Vintage Veronica (3 page)

The Pickers never go upstairs to the store’s main retail floor, which is called The Real Deal. It’s also a resale shop, but there’s no scale. Clothing is priced by the piece and is organized in a variety of ways: by decade, by color, by theme (there’s a big rack of army surplus, for example, and another one of marching band uniforms), by type of piece (the silk smoking jackets live together, as do the leather biker jackets). Never by size. Since the Pickers never venture upstairs, they
probably don’t know that there’s other stuff for sale on The Real Deal, too: jewelry, makeup, shoes, wigs, and costume props like swords and tiaras. It’s a huge store, and there’s stuff everywhere: feathered boas form a wall of curtains, sequined ball gowns shimmer from the rafters, and rows upon rows of false eyelashes wink at you from their perches above the jewelry counter mirrors.

The decor of Dollar-a-Pound is pretty much like The Real Deal’s, only messier and more worn-out. For example, there’s an old vintage motorcycle hanging from the ceiling of The Real Deal, and there’s an even older Volkswagen Beetle (unnecessarily labeled
THIS RIDE’S
NOT
FOR SALE
!) parked on Dollar-a-Pound, right next to The Pile.

The sign on the Volkswagen, like all the store signs, is painted in screaming neon pink and black. The Clothing Bonanza’s front door has this weird drawing of a neon-pink cat holding a huge black barbell above his head. One side of the barbell says,
VINTAGE, PRACTICAL, AND CONTEMPORARY CLOTHING!
The other side says
SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE
! On the cat’s T-shirt it says
OL’ RAGS
. Apparently, Rags’s shirt was not deemed worthy of an exclamation mark.

Rags is actually the name of one of the store cats, although he’s like Rags the Seventeenth or something. There are four or five other store cats and they all have names, but since I can’t tell them apart I think of them all as Rags. The store rules are also painted on pink and black signs, one by the cash registers on The Real Deal and one by Bill’s cash register on Dollar-a-Pound. Rule number seven is
PLEASE DO NOT HARASS THE CATS
! Rags spends a lot of time sleeping on or in The Pile,
where he is as likely to get harassed as he is anywhere else. Today, however, I don’t see him. Maybe he doesn’t like Fridays either.

In case you’re wondering how I can work at Dollar-a-Pound when I hate it so much, let me set you straight:

I don’t.

I work in the Consignment Corner, which is on the floor two flights up from Dollar-a-Pound. This floor is known as Employees Only!, which is for
EMPLOYEES ONLY
!, as the pink and black sign on the door leading upstairs emphatically states. Employees Only! and Dollar-a-Pound are not only two flights of stairs apart, they’re pretty much a whole world apart. They are connected, however, by a long metal chute. The chute starts at a metal bin near my desk and runs vertically through the store, cutting through ceilings and floors, and ending at the hole in the ceiling directly above The Pile. It is my job to weed through the clothing that people bring in and decide what should go to the good racks on The Real Deal and what should get dumped down the chute to The Pile. In effect, it is my job to keep The Pile well fed.

My boss, Claire, calls banishing something down the chute “depping” it. When she first said it, I gave her a confused look.

“Dep. Stands for Dollar-a-Pound,” she explained.

“Not ‘dap’?” I asked. Claire furrowed her brow and considered this.

“No, it’s dep,” she finally said. “Like, now I’m gonna dep this skanky old shirt.” She took a ratty T-shirt and threw it in the direction of the chute to demonstrate.

Because my job is in the Consignment Corner, I don’t have to do any “floor time” in retail land on either of the lower floors. In fact, I barely have to interact with anyone, which suits me just fine. I just deal with the clothes, which is great because I’m all about the clothes. I’ll take clothes over people any day of the week.

The truth is, I have a serious vintage clothing problem. I’ve been crawling around vintage stores, tag sales, and flea markets since I was a kid. Sometime shortly after my dad moved out, trolling them together became our standing Saturday morning activity. He’d pick me up with a tray of cinnamon buns and a folded section of the newspaper marked up with red pen. “Hey, Ronnie,” he’d always say, “let’s go to the fleas.” At first I thought it was boring, but I didn’t complain because it was nice to see my dad and it got me out of having to play soccer.

