Vanity Insanity (20 page)

“Crazy House.”

“Excuse me.”

“Looney Bin. Dysfunction Junction. You
did
ask me for help with a name for this place. You choose to enter a whacky industry and you hire
a bunch of…Vanity Insanity…Vanity Insanity. I like it!” A.C. stood up. “Seriously, what do you think? Vanity Insanity!”

I started to laugh. “I actually kind of like it.”

“Vanity Insanity.” A.C. stood up and smiled, repeating the name over and over. He was starting to annoy me again.

A week later, on February 14, 1984, A.C. and Angel got married.

The temporary sign went up the next day. A month and a half later, the permanent sign, which cost more than I’d paid for my first year of college, was hung above the bay in the Old Market.

Vanity Insanity.

17

Lucy: Highlight for Graduation Party

Wednesday, May 8

1985

L
ucy squealed as she ran into the shop. “Looook! Look! Don’t you just love it?”

She didn’t have to open the door to Vanity Insanity since I’d propped it open all afternoon on what was one the nicest days in May I can remember. Lucy, very tan and more bubbly than usual, ran in wearing yellow Bermuda shorts and a matching shirt. Flat pumps, purse, and jewelry matched as well. I’m pretty sure if you researched the origin of the name Lucy, you would discover that it translates to mean “tiny collector of many matching clothes.”

“What? What should I love?” I pretended not to notice the ring she was waving in my face. “What am I looking for here?”

“Not funny. My engagement ring. Do you love it or what?”

“Wow.” I held her hand, looking as hard as I could. What did I know about rings? “It’s one of the nicest I’ve seen…Now who is the lucky guy?”

“Don’t you know the rules of what you’re supposed to say to someone who has just gotten engaged?”

“Rules?”

“OK, I’ll help you. You first ask when the big day is.”

“OK, when’s the big day, Lucy?”

“Well, we’re getting married on Tom’s fall break in October.” Another squeal. “I have so much planning to do.”

“Am I supposed to ask about the planning next?”

“No. You’re supposed to ask what my colors are.”

“Colors?”

“The color theme I’m using for the wedding. Like bridesmaids’ dresses, napkins, decorations…colors!”

“Color theme?”

“I’m going with a jewel-toned fuchsia. And I’m accenting it with a cream color called moon shadow.”

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to have a wimpy-rainbow wedding?”

“OK, now you’re bugging me. No more questions.” Lucy marched over to my chair and plopped down, arms folded, a smirk hidden under her frustration.

“Sorry, Lucy. It’s just I’m in graduation mode, thinking that your next big event was your graduation, and you threw me off with the whole wedding thing.” I stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders and looked straight in the eyes of the mirror Lucy. “Seriously, congratulations, Lucy. Great news for you and Tom.”

Lucy frowned.

“Was it something I said?”

She shook her head. Her eyes started to water as Madonna sang about living in her material world from the radio.

“Congratulations?” I guessed.

“No…. graduation…you said graduation. I’m not graduating, Ben.”

“Sure you are, I have the invitation to your graduation and party at your parents’ house on my counter at home. It says that unless it rains, the party will be in the backyard of your house on Maple Crest Circle.”

“Nope. I just got my grades…I flunked meteorology. I bombed the final.” Lucy put her head in her hands, sobbing. I put my hands on her shoulders.

“Hey, who really cares about the weather anyway? We can’t control it. We just have to live with it. Yet some guy gets paid to be wrong most of the time about what the weather will be tomorrow. Heck, that guy probably didn’t do very well on his final either…”

“I haven’t told my parents, Ben.” Lucy sparked up. “But I have an idea. I was thinking that the party they planned for my graduation can be Tom’s and my engagement party. What do you think?”

“Have you talked to Tom about it? Marty? Theresa?”

“No. Nobody knows but you…about the class or the engagement. What do you think?”

“Does Tom know you’re engaged?” I smiled and started combing out Lucy’s hair.

“Of course he does. He proposed to me last night, outside on Creighton’s campus. Under the stars in Jesuit Gardens…He doesn’t know about the class.”

