In our small town there was a women’s dress shop owned and run by a group of elderly ladies. In the days before Lynne and I would spend Saturdays on the town square going from store to store trying to figure out what we could buy with our limited funds (and my limited funds often came from her father, because if she hit him up for a few dollars, he seemed to think he needed to give me money, too–THANKS, I.J.!), I’d wander in and out of stores on my own while my parents were shopping.
In the back of this particular dress shop was a vanity where women could sit and retouch their lipstick, powder their noses, and add another coat of hairspray to their helmet hair. I remember once testing some perfume and hairspray and hearing the old ladies in front whispering about my shameless use of their resources. My mother would have been mortified, but she and my father were long-accustomed to my wandering ways–plus I always told them all the gossip I learned on my excursions. I don’t think they gave a rat’s ass about the gossip, but since I could go days without speaking from behind a book, my voice reassured them I was still alive.
We didn’t purchase things from this shop. For one thing, we could shop at the PX. For another, the clothes were too old for my sister and me and too expensive for my mother. Mother had a friend named Nancy who had contacts all over the Southeast from whom she could buy clothes that hadn’t sold or clothes with small flaws at deep discounts (there were no “outlet malls” in those days). Nancy sold her clothes in a couple of shops, so buying from Nancy, along with being able to sew, enabled Mother to furnish me a season’s worth of clothes for a frugal sum. Even high-ranking NCOs didn’t make a lot of money, and we all know schoolteachers didn’t/don’t.
At some point when I was a little older, my mother and I were walking down the sidewalk, and she stopped to look at a blouse in this store’s window. I could tell she wanted it, so I talked her into going in and trying it on. She balked at the price tag: EIGHTEEN DOLLARS! Doesn’t that seem ridiculous now? But she could feed us for two weeks on eighteen dollars, and she rarely spent money on herself. The blouse went back on the hanger, and we left the store.
BUT… It wasn’t long before her birthday, and I was finally old enough to realize that most husbands are clueless about buying gifts. So I told my father, and we made a secret shopping trip of our own. Looking back, I wonder if I was so excited about the blouse that I gave it away long before she opened it. If so, she sure acted surprised, and my father knew he was off the hook until April (anniversary) and December.
The brown and orange striped blouse in the photo above is THE blouse. She could wear it alone, buttoned up, or over other shirts or shells, with orange pants and brown pants. She had it for years, and sometimes I wore it, too: as seen in this tenth-grade yearbook photo (hi, Vic! hi, Nick!), under my brown suede, fringed jacket that I just recently discovered my sister still has in her closet.
I think we got our, i.e., my father’s, money’s worth out of the birthday blouse. Now if I could only fit into that suede jacket again.
ETA: Original photo of my mother in the blouse was replaced because I found a better one.
