In "the good old days" summer vacation began at the Memorial Day holiday and ran until the day after Labor Day. It was a glorious time of playing outdoors, swimming at the local pool, and sleepovers with friends. However, I didn’t have to look at the calendar to know when the summer was ready to come to an end. It all came to a crashing halt on that fateful day when Mom announced it was time for her annual ritual of "torture and agony". No, she didn’t beat me, lock me in a closet or stick bamboo under my fingernails. (Those would have actually been less painful.) No, the suffering that was to take place would be quite public and completely legal. Much to my dismay, it was time to shop for school clothes!
This was a time in the distant past when girls wore only dresses to school. No jeans and a cute tee shirt for us. No, we had to dress like "young ladies." Young ladies who would spend recess with our ruffled panties showing because we were playing kickball in a dress. Young ladies who had frostbite all winter from walking to school in the bitter cold with our bare legs exposed. The only thing that made this "dresses only" policy worse was that my mother’s fashion taste tended towards Peter-Pan collars, white anklets and saddle shoes while my personality was more predisposed toward sequins, silk and stiletto heels. OK, I was just in elementary school, but I had great taste.
And so each August, after a terrific summer, Mom would spoil the mood by dragging me uptown to Sears and Roebuck. Again, this was the "distant" past—the early 60’s where there were no malls, no "Gap", no "Macys" or for that matter, not even a Wal-Mart! For those of us on an average budget it was just Sears, JC Penney or Woolworth. Each year the ritual began in the exact same way. We would enter the store, walk to the appropriate department and she would march directly to the first rack she came to. She then would pick up a dress; any dress, and say, "Isn’t this one nice?" I would instinctively look at her like she was holding a bag of poisonous snakes, sigh, roll my eyes and march off to another rack, often without even looking at what she was offering. Hour after hour, rack after rack, we would look at dresses and disagree on their worthiness. Why it took so long I don’t know because they all looked just alike. They were blue or red, plaid or solid, cotton or corduroy. Period. Not one lick of imagination here. There wasn’t one bugle bead, no lace, and not even a touch of fur. Just schoolgirl, "little missy" patterns. My mom, being Mom, never once took my individuality into consideration as we trekked through the Young Miss department. No, she just continued to be irrational and left me feeling like the poster child for the Wardrobe Challenged pre-teen.
This would go on until she was ready to send me to an orphanage and I was more than ready to go. I would have rather been sent to Girls School than go through this year after year. Our tastes were never going to converge so why go through this excruciating process? Why not just order my clothes from a local convent and leave me out of the whole thing? (I always wondered just who elected her the Chief of the Fashion Police anyway?)
I know I wasn’t alone in my predicament because every other girl in school was dressed just like me. There was no chance anyone would be able to make a fashion statement with these duds. We could have exchanged our clothing and sent them home to be washed and not one mom would have known the difference. Little Suzie’s wardrobe looked exactly like Little Mary’s, and Little Mary’s looked like mine, and so on. It was depressing.
To this day I remain convinced that Mother Sears and Mother Roebuck stocked those stores in order to inflict the same torture on their female offspring. And I’m convinced that those poor girls had to bear the same anguish as the rest of us. I mean, if just one of their mothers had cared, I know that there would have been at least one dress with a feather boa flowing from beneath the sequined collar of that plain little blue plaid dress!
