Thrift – by Catherine Zhou
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1.
Departing, I lug a chair across a highway and the volunteer thanks me for my donation. I choose not to tell them about the missing screw. We’ll just take this into the back, they say. The curtains close and the thing is no more.
Arriving, there are no walls. Baroque lanterns hang from metal frames. We’ve received a lot of guitars recently, he says. Do you play? The guitars are black and electric. A bookshelf curves around a field of children’s toys. It’s important to have no expectations here or you’ll be let down, so scour the spines. Find a book in Italian. Think, I could learn Italian if I tried.
Departing, the small things go into the bins out the back, which look like any other bins. A sign atop the lid: NOT FOR RUBBISH. I feed in my mugs and bowls. I shut the lid and my kitchenware is gone. I’m regressing. I’ve lost object permanence.
Arriving, the space begs: buy my things. I know you don’t collect dolls, but you could. They’re blonde and blue-eyed. There are versions for every person you want to be. Here’s a wedding dress, or three. Have you ever thought about marriage? We’ll give you half off if you buy the veil.
2.
Coolness is no confession. It’s the shiny aside, a consumerist baptism. The feather boa goes over your head like water, and you’re born again. By wearing it, you borrow both history and futurity. You invent stories: Paris Fashion Week, worn by a famous drag queen, hand-stitched from the feathers of an emu who died in the Great Emu War. You select a past based on how it will make you feel to have it as your skin. You parade objects at parties. Oh, this? I’ve always had this.
The aisles give you coolness as anonymity. They say, you can be anyone, be purged of your cisgender sins. Like the way that the hangers of some op shops are indistinct, and the clothes all blur together. Transgressing the gender binary is no longer a giant leap, it’s a step, a surreptitious turning of a corner. When everything is all mixed together, all the shirts just look like shirts. Try, momentarily, to change as well as want it.
The religion of it is a desire for absolution. It’s ritual, a passage through the smell of old churches. It’s an act of repentance: I know I used to buy clothes on ASOS, but I want to be better. What’s more, I want replacement. Empty out the closets and remake it all anew. There is a girlhood in me – crushes, sundresses, gossip, secrets, pain. I want it gone.
3.
Or you can try it on. Put on a hat and turn to your friend and say, what do you think? They laugh and you laugh. You put it back on the shelf and think, I could have been a fedora person.
I have always been obsessed with erasure. Autofiction labelled as the imaginary. Facebook feed as recorded history, to be deleted and curated. Avoiding the lens, so as not to be captured. I think that, above all, I was afraid of the archive as a fixity. I was afraid that it would document me as record and refuse to give me up to be rewritten and remade. See? I didn’t even like the fedora. I didn’t even think it looked good. I’m not even a hat person. My head is too egg-like. Or I’d say, what if I bought this as a joke? How funny. All the things that didn’t become me – all the bold, outlandish, audacious things, the emo things, the things that had gone out of style, the things that draped off my shoulders, that hung in the wrong places, that made me something other.
4.
The thing with chairs is that people buy them in sets. I buy them in ones, because I move in ones: one desk, one chair, one bed. Everybody wants one desk and one bed, but nobody wants one chair. So I hang its frame over me like a backpack, and wait for the traffic lights to turn.
I give away my things but don’t stay to watch them be taken. I wonder who would want them. To me, they are cheap things, plastic things, the kinds of things that would languish in a back room because they’re too modern, too flimsy, too absent of a history. In my mind, nobody will look at that chair and imagine that it was once graced by a royal ass. It’s an object reserved for the kind of person who goes to Ikea for fun.
When I get home, I’m in a liminal space. I have no furniture. My room is empty. The imprints left by the weight of me are shallow and will disappear. I vacuum over them so they’ll fade faster. This, too, is a kind of wanting. But there are no frills and no shiny things. There is nothing to buy, repurpose or hoard. The only thing to do is to leave.
Elsewhere isn’t something I can put on or look at in the mirror. I can only think of it in abstract terms, something I’m sure I want only because I’m in love with the idea of being away. It’s the moment before the door opens and the bell rings, when everything is expectation, and the threshold is an invitation into euphoria or disappointment, but the desire to cross is stronger than any fear of irreversibility. Then the door closes, and the musk is familiar. I’ve been here before.
5.
Sometimes, we go looking for something to buy. You look good in pink sunglasses and spotty dresses that look like modern art. You ogle shelves lined with trinkets and knick-knacks and bears with no heads. Everything delights you. As we walk through this mausoleum of things, you spin. Everything is something. You say you’re a hoarder. You hoard and I dispose. I think they come from the same impulse: the desire to attach meaning to things. You pick up a puppet. I could be a puppet person. The cashier wraps up your glasses and asks if they’re crystal. They tell you to be careful carrying them home.
I follow you in. Your wardrobe is brimming with hue and texture. I sleep on your bed amid knitted warmth, while bits of different parts of your life curl themselves into mine. And it’s all you. All the lamps with their mismatched lampshades, all the pots and the toed shoes, all the tomes marked with other people’s names, and the coppery rings, the projects and aspirations, the engraved spoons, pink teapots, candies, all the soft things, the blanketed things, the chips, the things that are rough around the edges, that need to be sewn up, stitched up, repaired instead of abandoned, a bit of glue, a bit of plaster to smooth things over, a bit of patience and a bit of time for all the broken things to become lovable again.
6.
Other times, we go just for the feeling of looking. We might be doing something else, and we’ll see the mannequin through the window. You say we have 15 minutes. So we pretend to be in a hurry. Someone is restocking books as we’re scanning. There are people to weave through on our way to the egg cups. You tell me it’s urgent, that you’re craving hard-boiled. We get there and the egg cups are flimsy and unbecoming. You tell me that you’ll settle for poached. When it’s nearly time to go, I watch you try on a fedora. You smile at your reflection and then you put it down. Yours is a different way of being. You want without need. ▼
Image: Becca Mchaffie - Unsplash
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