Second Chances

The mystery safe had been on the sales floor at the St. Vincent De Paul store ever since she started going there five or six years ago. The safe was a murky aqua blue and about 3 feet high, and it had a $69 price tag. I’m sure it was a pretty good safe, but the combination had been long lost. I don’t know much about safes, but I suspect this would compromise its value.

“There could be a million dollars in there, just sitting there,” she said. “Or an unpublished Dostoevsky manuscript. Or a human head.”

“Maybe we should buy it,” I suggested. “We could blow it up. Or hire a safecracker. Knowing you, you’ve probably got one in your address book.”

“I wonder if they’d let us blow it up here. That way we wouldn’t have to move it.”

She loved thrift stores, along with rummage sales and EBay. Basically, she just really loved stuff. All sorts of it. She collected milk glass, Bauer pottery and old ceramic pot lids for tooth powder. Lately she had also developed a troubling fixation with scissors. She wasn’t so much a pack rat as a collector whose passions were so numerous and eclectic as to converge into something that might resemble compulsive hoarding. I was the opposite, with a tendency to junk any item in the household I hadn’t used or read or played with for more than my arbitrary time frame of 14 months. If we stayed together, this would be a problem: Before me lay a specter of shelves groaning with dishes, closets stuffed with other people’s photo albums, avalanches of three-legged chairs in the garage and the paralyzing frustration I feel when confronted with clutter. Could a purger and a binger find domestic bliss?

Her fondness for thrift stores extended well beyond her thrill over a good treasure hunt, although that was a good part of it. Thrift stores were her supply depot. Her job took her all over town, and there were days when she was working double shifts and all but lived in her car. If she needed a clean outfit, she popped into a thrift store and plucked one off the rack.

She grew up in Los Angeles but was the daughter of hardscrabble Midwestern parents who’d grown up poor. For them, the Great Depression was a phantom that may have been pushed off center stage but was always ready for a curtain call. Scavenging was in her blood; her father was a raider of dumpsters and refuse heaps who brought home boxes of wine, unopened chocolates, old television sets and broken typewriters, all of which were either used, fixed or sold. On our first date, she spotted a chest of drawers discarded in an alley. She ran to her car, plucked a screwdriver from the trunk and pulled off the drawer handles. They were ornate, and she would use them in her art.

She had style in abundance. And yet she was wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters. “I refuse to wear anything but handmade leather-soled designer shoes, and I refuse to pay more than $6 for them,” she liked to say. Women at the parties she catered in Beverly Hills and Hollywood were always asking what boutiques she shopped in. When she told them Goodwill, they were never sure whether to take her seriously. Certainly she had an eye, if not an internal homing mechanism.

Among America’s mythic, puritanical virtues, frugality has not so much been lost as actively and scornfully flung away. People these days are less apt to talk about economizing than the “psychology of abundance,” which to me always sounded like a mental tactic to ignore the fact that you don’t have any money. She did not need Suzie Ormand to tell her there was gold in the loose change that fell between the car seats. Coming out of a marriage with $5,000 and a 10-year-old car, she rented a room in a friend’s house for $200 a month, reinvented herself as a caterer and floral designer, and within two years had squirreled away enough for a substantial down payment on a house. In those two years of hard work, she probably averaged $12 an hour. I loved this about her, and while I’ve always enjoyed shopping about as much as time-share sales pitches, I came to look forward to our weekend thrift store expeditions. At first it was vicarious: Her enthusiasm for plunging into a bin of chipped pottery and emerging with some semi-significant artifact was contagious. After a while, I started getting into the spirit of it. We bought a lot of cookware together, which when you’re dating is laden with unspoken expectation. We were testing the idea of settling down together.

Our first thrift store excursion was in Bakersfield, where she’d lived for several years. I’d come along to hold her hand while she saw the lawyer handling her divorce, which for a number of complicated reasons had been stalled for two years. On the way up she drove, as always, like a bat out of hell, doing her makeup in the rearview, managing the steering wheel with her knee. She kept telling me I’d get used to it, not to worry, that she’d never had an accident, St. Christopher was looking out for her. But it made me nervous. I figured it was a matter of time before something happened.

