“Nice save.” In the Boston suburb of my beginnings, those two words were clutch. They’d bounce through the stands after a nail-biting soccer play. They’d cackle across the cafeteria when a Twizzler almost hit the floor. But they meant the most, at least to me, when applied to my first love—vintage clothes.
“Nice save” was for my mom when she pulled a leather trench from our attic, made by my grandfather (a leather factory foreman) in the ’70s. “Nice save” was for my dad when he salvaged a vintage Marimekko gown from our neighbor’s crumbling barn. And “nice save” was for me, when I found an original DVF wrap dress at a yard sale for $5, and wore it to class feeling like a movie star.
The counterpart was, “Why didn’t you save that?” reserved for the clothes that got away. Among the missing: My mom’s embroidered bell-bottoms, disco heels worn to actual discos, a leather minidress with a Grateful Dead skull. Seeing faded photos of my mother in these pieces made me grasp that before she’d been a parent, she had been a person. I would never know her fully, and that broke my heart. It also gave me a mission: Archive all my designer clothes for my future children, once I could actually afford to buy them.
That first happened in 2005. It was late enough in the digital age for blogs, but early enough that “NFT” looked like a typo instead of a Gucci splurge. With no metaverse in sight, clothes themselves could be avatars, and gosh, I had some good ones: A Marc Jacobs bubble dress first seen on Gemma Ward; a heap of Luella Bartley punk prom gowns; a cat-print skirt from Miu Miu; a python bag from Fendi; A.P.C.’s oh-so-Sedgwick leopard print coat, bookmarked on MySpace (MySpace!) until I saved up enough to buy it.
On my 29th birthday, I was dancing at the Beatrice Inn while wearing pink cowboy boots—a classic “nice save” from a Texas Goodwill—when there was a sudden, sharp “ow!” in my core, and then a blood flood. I ran to the bathroom, leaned against the sink’s rim, and realized I was having a miscarriage. I hadn’t even known I was pregnant.
Conventional wisdom (and bad TV) says your whole past replays during a near-death experience. But this was a near-birth experience, so instead I saw the future in a dream. In it, I was a mom to a little girl. She did all the things I once did—scream Bangles lyrics on the swingset, sneak Stephen King novels into 6th grade. But slowly, dream-me was covered in tiny, inky handprints. My imaginary daughter was running away, screaming “I don’t have to love you! I didn’t ask for you!” In my dream, I knew everything about this girl, and yet, I knew nothing at all. I woke up choking on rage. I was grateful I could blame the blood.
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