Going Vintage (9 page)

“I never knew you were homecoming queen,” Ginnie says.

“I wasn’t. I was the junior princess.”

“Who is the boy?” I ask. “Did you know him?”

Grandma’s lips tighten. “I did. He was my date.”

“‘Clyde Walters,’” Ginnie reads. “The glasses are dorky, but he was cute.”

“He was your date?” I nudge Grandma. “Was he your steady?”

“Ooh!” Ginnie jabs at the poor boy’s face. “A steady! Grandma had a
steady
!”

Grandma takes a long look at the picture. “Yeah, he was my steady. I wore his ring for almost a year. My first boyfriend, actually.”

The ring on the chain around my neck had to be from him. I almost pull it out, ask Grandma if it was Clyde’s, if she wants the little memento back to remember her first boyfriend. But I don’t want to give it back, not when I have something so solid to connect me to her past. I’ll return the ring after I finish The List. Fifty-some years, it’s not like she’ll miss it. “What happened to him?” I ask.

“Nothing. We dated. We broke up.”

“Was it a bad breakup?” Ginnie asks.

Grandma rubs the back of her neck. “I don’t know of many good breakups.”

That’s the truth.

“He left California after high school,” she says. “I stayed here.”

“Was it tragic?” Ginnie asks. I’m glad she’s pushy. I would never ask, but I want to know.

“You could say that.” Grandma pauses. “But I got over it eventually. We didn’t have a grand romance, girls. I have
much better stories about your grandpa. Now
he
was the real thing.”

I try to create a flesh-and-blood reality from these black-and-white glimpses. What did Grandma’s bedroom look like? What was her morning routine? What did she do with her friends after school? What were her fears, and what did she want to be when she grew up?

Because Grandma? She
lived
her life. She was a San Francisco hippie in the late sixties, met Grandpa at a Berkeley peace protest and married him in two weeks. After spending the seventies as an advocate for this and that—women’s rights, the environment, literacy—she started her own nonprofit organization for global children with life-threatening diseases. Grandpa quit his banking job to go back to law school and work for her organization. He liked to tease that she was the boss. And she was. For, like, a hundred people.

A few years ago, she won some California lifetime achievement award and the rest of us had to wear dresses and eat chewy chicken breast while they showed a documentary of her achievements. I remember looking across the table at my mom, who kept readjusting her dress and fiddling with her cell phone. My mom … she’s very different from her mother-in-law.

But I remind myself now that Grandma wasn’t any of those things when she was my age. She was just a girl with a little list and big dreams.

“Where’s your senior yearbook?” I ask.

“Never got one.” Grandma closes the book and pushes it
onto my lap. “That’s enough of that. Mallory, you can stick that with the rest of my junk you cleaned out.” She stands and heads toward the kitchen. “I think I’ll have another helping. Ginnie, what’d you top this with?”

“It’s just ketchup,” I mumble.

The two of them go into a lengthy discussion on organic condiments and the evils of processed sugar. I feel like the heel end of a soy loaf that’s been tossed under the table to the dog. As much as Ginnie is an asset to Total List Domination, I need Grandma all to myself if I’m really going to find whatever it is I’m looking for. When they start in on the health advantages of raw beets, I tug on Grandma’s sleeve and say, “Sorry to interrupt, but, Grandma, I have to learn to sew.”

“Um, okay. Is this … for some class?”

“Sort of.”

“No it’s not.” Ginnie shakes her head. “It’s because of the tool.”

I shoot her a murderous look. She takes it with a scowl.

“And … are you asking me for help?” Grandma asks.

“Yes. I want to sew my own homecoming dress,” I say. “And I was hoping you could teach me how.”

Did I mention Grandma is also a master seamstress and does period costumes
just for fun
? She made Ginnie and me Easter dresses for the first ten years of our lives. Seriously, The Stars would die of jealousy if they ever saw this woman’s résumé.

“I’d love to help.” Grandma starts pawing through one of the boxes of patterns next to her machine. “I don’t know what
kind of fit you want, but there’s a fashion website with patterns for Oscar rip-offs.”

“Oh, that’s the other thing,” I say. “I’m, ah, kind of on a vintage kick right now.”

Ginnie clears her throat. “I’ll say.”

I should have waited until she was in the bathroom to bring this up. She’s overdosing on The Smug. “So I’d like to do a style from the early sixties? Like when you were in high school? That’s, uh, why I wanted to look at your yearbook. For ideas.”

“Really?” Grandma stops shuffling through the patterns and peers over her reading glasses. “You don’t want something slinky? I bet Jeremy would appreciate a sexier style.”

“Jeremy isn’t—” Ginnie says.

“Into sexy. Um, obvious sexy,” I say. Grandma doesn’t need to know about Jeremy. You know, it’d be nice if someone in my life didn’t know all my business, or think they know all my business, or know how messy my business really is. At least when I come to see Grandma, my life can be viewed as put together. “He’ll be fine with vintage. We’ll find an old pattern to use. But will you help? Please?”

Grandma crosses the room and gives me a hug, her jasmine perfume strong as ever. Even in this new space, with her boring furniture and painfully beige walls, at least she still smells like the old Grandma. “Of course. I’ll fit you into my schedule.” She laughs. “Right after tennis.”

Tuesday is another school day of whispers and questioning glances, another lunch, this time spent with Ginnie on the theater bleachers. We discuss list battle strategies, which to Ginnie means recipes, and I point out boys who would make good boyfriends. She’s so against the idea that I decide I’ll have to go covert in my steady search. Drop a boy bomb on her when she isn’t looking.

