Memory Lane Leads Home to Fairfield D.

When I go back to the town where I grew up, now that the people I loved are gone, all that is left are the places my life passed through--the beach house, the library, the pond where we ice skated, the synagogue and the Fairfield D.

It seems strange to think of a department store as home, but that is what the Fairfield D. was. It was where we bought stockings by the box and cotton underwear. It was a place where my mother bought faux -pearl earrings when she needed jewelry she wouldn’t mind losing on vacation. And it was where my father would buy two outfits for her on her birthday because he couldn’t decide between the casual and the sparkly one--a symbol, if there ever was one, of his expansiveness and of the 1950s, when a grand gesture was affordable.

Department stores in everyone’s hometowns are disappearing, and I wondered about mine. Last week I drove a little more than an hour up the interstate from Manhattan to see how this store in the center of Fairfield is doing--and never before had I realized how far outside the orbit of New York City my hometown was. It is truly New England, truly suburban. It is cotton sweaters and khaki slacks rather than black-lace hose and high-fashion pumps.

Unlike mall stores, the Fairfield D. does not have Madonna look-alikes spritzing you with perfume, nor elevators that go “ding, ding, ding.” In fact, the Fairfield D. has no elevators at all. There are wide, carpeted stairs up to the children’s department and upholstered love seats in women’s shoes. There is a parking lot right out back, and plenty of sales clerks when you need them.

I climb those stairs to the children’s department to find the woman who had sold me my first pair of Buster Browns 30 years ago, and there she is, neatly putting T-shirts on hangers and smiling, always smiling.

“You’re one of the Baum girls,” says Frannie. “You’re Meredith?” I shake my head. “Faith?” I smile encouragingly. “Geraldine!” she says triumphantly. We reminisce about Mary Janes and corduroy overalls, and about a time when I was a Size 6X, if I ever really was a 6X.

Then, in a quiet moment, she looks at me with a half smile. “I’m sorry about your mom,” she says. “She was such a smart lady.”

Frannie knows the whole story. She knows exactly when my mother died and that my sister Faith is expecting and how fast Meredith’s son Andrew is growing.

At 76, Frannie now fits 8-year-old Andrew in corduroy slacks and pins them up for alterations because they still do alterations at the Fairfield D. for free. Although she lives five minutes from a mall and three towns away, my sister still shops at the Fairfield D. because to her, there is no better place for dress-up clothes.

Downstairs, as I meander through cosmetics, the Muzak on the speakers fills up the quiet space and I am transformed. I am 15 again, a little pudgeball, trying to buy a dress for a dance. The sales lady and my mother are wedged in the dressing room with me, exclaiming how “sweet” I look in this velvet thing . . . and I want to die.

It is Hanukkah again, the one before my father died, and the whole family has driven together to buy gifts at the Fairfield D.

I am buying Faith a sweater, knowing she is around the corner buying me a blouse, the one I want. Somehow, buying for each other that way was like going into each other’s closets and wrapping up something we already owned as a gift. Things that came from the Fairfield D. were like that: They were familiar, they fit and they were returnable, no sweat.

And as I pick through the sales items in women’s sportswear on this gray February day, I am no longer a grown woman with her own charge cards, her own husband and a membership in a fancy health club four states away. I am once again one of the Baum girls, Louise and Jerry’s daughter, the youngest of the three.

To Pearl, the petite sales woman in hosiery, that still means Hanes Size C, Little Color; to Rose in lingerie, we are Carter’s undies Size 6. And now that Rose has just retired after 27 years, I am compelled to lift up my coat, spin around and let Madeline, who has been there a mere decade, take a look. Still a Size 6, she declares, laughing.

She leans her elbows on the glass display case and recalls all the connections: how she went to high school with my Aunt Gloria, and how her son, like the Baum girls, went to school with the children of the Manasevits, the family that owns the Fairfield D.

Deren Manasevit and I were in the same class, but unlike the goofy and dark-haired Baum girls, the Manasevit girls had long, blond manes and boyfriends, and they were exceedingly cool.

Deren has cropped hair now and is getting remarried in March. After working as a lawyer for a few years at the Justice Department in Washington, she returned home to the business, which was started as a dry-goods store in nearby Bridgeport by her grandfather and great-uncle in 1922. (Until the 1960s, they called it the Fairfield Department Store but changed the name to the Fairfield Store to make it seem like more of a specialty shop. But everybody I know still calls it the Fairfield D.)

After talking to Deren and her cousin Bruce, who is also in the business, I learn that not only does the store have a new generation that wants to run it, but it also has one that wants to shop there. And it is enduring in these troubled economic times.

“If you watch ‘thirtysomething,’ you’ll understand what the people in Fairfield wear,” says Deren. “It’s fun stuff, not the cutting edge of fashion, not suits and fancy outfits that are outrageously expensive, but honest stuff for honest people.”

She is a little disgusted when I get misty-eyed about all the half-slips I have bought there over the years and when I say I can’t remember purchasing a dress there as an adult because the styles seem a bit frumpy.

“For some reason, people still think this is where you come for your Brownie uniforms,” she says. “It’s not.”

Maybe not.

As I leave to go back to New York, I notice they aren’t selling just Carter’s anymore. The Fairfield D. now has designer undies by Ungaro, and in women’s shoes--in addition to white satin pumps that they’ll dye for you--they have blue velvet high heels for about $70.

On the drive back, I am thinking about Fairfield, the place where I awoke but which I did not choose. My parents did.

Sometimes I wonder what my obligations are to my hometown now that everybody has died and dispersed, and I think about the Fairfield Center, the gazebo on the town green and all the red-brick buildings along the Post Road. Perhaps I don’t belong there; perhaps you can’t go home again. But certainly you can make do with the Fairfield D.