2. Magic Hour
Magic Hour
HENRY
“Haul out the holly…” I sang tunelessly inside the empty shop as I hung a strand of fabulously tacky tinsel across the ceiling of the window display. Its abundant sparkle in the overhead lighting did nothing to lift my downtrodden spirits.
Holiday decorating solo was a depressing endeavor.
The first year without Great Aunt Isla, I did a pared-down display for Small Business Saturday—Isla’s Attic’s busiest shopping day of the year.
For this Christmas, alone and once again single, I went all out with the designing and the sourcing of props to keep myself busy.
If I was busy, I didn’t have to think about how hard the bah-hum bug had bitten me.
Everything we displayed in the window was for sale, so I always needed to match my ideas with what sorts of vintage products we could feasibly procure and pass on to the customer as gifts. This kept me suitably occupied for the better part of a month.
For a background, I painted a cityscape and then placed window facades in front of it to give the impression of a penthouse apartment in some glamorous city.
In the foreground, I garbed my mannequins in mod-style vintage dresses in various shades of red and green.
Each one held a martini glass up in a rousing toast. The theme was “Cheers to Christmas!”
Try as I might, I couldn’t summon my own cheer. Christmas had firmly lost its luster. The sooner it was over with, the better.
While I perched atop the ladder, still mindlessly singing along to Angela Lansbury, my main male mannequin listed a little in his white button-down shirt and argyle cardigan.
Before he toppled into my sprayed-white Christmas tree, which I’d covered in a veritable rainbow of blown-glass ornaments, I righted him.
“That’s it, sir. We’re cutting you off,” I joked to the mannequin, taking the martini glass from his plastic hand. I snorted out a laugh as I secured him. “Damn, you almost fell over and you somehow still look perfect.”
I gazed upon the mannequin some more, inspecting his strong, masculine jaw, his sharp cheekbones, and his full lips.
Pushing a single stray lock of blond hair into place, I said, “If only you were real, you’d be the perfect guy.
You’ve got a great build. You go along with all of my ideas.
You look good in just about anything. You’re flexible.
You’re a great listener, on account of you can’t speak. ”
Great Aunt Isla loved to tell the tale of how she acquired this marvelous mannequin.
One of the anchor department stores at the Monmouth Mall closed after a rough holiday season in the mid-2000s.
She’d gone to their liquidation sale hoping to score clothing racks and signage for cheap but stopped before making it inside.
Someone had disposed of most of the mannequins already, but one sat slightly sooty but fully assembled beside the dumpster, wrapped in last season’s coat and fleece-lined jeans.
When she pulled up to the school pickup lane on that February day, there was a second figure buckled into the front seat. My anxiety about having to talk to a stranger stirred in my stomach as I slid into the back seat. “Henry, say hello to our new friend.”
“Hello,” I croaked to no response. I waited for what felt like ages, wondering whether Aunt Isla’s friend was rude, or I’d done something wrong. She pivoted his head a full one-eighty and I screamed so loudly that she had to pull over and coach my breathing.
Through a fit of laughter, she said, “He’s only a mannequin, doll. He looked so sad outside by the dumpster all alone, like I was meant to find him. I couldn’t bear to leave him out in the cold.”
At once, he became Isla’s Attic’s unofficial mascot.
At some point, Angela Lansbury and the ensemble of Mame stopped singing.
The playlist on the ancient red iPod Nano I kept docked by the counter must’ve ended, which caused a low-lying mist of silence to creep through the store.
A chill ran up my spine as I gazed into the lifeless eyes of the storied mannequin.
“Okay, there’s going to be absolutely no more of that,” I scolded myself before dusting off my display and stepping out onto the sales floor.
I opened on time and unveiled the themed window to the miniscule group of regulars who camped out front wearing coats and holding coffees.
My windows had a bit of a reputation in Ocean Glen and the surrounding towns thanks to the store’s Instagram feed.
People interested in secondhand goods came by to snap their photo with my scene and then shop the sales.
