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LESLEY M BLUME
NYT Syndicate
During my sophomore year of high school, my parents gave me a choice: Play an after-school sport or get a job. In the end, it came down to vanity. After six long, terrible, socially exiled years of wearing braces on my teeth, the idea of dodging lacrosse, field hockey or tennis balls did not appeal to me. Employment seemed a reasonable act of self-preservation.
I can't remember how I landed at Toys in the Attic, a now defunct toy store in Montclair, New Jersey, where I grew up. I didn't like children, and I detest dolls ” I mean, I really hate them, especially the ones whose eyes roll shut when you tilt them backward.
That said, this particular toy store was sort of a nostalgic wonderland, filled with stern, wooden, relentlessly European toys ” the sort that usually did indeed hail from long-forgotten attic trunks. Marionettes gathered dust on the shelves; tin tops and pinwheels waited in vain for some misfit child to pluck them from their bins. If Barbie had dared to saunter into that store, she would have been swatted out with brooms. As someone reared in a sea of My Little Ponies and Snoopy Sno-Cone Machines, I must have found all of this Weimar-era quaintness strangely appealing.
The store's owner ” a tiny dumpling of a woman who resembled Geppetto's wife ” gave me an after-school-and-Saturdays gig. I might have seemed an incongruous hire, but she had a gift for hiring employees with no affinity for the under-10 crowd.
"Watch this," I was told one morning by one of my colleagues, a fifty-something former stockbroker who bore a startling resemblance to Peggy Guggenheim during her Venice years. We were standing behind the front counter; a toddler was staging a listless tantrum on the other side. She bit into a brownie, smeared the gummy brown cake across her teeth, and gave the kid a ghoulish grin. The child ran screaming out of the store. I was duly impressed.
My colleague was particularly shrewd on the topic of women and ambition. One afternoon, as she was ringing up a weary-looking mother of three, she advised me, in terms too crude to detail here, to always lead my life with the mentality of a man instead of a woman. The customer's children looked aghast, but their mother calmly signed her receipt, pointed her pen at me and said,"That's damn good advice ” listen to this lady."
Our stock boy was calm and efficient and suffered no fools; he was incapable of small talk, and his humour was solely reactive, if it existed at all. The basement stockroom was indisputably his domain, organised by his hand to a military level of efficiency. There, in the company of the stiff-haired Steiff animals and boxes of Brio trains, he ate solitary lunches ” disciplined fare, measured and weighed ” while reading old copies of The Economist and dog-eared paperback copies of Proust novels. (To that end, the only smile I ever got out of him happened when I brought him a bag of madeleines.)
But he could also be kind. Once, when college application pressure was getting to me and I had retreated downstairs to bawl, he came and sat quietly with me."This too shall pass," he told me and said nothing else. To this day, it has remained my mantra.
For a time, I shared the floor with a shopgirl in her late 20s or early 30s who wore a severe bob and a defiant swipe of red lipstick. She always had a faint limp, and I wondered for a long time whether there had been a childhood accident. One afternoon we took a break together and sat in the parking lot behind the store; I devoured Astronaut-brand freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream, meant to be sold in the outer-space section of the store, while she chain-smoked. She rolled up her jeans and took off her shoes to tan her legs. I blanched when I looked at her feet: gnarled, blistered, bruised, the works. She told me she was studying ballet."You know, Zelda Fitzgerald also didn't even begin to dance until she was in her 20s," she told me. I didn't bring up the fact that Zelda hadn't fared very well, onstage or off.
Eventually it dawned on me that I had begun leading something of a secret life. None of my classmates had such a coterie of characters in their hockey-stick-and-mouth-guard-filled lives. But my toy store colleagues, in a way, were becoming my people. I realised that I was actually more comfortable with them than with many of my own peers. We were all bonded by the undignified fact that we peddled hand puppets and yo-yos and plush pigs in tiaras while wishing that we were doing something else.
But there was more to it than that. Something about my cohort promised that adult life would be more diverse, more interesting, more peculiar than the preppy, homogeneous teenage world I inhabited during school hours.
Fast-forward a couple of decades: I have become a journalist; my success at my work depends hugely on my ability to talk with people from wildly different backgrounds. I've profiled matadors, heiresses, activists, fertility doctors, debauched film producers, mistresses of great artists and great artists themselves. The stranger the story and the less my subject resembles me, the happier I am.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that three years at Toys in the Attic influenced my disposition, and helped shape my ability to sit in peace with people from all walks of life. Back then, during a stage in life when most young people were vying for sameness and were desperate to blend in, I opted out of the clique and never sought any sort of permanent refuge in sameness again.
This remove has been a cornerstone in my worldview. If my tenure at Toys in the Attic contributed to my ability to do good work, I am grateful for it. I do, however, blame the store for my addiction to freeze-dried ice cream. I would live on it if I could.
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29/07/2016
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