After school, I escape to my room so I can comb through a set of encyclopedias I found in the garage. They’re twenty years old, so most of the information is outdated, but luckily history stays the same. I find
the sixties
in the
S
encyclopedia and skim through the stuff on hippies and Vietnam in hopes of getting a feel for the earlier, more innocent years of the decade. Like boy bands in slim ties and Jackie Kennedy wearing a pillbox hat. That’s another thing wrong with this century—no one wears dressy hats anymore.

There’s a knock on my door. “Mallory?” Mom calls. “Can we talk for a minute?”

I still have Grandma’s row of pictures on the ground from Sunday. Rather then shove everything back into the bin, I lay a blanket over the mementos. I do not want my mom to see this as a reason to discuss Grandma and the next phase in her life. She’ll try to make it this big moment, all sappy close-ups with one tear rolling down her cheek. My room/life is a mess right now, not something she can fix with some feigned empathy.

“Yeah?”

“Ginnie told me you and Jeremy broke up? I thought she
was joking, so I got on Friendspace and now I’m blocked from your account. What’s going on?”

I tilt my forehead against the door. Ginnie blocked her. Good move. But I wish she hadn’t told Mom about the breakup. I’m not ready for the inevitable mother-daughter bonding. “Ginnie told you. That’s great.”

“I’m hurt
you
didn’t tell me,” she says. “Are you okay?”

I unlock the door, only opening a crack. I swear I love my mom, but that doesn’t mean I want to do this now. My mom has the ability to take the tiniest bit of drama, explode it into a catastrophe, then somehow make the problem all about her. She’s got to be salivating over breakup news. Prime opportunity for a parental lecture.

“No, I’m not okay. But talking about it won’t change that. And I have homework.”

Mom’s face is shadowed, her hair backlit by the hall light. There’s a look of firm resolve on her face, never a good sign. “I’m not going to let you push me away. You’re in a crisis, and I’m your mother. It’s my job to help.”

Her actual job is to get all up in my business, and she’s a model employee when it comes to that.

“There’s nothing to help with. What happened happened.”

“You know what you need? A break. You need to go somewhere fun.”

“I’m not in the mood for fun. I just want to sit in my room—”

“And mope. Which is why we’re going to the happiest place on Earth instead.”

“No!” I try to shut my door, but Mom’s already wedged in her foot. There’s no escaping her when she gets an agenda. I put my hands up in surrender. “Fine. I’ll get my Mickey Mouse ears.”

Chapter 7

The Bradshaw family’s favorite Disneyland attractions:

1. Space Mountain: BEST RIDE IN THE PARK, especially at Halloween, when they haunt that beast
.

2. Splash Mountain: except when Mom doesn’t plan ahead and wears a white T-shirt. She gets soaked, guys ogle her chest, and she ends up buying a new T-shirt that she passes down to Ginnie or me even though:

a. gift-shop shirts are expensive
.

b. the shirt is always stretched out
.

3. The Tiki Juice Bar: Dole Whip sorbet treat. Healthy enough to justify because of the pineapple, delicious enough because of whatever makes it “whip.”

4. The teacups: you don’t have a soul if you hate the teacups
.

5. It’s a Small World: but only in the summer. It’s the most air-conditioned ride in the park. Dad brings those little orange earplugs and we get a nice, cool fifteen-minute nap
.

Another great thing about having a rich uncle Rodney who has lots of money but little time for family is that he gives us the same Christmas present every year: season passes to Disneyland. When we lived in Reno, our family made a yearly pilgrimage to my mother’s mecca. Now that we’re next door, we’re here at least once a month. And yes, we all wear Disney shirts and pins and fanny packs and the whole bit. You can’t have much style pride when it comes to The Mouse.

I wait until Ginnie and I are on the Jungle Cruise, rows away from my parents
,
before giving her a stern talking-to. “I can’t believe you told Mom about Jeremy.”

“It’s been five days.”

“We only broke up yesterday!”

“Officially. You should be thanking me for blocking her on Friendspace. She doesn’t need to see how unfriendly a space it can be.”

“Is it bad?”

“Posts on your page have trickled down, but you two are still big news.” Ginnie chews on an organic granola bar. Her fanny pack is stuffed with healthy snacks. “There’s probably a Save Jeremy fan page by now.”

“Save him from what?”

“The evils of the world. Or you. Same same. Crocodile.” She juts her chin in the direction of the menacing, robotic crocodile. We have a song listing all the animals we see, in order, on the Jungle Cruise.

“Bengal tiger,” I add.

“Dancing cobra!” Ginnie sticks her hand out of the boat, gesturing excitedly. Two tourists in front of us snap a picture of the snake. Extra points when we prompt a photo moment.

I hate to say it, but Mom is right. You can’t stay mad in Disneyland.

Ginnie sits back in her seat. “I can delete your site if you want.”

That makes the most sense. Wipe the whole slate clean, like what I’d just done on my iPod. Except … except, I have over six hundred friends on there, and some of them—like Reno friends—I only ever really communicate with on Friendspace. And all those pictures—I don’t think I’ve saved them anywhere else. And Ginnie and I have an ongoing Scrabble game through the site, and I can’t just let her win after two months. Then we’d have to play in person, and I don’t even know where Mom stores the board games.