Then I got hooked, big-time.

My dad is a serious collector. All serious collectors specialize, and his specialty is musical theater, especially all things Broadway. Mostly memorabilia, but he also buys vinyl recordings. My dad and I share a passion for the hunt, but our differences as collectors are clearly defined. He’s a total bug about condition. If a
Playbill
cover is ripped, or even bent a little, he’ll pass. Me, I’m more about the piece itself. My specialty is vintage clothes and quirky stuff from the fifties, and my crusade is for diamonds in the rough. Unfortunately, this means I sometimes fall for things that I only realize later are mostly rough and very little diamond. My dad claims this is unavoidable. “That’s show biz,” is what he says.

I spent a lot of time with my dad when I was a kid. Hanging out with him was a welcome alternative to hanging out with other kids, who basically turned on me once they got old enough to figure out my place in the social hierarchy. My parents got a whiff of this when I was in grade school and thought they could dodge this particular bullet by sending me to one of those crunchy schools.

Boy, were they wrong.

Journey back with me to where I went from third grade through eighth. A hundred and twenty kids behind a pair of double doors painted with a big yellow smiling sun and the school slogan:
THE SUNSHINE SCHOOL, WHERE THE SUN SHINES ON EVERYONE
. They took that crap seriously, too. If you were having a problem with another kid, the school rule was that you were supposed to say, “Stop, I really mean it.” Those five magic words were treated with reverence and squirreled away as last resorts. Each classroom was also equipped with a “friendship table” where adults could perch on tiny chairs to help kids overanalyze their playground squabbles.

Everything was great for a while. Meaning: third and fourth grades. Kids in my class asked me to their birthday parties and picked me as their folk-dancing partner and filled my red-construction-paper-covered shoebox with drugstore valentines each February.

But then I started fifth grade. I felt the tide turn that year. It happened little by little, like brown leaves dropping off a tree one by one until you suddenly look up and, boom, you can’t remember a time when it wasn’t fall. One afternoon, probably about a month before the fateful “I Never” party, I
was playing on the swings with a girl named Tanya. A girl I thought of at the time as my best friend. We were lying facedown and running forward to take off and feel the swings catch us like we were flying. I was a bird, flapping my wings, taking off and being caught, swinging back, again and again, soaring and feeling so free.

Then something hit the back of my leg. Hard.

“Bull’s-eye!” I heard someone say, followed by loud, rough guffaws.

I landed and looked over my shoulder at a bunch of older boys with a huge pile of horse chestnuts. You know, the ones that have those thick yellow-green peels that make them look like prickly tennis balls? They were using my butt for target practice.

My eyes welled up with tears, from pain as well as humiliation. I turned to Tanya for help. To my surprise, she was doubled over, laughing.

“Stop, Tanya,” I said, evoking the magic incantation as I had been taught. “I really mean it.”

The next thing I knew, she had run off and was letting the boys catch her and pin her down. When our teacher called us back inside, I marched Tanya over to the friendship table and gave her my indignant side of things. Tanya listened politely. I think she even apologized. I had the nagging sense that it seemed too easy, but I allowed myself to ignore it and feel better, to hug her and smile.

When recess time came the next day and Tanya ran off with the boys again, the nagging feeling came back and I was
unable to escape the realization that something had changed forever.

I cried to my mother, who, to her credit, rubbed my back and just listened for a while. Back then, she still wore clothes she made herself sometimes, but increasingly she wore leotards. She was studying to be a dance teacher and seemed to be busy a lot with rehearsals and master classes in the evenings. She also seemed perpetually distracted, staring off into the distance like the music in her head had started up and she didn’t want to miss her cue. And she got really into posture all of a sudden. Sometimes she would straighten up and she’d look like a swan or something. I’d try to copy her, straining unsuccessfully.

She held me for maybe a minute, minute and a half. Then she took hold of my shoulders and kind of faced off with me.

“I’m sorry,” I remember her saying. “I’m not going to lie to you. Kids can be very cruel sometimes.”

“Blub,” I said, sniffling, nodding.

