Retail Therapy

Three months after Diane died of lung cancer at age fifty-seven her husband, Jim, called and asked if I’d like to take her daughter, Chloe, shopping.

“Shopping?” Cereal sprayed from my mouth.

I was still in my pajamas at three in the afternoon, downing another bowl of the soggy sweetened pap I’d taken to eating between meals and before bed. They weren’t calories, I’d convinced myself, but ballast I needed to keep from howling off the face of the earth.

Shopping had been one of the great joys of Diane and my long friendship. Shopping had brought us so much pleasure I’d never do it again. Then, Jim reminded me about the inaccessibility lawsuit Diane had won for Chloe against a major retailer. Part of the settlement was merchandise. Diane would want me there with Chloe to spend the booty, to have my hand in her daughter’s legacy of clothes.

I met Diane in the early seventies in a teacher training program at San Francisco State College. We’d both moved to California from New York lured by Free Speech, Free Love, and the chance to start lives away from our parents. Soon after we met, we banded together with six of our fellow student teachers at Berkeley High School and hatched the idea for the alternative school we’d start after we earned our teaching credentials. I was twenty-one, Diane twenty-four.

We held most of our planning sessions in the living room of her small house in El Cerrito, north of Berkeley. One lucky person got the hammock that stretched across a corner of the room. Not only did Diane live in a house while the rest of us shared apartments with roommates, she was the only one who was married. Her husband, Lenny, spoke to us from behind the lens of the Super 8 camera with which he documented their lives.

The meetings went on for hours. We shared stories about our middle-class families, the rigid high schools we’d attended, and our visions for a school that would be a cross between Summerhill and Woodstock. Our school would smash all hierarchies, giving teachers and students equal say.

“But do we really want a stoned fifteen-year-old choosing our fire insurance?” Diane asked.

Her comments were smart and always made me laugh. As the months went on we discovered that we both had politically liberal parents with traditional ideas for their daughters, that we were both younger sisters of brothers older by four and a half years, and both Geminis. We admired the same novels and wanted to write. When it seemed impossible for us to be more compatible, we discovered that we both loved to shop.

The stores on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley were filled with treasure. Swirled Mexican glassware; embroidered velvet bags from India; peacock feathers; posters of Chinese workers, the Lord Krishna, and the Rolling Stones.

“Am I too short for this?” Diane asked in our first shared dressing room, the patchouli drenched Indian bedspread curtain barely covering our legs.

“You look beautiful.” I smoothed the ruffles on her tiered patchwork skirt. “Like a princess or Mother Earth.”

Our dialogue was a version of the way my mother and I had talked in dressing rooms. The conversations were not just about clothes. “Yes,” I was telling Diane, “you are perfect, limitless. You can be whatever you want to be.” We reversed roles effortlessly and many days she reassured me. We shopped to define ourselves. The Mexican pottery Diane and I wanted for our kitchens seemed light years away from the matched sets of Rosenthal china our mothers lusted over back in Brooklyn and Queens.

In the middle of one of our school meetings, Diane announced that she was pregnant. “I still plan to teach, of course.”

We all cheered and I pictured her reading Adrienne Rich to a circle of appreciative students, her baby bundled to her chest in ethnic cloth. Her child would be our child, the first citizen of our brave new world.

But when our school, The Daily Planet, opened the next October...