After the legal consultation, we had lunch in a Basque restaurant and went to the Goodwill there, one of her favorites. As a joke for a friend, I bought a coffee mug emblazoned Houchin Bloodbank Gallon Member, but I ended up keeping it. I thought it a humorously macabre image to contemplate before one’s breakfast, sort of like getting ashes on your forehead during Lent. I also found a battery-powered cocktail mixer--a glass vessel with a plastic rotary stirrer. Stenciled on it were the most amazing cocktail recipes, such as the one for a gin and tonic. “One ounce gin; add tonic.” It was magnificently heroic in its uselessness and oddly priced at $1.81, which got me wondering about what sort of strange value logic was at work here.

As we stood in the checkout line, she told me about a conversation she’d had in this very store. She’d started chatting with a man who confessed to her, “I come here to meet the women. It’s the best place to find ladies who don’t have too high expectations.”

Thrift stores are heavy with ghosts. At some point in your life you have to make friends with ghosts, and thrift stores are a good place to do this. I was very sensitive to ghosts at this point. It was winter and I had had a birthday, one that punched me in the head with the fact I was irrevocably in my 40s, a trend I’d tried to convince myself was reversible. One day we were at the St. Vincent de Paul (home of the mystery safe) and had wandered into the “art section.” There were pictures of sad-eyed dogs, rustic scenes of red barns, landscapes of sylvan streams illuminated by golden Jesus-light bolting through the clouds, nouvelle-deco prints from the early ‘80s framed in plastic. Then we came across a man’s portrait, done in pastel. He looked to be in his late 50s, and judging by the floppy collar and powder blue hue of his sport shirt, the portrait was probably done in the ‘70s. He had the wistful, boyish and sheepish smile of a man who spent too much time on the golf course away from his family, then got cancer and regretted it--but of course, I am projecting, and what I have come to love about thrift stores is the way they conjure up such flights of imagination.

“What’s the story with this?” I asked her. “This guy must have been somebody’s father, or grandfather. Didn’t anybody love him enough to keep his portrait?”

She almost started crying. I was fairly good at accidentally making her cry, so I moved her along.

Still, the ghosts hung with us. Thrift stores promote a kind of time travel. Looking at an old hair-dryer chair made me think of the beauty parlor where my grandmother got her hair done in the early ‘60s. There were old phonographs, the ones with the lasers that shine on the grid around the turntable so you could sync it to the right speed, and I thought of one I bought in college that my roommate spilled beer on the day I brought it to the dorm brand new. There was a lot of old cookware with handles made of bakelite, an early form of plastic that smells of camphor when you rub it, and old suitcases with name tags filled in by little old ladies who once lived in Glendale.

Thrift stores are eco-systems, archeological treasure troves, museums of obsolescence. Thrift stores are time machines and they are social levelers: There are not many places where you see, as I did at Valley Thrift in Sunland, a Mexican grandmother rifling through a rack of clothes and standing next to a blue-haired, art-damaged, tattooed, nose-ringed bohemian young woman of about 20. The girl spoke pigeon Spanish and trolled for a size 6 jumpsuit for one of the lady’s grandkids, and the elder woman was zeroing in on funky paisley blouses in return.

By summer, our relationship had frayed beyond repair. The timing had been wrong, I guess. Each of us had carried into it too much unchecked baggage, and when it finally came across the transom, our parting was not completely amicable--although against our better judgment, we kept talking. She continued to drive like a maniac, knee on the steering wheel as she did her makeup or opened cans of dog food for the basenji in the back seat, her constant companion. Finally it caught up with her. A few days before her divorce was finalized, her crazed and often sleep-deprived driving habits landed her in some very hot water.

Basically, she was flipping out. I brought her to my house and put her to bed.

The divorce was settled; now loomed another court date. The judge gave her a choice between a hefty fine and a hefty contribution to community service. Ever frugal, she chose the latter. She would have ended up picking up trash on the side of the freeway, but she told them she was expecting.

This was more of a wish than a lie, but it gave her the option to fulfill her service obligation by working at the Goodwill. One Sunday I stopped in, not knowing if she would be there. I found her in a back room, sorting through clothing donations, and spied on her for a few minutes as she organized garments into piles. Coming across what looked like a vintage dress, she glanced around to see if anyone was looking, and with that particular kind of nonchalant efficiency that only women have, tried it on for size.

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Martin Booe is a frequent contributor to the magazine.