Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (20 page)

“I’m going to die,” Nancy whispered to her.

“Why?” Heidi whispered back.

“I’ve been stabbed. You’ve got to help me. I’ve got to get out of here.”

Heidi looked around the room to see if anyone might notice the bride’s only two bridesmaids leaving the scene of the chuppa.

“Wait two seconds,” Heidi said. “We’ll run out as soon as it’s over.”

“No,” Nancy said, “I can’t take it.”

With that, Nancy stopped the Rabbi in midsentence and excused herself from the platform.

The room went buzzing.

Turned out, a wire on the corset that Nancy was wearing had broken and had stabbed her in the ribs. She was even bleeding. A doctor had to be called in and she had to be given a tetanus shot. Heidi’s brother, of course, berated Nancy afterward, telling her she’d single-handedly ruined his wedding.

After that, Nancy decided that she would never again wear anything that would constrict her body for the sake of fashion. Even if she had ten more babies, no matter what happened to her body, she would always go sans corset or girdle top. When I heard this, I wanted to boost her up and put her on a pedestal for all the good she was showing the women of the world. I only wished that I’d had the guts that Nancy had.

A week later, Nancy called Heidi from the hospital. She’d just had some lipo done and needed a ride home.

If you’ve never been to a movie premiere where your hot boyfriend produced the movie, I’m telling you now: It’s awesome. It’s enough to know that you get all the soda and popcorn your teeth would want to decay for, but even better, walking that red carpet hand-in-hand with your gorgeous boyfriend in a black Prada suit with a white shirt and a black tie and you wearing a black Prada dress with an empire waist that Lina the stylist picked out for you for the occasion is an experience unparalleled. Hundreds of flashbulbs blind you as you try to act as calm as you possibly can; stand as straight as you possibly can; and smile bright, though not too bright (like you secretly practiced in the mirror before the event); while photographers scream your name, albeit wrong—“Deanna!” “Adonna!” “Deandra!” But who cares? It makes you feel like you’ve cured cancer.

I couldn’t help but feel a little short in the Christian Louboutin heels, though.

“You‘re, like, nine feet tall in them,” Pete said, looking down at me. “Those other shoes you wear are too high anyway.”

He could have been right, but even as I was enjoying the attention I was getting for dating the famous producer, it was something that irked in my brain.

Walking down that red carpet, stopping at every step for Pete to be interviewed and photographed, I loved how he held my hand as I prayed that anyone from Harriton High School’s 1987 graduating class would be watching
Access Hollywood
the following night when the interviewer said to him, “And who’s this gorgeous lady on your arm?” followed by Pete’s perfectly enunciated, self-assured, indisputable response of “The gorgeous lady on my arm is my girlfriend Adena Halpern,” followed by the interviewer turning the mic to me and asking, “Adena, who are you wearing tonight?” Followed by my efficient and sophisticated toned answer, “We’re both in Prada tonight.” What a feeling! Much to my great sorrow, however, that part didn’t make it on
Access Hollywood,
but if anyone was watching that night and didn’t blink, they would have seen me in a very brief shot giving an air-kiss hello to the actress who starred in the movie.

There’s something about wearing a $3,000 dress that makes you stand up straighter, smile brighter, feel thinner. Sure, I had about twenty yards of Lycra underneath the dress, pulling in my thighs and stomach and blooming my size 32A breasts, making them look like I could nurse Wisconsin. Still, the feeling of walking into the ladies’ room and turning around to get a look at my padded ass silhouetted by the black Prada over it was a feeling I’d never felt before. Everything looked like I wanted it to. The boobs were up and cleavaged. The stomach was in. The ass was ... I had an ass! Everything was where it was supposed to be, and like Narcissus before me, I might have missed the rest of the party altogether because I could not get over my own reflection in the mirror.

“That’s a great dress,” I heard as I turned to see a blond-haired woman in a white Versace suit standing before me. “You look great in it. It’s Prada, right?”

I nodded, affirming her question. I think.

