Why I Feel At Home in Thrift Stores
Every article of clothing, every tchotchke, conjures a memory, a story.
I feel the scratch of worsted wool in my hands. The sweater smells of mothballs and wooden chests in attics. I’m back in the basement of a cafeteria in the Bronx, where the mailroom holds compact discs from Columbia House for a penny, glossy catalogs of preened college students in cabins and on lakes, swaddled in their rollneck sweaters and goose jackets. Handwritten letters from home when stamps were 29 cents.
It is 1995.
I slip my hands through the sleeves and there I am, 19, a Snapple-drinking college sophomore thumbing through a J. Crew catalog. Ordering a wool sweater in charcoal grey. And when it arrived wrapped in plastic, I pulled it over my head and felt its warmth. It smelled of full-body hugs, autumn in New England, apples and cider, crackling fires and scorched marshmallows.
In a Salvation Army in Bakersfield, California, I’m reminded of a brief moment when life was filled with so much possibility. A moment before cell phones and the internet, before planes crashed into buildings. Before electronic bill pay, student loan debt, and ten vacation days a year. Before we circled back on that email and touched base on that conference call. Before you voted for who? created a fissure in the fault that became a ground that opened up and swallowed twenty years of a friendship whole.
A brief time when possibility had not yet succumbed to reality.
The sweater is $4.99, but it’s blue tag week where all items are half off. So, here I am, holding a $2.50 piece of fabric in my hands, which rewinds the tape twenty-five years.
In a Los Angeles Goodwill, I crouch down and thumb through the CDs. Not because I plan to buy any, but to remember a time when music was a weight you held in your hands. There goes Kenny Loggins, Amy Grant, Whitesnake, New Kids on The Block, and Eddie Rabbit. Always with the Enya. The Commodores and Christian rock bands I’ve never heard of. So many compilations of soul sounds from the 70s. Christopher Cross’s “Sailing,” which once had me believing the ocean was a deep, unrelenting blue with caps glinting white. Feet dangling out of car window when it played that summer when my mother’s face was slammed into glass doors and wooden coffee tables.
It’s then a piece of plastic puts my heart on pause. In the middle of an aisle where a small child screams and a woman wonders aloud if Starbucks mugs are valuable. Do people care about Starbucks? Is it still a thing? The woman asks no one in particular. She has wiry hair and wears a t-shirt that reads: I eat tacos, sometimes. While I hold a CD in one hand, I pull out my phone, type in the album name, and then stop myself. On another aisle, on another shelf, past the transistor radios, computer monitors, and beat-up Betamax machines sits a CD player. I plug it in, turn it on, check the CD for any scratches, and press play.
1991 comes hurtling back while an old woman stuffs Starbucks mugs in her pockets.
Stern firm and young with a laid-back tongue. The aim is to succeed and achieve at 21. Just like Ringling Brothers, I'll daze and astound. Captivate the mass, 'cause the prose is profound. Do it for the strong, we do it for the meek. Boom it in your boom it in your boom it in your Jeep.
We are 15, sporting flight jackets and jeans two sizes too big. Everyone thought we were Boricua because only Puerto Rican girls puckered and pouted their blood-red lips. We jump the subway turnstiles in Woodside Queens. I’m deep in a rage blackout because the five-card Monty guys made off with the twenty dollars that took me a month to save—who steals from a teenager? Those motherfuckers are grown. I’m shouting at volume ten on the subway platform. Sarah flips the tape in her Walkman and hits play. Who’s stupid enough to play the game? You knew you were going to get ripped off but you kept on playing. Who does that?
We’re huddled close as she pumps the volume on The Low End Theory. As one subway after another pulls away from platform, we lean into one another. We stand still like that, two ears hot and red, bodies stiffened and feet falling asleep.
I don’t want to go home, Sarah says. I think of my mother with her bedroom door locked, television blasting, tins of rotting peach pies and empty beer cans underneath her bed. Our mothers with their plumes of cigarette smoke and voices thick with envy. Envy of us, our smooth, untouched skin—how we reminded them of everything they’ve lost. My mother leaning over a poem I wrote—I was a writer once. Before you.
