The small shop just past the corner of Mellon and Rhodes consigned a good number of the more extravagant frivolities of the neighbourhood. At various times over the past three years, it had housed, for however brief a time, exactly one thousand eight hundred seventy six different articles, ranging from the predictable to the esoteric. Joyce Berry’s not insubstantial handful of gold had ended up there, once she learned of her husband’s infidelity. Anne Rockwood’s silver fox swing coat entered on the most frigid of January days, after a brief and memorable detour to the drycleaner’s to erase its spray-painted trauma. Nicole Chapman’s great uncle’s collection of leather awls had pride of place, for three whole weeks, in a glass case near the window. For a time, early in its life, it seemed as if the small shop was destined to become the last repository of absolutory idiocyncracies and frustrated conceits, a refined albeit temporary residence for all the things people thought they should keep but hated to see crowding their own homes.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the sort of thing that was brought into the shop changed. Sara, the shop’s manager, only noticed it when she had to shift around the display to accomodate the growing number of accessories that had, she imagined, caught the fancy of Lise, the shop’s owner. Lise had owned So Close to Me, which she billed as an upmarket consignment shop for the discerning second-hand customer, for just over three years. After a stalled start when she mistakenly acquired baby and toddler clothes and gear, she had learned that her customers liked their children in new clothes and their second-hand shops focused on the esoteric and original. Her acquisitions policy was flexible, leaning toward madcap. She simply accepted for consignment only those things that caught her eye. Having learned her lesson with the kid’s clothes, which she had assumed would be lucrative, since people bought things for their children, she scarcely spent time worrying about whether things would sell. She simply acquired those items that appealed to her own unique sense of style and substance. She did not shre this policy with her bankers.
The overflowing rack of designer purses was thus incredibly perplexing for Sara. She could see no reason why Lise would have accepted them for consignment. They fit neither the profile of the store nor the proclivities of its customers, who bought their designer purses new or were given them as gifts. Sara’s curiousity piqued with every purse she hung on the rack. Each new purse lifted from the box marked “To put on Floor” gave rise to variations of the same emotion. She barely fondled the soft leathers. She didn’t even make her customary inspection of the lining to check for authenticity and quality of workmanship. She simply wondered what had prompted Lise to accept seventeen designer purses in colours varying from turquoise blue to steel grey, in shapes from the smallest clutch to the biggest hobo shoulder bag. Sara could see no way to ask Lise about the purses; they did not have that kind of relationship, nor did either woman want that kind of relationship.
Lise’s reason for the sudden and excessive appearance of purses had to do with a manila file folder found tucked in between two large hardcover anthologies in the room she called her library. For this reason alone, she would never tell Sara why she wanted to sell the purses. If she told Sara that she had once kept a file folder filled with pictures of her ideal wardrobe — and that this ideal wardrobe was accessorized by designer purses — Lise was quite sure that Sara would laugh her giddy laugh and promptly file the story under her “To Tell My Friends Re: My Silly Boss” file. That was the truth of the matter, though. Lise had found this folder, full of pictures cut from old Vogue, Chatelaine, catalogues, and more. She figured it was fifteen to eighteen years old, made when she had been a confused undergraduate searching for her “‘look” and her “purpose” and her “uniqueness.” Lise had sat there transfixed for a good hour, poring over the pictures. Then she walked as if in a trance to her overstuffed closet, and pulled out outfit after outfit, matching the pictures to the looks she pulled from her closet. The slim leg navy pants with the crisp white wrap-around blouse, chunky red necklace (probably cinnabar in the picture, red acrylic for Lise), navy square toe pumps; the drapey heather grey cardigan over leggings; dark denim with a plain black tshirt and fitted blazer; straight pencil skirts; riding boots; ballet flats — but with the exception of a large camel coloured leather bag, gifted to her one Christmas by a now-dead aunt of considerable wealth, Lise had none of the ‘carryable’ accessories that she had so clearly seen herself using. She used habitually one brown purse in the winter and one smaller black purse in the summer, a pattern established by her mother when she was fourteen and deemed old enough to carry a purse.
Two days after Lise found the manila folder, a woman with a vaguely East Coast accent contacted her about consigning some purses and Lise acquired the black leather portfolio-style bag that she instinctively knew would be the perfect complement to the dark denim outfits. She paid one hundred dollars for it, thrilling the customer and ensuring a steady stream of similarly well-heeled purse-loving purgers to her office next to the shop. One day, just to seal the vision, Lise perched herself on the edge of the desk, balancing a clipboard and a fountain pen, intentionally mimicking the posed presentation that had so captured her attention all those years ago. When Sara entered the office at the end of the day, as was her habit, she found Lise sitting like that, exuding a quiet confidence that had never been apparent before. Lise’s posture and composure disarmed Sara, who was wholly unprepared for when a stack of women’s magazines was thrust in front of her with the charge to cut out only those things that she loved that caught her eye, no matter what.
