The black velvet top was sandwiched on a rack in between a bright yellow dress and a pink skirt with white stripes. I bought it at a secondhand shop around the corner from my second-floor studio apartment. It was the only one they had. I wasn’t looking for anything specific when I walked into the store, but was only browsing, the way you do in your twenties when you look at clothes at secondhand stores. It’s fun, it’s an event. “Let’s go secondhand shopping!” a friend suggests after you’ve had too much coffee with her. “Why not?” you say, because you have time. You see an oversized 1920s red and purple-jeweled brooch over here, or a small 1940s forest green hat with a mesh net across the face over there. Random stuff someone donated. You don’t really think about that. Not yet. It’s likely the people who owned these things are now dead, and a family member brought their stuff to the store in garbage bags. You don’t think about any of that. You see some saddle shoes and pilled chunky wool sweaters with moth holes that smell musty, like old people. “Vintage,” the store owner says with a smile. You don’t think the people who wore these things had full, complex lives because you don’t yet have to think about your life like that, like a life. You’re in your twenties and you’ve got a lot of time.
The pink skirt with white stripes that was next to the bright yellow dress that sandwiched the black velvet top looked like a candy cane. It was a candy cane skirt. The black velvet top cost $2.50. It was a perfect cut. Sleeveless yet wide straps, a silver zipper all the way down the back. It was slightly cropped but barely, like when you’d stretch your arms above your head, you’d see a little skin near your navel. A classy amount of skin. It was a classy top. It had slits on the side about an inch thick. Good quality, too. The velvet was so soft, touching it reminded me of a man’s face just after he’s shaved. A little raw, totally smooth, not yet hardened from a day. When you think about that guy you don’t think that he’s had a whole life either, an entire life. You just think about that smooth face against yours. I tried the top on in the makeshift dressing room, a towel draped over a wire for privacy in the back of the store. There was no size, just a tag with $2.50 written on it. It fit me well. I paid and walked home.
When I got upstairs to my studio apartment, I put the top on again and stood in front of the mirror. With the jeans I was wearing, it looked good. I lifted my arms above my head and saw just a little skin by my navel and a tiny bit by the side slits. A classy amount of skin. It sure was a classy top. Perfect for a night out. As I looked at myself in the mirror I imagined living a different life, one I knew I’d never live.
It was the kind of top you’d wear to a dinner party on the Upper East Side in a pre-war apartment building with high ceilings and built-in bookshelves. The kind of party where people hold their stem wine glasses with their palms facing up in between their middle and index finger, as they walk and talk and move slowly but intentionally from eating dinner in the dining room to sitting on the sofas in the living room to having one or two side conversations in private in the den. Pre-war apartments have great layouts. They allow for multiple conversations between multiple people during a dinner party. The black velvet top would be great at a dinner party like that, where early in the evening you’d sit at a long chunky, very expensive wood table of maybe twelve people. They’re interesting and smart and quite civilized, and they think you’re interesting and refined, too, and smarter than they are, like when you tell them about the Edward Hopper exhibit you just saw at The Whitney, how you particularly loved his Washington Square Park series, you say, and they nod with envy because they haven’t yet been, or when you tell them about Blackbird, the play you recently saw at the Belasco Theatre. Yes, you say, the one with Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams. Yes, it did sell out, unfortunately, you add, and shake your head with disappointment for them as you hold your stem wine glass a few inches above the table with your palm facing upwards so it looks like it’s floating. You’re the kind of person who gets tickets for things. They’re jealous because by the time they heard of the show, it had sold out. You tell them how, after the play, you saw Jeff Daniels getting in a taxi just in front of the theatre. You’re in the know, you with your cute black velvet top. Everyone gets a little tipsy at parties like these and maybe a couple will make out in the small hallway by the bathroom but everyone’s refined enough not to get obnoxiously drunk. Maybe a tad too much wine, a little slurring. They’ll all feel fine tomorrow. The appetizers, mini bruschetta toasts with minced garlic and olives and fresh mozzarella balls spiked onto mini skewers with a tiny basil leaf, from an outside catering company that no one’s heard of except the host, your friend. Of course, she tells you in the kitchen, I’ll give you their number later. For your next party, she says, because you will have one, and you’ll wear something great when you host, you think to yourself, like your black velvet top. You know that the woman across from you is envious of the wide sleeveless straps of your black velvet top and the side slits and the tiny bit of skin that shows only when you bend. That’s a classy top, you know she tells herself. That zipper goes all the way down the back. Here I am at a dinner party on the Upper East Side in a pre-war apartment filled with bookshelves and perfect molding, you think to yourself, and no one knows I only paid $2.50 for it at the secondhand store around the corner from my studio apartment.