Let’s stay for one more song, I say. She nods. We stand there, pressing play on the tape, watching the subways pass us by. Hoping to be forever stuck on the boulevard of Linden.
On the floor of a church thrift store are a collection of what one might call art. Watercolor paintings on homemade canvases, framed posters and sepia photographs, a signed portrait of Alf, the furry alien made famous by an 80s television show—here lies a hodgepodge of art and the familial history of strangers. Low culture and capitalism. Pieces made with care and mass-produced posters of peonies.
A guy in chino shorts and Dior sunglasses picks up the Alf picture and considers it without irony. Is this like a dog or something? He asks me. No, it’s an alien. An alien? Yes, an alien. Chino man pulls out his phone and speaks into it as I edge down the aisle. Leaving him to prattle on about aliens having a “moment.”
I drape a sheet on the sidewalk of Thirteenth Avenue. It’s Saturday, 1985, and even though it’s Shabbat, the streets buzz with women in floor-length skirts walking arm in arm with miniature repeats of them. Most stores are closed except the pizzeria and the Carvel ice cream shop. Nobody’s buying but everyone’s shuffling.
I spread out the few items on the sheet I thought were worth selling. Propped up against a gate, I gesture to a large poster of red roses in slim black vases. I tell everyone in a five-mile radius about the weight of the glass and how I had to set it down a few times when carting it across the street. One would’ve thought I was auctioning at Sotheby’s the way I talked up the cheap picture and how I believed it to be worth ten dollars.
I sit on the pavement in my blue terry short set and jelly shoes. Everyone knows who I am because ours is one of the three non-Hasidic families living in Boro Park. They know my mother is married to the Israeli who paints houses, and has a family in Tel Aviv even though he’s married to my mother. And while we’re easy to ignore—goyim—Manny angers them with his gambling problem, dark skin and bare chest in the street. How he ridicules them in Hebrew and blows smoke in their face when they proselytize. Tell me, he would laugh, do you fuck your wife through a hole in a sheet?
They’re not Jews, he would tell me. I’m a Jew; they are mice running scared in the street. Keep this up and we’ll get evicted, my mother would warn. And Manny would shake his head because they still had hope for him. Hope he’d bring his family over and live a proper life. Hope he’d kick me and my mother out. Their hope keeps us in this house. Until two year laters when that hope gets us evicted.
Outside Florsheim Shoes, I hear the women whisper as they pass by. A kind mother suggests Sunday might be a better day. My knees burn pink in the midday sun as two men from the pizza shop stop to examine my wares.
Rosie know you out here, one of them asks. I nod. Of course, she knows. She was the one who unhooked the picture from the wall and said: see what you can get for this.
Jesus, the other says, to which I respond, tomorrow might be a better day for that. I’ll give you twenty for all of it, he says. Jubilant, I take the money and skip home wondering how many cans of Chef Boyardee and Kraft Mac & Cheese I could buy for twenty dollars. How many packages of the Little Debbie Cakes I like so much and the Frusen Glädjé tubs of vanilla ice cream my mother feasted on when we were flush.
When my mother comes home, she hangs the roses back on the wall and returns the trinkets to their boxes and drawers and she says, I heard you did good. I hand her the twenty and she takes the money out of my hand and walks out the door into the night.
I trace the spines of vintage books and bestsellers. In some stores, they’re sorted by color or name, and in others, they’re merely stuffed on the shelves—60s Betty Crocker cookbooks standing alongside millionaire secrets and poets who laid their heads down in ovens. I thumb through the stories people throw away. I page through recipes of baked Alaska and jellied ham, wondering about a time when people believed in ornamentation and a woman’s place was firmly ensconced in the home. A time when everyone was drunk and everything hurt but houses were going for a buck if you were a veteran. Years I’m grateful for never having known.
