Vintage Veronica (2 page)

In my town, Mookie’s Donut Shops are everywhere. People call them “Mooks” and give directions by them, like “Go down a couple of blocks and turn right at the Mooks.”

The Mooks next door to The Clothing Bonanza is like the one that time forgot. The counters and stools are pink vinyl and chrome, like in an old diner, even though the Mookie’s Donuts corporate colors are yellow and orange. It’s sort of fitting that the only Mooks in town that missed out on being renovated is the one next door to The Store Caught in a Time Warp! Of course, this Mooks doesn’t take the retro theme any further than the stools and counters. The employees all wear Mookie’s Donuts pee-and-cheddar-cheese-striped polo shirts, which you’d think would be an equal opportunity fashion disaster, but which look particularly hideous on girls built like me. Not that I’d ever consider working there under any circumstances.

The Clothing Bonanza, thank God, has no dress code
except
No New Clothing!
The Florons, which is what my boss, Claire, calls everyone who works on the main retail floor, wear a pretty wide variety of vintage clothes, often mixed with more modern touches like blue hair dye, tats, and piercings. Mod is very popular with the Florons—monochromatic polyester minidresses and the like—as are Glam, Goth, and what I like to think of as Gloth, which is a look that’s kind of both. And kind of neither.

My own look is a little hard to define, or at least I like to think it is. I’m all about individual pieces. If they speak to me, I buy them, even if they don’t fit. Back when my mom didn’t cringe at the sight of me quite so much, we used to do all sorts of dumb, crunchy activities together. So I actually know how to sew pretty well, which helps if you want to wear a dress that is a couple of sizes too big or, as is more often the case for me, too small.

Most of what I buy and what I wear is stuff from the fifties, although occasionally I’ll venture out of my decade for the right piece. The only thing I skip is the shoes—fifties girls’ shoes are death. I stick with men’s stuff like two-tone creepers and bricks, good clompy shoes that go with everything. I also have a pair of Chuck Taylors, and a pair of bowling shoes that I only wear in the winter. But from the ankles up, I like girly stuff. Tulle crinolines, full circle skirts, bolero jackets, silk dressing gown jackets, beaded cardigans. Especially beaded cardigans. I’m also a sucker for anything with fruit on it. Cherries, pineapples, lemons … I even have a watermelon dress. The fifties were all about fruit.

Today, under a ridiculous number of layers of pink tulle,
I’m wearing my (men’s size eight-and-a-half wide) black-and-white two-tone creepers, which are uncomfortably hot but not as bad as bowling shoes. When I swish on over to the Mooks, there’s a line out the door there, too. It’s not Pickers, of course. In fact, it seems to be a lot of the Florons. I recognize two of them, Zoe and Ginger, right off the bat. They are in line a few people up from me, but they’re very noticeable because Zoe’s like a full head taller than anybody else and Ginger’s got bright pink hair and a squeaky laugh you can hear about a mile away. They seem like they’re probably about nineteen or so—enough older than me that I’m simply not on their radar, even though they’ve been on mine since day one.

Zoe and Ginger are pretty much always together. With the exception of their shared appreciation for thick black eyeliner, they look about as dissimilar as any two girls possibly could. Zoe’s look is over-the-top Gloth. She’s also, as I mentioned, an Amazon. She’s got a jet-black Cleopatra hairdo and these va-va-voom black outfits that a drag queen would envy. Ginger, on the other hand, is short and skinny. She’s got a long horsy face, big eyes that shift from side to side like one of those fifties cat clocks, and long, stringy hair that changes color practically every week. She dresses mostly in shapeless sixties shifts and white go-go boots. She’s also fond of Hello Kitty baby barrettes.

I get in line several people behind them and wait. Bill is there, so I give him a noncommittal nod. Bill is an old guy, maybe twenty-five, with a long, straggly ponytail. He sounds even older when he opens his mouth, because he calls
everyone “man” and says things like “heavy” to mean that something sucks. He’s also the closest thing I have to a friend at work. Unfortunately, he seems to think he’s my ex, because at the beginning of the summer, when I first started working at the store, I went over to his apartment after work a couple of times to watch movies and eat nachos. I guess he thinks that meant something. I think it didn’t. When I stopped coming over, I told him that it wasn’t him, it was the goddamned Weight Watchers. Nachos are just plain not worth the points.

Plus, he’s boring, but I didn’t tell him that.

It turns out Bill isn’t in line. He’s just standing there, holding a Mooks bag and smoking a cigarette. When I nod in his direction, he comes right over.

“Hey, Veronica. What’s up?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Not a lot.”

We both nod and look away for a while.

“You walking back after?” he asks finally.

“Looks that way.”

“Cool. I’ll hang.” He shuffles forward with me as the line inches along. We watch some fire ants attacking a half-eaten cruller. Bill pokes it with his sneaker and one of the fire ants rears up, waving angry legs.

“Is anyone watching Dollar-a-Pound?” I ask.

“Yeah, I got Zoe to cover for me, why?”

I point in her direction. Bill rolls his eyes.

“Christ,” he says, taking a last drag. “Later, man.”

“Aren’t you going to give her shit or anything?”

Bill raises one eyebrow at me. “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” he tells me.

“Good to know,” I say, turning my attention back to the ants.

After Bill leaves, the line crawls into the Mooks. The service there is uniformly lousy, which I find comforting in its predictability. I also enjoy the fact that after going there about twice a day for the entire summer I’ve been working at The Clothing Bonanza, no one has ever remembered my order. It’s not a particularly complicated one, either: one extra-large iced mocha smoothie, which they insist on calling (and I refuse to call) a “s’Mookie.”

