Vintage Veronica (4 page)

But this was not going to go over well at home. After my
mom had run into her former dance student at the farmers’ market, she had become convinced that my summer plans were all set. So far, I hadn’t gotten around to telling her that I’d skipped my interview at the animal shelter to go to an estate sale instead. Of course, I reassured myself, as long as my mom didn’t run into this particular ex-student any time soon, my change of plans could probably slide clear on through into August undetected.

Claire turned out to be a one-woman Consignment Corner. My job was to be her assistant. I was expected to shadow her as she made appointments with consigners, picked through their stuff, priced it, and logged it in. I quickly learned that Claire didn’t share my reverence for the merchandise. She knew vintage, to be sure—she’d worked it long enough to have the styles and designer names at her fingertips. But to her, the clothes were all “just meat.” Meat to be piled up, slopped around, slapped with tags, and shuffled off to The Real Deal or discarded and “depped.”

When I get up to Employees Only! today, I breathe a sigh of relief. No Claire. Just Rags, or at least a cat that I think is Rags, sleeping on the well-clawed dirty pink couch with the exposed springs.

Claire’s habitual lateness works well for me because I actually prefer the company of vintage clothing to people. I mean, technically, I’m never actually alone on Employees Only! because, like the floor’s name says, there are other people working there. But it usually feels like I am, because the other employees completely ignore me.

Which is fine by me.

Today, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, it feels different on Employees Only! It could be because there are no appointments. So, without Claire, it’s pretty quiet. Not quiet-quiet, because it never is up here. The industrial equipment creates a constant din, like if you were on a train with all the windows open. Employees Only! serves as a weigh station of sorts, kind of a vintage clothing purgatory. It is a maze of old garments and the huge, ancient machines that process them—the pressers and the steamers, my favorite of which is the Moist-Rite Finishing Cabinet. It looks like a big set of metal gym lockers but is actually a surprisingly efficient steamer. Plus, there are these giant fans, because it’s wicked hot up here.

The other employees on Employees Only! are these women I think of collectively as the Lunch Ladies. They sit all the way on the other side of the floor from the Consignment Corner, sorting piles of the clothes the store buys in bulk from vintage clothing wholesalers. They get up occasionally to operate the pressers or add items to the Moist-Rite Finishing Cabinet, then they resume their seats at sewing machine tables to mend clothes bound for the retail floors. Claire says they’re from all over—Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil, you name it. New to this great land of ours, they seem thrilled to work for next to nothing with perks like all the dry-cleaning fumes you can inhale.

I don’t deal with them directly, because most of the clothing they process doesn’t come from individual consigners. I call them the Lunch Ladies because they all bring their
lunches from home in old margarine tubs and eat crowded around a card table next to the main dry-cleaning machine. It probably makes their food taste like dry-cleaning fluid, and it definitely requires the couple of Lunch Ladies who speak the same language to yell their conversations. Yet it doesn’t seem to occur to them to leave the third floor, much less the building.

At times I’ve been tempted to point out to them that the Mooks next door tolerates a regular parade of Pickers using the bathrooms and drinking the little thimbles of half-and-half. Surely this is an establishment that might welcome a bunch of gainfully employed brown-baggers, some of whom might actually purchase a cup of coffee or a baked good from time to time.

But none of the Lunch Ladies speak English. So I haven’t bothered trying to clue them in.

From the rack, I choose a light blue sailor dress I’ve been sketching and get out my sketchbook. One thing I love about it is that the buttons don’t just have anchors on them, they’re shaped like anchors. Also, it reminds me of a dress I had when I was little. Not just young, but actually little. Like four or five, when the only hint of my future girth was my rosy round cheeks. My dress had the same pleats and the same dorky little square neckline with piping all around it. According to the photo albums, my mom used to make outfits like this for me by hand. Back when she used to sew and didn’t cringe at the sight of me.

Most mornings, while I sit there by myself, waiting for
Claire, I make these little sketches of the best stuff I find—whatever is the most unique or unusual, along with some stuff that just catches my eye or speaks to me for some reason or no reason. I need to buy some colored pencils one of these days—my black felt-tip pen is just not doing this dress justice.

I started drawing pictures of vintage stuff when my dad and I used to go to the fleas. He’d always buy all kinds of random stuff—his Broadway tchotchkes, of course, plus old vinyl records of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, commemorative plates of the fifty states, you name it. Invariably, I’d come up with a couple of trinkets I knew I couldn’t live without: a blue glass fish, a hula-girl doll with wobbly hips, a Chinese fan. He’d look at me over the top of his glasses and raise a single chubby finger.

“One thing, Ronnie. You can pick it, but it’s gotta be just one thing.”

So I’d plant my feet and stand there, scowling, trying to make up my mind between the irresistible treasures. Finally, drawing pictures was a compromise he invented for me. It became a way for me to take home as many treasures as I wanted without breaking his rule.

Usually I can get about an hour of drawing in before Claire appears. But today, ten o’clock rolls around and still no Claire. I finish drawing the dress and begin doodling pictures of myself waiting around with my thumb up my ass. Claire hasn’t told me the password for the computerized inventory system yet.

When I get bored of that, I start sketching a pair of opera-length gloves a consigner brought in last week. Just then the phone suddenly rings, startling me.

“Hello,” I say, expecting Claire.