“
Bu-ut
,” she suddenly singsonged, shifting gears and catching my eye, “it’ll be easier for you to make friends, real friends, with nice girls if you’d just try …” She paused, but she didn’t really need to finish the sentence. I knew what she was thinking:
if you’d just try to lose some weight
. All the wonders of the world—friends, fun, fabulousness—would be mine if only I’d get it together and stop being so damned fat. Which was a point she’d been hammering for a while; she just finally found something to anchor it to.

I nodded glumly, knowing she was right.

It was all my fault.

When she walked me in to school the next morning, I stared accusingly at the sun painted on the front door. I had never noticed how phony the sun’s smile looked before. I reread the slogan.
THE SUN SHINES ON EVERYONE
.

Everyone but you, fatso!
the sun seemed to be saying, winking snidely.
Have a great day!

I hated school from then on. Going to the fleas with my dad was pretty much my only pleasure. That and eating, which, now that I think about it, we did a lot of when we went to the fleas. These great big cinnamon rolls the size of your head, with cups of extra white icing on the side, and giant sweating plastic tumblers of pink lemonade to cut the sweetness. Mmm … good times.

I’d probably still be going to the fleas with my dad, except that he’s not here anymore. Broadway called, or more specifically, the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Broadway. They wanted him to manage their food services. My dad referred to this as his “big Broadway break,” although he said it in kind of a wistful way. It’s a little weird to think that my dumb little summer job is closer to working in the antiques biz than my dad’s, especially since he got me started.

I never knew jobs like mine existed until I went to The Clothing Bonanza to consign some of my own stuff. I didn’t have an appointment or anything. I just brought a bag of stuff to the second-floor registers and asked the girl working there if the store bought stuff.

“You got an appointment?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

“I dunno,” she said dubiously. “Lemme see.”

I passed the bag across the counter. The girl riffled through it, raised an eyebrow, and picked up the phone.

“Yah, hey, Claire?” she said. “I’m sending one up.”

Hanging up, she pointed behind me.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” she said.

I turned to look. Sure enough, the wood floor was painted black except for a four-inch-wide path painted gold. I followed it down the middle of the cavernous main retail floor, past the wigs and shoes and racks of vintage dresses grouped by decade or by the predominant color of their fabric. When the path led to a door, I stopped. The pink and black sign on the door said
EMPLOYEES ONLY! DO NOT ENTER THROUGH THIS DOOR
. But the gold path went right up to the bottom of the door.

Looking down, I noticed what looked like a bite taken out of the bottom of the door. I squatted down carefully and realized it was a homemade cat door cut out of the bottom of the regular person-sized door. Peering through it, I could see that the yellow brick road continued behind the door. My heart pounding, I pushed the big door open and followed the painted path up a rickety staircase.

“Your grandmother die?” asked Claire when she looked through the stuff I brought in to sell. I sat awkwardly on a lumpy rose-beige bouclé couch in her makeshift office, an open area in the corner of the floor partitioned off by several clothing racks. Next to the couch were a desk, a chair, and several mismatched filing cabinets.

“What? No, why?”

“This blouse.” Claire pulled it out of the bag and inspected the lace by holding it up to the light. “It’s your grandmother’s, right?”

“No.”

“Huh. I haven’t seen one of these in a while.” She dug some more and made sort of an appraising grunt. “Mmh … This Marimekko’s pretty unusual. You sure you want to get rid of this?” She held up a lime-green and white shift with a round metal pull tab on the zipper.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“Why?” she asked.

“I have two others at home.”

Claire made a low whistling sound. Then she offered me a job.

“I … sorry?”

“Part-time. For the summer. You’re in school, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” The way she said it, I could tell she meant college. I took the job without bothering to correct her.

She laid out the basics: what I’d get paid (“The pay is for shit …”), when I’d get paid, and what I’d be doing (“but there’s no floor time”). I kept waiting for her to ask if I was sixteen. My plan was to answer yes, even though, technically, I wouldn’t be for another six months.

But she didn’t.

While she rattled on about the job, I was kind of freaking out inside. I mean, I’d never really worked before. I’d never even babysat before. I was psyched to have a summer job of any kind, especially one that didn’t involve scooping poop.