Free Underfoot In Show Business by Helene Hanff

Maxine’s phrase, “hung like a bag” on me, I’d early resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t sew and couldn’t afford alterations and I went around unconcernedly pinned together. So whenever Maxine and I were strolling on Fifth Avenue and she wanted to stop in at Bergdorf’s or Bendel’s, she’d pause on the sidewalk in front of the store, run an eye over my conglomerate outfit and say simply:
    “You wait out here.”
    But of course there were critical producers’ lunches and large romantic evenings for which I had to look the part. On most of these occasions I just borrowed Maxine’s clothes, having had the forethought to get thin enough to wear them. But every now and then, both of us had important engagements for the same day or evening and Maxine would report with distress that she didn’t have two suitably elegant ensembles on hand.
    In such emergencies I followed her instructions. I went to Saks, bought a beautiful dress or suit on my charge account, took it home, wore it on my big date, and returned it to Saks the next day. (Except that, being sloppy, I generally got a spot on it, in which case I kept it and paid it off at the rate of five dollars a month for a year or two so that by the time I threw it out it was all paid for.)
    Maxine borrowed my clothes only once. She borrowed a ruffled organdy blouse handed down to me by some sadist, my five-year-old black suit and a beanie my mother had knitted, which was my hat wardrobe that season.
    “What do you want them for?” I demanded. Maxine looked evasive.
    “I’ll take care of them,” she said.
    Two weeks later, when she returned them, I found out she’d worn them on location in a rooming house in Brooklyn, where she’d played the lead in a documentary film on gonorrhea.
    When it came to vocal lessons for Maxine, and Latin and Greek lessons for me, we hit our first snag. I’d been trying to teach myself Latin and Greek and she’d been trying to teach herself to carry a tune and neither of us was doing too well.
    Private instruction being both necessary and expensive, Maxine decided that the solution for both of us was to Sell Something. This led to two exhausting Saturdays, the first spent haggling with the Empire Diamond and Gold Buying Service over the value of my high school graduation ring and a ring my parents had given me with a minute diamond in it, for both of which Empire gave me a stingy fifteen dollars, and since this wouldn’t buy much Greek I bought Shaw and Shakespeare with it instead.
    The second Saturday we spent trotting from secondhand clothing store to secondhand clothing store trying to sell Maxine’s mother’s fifteen-year-old Persian lamb coat. That coat gave Maxine nothing but trouble anyway. Her mother had passed it on to her a couple of years before, and for a whole season Maxine had worn it with chic assurance. But during the second season, she made the mistake of wearing it on a picket line she had volunteered for. You turn up on a line of starving strikers wearing a Persian lamb coat and you are liable to be stoned to death. Maxine escaped without injury but she lost her taste for the coat, so one hot Saturday in August we lugged it to the Ritz Thrift Shop ready to trade it in for vocal lessons.
    “How much are you asking?” said the man at the Ritz Thrift Shop, running a practiced eye over the coat.
    “I thought two hundred,” said Maxine in a tone that managed to be both haughty and friendly.
    “Oh, we can’t even talk!” said the man. When pressed, he allowed the coat might be worth forty dollars to him. Outraged, we stalked out of there and lugged the coat in and out of all the secondhand stores on Sixth Avenue and Eighth Avenue and then we went across town and lugged it down Second Avenue and up Third, and at five o’clock we gave up and lugged it back to the Ritz Thrift Shop and Maxine took the forty dollars, which paid for eight vocal lessons.
    The problem of my Greek and Latin lessons remained