The “class” was just one of many that Lucy had tolerated over the past four years. She’d started out at Kearney State College but missed Tom too much, so she came back after just one semester and enrolled at UNO in Omaha. With Tom at Creighton University, Lucy was just a five-minute ride away. I’d run into her several times on campus, and I can say this much: the girl never studied. Lucy loved everything about college except the classes. They were an inconvenience that she endured so that she could do what she did best, socialize. I had always suspected that her grades were not stellar. Louis Mangiamelli wanted each of his kids to have a college education, but as far as Lucy was concerned, what she would do with that degree was as much a mystery to Lucy as it was to me.

Our secret discussion, packed with all sorts of things she had told no one else, was interrupted as Jenae got off the phone. “Hey, what did I miss, girlfriend? I had to make some stupid appointment for Toby. Where is he anyway?”

“He ran to pick up supplies.” The running tension between Toby and Jenae was amusing more than intrusive in the daily interactions of Vanity Insanity. Jenae irritated Toby. Toby irritated Jenae. And for that reason alone, I positioned their stations right next to each other.

“Jenae, I’m getting married!” Lucy shouted and thrust her hand out to Jenae, shrieking louder than before. So much for the big secret.

“Married!” Jenae joined the shriek fest. “Lucy Lu, you will be the most beautiful bride.” Jena’s black ankle boots in May were a statement alone. She’d toned the look down with a deliberately ripped pin sweatshirt over her leather miniskirt. Her now-brown hair was pulled in a tight ponytail to the side and two chopsticks—at least that’s what they looked like—were poking out of her head as though they had been forced into the back of her neck, through her brain, and up and out of her head, perfectly poised like two antennae.

“OK, now when is the big day?” Jenae asked with big, blue, sincere eyes.

“Well, my fiancé,” Lucy started, “I can’t believe I can finally say F-I-A-N-C-E…” She dragged it out. “My fiancé is in law school, but neither of us wants to wait, so we’re getting married on Creighton’s campus at Saint John’s over his break in October.”

“And the colors?”

Jenae knew the questions? Jenae didn’t strike me as the type who would know the questions. Lucy couldn’t answer since Jenae’s next appointment was standing in the doorway. Jenae gave a congratulatory hug to Lucy and ran up to the small, older woman, smiling at her.

“All right now, Miss Colleen, let’s go make you look fabulous.” She held the older lady’s hand all of the way to her chair.

Once you could get past the latest Jenae getup, you were overwhelmed by her warmth and exuberant energy. I know this is why her clients were
loyal to her, that and the fact that she was great with hair. Ironically, about 75 percent of her clients were woman over the age of fifty. They were not threatened by her effervescence, taste in clothing, or beauty. In fact, they might just have been hoping that some of her edgy looks would rub off on them as she shampooed them. The final look Jenae gave them as they walked out the door was usually conservative, but she would style it with some gel and extra hairspray so they walked out with an extra, little, zippy something-something.

Lucy cleared her throat. “So, what do you think?”

I had to be careful here. “Well, that depends. Are you asking me about your hair or the lies that you’re living?”

“Ben, I haven’t lied to anyone—yet. I’m going make up the class this summer while I’m working at UNO. Did I tell you that I got a new job in the dean’s office? Anyway, I’ll be on campus, so it’ll be no big deal to retake the class. I’ll graduate in August. No big graduation. I don’t even want a party.”

Lucy may have had her share of inappropriate guilt in life, but she felt none as she looked to her college education as something “to get over with.” The degree was not a means to an end. The piece of paper would not catapult her to her dream career. Most of her girlfriends were entering careers they would embrace until marriage and baby came along, only to find that
guilt
was an unavoidable state of mind for the remainder of their lives. Guilt if they remained in their jobs to succeed and reap the financial benefits that would afford a lifestyle they might not have known as children. Guilt if they stayed home and “wasted” the years in college. Parents had cheered them on, “You go, girl! Run for president!” until that first baby came along, and “Of course you are going to quit.” A young woman in the eighties was facing new problems. The smart ones handled it well. That would include Lucy.

The money her parents had paid for her college education was not wasted, in Lucy’s opinion. She had met a ton of interesting people and learned a lot of interesting things—except meteorology. Lucy had a real career goal in mind: marry Tom Ducey and have a lot of babies. She had
not gone to college to get her MRS degree. She was not “pre-wed.” She had no hidden agenda. She would tell you that herself. She’d always known that she wanted to get married and stay home with her kids. You got a problem with that?

