A Risky Business

Recently, I’ve been looking for a small “bat” bottle of vintage Shalimar perfume. I guess this means I’ve become a collector, as I seem to need it. I have a pretty good vintage perfume collection now. Not having Shalimar is sort of like not having “Blonde on Blonde” in any respectable vinyl collection. But these prices!

So I’ve been going to estate and garage sales. My utter lack of success at these has made me wonder. How often do good perfumes really turn up?

I posted the question on a couple of fragrance forums. I asked readers if they had ever “scored” big at a tag sale, and, if so, how many sales did they attend before that, as a number or as a percentage. Perhaps naively, I expected lots of responses.

The answers -- and there have been few so far -- were enlightening. People listed in detail the perfumes they had found. Other forum members oohed and ahhed over the treasures listed. Some suggested asking the host of the sale. Although there were vague references to going to sales “for years,” no one got specific about how many such sales they’d attended. 

While certainly not a scientific sample, I thought these results were interesting. I began to wonder if people who frequent estate sales regularly just don’t want to admit it. Kind of like playing the lottery: the big winners tend to be the daily ticket-buyers, reflecting simple laws of probability. But you’d be hard-pressed to get anyone to admit that they’d spent the milk money that way.

My own experience with estate sales has been gloomy. Some old lady dies, and leaves behind a house full of stuff. Once the heirs have taken what they want, an estate sale company comes in and picks over what’s left. After pigeonholing the valuable items, or so I’ve heard, they put the bleached bones on sale to the public. Nothing, it seems, is sacred. The first time I saw used lipsticks with price tags on them, I started calling this “the vulture culture.”

The estate-sale proprietors here in the South are unfailingly well-groomed and well-spoken, polite even to the gentlemen coming through asking if there are any guns to be had -- I saw that twice in one day last week. And I know that you can't take it with you. This is where much of the merchandise in flea markets, antique stores and  ebay comes from. In a way, by paying their markups, I’m paying for the privilege of not having to do this myself.

As I wander through these houses, I wonder about the people who lived in them. At some, like one I went to last year, there are few secrets. At others, there are many. Childrens' rooms, in particular, bother me. What happened to the kids? Why was a little girl living with an obviously older -- you can usually tell by the amount of home-health care stuff for sale -- lady? What happened here? At one particularly disturbing house I saw, it looked as though the whole family had simply evaporated. OK, I know I’ve got a too-fertile imagination, but I kept wondering about that one. Was there a car crash? A plane crash? Or was this house kept as a sad shrine to offspring that had grown up and moved on? A hundred houses, a hundred stories.

Maybe I don’t need that Shalimar after all.

And so I put the question out once more: do you go to estate sales? (You don’t have to say how many.) What have you found at them? Do you end up buying stuff other than what you were looking for? (I bought a nifty brand-new western styled leather daypack for twenty bucks at one last week. See, even me. I “scored.” What is this compulsion to brag all about, anyway?)

Maybe this. Maybe we boast about our finds because it makes walking through these spooky houses easier. Makes the experience less horrifying. It diverts attention from what none of us want to think about, namely this: someday, this could be my stuff.

The Estate Sale

We’ve all heard the estate sale stories. So-and-so got a giant mint bottle of vintage Tabac Blond for $2. All I ever find is scary Seventies stuff like, say, an orange crock pot, missing the cord, its receptacle caked with cat hair and cobwebs. But I saw an ad in the paper yesterday for a sale in a very nice part of Atlanta, near the Governor’s Mansion. Maybe, I thought, they’ll have some decent perfumes. It seemed promising enough.

There was a line out front. I eavesdropped on the conversations around me. Many of these people knew each other. They seemed to be part of the subculture of estate-salers and resellers. Early birds were already carrying the antiques out when I arrived. And many of the people had that old-time Atlanta accent, in which “there” is pronounced “they-ah.” This accent is unmistakable to a native. It tells everyone who knows enough to care: “A’hm from he-yuh, as was my muth-ah, as was huh muth-ah.” You hardly ever hear it any more. I didn't expect to hear it here.

Finally, they let me inside. It looked as though the hearse had just left. The books were still on the shelves. Other than a few tables heaped with costume jewelry, and other ones with dinnerware, the belongings were untouched. The house was dark, dusty and dirty. Someone had turned the air all the way up, too, so it was tomb-like cold.

I began moving through the rooms. There were racks and closets filled with clothing that looked like it had belonged to a New Orleans madam, or maybe a nightclub singer. It was all sequins, and jeweled tops, rhinestones and satin and stained silk, glittery caftans, stockings -- imagine people picking through your stockings! -- and gloves. I saw tables filled with odd ceramic knicknacks. There wasn’t any lingerie, thank God, but there were shoes, at least 75 pair, all tiny -- size five or six maybe -- spike-heeled and expensive. And there were bed-jackets. More sequins. More glitter and glitz than I’d seen in decades.

It was the last sort of clothing I would have expected to see in this staid old Buckhead house.

The place had already been picked over, and if there had been any good perfume, it was gone. But there were at least a dozen empty bottles, big ones, of Bal a’ Versailles. I can’t imagine how one person, in one lifetime, could have used them all.

Who was she?

I didn’t linger long enough to read labels. The clothing was flashy, but certainly not couture. I saw no men’s wardrobe or things, just women’s, all this flimsy finery bursting out of closets and drawers, the bathroom a shambles, even the makeup for sale. What was her name? I kept thinking of something like Estrella, or Lila or Blanche, like Blanche du Bois, a faded Southern lady, hanging on to whatever kind of past had required her to own all this. Was she someone’s mistress? The companion to a wealthy man who went home every night to a single strand of pearls and a discreet dab of Chanel? Did she spend her days lounging around on velvet sofas, dressed in chiffon, reeking of Bal a Versailles, waiting, always waiting?

I thought: Tennessee Williams would’ve loved this.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

My entire haul, by the way, was a few samples of vintage edp that would be considered “old-lady” -- Je Reivens, Rive Gauche and Shalimar. I can still smell them on my wrists.

They are the perfumes of a ghost.




Estate sale photo used under license from Dreamstime.com.