From where I’m standing, I can see that Zoe and Ginger have almost made it to the counter. Then someone in front of me steps out of line, so there are only two customers between me and them. I hear Zoe say, “Well, whaddaya know? They have a new assistant manager this week.”

“Why should this week be any different?” replies Ginger, giggling.

The counter girl narrows her eyes and takes a deep breath as Zoe and Ginger close in on her. She looks like one of those animals that try to make themselves appear larger when predators approach. She has thick glasses, the standard-issue Mookie’s uniform, and these ginormous boobs. Clearly, it’s not her lucky day—the water parts and Zoe and Ginger step forward to become her next customers.

“Welcome-to-Mookie’s-I’m-Carla-can-I-take-your-order?”

“Mmmmmm, I’ll bet you are,” says Zoe, reaching out and tweaking the orange and yellow advertising button (which
reads MMM … S’MOOKIE-LICIOUS!) that perches on the girl’s polo shirt like a goat on a mountain range.

“I’m … sorry?” The girl steps back, clutching herself protectively.

“Could you please try not being such a bitch all the time?” says Zoe brightly. Since I’m behind her, I can’t see her face, but I can tell from her tone of voice that she’s grinning like a barracuda.

The counter girl blinks repeatedly.

“What?” she asks.

“I
said
,” says Zoe, sounding impatient, “could I please try the sausage bagel sandwich this time?”

The counter girl storms off. Some sort of huddle takes place behind the counter. Meanwhile, the two people ahead of me get served at another register. I shuffle toward the counter, where Zoe and Ginger are still standing.

“Hello? Ec-squeeze me?” calls Zoe, leaning over the counter and waving. Turning to Ginger, she gripes, “Who do you have to blow around here to get a sausage bagel?”

Just then Ginger looks my way. “Hey,” she says. It is the first word she’s ever spoken to me.

“Hey, what’s up?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“Oh, nothing. Same old, same old.”

A short Indian-looking man with a mustache breaks away from the huddle and comes to the counter.

“Well,
hello
,” simpers Zoe, putting both elbows on the counter and leaning on them so her cleavage is even more unavoidable than usual. “You must be the assistant manager.”

“I am Mr. Singh. Is there a problem?”

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to get my order filled. Do you think you could
fill my order
? I asked for a hot sausage in my buns … ooh, I mean my bagel.”

The man’s darkish face begins to look purple.

“I think you should leave,” he says in kind of a clipped way.

“YOU WANT TO GO OUT WITH ME?”
asks Zoe, loud and incredulous.

“No, I think you should leave. Before I call the police.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Zo?” Ginger pipes up. “Let’s bounce.”

“NO,” says Zoe firmly. “I will not step down in the face of SEXUAL HARASSMENT. I will take back the night, as will all my sisters. This is not about donuts. This is about OPPRESSION.”

Every eye in the Mooks is on her.

“And I will not be silenced. Before I am through, everyone will know that
that
man said that GIRLS LIKE ME DON’T DESERVE TO BE TREATED FAIRLY.”

“Now wait just a minute, Miss,” says Mr. Singh. It comes out
mees
.

“AND SOMEDAY,” Zoe continues, “I hope he will learn that ALL PEOPLE SHOULD BE TREATED EQUALLY, WITH COURTESY AND RESPECT. And then and only then will I say, HALLELUJAH.”

“Hallelujah,” says someone in line behind me.

“Amen,” chimes in someone else.

I turn around. The entire store is glaring at Mr. Singh. He leans forward and says something quietly to Zoe.

“Okay,” she says.

Then he leaves the counter and comes back with a large Mookie’s bag. He hands it to Zoe, and she and Ginger practically skip out of the store.

Without missing a beat, the counter girl with the huge boobs looks at me and says, “Welcome-to-Mookie’s-I’m-Carla-can-I-take-your-order?”

No wonder Claire’s first piece of advice to me was: Never talk to the Florons if you can help it.

don’t end up ordering a donut after all.

After Zoe and Ginger leave, I just want to get the hell out of the Mooks as fast as I can. Donning my sunglasses, I clutch my purse and my iced mocha smoothie tightly to my chest and march straight from the Mooks to The Clothing Bonanza.

I brush past the line of Pickers, trying to look as officious and disinterested as possible so none of them will launch into an angry tirade about “cutters” or start riffing on my look. Luckily, Bill sees me struggling with the front door and opens it for me.

“Must be a full moon or something,” he says, glaring over my shoulder at the teeming masses as I cross the threshold.

“Or something,” I say.

Bill shrugs at me, like
What are you gonna do?
He must be pretty used to the Pickers by now. After all, he’s been working at Dollar-a-Pound since the earth cooled. On a positive note, this has given him an unrivaled collection of vintage iron-on T-shirts. Today he’s wearing a baseball-style shirt that says I’VE GOT A MAGIC STICK! and has a picture of a caveman on it.

About every hour or so, Bill reassembles The Pile with a garden rake and yells “Clear!” On cue, the Pickers shuffle out of The Pile. Then Bill presses a button and a torrent of additional garments rains down from a hole in the ceiling. It’s a loud process, kind of like a subway train running through the store.

From what I can tell, the common denominator among the Pickers is being very cheap. Or very poor, maybe. Some Pickers are insatiable and root around in The Pile all day long. Some are only interested in one kind of item, like this guy who collects hats. Sometimes I see him sitting at the Mookie’s Donuts next door, drinking a coffee, with a stack of eight or ten hats piled on top of his head. He looks like this picture in a book I had when I was little. And he’s one of the more normal ones.