Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown (5 page)

“This time, throw her a little higher before you drop her on the ground,” Michael instructed. “It knocks the wind out of the opponent.”

This was their world. There were no girlfriends, just other pimple-face boys who raided our refrigerator. These boys had odors as bad as “the funk of forty thieves,” Laner would say. I never heard gossip about the high school kids, except once when some guy got kicked off the wrestling team for rigging the scale so he would make his weight for a match. Dirt, grime, and the ever-present sound of a football, basketball, or baseball game blaring on some television heavily overshadowed any feminine customs in my house. Therefore, if Laner had actually left like she kept threatening to, I would have never been taught her three most important rules to living a ladylike life:

After David graduated from high school, he moved into an apartment in downtown Philadelphia with his best friend Rob Meyers and started his college career at Temple University. For as much of a slob and violent offender around the house as he was, I missed my big brother and instinctively continued to tiptoe when I walked by his room at two o‘clock on a Saturday afternoon when he would usually still be sleeping. I began to long for that jackass who’d bang on the bathroom door for me to “hurry up” and “don’t use all the hot water,” the entire time it took me to take a shower. Michael was gone for the most part, too. Since he and David were perpetually joined at the hip, he was always staying downtown at David’s apartment. At that point, since both my parents worked, it was just Laner and me after school watching her soap operas, or “stories” as she called them, on television. I would eat a Ring Ding or two before she slapped my hand, warning me of my ever-increasing weight gain.

In the early part of David’s sophomore year at college, he met his first girlfriend, much to my chagrin.

I took an immediate dislike to Debbie Penderstein and her slender frame, long brown hair, and immaculate clothing choices. So did Laner. “Who does she think she is, coming in here with her bony behind and designer clothes, leaving her plate just sitting there on the table and not bringing it to the sink?”

Debbie really did have the most beautiful taste in clothes, though. Her blue-and-white-striped sailor top and matching white wide-leg pants with matching blue lace-up Espadrilles left me salivating. The black Chinese Laundry sandals she wore with black pants and a Fair Isle sweater made me jealous beyond words. She always smelled like lilacs and she never had a hair out of place. Frankly, David and Debbie looked like Beauty and the Dirty Beast. What she with her elegant, French-tip nails saw in my long-haired, ripped-jeans, and permanently-stained-sweater brother was beyond my grasp, but David was in love.

“Hey,
Bubbah,”
David said calling me by the nickname I’d asked him repeatedly not to call me, “look at how pretty Debbie is.” He kissed her on the cheek.

For as much as I didn’t like Debbie, she didn’t like me much either.

“Hello, Adena,” she’d snarl at me as she entered our family room where I was watching television. “David and I want to watch a movie. Do you think you could go someplace else?”

We had absolutely no reason to dislike each other; it was one of those things. My brother Michael even told me that Debbie said I was on her “blacklist.” And even though I had no idea what a “blacklist” was, she was on mine too.

On the first night of Hanukkah, my mother decided to have a family dinner in the dining room—something we never did. We were never a very religious family, even for a gift-giving holiday like this one. Debbie always had this sort of one-upmanship attitude, and I think my mother felt it too, so that’s why she did it. I was against this Hanukkah dinner from the start, but was promised Laner’s famous lasagna in return for my suffering.

As we lit the candles on the menorah (no prayer was said since no one knew one), gifts were handed out. Debbie got me a purple address book with little flowers on it.

“Aw. That was so sweet of Debbie to get something for little
Chunk-a,”
David said. He kissed Debbie on the cheek while I asked him yet again not to refer to me by yet another disparaging nickname.

I was told that I got Debbie a scarf, which my parents picked up and signed my name on the card, which she seemed to dislike immediately upon opening the gift. Good. We were even.

She handed David her gift to him, which was packaged in a shirt box from Boyd’s in downtown Philadelphia. Boyd’s is a very expensive men’s store that I had only been to once when I stopped off with my dad when he had to pick up a new tuxedo shirt and cummerbund for a party he and my mother had to go to. Everyone knew, though, that Boyd’s was the pinnacle of men’s fashions in Philadelphia, so whatever was in that box, it had to be of the best quality and, thus, a waste, given my brother’s tendency to be so indifferent when it came to clothing.

I grabbed another chocolate-chip cookie from the tray and began to go at it, ignoring my parents’ fawning over the gift that hadn’t even been opened yet I heard the sound of ruffling tissue, followed by my mother saying, “Oh, Debbie, that is gorgeous!” What I heard next were trumpets of exultation blaring in my head as I turned for a second and caught my first glimpse of the splendor coming out of that box.

It was truly the most beautiful sweater vest I’d ever seen. Chocolate brown in color, the sweater had three large argyle diamonds going down the front in pastel pink, blue, and green.