“I’ll have to call over for that,” she said, straightening her red string Kabbalah bracelet and walking out the door like a ray of light as quickly as she walked in.

“Was that who I think it was?” another woman in the ladies’ room asked me.

I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe, and I’d lost all feeling in my body. I had gone blind. I stared back at the woman, trying to find clarity along with the oxygen my body was begging for.

“She’s calling over for my dress!” I eeked out.

ina had become my new best friend, the kind who you can say anything to and vice versa, and a new member of our group.

She had also become the one to call for any situation.

“I have a baby shower in two weeks!” Serena cried.

“Masse Made to Measure on North Flores, white-and-blue-striped dress, right side of the store, fourth dress in on the third rack,” Lina told her.

“Should I get the blue T-shirt or the green one, or maybe the red one?” Rachel cried.

“Green. Goes with your eyes,” Lina told her.

“Emmy Awards. She wants to know if she can wear pants,” Susan’s assistant asked.

“Which row is she sitting in?”

“Sixteenth row.”

“No. She must wear a dress. Any woman sitting in the first twenty rows wears a dress.”

She was blunt (most times too blunt), savvy, extremely knowledgeable, and most of all, naturally fashionable. It is my belief that there are a few people in this world—not many, just some—who have the ability to use the side of their brain that’s meant for picking out the best outfits possible for any occasion. You know that person. It could be a friend, but more possibly an enemy who arrives at the party or the restaurant or the supermarket in just the right jeans or dress and accessorized with exactly the right earrings or bracelet. This was Lina.

For Lina’s personal style, however, she didn’t wear Prada or Chloé or Dior. They wore her, and this was something I took early note of. Her body was nothing to scream about. She was on the tall side, about 5’6”, she was naturally thin and didn’t work out, leaving some flab here and there; but her attitude about the clothes on her back was that she hated everything, but wore it on the basis of the fact that she needed to put something on. This was why she looked good in them. She wasn’t
excited
about the Chanel suit she borrowed from a photo shoot. What mattered was that it fit accordingly on the body and for the occasion. The gold bangled bracelets or hoop earrings that she threw on as she was running out the door might have taken me hours to contemplate. Not Lina. She was a professional.

“How do you do it?” I asked her one day when she showed up for lunch wearing a large scarf wrapped around her waist, forming a tight-fitting miniskirt and an old, worn gray T-shirt with just the right sags in the neck and tightness in the sleeves.

“It was ninety degrees today,” she said, grabbing a piece of bread. “All my other skirts were in the laundry, so I had to improvise.”

“And how long did it take you to do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to change the subject, acting like it was the most ridiculous of conversations. “Like, on the way to my car in the garage.”

On the work front, I had taken Kelsey’s place as the fashion plate of the Promo House and the twenty-four-year-olds were thrilled with the conquest.

“Where did you get that top?” Kelsey asked as I passed her in the hall.

“Oh this? It was sent over to me. It’s Stella McCartney” I brushed off the comment. “You know, Stella is so environmentally friendly, and that’s what I’m all about right now.”

For the two of us, I don’t know how much money Pete paid Lina. (He wouldn’t tell me, saying, “Who cares, just as long as you’re happy.”) But she became a central figure in our house, which was something I sorely needed.

Almost every night, there was an occasion to be dressed for.

Whether it was a black-tie benefit to cure AIDS, diabetes, autism, heart disease, Alzheimer‘s, or breast, ovarian, prostate, or lung cancer, there was the perfect dress that went along with it.

If there was a benefit to raise awareness about rape; starving children; starving children in Africa; starving children in Chech nya, the Sudan, or Russia; suicide; women’s issues; men’s issues; terrorism; politics; mental health; or pollution, there was a dress that went along with it.

