The Yearbook (6 page)

“Paula?”

“Not Paula, dear, Pola. Pola Negri, the silent film star. Some people claimed it was a publicity stunt, but don't you believe it.” The woman looked sad about this Valentino business and Lola worried she might be about to cry. She thought she better change the subject.

“So this was a theater, huh?” she asked, and tried to look interested in the answer.

“It was called The Grand, and a great showplace it was, too,” sighed the lady, whose name tag read, “Miss Bryant.” “It closed in 1974, right after they built the Springfield four-plex.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “By the end, they were playing only the dirty movies, if you know what I mean.”

“Pornos,” Lola whispered back, and the woman nodded regretfully.

Lola looked beyond Miss Bryant, through an open set of doors quilted in red leather, to where the theater seating had once stood. Rows of clothing racks sloped toward a stage cluttered with junk. The impression was that of an enormous garage sale tilted on its side.

“Looking for anything in particular?” Miss Bryant asked, her magnified eyes bobbing under the big lenses.

Lola thought it might be rude to say that she'd only come in to get out of the rain, so she said she'd stopped by to browse and descended the cluttered slope of racks arranged by decade. She came first to a forest of taffeta cocktail dresses from the 1940s—a few still bearing the stains of some long-forgotten champagne toast—and then roamed into a neighborhood of 1950s petticoats. She turned and meandered into a far corner near the stage. Then she saw something that stopped her cold: It was Whoopsie Whipple's pink silk dress, or one just like it. The dress jutted out from the end of a rack as if, like Whoopsie herself, it wanted to be discovered. Lola reached out and rolled the fringed hem between her fingers. It felt fragile as a moth and reminded her of the yearbook. She checked inside the collar on the chance that somebody had sewn a name label into it. There was none. It sure looked like Whoopsie's, though. She sniffed the fabric. It smelled of old perfume and mothballs.

“Eighteen ninety-nine,” said a voice. Miss Bryant had sneaked up on her again.

Lola jerked her nose out of the dress.

“That's the price, of course, not the vintage,” the old lady added.

“1923, maybe?” Lola ventured.

Miss Bryant gripped her wig in excitement. Lola's guess was exactly right. Might she be a fellow history buff? “How I do adore the Roaring Twenties. It's one of my favorite historical decades. The Jazz Age. Flappers. Flagpole-sitting. Al Capone and the bootleggers.”

“Was that a band?”

Miss Bryant looked bewildered. “You don't mean you've never heard of Prohibition?”

“You mean probation,” Lola said. “That's a punishment you get instead of jail.”

“Oh dear. Oh my. No. Prohibition made alcoholic drinks illegal from 1920 to 1933 by Constitutional amendment, the 18th Amendment. Memorize that. Have you?”

“1920 to 1933. The 18th Amendment,” Lola repeated. “Beer was illegal? That's hard to believe.”

“I know whereof I speak,” Miss Bryant said. “I'm the president of the Ashfield Historical Society. Don't they teach history anymore?”

“Maybe it doesn't stick,” Lola answered, scraping aside the hanger that held the pink dress. Time had reduced the next few garments to faded scraps of silk and organdy. “What was that you said about sitting on flagpoles?”

Miss Bryant nodded knowingly, disappeared into the confusion for a minute or two, and returned with a large framed photograph of a man in a suit and tie sitting on a platform mounted atop a flagpole. She looked pleased with herself.

“Flagpole-sitting was one of the great fads of the 1920s. The record was set in 1930 by Mr. Bill Penfield,” Miss Bryant said, pausing to indicate the man in the photo. “He sat on this flagpole in Strawberry Point, Iowa, for fifty-one days and twenty hours until a thunderstorm brought him down.”

“Who knows how long he might have stayed up there otherwise?” Lola commented. It was the only thing she could think of to say.

“Indeed, who knows?” Miss Bryant agreed, leaning the photo against a pillar. “Of course, by then the fad had gone right out of style.”

“Of course,” Lola nodded. She turned away from Mr. Penfield on the pole and pushed aside the next hanger. A sleeveless shift of pale green silk was revealed, the beads along its “V” neckline still managing to twinkle a little in their old age. It was slinky and feminine, not her kind of thing, but she reached out for it, and draped it along the front of her.

