Adventures in Resale
Taking my baby body out for a spin
Spring has sprung which means certain days here it’s a balmy 80 degrees. This means I’m shedding my winter cardigans like fur, but unfortunately there’s not much underneath them due to the fact I’m suffering from BABY BODY, first discovered by US Weekly, M.D. in the year 1992).
The pants I currently fit into fall into two categories: yoga and maternity, which are demoralizing in different ways. The former, because athleisure has never appealed to me—if I want to be comfortable during the day I prefer to stew in pajamas and shame. The latter because the term “maternity clothes” is the first dehumanizing step in the societal conspiracy to turn women into asexual procreative vessels. So, suffice to say: getting dressed these days is depressing.
As a little treat I thought I’d cash in a credit at a “hip” clothing resale chain, which I had recieved months earlier in exchange for submitting my old clothes to be picked over by someone too young to know their workplace shared a name with a seminal Britney Spears vehicle (Crossroads). After picking out three things from a pile of much more than three things, I was awarded a pitiful store credit.
This week, I returned to peruse racks filled with clothes in the style of “things I was not brave enough to wear in high school.” I found three garments that looked like they might fit. I didn’t have time to try them on, since I was on my way to a Pelvic Floor Therapy—that’s form of physical therapy in which a really nice woman feels all around “there” and tells you how to stitch together your torn up body which should return to normal in anywhere from six months to never. I thought “there’s no way they won’t fit” (mistake) and headed to check out.
Luckily there was no one else in line, which meant it only took five minutes for the woman behind the counter to notice me. I couldn’t blame her, given the amount of bangs and black eyeliner in between us. She waved me up and then took my items from me one at a time, removing them from their hangers with the same delicacy with which one might undress a burn victim. Eons later, the three items sat on the counter. She started to ring me up when I mentioned my credit. This was a mistake.
She looked up at me. “Do you have a card?” I didn’t. I could tell, from the small portion of her eyes visible to mine, that this was bad news. “Unfortunately,” she said in a tone that didn’t seem to care one way or another about my fortune, “we don’t have any way of tracking your information without a card.” I gently tried to point out that this directly contradicted what I was told when I was not given a card, but I also knew that the chances of someone with their whole life ahead of them going above and beyond to track down my stupid credit were as slim as her figure.
With age comes wisdom, so I did the aged wise thing: sighed and gave up, telling her I’d just pay for whatever it was. I was running late. But that’s when fate intervened. A man who had been sorting some other poor soul’s clothes paused his act of violence to perform an act of mercy. He was older and had the air of someone who could no longer solely subsist on hope and cigarettes. An ally.
He told my gal that my credit might, in fact, still be in the system. He checked. It was still in the system. I had a credit available.
I thanked him, and Gen Z Jane Birkin closed out my interaction with the credit. “I didn’t know that they could still be in the system,” she remarked seemingly to no one, unfazed by the effect this lack of knowledge had on our blisteringly recent interaction. I not only owed nothing, I was owed a dollar and some cents, which meant I spent approximately an hour watching her count out pennies from a change drawer.
Later, at home, I tried on the clothes, which included a pair of pants two sizes bigger than what I normally wear. They didn’t button. I didn’t know what was worse: that my case of BABY BODY was more advanced than I realized or the fact I’d have to attempt to return to these clothing items to the lackluster customer service professionals at Britney Spears’s Crossroads (2002). Probably both?
Yoga pants it is for the foreseeable future.