A Three-Piece Collection

At a family get-together, my niece’s sweet hand-sewn giveaways laid out on the floor, I chose the braids (1). But I’ve barely worn my Zoë booty—I keep forgetting.

The black-and-gold bands (2), also a gift, came strung with a chunky-looking something I took off. I vacillate about wearing them. I don’t know how to say this without sounding stupider than ever: they make it look too much like I’m trying. I am. They’re snake-y. They jazz things up. They fend off starkness.

The overblown beadsandbeadsandbeads thing (3) from Gift & Thrift is more of a joke. Greta wore it in the play we did. Overblown was the point.

The necklace from Pat—I don’t know where it went. Did it slide off the picture frame I hung it on, down into the wastebasket? Or did one of my grandgirls snitch it? On a pair of tiny bars: the words that came from the mouth of the majority leader in the mostly empty Senate chamber after he tried to shut down Elizabeth Warren. Nevertheless, she persisted. She—Warren—went on reading Coretta Scott King’s letter, out in the hall.

It was a wee bit irritating, the dingle-dangle of the bars against my sternum. Still, they’re a loss.

Cautions about seductiveness came thundering across the pulpits in my past. The patriarchy blanched at bodies, period, not just jewelry. So you might see how a person could—can—never be good enough. You might also see why she owns so skimpy a collection, nothing a Jezebel would want.