My color wheel is a bit limited. I own a lot of black clothing. And I have a distinct weakness for blue, especially pale blue. So a couple of weekends ago, I did something I haven’t done in years: I bought a white shirt.
Once a year, the moneyed liberals in the Eastmoreland neighborhood of Portland – which is a comfortable stroll from Reed College – get together and have a yard sale. This is no ordinary yard sale: There are refreshments and toilet facilities and scheduled entertainment and walking maps and a Web site. For one weekend out of the year, it’s okay to wander aimlessly through the neighborhood, wonder at the beautiful yards and the enormous homes and paw through the shit that the rich folks no longer want.
I love the concept of yard sales. Based on what I’ve seen, there is really no reason to buy much of anything brand new. But this year I did show more restraint than usual. I bought one book – Angela’s Ashes – and three CDs. The CDs I found on a deep, sturdy table on sale for $3.00 each, which seemed high to me. So I asked the woman sitting in the rocking chair whose music collection she was selling and she told me that it was but a fraction of her father-in-law’s inventory. Her father-in-law, she went on, was a doctor, and he used to come home and listen to his jazz music to clear his mind of the operating room. That’s a bit of a cliché, I thought. A retired doctor’s beneficiary doesn’t need $3.00 per CD – I give myself permission to be unusually scornful at yard sales, especially those held in the driveways of the ostentatious – so I held up what I wanted – Carman McRae, Diane Reeves and Sarah Vaughn – and offered her $3.00 for all three. To which she said, “Deal.”
A few driveways later, like a flag of some sort, once the white shirt caught my eye it didn’t let go. It was all clean lines and quality seaming and well-pieced fabric, hanging there on an enormous wheeled, chrome-plated wrack. I ran my fingertips over it and turned it inside out. Banana Republic, according to the tag, 100 percent cotton, made, according to a tiny, oddly placed tag, in Hong Kong but, so says the third and very prominent tag, Woven in Italy. The problem with white shirts, in my experience, is that they never stay that way for long. In the past, if I’ve managed to avoid spilling or splashing to dribbling something onto the whiteness, over a very short period of time the edges of the collars and the cuffs begin to fade and smear. I don’t use bleach.
I held it up and examined it from various angles. I’d probably only wear this a few times, I thought. This is beautiful, I thought, but even though it only cost $1.00 – it was everything half off by the time I arrived at this particular sale – it goes against my general guideline of buying clothing only if I’ll get a long run out of it.
I’m not sure what word I’d use to describe how I felt when I put the shirt on after a bath and a shave. Noticeable, perhaps. Pristine, maybe, although that may be too strong of a word. It fell perfectly just beneath my hips. It was loose without being tent-ish. My complexion and my hair and eyes looked somehow more pronounced. If the shirt had ever been worn before, it didn’t reveal it. I wore it with a pair of pale tan pants and black shoes. I wore it downtown to a birthday gathering held 40 floors above the pavement. I wore it as I chugged down at least a gallon of ginger ale, as I ate wonderfully spiced and fried calamari, a sloppy cheeseburger and a desert that was more or less deep-fried doughnuts, coated with sugar and served up with a cup of melted hot fudge on the side. In a departure from what I usually experience when I wear a shirt for the first time, the white shirt was a shock at first, a source of self-consciousness. But after a bit of time passed – 20 minutes? An hour? – I forgot that I was wearing it and returned to my more familiar self. Forgot, that is, until I came home, took it off and hung it neatly on a hanger in the bathroom. Later, as I was brushing my teeth before bed, I took a closer look at the shirt and noticed that in spite of the colorful and greasy food I’d scarfed down while wearing it, it still does not bear a single stain.