“Ravishing,” Miss Bryant said. “You look just exactly like a flapper. Hmm. Except for the hair. Back then the bob was in style.”

“No long hair?”

“Certainly not. The bob meant freedom, modernity, fun. Long hair was old-fashioned, stuffy, restrictive, like long dresses and corsets, something from the past.”

Lola ran a hand down her ponytail. She didn't like it so much anymore.

Next to the flapper rack sat a wicker basket of long gloves in various conditions and colors. Lola tried on a pair of white ones, then picked up the silk dress again and admired the way the gloves went with it. Glancing down, Lola caught sight of the scuffed basketball shoes she'd saved up so long for last year. They looked big and stupid in the company of the dress. She turned toward Miss Bryant, who had climbed up on a stepladder and was rearranging the specimens on a hat rack.

“Excuse me,” Lola said. “What's a hobo, exactly? Is it any different from a bum?”

Miss Bryant took a man's top hat from the rack and put it on, as if this would help her think better. “The hobo wasn't a bum,” she began. “He had a creed and a work ethic. He rode the high iron far and wide and composed campfire ditties of enduring social relevance.”

Lola nudged at a floorboard with her toe. “Do I . . . look like a hobo?”

Miss Bryant examined Lola from under the hat brim. “You look nothing whatsoever like a hobo. For starters, you'd need a banjo, or at the very least a harmonica, and a red kerchief with all your worldly goods bundled inside, hanging on a stick.”

“A stick?”

“Or a hoe.”

“Oh,” Lola said, and turned back to her browsing.

But the hobo question had got Miss Bryant's attention. She adjusted her glasses to look more closely at Lola. It was rare for a young customer to ask such an exceptional question. “Just passing through?” she asked.

“No. I live here,” Lola answered. “In the Wrigley home.” The instant she said “Wrigley” she regretted it. The word meant “unhinged delinquent” in Ashfield and frightened people off. But with Miss Bryant it seemed to have the opposite effect.

“Ah, Old Judge Wrigley's place. I know it well. Used to visit the rose garden when I was little.”

“Not
that
Wrigley place. I mean the group home. On Quarrier Street.”

Miss Bryant took Lola by the arm. “Let me show you something.”

She ushered Lola to a roped-off staircase with a sign across it that read,
NO ENTRY
. Miss Bryant moved the rope aside and led Lola up a curving set of stairs.

In a moment they were in the balcony. Lola was shocked. The place was piled floor to ceiling in Yesterday Boutique junk: overstuffed trunks and boxes, books and bundles, packages, chests and papers and crates. Miss Bryant disappeared right into the pile, like a deer into a thicket, and Lola saw that a path had been blazed through it, narrow and twisting, but definitely leading somewhere.

Lola followed, the path leading up and up under her feet, until they arrived at a narrow door reading,
PROJECTION BOOTH
. Miss Bryant took out a set of keys and unlocked it. They stepped inside. The rectangular room was filled with even more stuff—old film cans, oddball appliances, stacks of magazines. There was a mink cape with genuine teeth, baskets of doorknobs, a bag of bags, two bed warmers, a yoke for oxen, and six or seven broken cuckoo clocks hung all in a row. But there was also a tiny, tidy bedroom at the far end furnished with a single bed, an antique floor lamp, and a little round rag-rug. It reminded Lola of a bedroom in a dollhouse.

“You
live
here?" Lola blurted out, then worried it might have been rude to ask.

“Shh,” she said. “I'm not supposed to, zoning laws and all. If the city found out, I'd be in trouble.”

Miss Bryant turned and yanked open an old refrigerator. To Lola's surprise, it was crammed with books.

“I did have a house once, a nice warm little house,” Miss Bryant said. “But it was hard to come up with the payment month after month, and business here, well, it's not as good as you might think. Anyway, it's a dull story. I'm making do all right.”

She opened one of the fruit drawers, rooted around, and brought out an old volume. “Yes, yes. Here we are,” she said, and sat down on a celery crate, daintily, like it was some kind of gorgeous silk tuffet.

Lola sat down on the cinder block next to it and watched Miss Bryant leaf through the pages of the book she'd selected. Lola was beginning to see that the Yesterday Boutique was not the nutty jumble that it seemed but a highly organized affair that made complete sense to Miss Bryant—crazy, but with a pattern, like her psychedelic pantsuit.