The truth, of course, is that I’ve never been to dinner parties like that. And I’ve never lived in New York City. I’ve seen them in movies and thought, it sure would be great to have friends who invite you to their dinner parties in their pre-war apartments on the Upper East Side. But I haven’t and likely won’t start now because I don’t have many friends and I don’t really like the ones I do have and I’m just so tired all the time. Besides, I don’t even know anyone who lives in a pre-war on the Upper East Side anyway.
When I took the top off after looking at myself in the mirror, after imagining a life I’d never live, I was going to hang it in the closet on the far right with the other pieces I never wore. But I didn’t. This is significant. Bear with me. I hung it in between the center and the far right. It might sound trite, but it matters where one’s clothing hangs in one’s closet. I didn’t hang the black velvet top in the far right with the other pieces I have that also represent a life I’ll never live—the black dress with the three-quarter length sleeves and baby doll collar and the cabernet-red strapless dress with the satin bow at the empire waist. Instead, I put the black velvet top in between the far right and the center. It was an effort, I know now, to have a little hope. I’ll likely never wear this, it means, but maybe I’ll wear it. That’s what hope is, a maybe. “I no longer love her, that’s certain,” Pablo Neruda writes in “Tonight I Can Write,” “but maybe I love her.” Like maybe the black velvet top will be different. Maybe it has more of a chance to be worn than the dresses that live permanently on the far right. And maybe if I wear it, I’ll have that kind of life. To have hung the velvet top on the far right as soon as I brought it home from the secondhand store would have been a defeat, an admission of failure. I wasn’t prepared to do that. But placing it equidistant between the center and the far right means perhaps someday. The locus of hope. Maybe someday, when I’ll no longer live in a studio apartment by myself, and when I’ll no longer smoke cigarettes, when I’ll no longer be single. You know, someday, when I’ll have friends in New York City who invite me to their Upper East Side pre-war apartment for a dinner party, the kind where people walk by and see us in the windows and we look so intellectual and cozy from the outside.
I’d been working nights at a neighborhood bar for a while, serving rum and Cokes and old fashions to regulars who got drunk, tipped well, and hit on me, when I bought the top. Once, I made out with one of the regulars who was twenty years older than me in the parking lot of the bar near my car after my shift. He looked like an aging Marlboro Man. We kissed sloppily for a few minutes, the flickering Budweiser neon sign our moonlight. That’s not something girls who have strapless dresses like the one on the far right side of their closet do, I remember thinking. They’re wooed, proposed to. They’re certainly not making out with an old guy in Levi’s in a bar parking lot full of gravel and cigarette butts. During the day, I attended grad school classes, learning to become a teacher—I eventually left the bar when I got my first full time teaching job—and tutored in the homes of rich kids and subbed at a nearby high school.
Those dresses on the far right, forget about it. They never had a chance to live anywhere but the far right. Those are the New Years Eve party dresses girls wore at the bar, dresses you wear when you’re proposed to. Hang on. If it’s a surprise, why would you be wearing a dress like that? Did you really choose to wear a cabernet-red strapless dress with a satin bow at the empire waist to go out to dinner? Who are the women who just happen to wear those dresses the night their boyfriend decides to propose? See, those are the kind of dresses you wear if your life was different. You buy a new one for each occasion. But I just couldn’t throw them out. They’re a foil to the daily clothes the way the pretty girl in high school is a foil to the ugly girl. One has a life and one doesn’t have a life, and they need each other to exist in their respective roles. My life is the center clothes, the daily clothes—the part of the closet professional organizers call “prime real estate” because it’s right there, in the center—of boring tops and pants that are fine because they are functional and generic enough for work. I have four pairs of the same black pants. I wear them with a semi-cute top and cardigan. Those are center closet clothes.
I wonder what it would be like to live a life where the far right dresses are the center clothes? Now that would certainly be a life! I remember the day I tried on the two dresses that live on the far right of my closet. When I put them on in the dressing room at the store I’m sure I knew I would never wear them. But they were so pretty and putting them on made me feel pretty, too. Especially the cabernet-red strapless dress. That’s a special-occasion dress for sure. I took my clothes off in the dressing room that day, and stepped into the dress because it was strapless, and pretended I’d stepped into a whole new world, and then I remember thinking, who owns strapless dresses? And I shimmied my hips as I pulled the dress up and the satin bow on the empire waist was so delicate and girly but the strapless satin across my chest was womanly. And even though it was strapless it was high enough that I showed no cleavage. It was a classy dress. Like the classy velvet top. And then I tried on the black dress with the three-quarter length sleeves and noticed how it made my arms look longer and the baby doll collar made my neck look slimmer. So I bought both dresses and briefly imagined living a different life. But by the time I got home I was back to my life and I wondered why I bought them because I knew I’d never wear either one. Yet I couldn’t bear to return them.
That would be an admission of not living a certain kind of life that I just wasn’t prepared to admit, because maybe—“but maybe I love her”—I would be invited to a party someday where people wear dresses like that. I immediately pushed them all the way to the far right of my closet and they became the foil to the daily clothes in the middle. (By the way, the left side are jackets, in case you’re wondering.) Since I already had clothes on the far right, it would have been a defeat to also hang the black velvet top there the day I brought it home. So that’s why when I put it equidistant between the middle and the far right, I felt a flicker of hope.
