The Girl Who People Recommend

Vintage

Aly and I are looking for a very specific dress. It was red and white polka dot with a scoop neck and thick straps. The problem is that it didn’t exist. We had searched every thrift store and vintage shop in the city- except one. It’s this great store we’ve gone too a couple times and has come to take almost a legendary spot in our minds, right alongside that certain Salvation Army off Clybourn.

So we pull up to the vintage store and there’s a couple standing outside. They’re waiting for it to open. What kind of store doesn’t open until two in the afternoon? Well this one, apparently. Problem is it’s well past two. We all quickly realize the second sign displaying the store hours, which is posted a mere five inches under the first sign displaying the store hours, reads that the it doesn’t open until three. Aly and I quickly decide to go eat Thai food and come back later.

Our bellies full of crazy noodles, we arrive back at the shop right at three o’clock. The owner still hasn’t arrived. Now there’s the same couple plus a really old man waiting outside the shop. Aly and I decide to run across the street, pet a couple puppies, and return to the shop ten minutes later.

Still no sign of the lady who owned the place. After sitting in her car for a while with the windows down and our feet dangling out, Aly and I decided our wait wasn’t worth it and left.

Four days later, during which we still hadn’t found a dress in the entire city that resembled the one we so desired, we returned to the store right at three, understating the discrepancy in store hours, giving the owner a break, and making excuses for her like “maybe she had a late night and just slept in accidentally” or “maybe she got into a terrible car crash or something”….

But when we pulled up, the store wasn’t open. Aly was baffled. I declared I was going to throw a brick through the window. But only jokingly. Instead, I went up, cupped my hands into the window and stared deep into the store.

“This sucks” Aly said as I returned to the car. I agreed. I was pissed. I decided to write the owner a letter. “That’ll show her,” I thought.

Many minutes later, as I’m still scrawling violently on a torn out sheet of paper, Aly huffed and begged me to hurry up and finish it already. And just then, as I’m dotting the final sentence with a very furious period, Aly gasped as the owner walked up and unlocked the front door. “Let me read that” she said and put her hand out for my note. I handed it over. As she scanned it quickly she declared “ok, let’s go give her a piece of our mind.”

We were in before the owner lady could flip the sign from closed to open. But she wasn’t even taken aback by us, two girls in skirts, rushing in with the determination of a hurricane.  A few moments following our arrival, she managed to sigh out a pitiful ‘hello’.

We flipped through the racks quickly, pulling our red things, pulling out polka dotted things, but finding nothing that fit our requirements. We were so very certain the perfect dress was going to be inside that vintage shop. We were betting on it. We were out of time, and had she been open four days previous, we could have resorted to another plan. But now we were screwed.

By this point, the owner had shuffled behind the counter and pushed play on her answering machine. Each memo bellowed out a frantic caller into the hallow empty store with half the lights still off as she stared into the blackness at the back of the shop, not hearing or comprehending a single message. Finally, as we were about to leave, she asked “can I help you find anything?”

Aly and I, once so determined to tell her off, once so set on making her realize what a terrible and unthoughtful nuisance she had made in our lives, stopped, and were merely able to putter out: “a red and white polka dotted dress, please.”

She combed the racks, shrugging out all the clothes we had looked at already. She seemed stooped and sad.

“There haven’t been many red dresses around this summer” she exhaled breathlessly.

“Ok. Thanks so much” we said, with a much more consoling tone than an irate one, and scuffled quietly out of the store.

I think we both realized sometimes in life there are much worse things happening in the world than the inconvenience of a vintage store being closed.