But over the years, more vintage stores catering to luxury clientele opened in the surrounding neighborhoods, and developers built pricier apartments that homogenized the skyline near the waterfront.
Upscale restaurants serving culinary foam and foie gras bought out the leases of steadfast family joints.
With all that change to our beloved beach towns, regulars moved away or found new favorite stores or maybe just didn’t feel Isla’s Attic was the same without the titular Isla around to cast her recommendations.
Heaven knows I wasn’t a solid substitute when it came to sass and sparkling conversation, thanks to my rampant social anxiety.
Still, my morning was busy.
I sold many of the ornaments on my display tree, but thankfully I had plenty of stock in the back to swap them out for, which gave me good excuses to leave the floor and hide away for a while.
“I had ornaments just like these growing up,” said one woman wearing a Patagonia jacket and a beanie as I wrapped her finds in old newspaper.
“I was never allowed to touch them or hang them because they were so beautiful and delicate. My mother is going to be so excited when I show her these on my tree this year.”
The dressing rooms remained occupied throughout, though some customers took frustratingly long inside, which meant others stuffed their pieces back on the racks near the walls and left.
Isla would’ve known what to say to keep them around until the room freed up.
Me? Words clumped behind my lips, but I didn’t dare let any out.
I was too afraid they’d be the wrong ones.
As the hours ticked by, the foot traffic dried up. Being located on Anchor Avenue instead of Main Avenue and in Ocean Glen instead of Asbury Park proper meant less people popped by without intent.
I grew lonelier as the day crawled toward closing. I dusted and played music and scrolled on my phone, but every new task felt like it claimed an hour when really, only minutes had passed. Bored didn’t even begin to describe my stagnant state.
When living on her own was no longer an option I could allow, Great Aunt Isla sat me down and tucked her key ring into the front pocket of my button-up shirt. “Take good care of our weird little place, okay, doll?”
I didn’t bat an eyelash, attempting to be brave for the both of us.
But as one year turned to two, the joy leached from the walls and the excitement of a perfect find at an estate sale or auction or flea market to display in our window flattened into an undercooked diner pancake.
Without Isla, Isla’s Attic felt less like a store and more like a real attic in a creepy mansion somewhere on the Maine coast. I played the role of the moody ghost, lurking in the shadows, yearning for anyone to come inside and notice me.
But, I’d made a promise, and promises meant something to me.
I poured myself a third cup of strangely acidic coffee before pacing in the break room, where there was a minifridge, a fifties dinette set complete with four sparkly red vinyl chairs, and a semi-functioning desktop computer beside the door that led to the back patio.
I stopped in front of Isla’s wall of memories.
The first dollar she received, signed by the customer, was framed and hung next to a photo of her outside the shop holding up the keys on the day she signed the lease.
Even then, the building itself was old, built in 1870 in a Victorian style.
The landlord, Mr. Potter, had it painted teal with mustard and red accents.
The quirky colors were what drew Isla to the place all those years ago.
Well, the colors, and the quaint one-bedroom unit above the shop with its own entrance around the side and a balcony that hung over the charming porch where customers would often sit and chat with Isla for hours about life and love and pre-owned wares.
She liked the location, the convenience, the community.
It pained me to be the one who had to drive her away from it.
The one who moved her into the beige mundanity of Sunshine Meadows.
But when I found her at the bottom of the stairs leading up to her unit one morning, crumpled and soiled and without her phone, my hands were tied.
The structure couldn’t accommodate a chairlift, she refused a Life Alert, and her eyesight was going.
She wanted to be alive more than she wanted to be here .
At least that’s what I had to keep telling myself.
Beside the photo of young Isla, there was the original shop sign that fell during a hurricane but was somehow found miles away by a brave homeowner and returned in half-decent condition.
Pictures of my window displays over the years sat in dusty frames right next to sculptural paintings I made as a college student getting my BA in visual art from Monmouth University.
When was the last time I painted for pleasure? It had to have been before I started dating Cam. You could’ve called me a Christmas present by how wrapped up in him I was.