“Aha. Looky here,” Miss Bryant said.

Lola leaned in. It was a picture of the Wrigley house. Her house. A white-haired couple stood by the front door. “Judge Horace and Eunice Vance Wrigley, 1948,” the caption read.

Lola skimmed the text. These Wrigley people built the house in 1921 and left it to the county in their will. How funny to think the name Wrigley wasn't always associated with juvenile delinquency. Lola pulled the new magnifying glass out of her jacket pocket and took a closer look. The fancy carved front door was unknown to her. It had been changed somewhere along the line for the metal-and-safety-glass model, the one with the tattletale keycard-swipe entry. She turned to the next page, which showed several pictures of the interior. She couldn't believe it. Her house hadn't always been a chopped-up maze of linoleum cubicles. It hadn't always had those low, plastic ceilings with the fluorescent sticks inside, that sickening green paint. It was once an airy, graceful mansion.

“And here's the rose garden,” Miss Bryant said, turning the page. “The Wrigley roses. An acre of roses. They covered the whole back lawn. People came from far and wide to see them in the summer. The Wrigleys didn't have any children. They put all their love into the roses, I guess.”

Lola thought about the noisy car dealership that now covered the ground where the roses had once grown. It butted right up against the group home and reeked of tires. The stink made you never want to open the back windows. She was about to mention the dealership but stopped herself; Miss Bryant probably preferred to remember the rose garden as it had been all those summers when she was little.

The next pages showed pictures of a neat little brick downtown. It took Lola a few seconds to realize that she was looking at Ashfield. She skimmed through the rest of the book, surprised by the wide-open fields that ran all the way to the edges of town and the dusty two-lane roads that crisscrossed the center. Lola closed the book and handed it back to Miss Bryant, who returned it to the fruit drawer and slammed the refrigerator.

In a moment they were back at the replica snack bar.

“Thanks,” Lola said. “Your store is interesting. Way better than the mall.”

“Why, thank you,” Miss Bryant said. “Come back anytime. Tell your friends.”

Lola nodded and stepped outside. It was dusk. The rain had stopped, but it was cold and windy. She worked the combination on her bike lock and it clicked open. She was about to remove the chain when an idea came to her, so clear and alive that it was more like a voice than an idea:
Buy the green dress, Lola.
She dropped the chain and let it dangle as the voice got louder, more assured:
You want the dress. You have the money. You should have the dress, the gloves. Buy them. Buy them, Lola.

She rushed back through the double doors, not even bothering to lock up her bike. She made straight for the 1920s rack, Miss Bryant jogging after her. Lola chose the dress she'd admired, plus one blouse, one skirt, one bell-shaped hat, a string of fake pearls, and the only pair of shoes in the store that would fit her twenty-first-century feet. The shoes were a bargain at eighty-nine cents plus tax. In a dark corner of the stage under a pile of tennis rackets, she found several antique-looking suitcases and chose one of them. In a glass case near the cash register, she impulsively picked out a beaded coin purse with five old silver dollars inside.

She paid for the goods with Terry's two fifty-dollar bills. It was good to be rid of the money, of anything that had been that close to Terry's butt. She stuffed her loot into the suitcase and said goodbye to Miss Bryant a second time. Then she mounted her bike and wheeled off, shifting and reshifting her whimsical cargo into balance.

When she glanced back, Miss Bryant's hand was changing the sign from “Yes, We're Open” to “Sorry, We're Closed.”

Danielle was out, so Lola changed into the green dress, the hat, and the gloves. She leaned back on the bed and stared at one of her arms with a feeling that was new to her. What was this feeling? Happiness? Excitement?
No
, she thought.
It's delight
. She was delighted. It wasn't just how the glove looked; it was how it made her feel, like someone marvelous out of a movie, like that Pola Negri woman. She twirled the fake pearls. “Valentino, you were the great love of my life. I fainted at your funeral, you know, twice in fact, maybe even three times, and I wasn't even faking it,” she was saying aloud just as Danielle opened the door.

Danielle looked at Lola, the blue eyes wide in her bony face. “What's going on?” She dropped her purse on the bed and moved to investigate. Danielle was always moving to investigate.