What I’m really trying to say is that I’m well into middle age now, and I think I’ve spent much of my life waiting for my life to happen. It’s not just the dresses and the velvet top. It’s so many things: the martini glasses I bought for the dinner parties I knew I would never host, particularly while I lived in the tiny second-floor studio apartment and didn’t even have a table, and only knew what a martini was because I made them for people at the bar; the plates I shoved in the back of my closet for just the right guy I would someday date; the skirt for when I would lose the ten pounds I wanted to lose. In the meantime, which is to say, while I actually lived my life, I settled for plastic cups and paper plates and average clothing.
I did wear the black velvet top once (which was more than I ever wore the dresses on the far right) to a bar not far from my studio apartment on New Years Eve. I had a crush on a guy who told me he’d be there. It wasn’t really an invite. He’d only mentioned in passing that he was going, so I decided to go, too. I wore the top with dark blue jeans, black ankle boots, and a chunky red and black beaded bracelet. To be expected, girls pranced around in strapless dresses. I mean, if you’re going to wear a strapless dress, New Years Eve is the night to do it. I thought the same about velvet. I stood around awkwardly trying to talk to the guy as he moved from group to group throughout the crowded bar. I realized around 11:30pm, when he failed to respond to my bad attempts at flirting that he really wasn’t interested in me. I hid in the bathroom just before midnight and sat on the toilet as the crowd shouted the ten-second countdown in drunken unison. At midnight, I stood up, pressed my forehead against the bathroom stall in defeat and wondered what I was doing with my life, why I wasn’t living a different life. At 12:30 I snuck out and called a taxi. The black velvet top didn’t save me. I never wore it again, though I put it back in its place in the closet between the center and far right. Maybe someday, “but maybe I love her.”
Another time, a few years after I wore the black velvet top once, I was at a grungy bar with some friends. Most of the people there were wearing T-shirts and flannels. It was smoky. Someone was playing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” on the jukebox. I was wearing middle of the closet clothes as per usual. Jeans and a top. Fine, functional. It was a square-shaped bar. Later, a small group of men and women, maybe six of them, entered the bar and sat across from us. They were all dressed up. One of the women wore a forest green strapless dress with a satin bow at the empire waist. It was just like the cabernet-red dress I bought but had never worn. Her green shoes had been dyed to match the dress. The men wore tuxedos. Clearly they had been at a wedding or graduation. My friends and I stared at them with our mouths open. They held themselves with an air of having been dropped into the grungy bar from another planet. They knew they didn’t fit in and didn’t care. They were above belonging. They held their glasses of wine with their palms facing up like weightless bubbles and sang the lyrics to “Free Bird” as though they were on a stage singing about traveling and things staying or not staying the same. They floated inches above their seats and their toes in their high heels were pointed like ballerinas. I bet the one who had the green shoes dyed to match her dress also was actually a ballerina who had pointe shoes dyed to match her tutus. One had perfect skin and a pouty lip and strawberry blond curls. I thought to myself, now that’s the kind of woman who gets invited to parties at a pre-war apartment on the Upper East Side. Good thing she’s got that strapless dress.
The velvet top didn’t only live in between the center and far right of my closet. It lived somewhere in between my everyday life and my fantasy of the life I was missing. I kept it there for a long time. Finally, a few years ago, I admitted defeat and gave it away. It turned out it was a lot of pressure to put on a sleeveless velvet top that someone else donated a long time ago to a second-hand store. Then again, it’s a lot of pressure to put on oneself, too, to always want one’s life to be different, to not live your own life when you’re living it, to one day be as old someday as the dead people whose clothes were dropped off in garbage bags at the secondhand store and wonder what you did with your life when you had it.
These days, I wonder what it would feel like to be old and to have been happy with your own life; which is to say, if I had worn the black velvet top a lot, so much that the velvet became mashed and worn, the zipper eventually broken, if it had lived in the center of the closet. What if I simply hadn’t cared who wore strapless dresses and who didn’t, if I had lived the kind of life where maybe might happen—“but maybe I love her.” And I wonder what it would be like if someday someone in their twenties walks into a secondhand store after drinking too much coffee with a friend and sees that velvet black top in between the yellow dress and the pink candy cane skirt and thinks, now, whoever wore that top, that classy top with the wide straps and side slits and silver zipper all the way down the back, whoever owned that top, she really must have had quite a life.
Liz Rose Shulman is the author of Good Jewish Girl: A Jerusalem Love Story Gone Bad, published by Querencia Press. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, HuffPost, Slate, Los Angeles Review, The Chicago Tribune, and Tablet Magazine, among others. She teaches English at Evanston Township High School and in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago. Visit her at lizroseshulman.com.