We were always getting dressed up to save something, whether it was the whales, the water, the rain forest, the redwood trees, the children, arctic wildlife, the black rhino, the chimps, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, or the manatees—which I thought said “matinees” on the invite and was excited to go, since going to the movies in the afternoon has always been a passion of mine. One week, after three nights of hobnobbing to save this or that, we were at an organ-transplant-awareness dinner and Pete joked to our table as we dug into the pate, “Save the liver” in a Julia Child/Dan Aykroyd SNL impersonation that no one else at our table thought was as hysterically funny as the two of us did.

And everywhere we went, someone got an award. There was the lifetime achievement award for film, television, and theatre. There were the crossover awards, the ones given to famous actors or directors who had a passion for those living in poverty, or who had just made a movie about someone who suffered from muscular dystrophy. At first, I felt it was important to lend my support to these events. After a while, however, it was like a TV movie’s cliché: the disease of the week. One night, Pete got an award for his achievement in helping to bring the arts back into inner-city schools. We forgot that he was being honored until we got to the benefit and saw his picture on the marquee.

“What disorder are we honoring tonight?” I asked Pete one morning as we were brushing our teeth.

“I think it’s spina bifida ... no, it’s something about getting kids off drugs.”

It wasn’t that we didn’t care. We did; especially Pete. He was always wanting to give back for all the success he’d achieved, and I respected that and wholeheartedly read up on that particular night’s event. The problem was that it was getting to the point where nothing was special anymore. 1 had overdosed on black tie and charity.

Still, there was Lina, arriving on the afternoon of the event with the dress for the occasion. Underwear from Target was heading farther and farther back into the lingerie drawer, being replaced by padded underwear and girdle tops. One day Pete came home with a huge box for me. I opened it to find forty pairs of Cosabella underwear.

“They were a PR thing that Cosabella sent over,” he said, grabbing a banana and looking at his BlackBerry. “They want us to put it on the actress for the new movie. I told them to send some over for you. I love to see you in sexy underwear.”

So I started wearing the boy-cut sheers in black, red, and pink.

My six-inch heels were being replaced by three-inch heels, which I felt way too short in until Lina assured me that my other shoes were “horrible.”

“You’re not fooling anyone with those high heels,” she said. “Everyone can plainly see that you’re four-eleven.”

“Five-two and a half,” I sauced back at her.

“Yes, with the three-inch heels, you’re five-two and a half. It’s time to be the real you,” she said, putting her arms around me and making me feel like I was at some sort of an intervention. “Accept your height. Get real. Use what you have.”

As I entered Serena’s house for a dinner party one night she looked down at me and said, “Why do you look so short?”

“I’m being the real me,” I told her as I slumped by.

I came home one day to find that all of my Calvin Klein athletic bras were gone, and push-up bras sat in their place. Cosabella sent Pete’s office more than forty bras that all happened to be my size—32A. If there is one thing I know for sure in this world, lace push-up bras, while stunning to look at, are not for running on the treadmill. The support is shockingly bleak and, frankly, downright itchy from the lace. The feeling of pulling your bra down at each interval is not a milestone of celebration one wants to display on a busy Saturday at the gym.

In short, I was starting to hate Lina. I started to hate what she brought me for each occasion. I missed Banana Republic back-room sales and buying Drano, Comet, and Tide laundry detergent along with my underwear at Target.

“Never wash your clothes with low-class laundry detergent,” Lina scolded me once. “Caldrea, Good Home, or Beach House. Those are the only products I would ever use.”

One night, I’d just had enough.

There was a dinner honoring a woman who had learned to walk again after being crushed in an auto accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Lina thought this occasion called for the shortest of skirts.

“It’s a celebration of the legs,” she said. “It’s the one thing you’ve both got going for you.”

I almost slapped her after that statement.

I looked at Pete as I watched him put on the John Varvatos blue suit, the one that Lina and I had picked out for him the week before at the opening of the new John Varvatos shop on Melrose.

“I can’t do this tonight,” I told him. “I have to put on sweats and order Chinese,” I said, sinking onto the bed and clutching the blankets.

“I’m glad you said that,” he said, loosening his tie. “I was thinking the same thing.”

He threw himself on the bed next to me and we embraced.