“I’ll take Mom and Dad to dinner or something to celebrate when I do finally graduate. I’ll be working full-time until Tom gets a job; I’ll work to put my husband—I just said husband—through law school. I can’t believe I’m getting married.”

“I think that the graduation ceremony and party were as much for Ava and Louis as for you, Lucy. They’ll be disappointed.” I could tell this was not what she wanted to hear.

“I didn’t plan on flunking meteorology, Ben”

“I know. When are you going to tell your folks? Graduation is in three days.”

“Soon…Do you think they’ll be happy for me? I mean about the engagement?”

“I think they’ll be very happy.” I would hear the full reaction when Ava came in to have her hair done the following Tuesday. “You might want to bring Tom with you to buffer the school news. Once they see how excited you are…and hear about those wonderful color themes or whatever you called them, they’ll be fine.”

“Ya think?”

“Are you kidding me? They will get off the couch and hug the future Mrs. Ducey.” Then like a light bulb going off and falling directly on my head, the thought hit me. “Lucy Ducey?”

“Yeah, yeah. I figured that one out when I started having a crush on Tom. I think I was in seventh grade. Haven’t you ever thought about that? I probably wrote it a million times on my notebooks in study halls.”

“Lucy Ducey.” No, I had never gone there before.

“I love the sound of it, so don’t make fun or you won’t be an usher at my wedding. Now, what funky thing should we do with my hair for my engagement party?”

“Something big and poofy, I’m thinking. Or spiky! I’m an usher?” I walked Lucy over to the sink.

The good news about Lucy’s hair in 1985 is that she was finally “in.” Other women were paying sizable amounts of money to get the curl and volume that Lucille Belle had been born with. If anything, I was still calming her locks a bit to give her a Julia Roberts style, but she shone in the middle of that decade.

I warmed the water as Lucy sat down by the sinks and babbled on and on about her plans for the big day. I listened and nodded as I shampooed her hair. No longer did we talk about the “newness” of my salon, and that was more than all right with me. I had grown tired of talking about the place, so I couldn’t have been happier when clients stopped asking if I was “getting settled” or if I was “going to make it downtown” or if I was “happy with it all.” We were back to the clients’ hair and their event or disaster of the day, and I liked it.

That day in May, I was finally settled. Vanity Insanity had been up and running for a full year and two months or so. I had a lot of ideas for changes with the bay, but I chose to put any extra money into new equipment and additional employees. What remained—until an unknown future date when I could put money into fixing up the place—was a hodgepodge design. One wall of the bay was brick. The previous renters of the bay had painted the remaining two walls just before their business tanked in what I guess was a last-ditch effort to save it. The owners of Candy Fantasy or Candy Addict or something like that had painted one wall a bright yellow and one wall an obnoxious pink before the last bell had rung for their sweet endeavor. I was stuck with yellow and pink, colors I would have never chosen. Fine for now.

The sinks and counters of the hair stations were black, the cheapest choice I could afford. By the entrance were church pews, anchoring the big door, with their backs toward the windows that climbed from floor to the ceiling. A.C. and I had picked up the pews from Saint Pius X after the parish remodeled the church. Anyone who could load the old pews and
take them away could have them for free. A.C. helped me load them on a borrowed truck from Subby Mangiamelli one weekend.

That same weekend A.C. and I had picked up an old desk from the Union Pacific Railroad building downtown. Mac informed me of a similar you-move-it, you-own-it deal, as the UP was getting rid of several floors of old furniture. A.C. and I moved the gigantic, sold, cherrywood desk from the tenth floor of the UP building. The guard on the main floor had felt sorry for us and helped us move the desk as far as the sidewalk before he needed to go back to his guard duty. Once we’d gotten it back to the Old Market, we’d set the desk by the pews near the door.

The desk was definitely my favorite piece, an anchor of integrity that seemed to be floating like a circus balloon in a bubblegum disaster of a room. I kept the appointment book open on the desk at all times next to an old, black rotary phone I’d found at a Goodwill thrift store. The desk served as a receptionist desk, even though I didn’t have a receptionist, though Hope liked to think that she was the receptionist on the days that she came in to drop off towels and clean sinks and the back room. She drove Toby crazy when she got to the phone before he did, since she took twice as long to make an appointment. She was slow and cautious on the phone, and some callers could not understand her very well, but I was happy to have her around throughout the week.