Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (16 page)

I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to, but how do you tell a person that you’ve been dating for a year that you are truly a clumsy, bedraggled neurotic who never said or did one thing that wasn’t well planned because you didn’t want him to find out the truth?

“Do you remember the first time we went out?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. “I just remember you opening the door to your apartment and seeing this really beautiful woman who wasn’t done up or trying to be something that she wasn’t. You didn’t seem like every other girl out there. I had seen you for all of two seconds and I truly thought to myself, ‘This is someone I could see myself being with. This is someone just like me.’ So then we went to that sushi place and I could tell you felt uncomfortable there and you looked it and, I don’t know, I just loved that about you. I just thought it made you even truer. You were just being yourself. Most women would have tried to put up a front and get nasty, but you just said to me, ‘There are a lot of pretty girls here,’ and I just thought, ‘You’re the prettiest girl here.’ You were the prettiest girl there because you were the truth. I’ll be honest with you. It scared me that night. I really thought that you were the one for me. It scared me so much. That’s the reason I didn’t call you for six months. I tried to date other girls, but every time I went out with someone else, I came back home thinking of you.”

His words stung like acid reflux from spaghetti sauce. His words broke me. From the very first second I saw him, all because of my own hangup, I saw what living a lie had done to us.

“I’ve been living a lie with you this whole year!” I shouted. “I thought you
liked
those girls. I thought I should
be
one of those girls!”

“Why, though?” he asked, “Why? I even told you one night that I thought you were perfect. Why did you feel like you had to change?”

I had no answer. Tears started streaming down my face. The mascara was also streaming down my face and onto my robin’s egg-colored cardigan, and for once I wasn’t about to get some club soda to try to take out the stain before it settled.

“You’re just not who I thought you were,” he said, taking my hand.

“But I am, I swear,” I told him.

“Every time I see that closet of yours,” he said, “that’s all I know about you. I have no idea who you are underneath. Look, you’re a wonderful person, but I just need to be with someone who I feel more comfortable with. I’m sick of trying to feel so perfect around you. I don’t like the feeling that if I drop some ketchup on my jacket and I don’t change, or if I wear the same thing on a weekend vacation, you’re going to think less of me. I don’t want to have to constantly keep watching what I say or do or wear. When you wouldn’t come to my boss’s house and lied to me about being sick, that was the end for me. I’m sorry for sounding cruel, but I want to be with someone who has more depth than that.”

“I swear,” I told him, “I’m all depth, I’m a pit of depth. Ask me. Ask me anything,” I cried.

“It’s just too late,” he said, putting his arms around me as he gave me a good-bye hug. “I’m sorry. This just isn’t working for me anymore. I’m going to go.”

And with that, he put on his gray suit jacket and left my apartment for the last time.

I stood staring at the unfinished Chinese dinner. He had me all wrong. All I wanted to do was run out to him and dramatically bang on his beat-up Saab’s driver’s side window and cry out in a desperate attempt at reconciliation, “I KNOW PAIN! I SPLIT MY SHORTS IN THE SEVENTH GRADE! I HAVE FLAT FEET!” I didn‘t, though. It was too late for any of that.

He would never know the real reason behind the six-inch heels or the glorious comfort I felt from wearing a pair of Gilligan O‘Malley underwear from Target. He would never know that I idolized Madonna or how many times my breasts had been accidentally exposed in public. He would never know that I had any quirks or funny thoughts or even a smart one now and then, because I never allowed him to. I was too afraid that once he found out what was underneath all the style and pizzazz, he might not have liked what he saw and in return, I ended up making him feel the same way. It’s really a shame, too. We would have gotten along really well.

I picked up the phone and called Rachel and Susan, who came right over.

“So, you panicked,” Susan said. “Big deal. Next time we’ll warn you sooner. We’ll shoot you up with some Ativan.”

“Happens to all of us,” Rachel said, putting her arm around me.

They stayed with me for the rest of night.

