Vintage Veronica Read Free Page B

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, Iwas 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