“Hey, um, Veronica?” It’s Bill.

“Yeah?”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. You?” I say, even though there’s only one reason Bill ever calls up here. The chute is clogged.

“The chute’s clogged, man.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” I ask, though I already know exactly what he wants me to do about it.

He wants me to buzz The Nail.

And The Nail just happens to be the one thing that I don’t like about Employees Only!

he Nail is this guy named Lenny. He’s the only person that I am actually required to interact with, unless you count the consigners. Which I don’t.

Lenny is the guy who stocks the store’s inventory, picking up racks of consignment items from me and taking them down in the freight elevator to The Real Deal. He’s also in charge of unclogging the frequently clogged chute to Dollar-a-Pound. He only comes to Employees Only! when one of the Lunch Ladies or I ring this old-timey buzzer and summon him up to the third floor. There’s really nothing for him to do up here except pick up racks of clothing for transport. Or unclog the chute.

I call Lenny “The Nail” behind his back. It’s from this
song. See, at school this year there was this girl named Kay who showed up from England midway through the year and was sort of like my friend for a little while. She was fat, too, only she had a British accent so she was able to get a boyfriend anyway. The boyfriend was named Kurt and he played the guitar and did a lot of open mike. Kay dragged me out to hear him play, like, constantly. My mom was delirious with joy that month, even though I could tell she wished I’d snagged a skinny friend instead. Kurt was part of this scene that wasn’t really a scene that called itself “anti-folk.” Which was confusing because if anyone had ever asked me what the music sounded like, the first word to come into my head would have been “folk.”

Anyway, Kurt wrote this song about spending a summer working as a carpenter’s assistant. Apparently, his boss was an unemployed philosophy professor (or so he told us during his pre-song monologue). The guy would always say to him, “Don’t just hit the nail. BE the nail.” So the song was called “I Am the Nail,” and the chorus consisted of repeating that line a few times while strumming a lot and brooding purposefully.
I am the nail, I am the nail, I am the nail … Gonna be that nail, I am the nail, I am the nail …

I found the song ironic because the fact was, Kurt had something of a nasty temper and used his voice more for yelling at Kay than for singing. Clearly, he was more of the hammer type. I made the mistake of pointing this out to Kay at lunch one day. She responded by snuffling a lot, then telling me I didn’t know what the bloody hell I was talking about.

“Oh, yeah?” I said, tempted to tell her that I knew a thing or two about people who say they love each other but spend most of their time yelling at each other. I wasn’t quite ready to tell Kay the gory details about my folks splitting up, but I had rationed myself a daydream or two about our friendship surviving long enough to get to the mythical sleep-over-and-spill-your-guts stage. I pictured us whispering late into the night over a giant bag of M&M’s, our voices overlapping as we interrupted each other and finished each other’s sentences. I had never let anyone get to know me so well she could finish my sentences. With Kay, I was thinking maybe I might.

“Yah,” said Kay, with a deep, soulful sniff.

“Look, Kay,” I tried.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine, be that way.”

I went back to my sandwich. Kay blew her nose, then shuffled off with her tray. A few days later, one of Kay’s new friends informed me that Kay had gone to the assistant principal’s office and changed her lunch period so it wouldn’t be the same as mine anymore.

So much for that sleepover.

Whatever. I’m so over it, but I still have that dumb song stuck in my head:
I am the nail, I am the nail, I am the nail …
As soon as I met timid, squirrelly, flinchy ol’ Lenny, I immediately thought of it. Lenny is The Nail if ever there was one.

I usually have to ring the buzzer four or five times to get
The Nail to move his sorry ass upstairs. I don’t know what it is with him. Maybe he’s stoned all the time like Bill, but I don’t think so. With The Nail, it seems like it’s part of his DNA. He’s probably about my age—maybe a little older, like seventeen or eighteen—but he moves really slowly and carefully, like a much older person. Plus he’s one of those thin, fragile types. All translucent skin, pale eyes, and ethereal, wispy hair. He walks gingerly, like he’s afraid that if he doesn’t step each step just so, gravity will lose its hold and he’ll just blow off the face of the earth. Which is as likely to happen on Employees Only! as anywhere, because of all the big industrial fans running 24-7 to keep the dry-cleaning machines from baking us all to a crisp.

I hang up on Bill and hit the buzzer. I end up having to ring it six more times before The Nail finally appears.

“Hey,” he says.

“Yo,” I reply sarcastically. The Nail blushes and smiles at his feet as if I’ve said something embarrassing.

“What’s up, Len?”

“Oh, um, nothing, you know …” His voice trails off. Small talk is not his strong suit, though I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what is.

“The chute’s clogged again,” I inform him.

“Oh, okay. I’ll take care of it.”

He lurches over to the bin and sticks his head into the chute. He leans further, shifting his weight, and his top half is momentarily out of view. His pants fall slightly, revealing the elasticized waistband of his underwear and the curve of
his lower back. I’m totally skeeved by the sight, and yet I can’t not look. I guess I must be curious to see if a guy that skinny has a butt crack, and it seems obvious the answer will be revealed any second. But then he sort of rolls over onto his back, bringing his knees up and shimmying deeper into the tunnel. His feet and the cuffs of his jeans dangle as he works. He’s not wearing any socks, and I notice a dark maroon line running up his leg, starting just above his ankle and disappearing into his jeans.