She stood there, before me, straight out of John Singer Sargent's huge portrait of a Flamenco dancer, hanging in the Elizabeth Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. But we weren't in Boston, and she was no museum piece, but a dark, lovely, vivacious beauty, smile large on her face, standing before me. Standing before my shopping cart.
She, I and the cart were in a thrift shop, one of the many operated by the Salvation Army. She stood before my shopping cart, viewing in turn what lay there, then me, and then my little dog in his carry-bag, snug asleep, eliciting laughter from her and the remark that he was guarding my treasure. That treasure not being the tiny dog, but the long dark velvet flounced skirt that lay alongside him.
She was everything I am not; young, willowy, long black curly hair, chatty and overtly friendly. Her zest for life and unaffected words accented as an immigrant's, clearly identified her origins from the Iberian Peninsula. Her good humour was infectious; no one could conceivably be confronted by someone like her without melting themselves into good humour and easy conversation.
She was, she said in the best of moods, happy and loquacious because she was shopping, and she adored shopping. Whenever she felt blue (impossible!) she said, she came along to the Sally Ann, spent a few dollars selectively and immediately felt her mood lift into happiness. Her husband, she confided, was accustomed to her habit, and trusted her to set reasonable limits.
In retrospect I feel so badly that instead of explaining to her that I'd chosen the skirt for warmth, to wear indoors on cold winter days, causing her to exclaim "But it should be worn anywhere in public, it is a social garment...!) I should have been more sensitive. Why it hadn't occurred to me to offer the skirt that seemed so desirable to her, is beyond my reckoning.
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