Two days later, I got a pink slip e-mail from
Shopright.com
. They were bankrupt and going out of business.

pair of Juicy Couture black linen drawstring pants was laid to rest today after being battered and worn to their slow and painful demise.

With their early 2001 birth unknown (though tag records indicate MADE IN THE USA), the pants spent their early days in the spring of 2001 at the Barneys New York store in Manhattan.

“Yes, we have it in a small,” a Barneys saleswoman said over the phone to a saleswoman at Barneys in Beverly Hills, followed by, “You’re kidding ... No, she did not.... She said what? ... That is hysterical ... Sure, I’ll FedEx them today.” The New York saleswoman then folded the black linen drawstring pants and put them in a FedEx envelope as she told a fellow Barneys saleswoman the story of the black linen drawstring pants’ new owner in Los Angeles, California.

The new owner, described by the saleswoman in the Barneys Beverly Hills store was said to be a “miserable blond-haired woman in her early thirties” who tried on a pair in a size medium in the Beverly Hills store. Before buying the medium-size pants, she informed the saleswoman that she was an expert on shopping and demanded to know if she should buy said pants in a small or medium, given the shrinkage-in-wash factor.

“She was nuts,” the Beverly Hills saleswoman reported a year later. “I tried to be nice and told her that the pants wouldn’t shrink and that she should buy the small. My luck, no more smalls were available in the Beverly Hills store. I was about to tell her that all I had to do was call the other Barneys stores and find it in a small, but then that crazy woman went ballistic, going on and on about how her life was a failure and her boyfriend had just dumped her and she lost her job and all she wanted was those pants to make her feel better.”

A rumor had circulated through the store that the blond woman in question had only that morning donated a wardrobe full of halter tops, cigarette pants, and other provocative items of clothing to the Salvation Army. This rumor was backed up by a volunteer working at the organization stating, “Yeah, that lady came by and just kept dumping stuff, then she’d go back to her car and get more stuff and dump it on me. I mean, I know we’re the Salvation Army and all, but what are we going to do with all these halter tops?”

In an effort to keep the peace that Barneys was known for, the saleswoman called the New York store, found the Juicy Couture pants in a small, and handed the miserable blond woman a tissue, assuring her that she would have them as soon as they came in.

“So then she was all,
‘Which day?’
the Beverly Hills saleswoman continued. ”I didn’t know which day. How am I supposed to know? Do you see anything about me that says ‘postal worker’? So I went over to my manager, who had already heard that woman screaming, and my manager said, ‘Have them FedExed to the woman’s house so we can get that deranged lunatic out of the store and be done with her already.’ So then the miserable blond lady left, running down the stairs toward the ground floor, shouting out to me and my manager, ‘I bought a four-thousand-dollar Vera Wang couture gown here once! You people should have a little more respect!’ ”

The miserable woman, who had only recently become one of the casualties of the Internet crash of 2001, decided to sleep in the next morning, as she forgot there was anything worth waking up for. At noon, the woman opened her apartment door to find a “While You Were Out” slip from Federal Express. Seeing no reason to continue with the day, with the exception of several trips to her kitchen to retrieve the Sara Lee pound cake and SpaghettiOs she ate at various times throughout the day and night, the woman headed back under the covers of her bed and stayed there until the following morning.

After dawn’s “early” light awoke the slumbering, gloomy woman at 11:30 the next morning, she went to retrieve some leftover SpaghettiOs. Her doorbell rang.

“Who is it?” She sniveled in her crumbling state.

“FedEx,” the male voice answered.

Dressed in only a tank top and Gilligan & O‘Malley underwear from Target, the woman signed for her package and shut the door without saying thank you.

She opened up the package to find Juicy Couture black linen drawstring pants in a size small. After putting them on, the woman barely took them off for a year.

“I offered to buy her another pair when she came to my birthday party. I thought they looked cute on her,” said a woman who identified herself as Felicia, a friend of the downhearted woman.

