Milica Mićić Dimovska – Boutique Cinderella

If one were to travel to Kamenica, Serbia, they would perhaps locate, in a “room off the street”, a tiny second-hand clothing store with the sadly overblown name of Boutique Cinderella. There, stuffed amongst the chiffon, the velvet, the suede, the linen, you might find Marina, a youngwoman who is alone but not lonely, because second-hand clothes are sometimes beautiful and that, even at her age, in her position, with her mother standing always nearby, is enough.

Serbian writer Milica Mićić Dimovska's short story, Boutique Cinderella, is fiction, but we all know this woman. She is someone who has become too aware of the world's foibles and its immense ability to grind and grind away at all that is good and innocent and pure and just about a personality until there is nothing left but one's work ethic and their sense of pride in saving enough money at the end of the week to afford a small treat or two. This is a woman who must, though we don't learn that she does, possess several pets, more than likely cats.

Marina is has turned her back on the world but she is happy enough because of the store. Dimovska is quite clever to focus Marina's affection toward the store as an entity rather than as an occupation or calling. Marina, in naming and running her store...

was proud of her inventiveness, her sense of irony. With that name she mocked herself, her mother, and their customers. Or else, in a way, she was currying favor with herself and others. She was feeding hope. To turn an ordinary rag into a ball gown.

But she dislikes customers, and dislikes it even more when they wish to buy something. Certainly, purchases pay the bills, but then the quantity of the store has been depleted, and for what - money? That's hardly a fair trade-off. A dress on a rack – her rack – is significantly more valued than when taken away by some flightly young woman who knows nothing about caring for the dress.

Which was of course a delusion, for a dress feels nothing. A dress is, but it does not exist. Marina played with what she had learned from philosophy. A dress is, but it has no idea. About what? About battle, about being . . .

Dimovska's language remains plain throughout. It is unadorned, like Marina, and yet it shivers with suggestion, just like Marina. We know there's something deeper there, but how to find it? Dimovska keeps the reader at arm's length, content to hint at depth without showing it. Marina comes across as one of those women who used to be so beautiful, so vibrant, so funny, so intelligent, and then – what? We don't know, but something.

Dimovska increases the feeling of Marina's life sliding by in showing Sofija, Marina's mother, as she explores the town in search of cast-off goods to rummage through in the hope of finding clothes worth selling. Sofija is Marina taken to her natural logical conclusion, which is to say the cleverness, the prettiness, the smiles, have been replaced with claw-life scavenging fingers, petty thoughts, and an eye meanness and a voice for cackling. Sofija doesn't care for the clothing any more, she doesn't care for anything – she simply is, acting as a conduit for keeping the store alive. Marina, on the other hand, though she has become withdrawn from life at least wishes to live it in part, if only by appreciating the beauty in clothing.

What is Dimovska telling us by juxtaposing the daughter with the mother? It is difficult to avoid reading Boutique Cinderella as anything other than a critique of members of the working class who allow themselves to become swallowed by their profession. Sofija is a terminal point – she has no culture, no intellect, no desire beyond the material, no hope, no dream, nothing. She wishes merely to accumulate clothing and then sell it, but her motives are hardly capitalistic, it just happens to be all she knows. She is the product of spending decades acquiring and selling clothing. Marina, on the other hand, is Sofija a generation younger, on her way to the same fate but not quite there yet. It's sad, really, because Dimovska in no way indicates that Marina will avoid her mother's fate. Rather, we can expect that it will occur; what we are seeing in Boutique Cinderella is the boulder as it falls off the cliff to drop down into the ravine, where it will never move again. It's a tragedy.

Boutique Cinderella by Milica Mićić Dimovska is a short story from Words Without Borders' January 2011 edition, The Work Force issue. All of the work reviewed is freely available online.

See Also

Other stories from the Words Without BordersJanuary 2011 edition, The Work Force issue include:
---Pradelli, Ángela - The Bather

Words Without Borders review series:
---August 2010: Writing From Hungary
---October 2010: Beyond Borges: Argentina Now

Index of short stories under review