Tiffany Blue

The other day while digging in my compost heap I uncovered this small blue box. How it got there, I have no idea, but it brings back a host of memories: Tiffany Blue, although besmirched, is the signature color of all the gift boxes that came from Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue Store in New York. It still has a whiff of nostalgia…

There were times when these small blue jewelry boxes turned up everywhere, at graduations and birthdays and weddings in all the upper-class white spaces where those events took place: Country cubs, big houses, college assemblies. They probably still appear in those places—my granddaughter received one at her graduation last week—but the luster has considerably dimmed, and not just in my compost pile. Even the beautiful Fifth Avenue store seems a little shadowed, filled with tourists from other countries who still worship the mystique.

Thinking about Tiffany Blue sent me to seek the old movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s which begins with Audrey Hepburn in a long black evening dress and high heels, munching a pastry in the early morning hours in front of the shop’s windows, exuding the longings of a young woman without the means to go in and buy something. Finally, she does persuade the store to engrave a plastic ring out of a Cracker Jack box.

The movie itself, for all its charms, communicates a fatal message which made me uneasy even many years ago when I first saw it. Yes, Holly is wild, apparently free, a bird as bright as the New York lights. But in the end, she is captured, giving up her vaunted independence for True Love and a husband with perhaps enough cash to take her to Tiffany’s and buy the diamonds she covets.

It’s not really applicable today when both my granddaughters are graduating from law school and college with the ability, training, connections and drive to buy their own diamonds, if they wanted them, which they surely don’t.

But of course this is not true of most of the women in our world who leave home untrained, unprepared, and perhaps no longer depending on the dream of True Love. They are the ones who now will be driving hundreds of miles to states like my New Mexico where abortions are still legal. Their lives hang by a thread, their ability to pay for what they want never secure, never free of the threat of abuse.

And yet we are not the ones committing the murders.

Are we resigned, patient, wise? Or do we all learn sooner or later that pressing our noses against plate glass windows is the closest we will ever get to the goodies?

And so why want the goodies?

In Women