At the end of the aisle, I spy a familiar book jacket. It’s a galley, which is a sample book sent to press and trades in hopes you’ll be lauded as the next big thing. I open it to the title page and there’s my signature. It’s a copy of my first book, Sky, and there’s the familiar black and blue cover, which I always thought fitting because while everyone saw a girl and a bridge, I saw a massive bruise.
I hold the book in my hands and I remember the years it took to write and rewrite it. I can’t bear to open it because I prefer not to revisit all that history. But it reminds me of a party I threw in downtown New York in 2008 when I celebrated its publication and a year sober and there goes my pop weaving through the crowd after I’ve made my speech and dedicated the book to him. He’s wearing a sports jacket, white shirt, and slacks, and we pose for photographs. We were our happiest selves.
I don’t remember much from that night, but I remember holding on to him and him slipping away. Me reaching for him and him getting lost in the thicket of people. Me shouting, we did it! And he echoing back, we’re free! And I see us careening down Merrick Road and Sunset Highway in a red Cadillac, a Jeep. Sitting in a Wendy’s restaurant dipping salty fries into hot cheese. Standing in a 7-Eleven feasting on hot dugs and slushies after our Thanksgiving meal covered the kitchen walls. Buying our time in park verandas wondering if she’s asleep yet. Is it safe to go home? Wondering how many times I have to hear about her trips to Brooklyn and the white vials in her jacket pockets. How many years until college, until I’m free.
While the book was mine it was also his, it was a life endured and survived. A story of how you can love someone so much and they’ll never be who you want them to be. A story of first hurts and a life of dressing wounds.
But that night I don’t feel the cuts or the burns or the rasp of her deep voice filled with smoke and anger. All I see is my pop hugging my friends. All I see is us laughing. And I want to hold onto that moment, so tightly, so much, frightened of taking a breath and letting it go.
In Bakersfield, an orthopedist rattles off a list of injuries. I’ve torn this. I’m fractured that. The tear in the thigh is a surprise that makes him pause. He asks if I’m taking notes, to which I respond, I’m quietly weeping. It’s a lot to take in. And on he goes, reading one multi-syllabic word after another, translating from what I’m assuming is Greek it’s that foreign to me. But I read along and listen to my knee’s greatest hits.
Do I need surgery? You don’t need it now, he says, but we can’t close the door on it. Because there’ll come a time when you’ll be in pain again. When you might feel unstable on your feet. I laugh over a phone line and say, I’m in pain now. I think I’m often unstable. But I don’t go on about it because I fear the joke won’t come off.
After, I hop on my crutches, get an Uber, and find myself in a Salvation Army. I use the cart as a makeshift walker as I hobble down the aisles. I sort through gauzy linen blouses and silk slacks. I feel hand-beaded jackets made in Hong Kong and sweaters spun in Scotland. I consider a pair of pajamas with feet and reconsider. In a hundred degree heat, I add a pair of flannel pants to my cart. I feel the weight of two-ply cashmere and angora in my hands. I try on straw hats and handle teacups in bone china.
While I wear mostly black, blue, and neutrals, today I want a basket of blooms. I want floral teacups and fake flowers. Poppy-printed t-shirts and sweaters with embroidered tulips. I want pink slacks awash in micro-floral prints and 70s tumblers with daises etched in the glass. I want to fall into a field of flowers and curl the leaves under my fingers. I want the petals to swathe my skin and swaddle my knee. I want to crawl back to rollneck sweaters in 1995 and A Tribe Called Quest in 1991 and sheets covering sidewalks in 1985. I want the pop I knew and loved in 2008.
Thrift stores transport me to another time, another place — anywhere but here. Anywhere but this moment where there exists so few possibilities, and it’s hard to see the love and feel the music. They rewind the tape to a moment when I had all the chances to take and roads to consider. Not this sole narrow road in this loud time in the forever not-quite dark.
Exquisite prose. Very relatable for another 47 year old on the other side of the world.