A Handbag Named Desire: Desperate for a Vuitton Speedy in Working-Class Massapequa
This all took place a long time ago, so long ago there wasn’t even a Louis Vuitton store in Manhattan. I was still living at home with my parents, in Massapequa Park on Long Island, and what I wanted more than anything was a Vuitton Speedy, which at the time could only be purchased at two places: Saks Fifth Avenue, and an old-line luggage store on Madison Avenue called Crouch & Fitzgerald. If memory serves—and this all depends on memory!—Crouch & Fitzgerald would stamp your initials in gold on your bag, a service included in the price of around $100, an unheard amount in those days. (For reference, the first real job I had out of college, in the library of The New School, paid $135 a week.)
But why did I even want this thing, when I spent most of my time playing the guitar badly and going to protest marches? But want it I did. It represented a sort of European ideal of class and sophistication, the kind of thing carried by Parisiennes who shopped every day for fresh produce at the local marché, who had never set foot in a suburban station wagon or a disgusting supermarket. Once the Speedy was on my arm, I would join the ranks of people like Sara and Gerald Murphy, wealthy Francophiles who palled around with the Fitzgeralds in the 1920s and were famous for their Vuitton trunks, piled up dockside in places like Deauville and Le Havre in Normandy, each of these behemoth valises bearing different colored stripes to denote which case belonged to which family member.
I wasn’t going to Le Havre. I was taking the Long Island Rail Road to Manhattan, where I would spend my time ogling the goods at Bergdorf Goodman and attending street demonstrations. If there was a glaring incongruity between these activities, an indication of a profoundly divided self, so what? Didn’t French girls look gorgeous when they stormed the barricades in May ’68? (When I did get to Paris, as a junior in college, my carefully curated Massapequa wardrobe suddenly seemed to me so base, so pathetic, that I went to Galeries Lafayette and bought a square-necked Cacharel linen dress and a black blazer and wore them every day.)
Perhaps another young woman, someone with a shred of pride and dignity, would have saved up her own money and bought the Speedy for herself. I was not that person. I am the younger of two sisters, so childish in so many ways that my nickname to this day in some circles remains Baby Lynnie. My parents were very indulgent, and since I never really worked after school or in the summer (I tried, but I got fired a lot), my work, a harsh critic might say, was staying submerged in my powerful fantasy world and convincing my parents to buy me things. Both of my parents had union jobs—my dad was a TV stagehand, my mother a public school teacher—which meant that we had sufficient income to eat out frequently (my mom hated cooking) and go to Broadway shows (they both loved musicals.) My father, especially, had certain tastes that separated us from our neighbors—he revered The New Yorker; he sat through Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits twice; Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet had pride of place on his bedside table. In truth, we fancied ourselves as far more cosmopolitan than our neighbors. And my dad had his own version of a Vuitton bag: When he inherited a little money, he realized his dream of owning a Ford Thunderbird, a white sports car with a turquoise roof that looked faintly ridiculous parked in our cement driveway.
If my dad understood this Vuitton obsession better than my mother, she was the one who made decisions about birthday presents. I am not sure what shameless tactics I employed—I know there were tears—to wear her down, to worm the credit card out of her decidedly non-Vuitton purse, which ultimately allowed me to take the LIRR to Crouch & Fitzgerald and get my glittering, monogrammed prize. Perhaps some of the fairy dust that I had sprinkled over this thing rubbed off on my mother too? Maybe the idea of her daughter leaping out of Massapequa awakened in her some long dormant desire to transcend her surroundings as well—to feel the thrill she must have felt when she attended Hunter College—a huge achievement in her Bronx household—and my grandfather bought her a sheared beaver coat in grudging acknowledgment of her triumph.
Because here is the strange thing: After all the arguments about how absurdly expensive this handbag was, and how no sane person would covet a plastic-coated fabric bag that was a not-very-nice dirty-brown color and bore someone else’s initials (LV, so close to my LY!), a few months after this precious satchel was dangling from my happy wrist—my mother went to Saks and bought a Speedy for herself.
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