The Cool Part of His Pillow

Chapter 1: Blue Roses-3

Andy’s blotto, so I drive. The headlights sweep across the potted topiaries aligned with the heavy wood front doors I myself reseal every spring, across the signage of Great Rooms! in a typeface I chose, not because it was retro, but because it looked trustworthy.

I pull close and idle. This was formerly Packard Elementary, a large brick two-story school shuttered for lackluster performance. Dee represented me in negotiations with the city. I could never be impartial, but I’m always impressed. It’s large and varied, now housing specialty shops and a culinary hub with everything from cooking lessons to knife servicing.

I had been with a collective of furniture stores as a visual design manager, the pay poor but the title, right out of college, impressive. Every store walk I had with upper management was lauded and rewarded with more locations and more work. I started hating the travel, walking through hotel lobbies with damp hair and realizing every other guest smelled like the same cucumber and verbena shampoo/conditioner combo. And I missed Andy all the time. My ultimatum was addressed by creating an office-based position: VP, Creative Services. I came to find the Marketing golems quite content to steal promotional campaigns from other furniture chains yet I remained, proofreading silk-screened signage for a series of never-ending sales, until Andy drove me past Packard and simply said, “Get out of your own way.”

“I hate that phrase.”

“s**t or get off the pot.”

“Hate that one too.”

I got out of my own way, then shat. I had no meticulous master plan, just instinct. At thirty-three, I mortgaged real estate with significant asbestos-mitigation issues, in the kind of neighborhood you pray turns around so your customers feel safe enough to turn their back.

I figured many curious would come because they went to school here, so we kept the old chalkboards, desks, and globes. This wasn’t just in tribute. I had a Visual budget of zero. We still use the hallway bells, now timed to signal the beginning and end of shopping hours.

I took the principal’s office. I kept the marble floors as they were, having hated industrial carpeting ever since my mother used her employee discount at the carpet warehouse she worked at to wall-to-wall our home in remaindered Celadon. We have no statement staircase, just two narrow flights to a second floor that still reverberate with those energized slap-slap-slaps toward recess. I re-engineered the former cafeteria to display cookware. The gymnasium is seasonal: outdoor patio furnishings spring up every March, and November brings pre-lit, pre-decorated Christmas trees so towering they’d only fit into a McMansion. The auditorium with its Depression-era murals had a serviceable stage, and I offered it for community rental or, if I liked the cause, gratis.

Still, I had vast and odd space to fill. I knew what Pottery Barn could do; what they couldn’t, I made my niche. Ralph Lauren said somewhere that you can’t be too hot or too cold. That sounded right to me. Flavor of the month is nice—we’ve had our share of tables made from things like orange safety cones—but comfort food is nicer. I began acquiring. I brought in a struggling upholstery firm. I tracked down a steelworker whose gates I admired at a museum and asked about an alliance. He began turning out everything from kickplates to customized trellises and fencing; a daughter and son-in-law later started designing bracelets. Milliners made tapestries. Local artists got their own stalls for their hand-painted canvases. I didn’t eschew heirlooms but I didn’t want shelves of empty perfume bottles, either, so we contracted a husband/wife team to bid on estates that met their antiquity standards.

Dee goaded me into buying surrounding land when it became available. I gutted three old school buses, arranged them in a U-shape, repainted them a brighter yellow, and they became a specialty lighting depot. I added a freestanding custom home theater center, tracking down the same brick as that of Packard Elementary.

Mr. Albanese, a professional arborist nudged into retirement, then approached me. He and his wife overplanted a small wood behind us with seasonal produce and herbs that they sold under a side awning. Friends of his inquired, and it turned into a Saturday farmer’s market on what was the playground, where I placed picnic tables, swings, and a basketball court for families to make a day of it. It’s grown large, and Mr. Albanese wants to extend into winter with root vegetables and ice fishermen friends who want to sell their catch.

No one was more shocked than I when House Beautiful accepted my invitation to see some of our work firsthand; I had luckily stumbled into a new layer of regional editors. A six-page spread on a pharmaceutical CEO’s Tara and the millwork I personally oversaw followed. More than anything, it was this article put us on the map, drawing customers from other states to what had been just another high-end backwater store. We soon became the destination others feed from and not the other way around. The quadrant transformed. A gourmet custard emporium, independent art cinema and a Brazilian steakhouse sprang up on the opposite side of the road. A long-dormant strip plaza was revitalized with a Greek deli, a watch repair shop, fondue restaurant, and Apple store. And is any neighborhood metamorphosis complete until you can get your eyebrows threaded? That opens next month.

It was all very heady, but it didn’t happen as fast as it seems. I was, at times, impatient and irritable, discouraged, disgusted. We took a hit in that last bout of the country’s economic woes, but our lack of snobbery sustained us. Much to the chagrin of our customer service department, I started layaway, remembering how fanatically my parents paid weekly on a genuine arcade pinball machine for Olivia and me one Christmas. I also didn’t panic and depart from twice-yearly sales (and never on the same date). More, and you train your customer to adjust their cost expectation downward and wait.

Mostly, I’m still a little mystified and a lot gratified. It’s a simplified summary of a complicated process, but it was simple in its hopefulness, and is still Mom-and-Pop enough that when Andy brings Gertie and Noel at the end of the workday, when they run wild and pee and no one can reprimand me, I still feel like I won something.

My biggest personal victory right this second is seeing how the variegated ivy Andy and I had planted over a decade ago established a dense, seamless hedge on the exterior. The store looks like it’s been here forever, a real business as rooted as the ivy.

“Who’s the workaholic now?” Andy is awake or, more aptly, has briefly regained consciousness.

I back out. “Only looking, just checking.”

At the next stoplight, Andy slurs at a moody shop window of female mannequins in wedding gowns: “Hey, Bethany’s Bridal, where are the boy brides?!”

“Shut up! Don’t draw attention!” I warn. A DWI is one of those acronyms, like SARS or GOP, that you don’t want associated with your name.

“I’m gonna do something to you,” he growls huskily, trying for sexy but sounding more like a state governor who’s just denied a stay of execution.

For once we don’t have to repeatedly put Gertie and Noel down from the bed; we lure them away with a giant gift bow. As we thrash, they s***h, all in flashes of lightning.