Eloise was bored.Her husband had wandered off to the golf course. It was only the third morning of their vacation and already he had begun leaving without a word to whack the shit out of a little, white ball with some pickup group of strangers. Fellow businessmen, a great group of fellows, he would say.
She wouldn't be needed until it was time to get ready for dinner. Then she have to would endure his retelling his new golfing buddies' stories. How a detail overlooked had derailed a big deal or a fortuitous opportunity taken had launched a successful career. Business turned on such small things, he would say.
Maybe she would be lucky and he would not agreed to dine with his foursome. Otherwise she'd spend the evening smiling and laughing at the same, boring stories in their original telling, most likely loud and uninspired.
Meanwhile, Eloise was bored.
She drove down the coast in her open top, rental, Mercedes convertible, looking for someplace to shop. She had exhausted the upscale jewelers and foreign designer satellite outlets. Her husband's credit card allowed her almost limitless freedom. So she tried to buy her way out of boredom.
It wasn't working. She was still bored.
She passed up the art galleries. She didn't understand art. Art is supposed to be pretty, she thought, but that didn't seem to be necessary. So she let a couple of gallery owners her husband had recommended decorate their home. She wasn't sure what those things hanging on the walls were exactly. But her husband never objected. She had very good taste, he would say.
The highway veered away from the coastline and she followed it rather than turn against traffic. She was driving for the sake of driving. She was looking for something not boring.
The further she drove, the more pedestrian the shops. Exclusive boutiques gave way to upscale, big city designers; expensive, corporate retailers yielded to national chain stores and big box, mass marketers. The parking lots got bigger and the colors got more garish until finally, she drove out of civilization altogether.
She reached an area that seemed to have slipped through time. The homes looked left over from earlier, less prosperous eras; peeling paint so faded everything looked brown and gray. Hardly anything was paved. It was difficult telling the difference between the dirt and the homes and the emaciated trees stuck haphazardly in the ground.
To Eloise, it felt a lot like home.
She spied a long, low building, something out of a Western novel perhaps: wooden frame, porch with a wood rail fence that wrapped around three sides, windows with shutters. The porch and the grounds around the front were cluttered: rocking chairs, earthenware vats, lawn gnomes, concrete garden statues, plastic furniture. Mobiles and wooden carvings hung from the eaves.
A large sign in faded reds and greens upon the roof proclaimed "Auntie Bella's Lost and Found." It was a thrift store, the kind Eloise haunted when she was young. The kind of place her husband would pass by without seeing, and in which she had once vowed never to set foot again, but the draw was irresistible.
In a place like this, she had found a bit of lace for a penny which she sewed into a cheap brassiere and made it look daring and racy, and caught the eye of a rich, young man. She transformed an old, silk bandana into a trendy belt. Costume jewelry, which she meticulously cleaned and deliberately over-polished, sparkled in the man's eyes. And once a bit of sheer fabric had been strategically sewn into her blouse, her nipple would play hide and seek for hours with the rich, young man who sought to buy her attention. You're a fine thing, Eloise, he said.
Eloise pulled into the parking lot. The gravel crunched under foot. The porch steps creaked under her delicate weight.
A sign by the entrance announced "Unexplained Treasures and Displaced Objects" could be found inside. Eloise thought this a strange way to advertise used junk, but, as her husband would say, a good slogan intrigues as much as it sells.
Under that sign was another, "Mind the door. Don't let the bunny out."
Eloise pushed open the door, listened to the delicate tinkle of the door chimes, and stepped inside. The room smelled of lavender and dust, musty wood and old clothing, antique varnish and rich, dark soil.
Even though the day was white hot outside, the inside of the store was cool and dark. What sunlight made it through the grime and dripped paint was mostly defeated by the dark towers of goods piled in front of the windows. She had to remove her wrap-around sunglasses.
Eloise felt a rush of anticipation, a reawakened surge of desire, as she surveyed the store's offerings. She stood on a linoleum shore about to wade into a high tide full of the flotsam and jetsam of other people's lives. Here, among the castaways, she had once discovered life, and she might as well go looking for it again. It was better than being bored.
Eloise drifted through the maze of table displays, glass cases, cardboard box towers, woven baskets and wooden boxes and old, leaning, book cases which overflowed with fabrics and knick knacks, dishes and papers, hardware and toys; things too new to be antique, yet too old to be collectible; things lost and displaced in someone's earlier life, waiting to be renewed.
