.  And now I could help her.  It's as if
that note was written about me, back in my childhood in Texas:

"GOOD.  Repair and Let Out."

(to be continued)