“I didn’t think it was right for her to wear them to the job interview I got her,” added Susan, another friend of the despondent woman. “And while we’re on the subject, six-inch heels with Juicy Couture black linen drawstring pants are not appropriate to wear under any circumstances, especially a job interview!”

Yet it was reported that everywhere the saddened woman went, the pants were sure to follow. From cashing her unemployment check to Wednesday movie matinees with fellow ex-Internet employees, the black linen drawstring pants became a source of comfort after agonizing job interviews and deplorable dates that never went anywhere. Frequently paired with a Calvin Klein white ribbed tank top that the pants affectionately called “Tanky,” the duo soon began to enjoy their newfound grimy life. They enjoyed getting up each morning/afternoon and relished experiencing where that day would take them. Most times, it didn’t take them anywhere, but anything was better than sitting in that bare closet, hung on a hanger attached to a concave pole, which was rumored to have gotten that way from the weight of the piles of clothing the woman had donated to the Salvation Army several months before.

Three months into Black Linen Drawstring Pants’s life, the first in a series of tragedies struck. While attending the 2001 NBA Finals basketball game between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers at L.A.’s Staples Center, the depressed blond woman had a moment of glee and she shouted in exhilaration as Allen Iverson led the 76ers to a 107-101 win in overtime.

“Suckers!” the woman angrily shouted to the crowd of yellow-and-purple-wearing Laker fans around her.

As the crowd began to hiss and jeer and throw various junk food wrappers and half-filled cups of beer, the woman suddenly became frightened and leaped out of her seat to escape from the stadium, catching Black Linen Drawstring Pants on the armrest of her seat and creating a tear on the side of the pants. The next day, the woman took the pants to her dry cleaner‘s, who quickly sewed up the hole and insisted on dry-cleaning the pants for free to compensate for of all the business the woman had given them the previous year.

The second in the series of tragedies occurred when the woman went to throw some trash away on a rainy night and accidentally left her keys inside. As she waited for her friend Heidi to come with her spare keys, the woman stayed at her neighbor’s apartment, along with the neighbor’s cat, Friskers. As the blond woman innocently tried to pet the feline, Friskers became alarmed by the rainwater dripping off the woman’s body, so he opened his paw and dug his nails into Black Linen Drawstring Pants, which prompted another trip to the dry cleaner’s to patch up the frayed hole they had suffered in the ghastly incident.

A week after returning home from their second stay at the dry cleaner‘s, Black Linen Drawstring Pants were awoken from their closet at 4 a.m. and worn for a trip back to Philadelphia.

The woman cried into her parents’ arms, sobbing, “I’m a failure, I’m a failure,” which her parents heartily denied.

“You’re going through a rough patch,” her father said. “Everything will work out, I promise.”

“But those pants,” her mother said, “those pants have got to go.”

The saddened blond woman took their words to heart and headed back on a plane toward Los Angeles. Three days later, she was hired by the Promo House, an entertainment company, to write promotional ads for upcoming television shows.

The woman entered her apartment that evening and grabbed Black Linen Drawstring Pants. She began to put them on when, sadly, tragedy struck for the last time.

As she pulled the drawstring together, the string could no longer take the pressure and broke in two.

The woman, now in high spirits and feeling as if her life might be back on track, took off Black Linen Drawstring Pants and sighed.

As she threw the pants into the trash can, she said these final words in memoriam:

“Thank you, dear Pants for your comfort, your reassurance, your durability, and your strength, which got me through a difficult year in my life. As you continue on to that big department store in the sky, may you find the peace and joy you so deserve. I will miss you, my friend, and I promise to think of you often.”

To quote W B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old”

wenty-four-year-old women rock!

I’m not supposed to use the phrase “rock,” though, my twenty-four-year-old work friend Kristen told me. Evidently, that’s very out. Since I became friends with my young office buddies at the Promo House, I’m constantly reminded of new sayings that are in and sayings that are out.