Things a lot like Eloise.
There were boxes of used postcards with hand written notes from Paris and Bangkok and Lima, Ohio. Shelves, haphazardly tacked to the wall, held ceramic dogs, paperback novels and carved figurines. A row of baskets spilled sea shells upon the floor. Boxes half full of vinyl records were shoved beneath tables piled high with browned copies of Life and Look and National Geographic.
Red and blue ski parkas burst among long, gray, work coats. A bright red, stuffed devil sat lopsided in a green, chipped, stoneware bowl. A flock of dyed straw handbags hung from hooks embedded in cheap, walnut-colored veneer.
Eloise lost herself in the blur of colors and scents and textures. Everything seemed new despite their disrepair. Everything reached out to her. She wanted to touch everything, smell everything, possess everything.
She held up evening dresses, long out of style, against her body and peered at herself in the undulating glass of a tall, cracked mirror. She ran her fingers across the cool, slick surfaces of dozens of glass bowls. She lifted a family of stuffed teddys, one at a time, and breathed in the aroma of each child who had loved and abandoned the bears.
She rummaged through a box of used Barbie dolls, most in their trademark swimsuits, a few in dresses, some sans clothing altogether, remembering her Barbie, the only doll she had ever owned, the doll she had kept through high school and even to the edge of adulthood, the doll she had confessed her troubles to and then abandoned when she had met her rich, young man. You are a bit old to play with dolls, he had said.
In the bottom of the box was a well worn Barbie in a faded red summer dress, hair shorn by inexpert, childish fingers, a splash of green paint where she had fallen onto a just painted, park bench, and a loosely fitting arm, the result of being dragged about a bit too often.
Eloise picked the doll up. She recognized the scratches under the right eye. Eloise had come home angry after a young man had mocked her looks and had dismissed her, laughing. She had attacked Barbie for being perfect and beautiful when Eloise was not. She remembered sheering off Barbie's long, blonde hair when her first attempt to bleach her stringy, brown mange had been disastrous.
She remembered the tears, long dried and hidden among a myriad of discolorations. She had shed them on Barbie's clothes during her long string of romantic disappointments. Only Barbie understood the pain. Only Barbie knew what it was like to be perfection itself and yet dismissed as trivial, unimportant, merely a pretty plaything, left on the playground by the boys and never taken home. Something to dally with, not something to treasure. You're just a party girl, they had said.
Eloise learned from Barbie that perfection was not enough. You also had to package it in pretty clothes and showcase it by seeking attention. You had to withhold that perfection, hide it behind a perfect mask, until they bought you and took you home.
Eloise learned from Barbie until she had become the doll herself, perfect in form and demeanor, wholesome yet seductive, desirable, pliable, perfect. Barbie had taught Eloise how to capture her rich, young man, and then the woman had discarded the doll, no longer necessary, no longer treasured.
Something startled Eloise when it brushed against her lower leg. She looked down to see a small, white rabbit looking expectantly up at her.
"You must be the bunny," Eloise said.
A red haired woman in a long, black dress came by and picked up the rabbit.
"I am sorry she bothered you," said the woman.
"Oh, no bother," said Eloise, who reached out and gently petted the bunny. "She just startled me a little. What's her name?"
"Her name is Fluffy," said the woman. "Not terribly original, I know, but we didn't name her. We just sort of adopted her."
"Do you have a problem with her running away?"
"Sometimes. She tries to get into people's cars. I think she has an adventurous spirit, but Elizabeth says Fluffy thinks she is a people, not a bunny. It's important to know what you are."
"I know what I am," said Eloise. "I'm a Barbie doll."
"Of course, you are, my dear," said the woman.
Eloise bought Barbie and a bit of lace and some sheer, black fabric. The total bill came to less than four dollars. The store didn't take credit cards and all Eloise had was one hundred dollar bills. When the red head protested that she didn't have change, Eloise waved it off.
Money wasn't important. She was in too much of a hurry to get back to the hotel. Barbie and her had a lot of catching up to do. It had been too many years.
Besides, Eloise had a one hundred dollar bra and a five thousand dollar evening dress back at the hotel, waiting to be snipped and sewn. Tonight, it wouldn't be her rich, young man who would be bored.
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