“It’s really nice,” David said, kissing Debbie on the cheek.

Nice wasn’t even the half of it. It was so my brother David to simply disregard a sweater as beautiful as that. One thing was for sure, he would never wear it. Another thing was for sure, I would.

As I awoke early the next morning for school, there was one thing on my mind: that gorgeous sweater vest. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to the last place I’d seen it—the dining room, where of course it was still sitting. I pulled it out of its Boyd’s box and took it upstairs to my room, where I matched it with a pink oxford underneath and my Sassoon blue jeans that were so tight, I had to lie flat on my bed and pull my stomach in, in order to button them. I had never looked more fashionable or more beautiful in my whole entire life.

I went to school that day and struck a pose everywhere I went.

“Cool sweater!” Mrs. Langoustine, the cooking teacher, said.

“Where did you get that?” Amy Chaikin asked the minute she saw me.

I could have had a theme song for me as I walked through the halls that day. I was like the cover of a beauty magazine, and the sweater was giving me the confidence to prove it. Even as the bus let me off down the street from my house, my neighbor Peter Sernoff, who never spoke to me since he got into the popular group said, “That sweater is really nice, Dean.”

I strolled into the house that afternoon and walked up the stairs, shifting my hips from extreme left to extreme right as I entered the kitchen to find Laner sitting at the kitchen table. She looked exhausted and heartbroken, like someone had died.

“Dean,” she said softly, “what went on here today, I don’t know how I lived through it. Your brother is so mad at you, and I’ll tell you something, I don’t blame him. How could you take his present that Debbie got him and then go off to school in it?”

Had she hallucinated?

“Because he never would have worn it. You know that!” I told her. “He even left it here!”

“He left it here by accident, and then he purposely came back to get it this morning to wear it out to lunch with Debbie’s parents. Jesus wept. When he looked in that box and realized that you’d taken it, I thought he was spent to go out of his mind!”

I knew she was telling the truth, as I could almost hear the echoes of his rant. The cause to create drama and shrill, deafening tantrums by any of the five Halperns was a standard custom in our house.

“He started going on and on. ‘How could she do that?’ And then Debbie started putting her two cents in, ‘That sister of yours is a spoiled brat who has to get everything she wants!’ Don’t you worry. I told that Debbie to mind herself when she was talking about one of my kids, but Dean, you didn’t think he’d wear it and I never thought he would have worn it, but how could you just take it without asking?”

She had answered her own question. Who would have thought he would wear it? No one. It was a given, and yet still, I elt worse than awful.

“Dean, you take that sweater off and fold it up nicely and put it back in that box, and I don’t want to ever see you do anything like that again, you hear?”

I took off the sweater and neatly folded it like she told me. A couple of hours later, I was in my room with the door shut when I heard David and Debbie come into the house. No one knocked on my door.

For the next three years that David and Debbie dated, David’s wardrobe got better and better—a sweater with no holes, a pair of pants that hadn’t frayed—and I never borrowed a thing, not even that really cool jean jacket with the Michael Jackson-esque sideways zipper pockets and fringe coming off the sleeves that David only wore once. No one ever mentioned what I did. I didn’t exactly get punished for it, but my remorse stayed longer than it should have.

A couple of years later, when I was fifteen years old and my parents went away for the weekend, I decided to invite some kids from school over—which turned into the entire school, complete with beer kegs and cigarette burns on my mother’s good couches. It was getting way out of hand, but I was too afraid to do anything about it. I couldn’t call my parents or my brothers, because they would have gotten mad at me for inviting people over in the first place. As I was looking through my old purple address book with the little flowers on it, I came across Debbie’s number. She was living downtown and didn’t have a car to come and help me, but offered to stay on the phone with me until things calmed down. I went up to my parents’ room and shut the door and for the next four hours, Debbie and I talked about everything from where she got her clothes to the fact that we both thought Andrew Ridgley from Wham! was super hot. It was the first time we ever really had a conversation, and although it wasn’t exactly what was said between us that was important, we were finding out we weren’t the enemies we thought we should be. A few weeks after that, David and Debbie were going to see a movie and asked if I wanted to join them. The delight in my face said it all. Somewhere around my Sweet Sixteen party, Debbie and David broke up and I was truly sad about it. I still think of her from time to time and hope she’s well and as fashionably dressed as she always used to be.

Years after the breakup, I was hanging out with Laner in the laundry room, as I was wont to do as she folded some clothes that David had dropped off. I saw her take the sweater, mangled and pilled, out of the washing machine. “Why I’m doing this, I don’t know,” she said as she placed the seriously decomposed sweater vest on a hanger to air-dry. The sweater had been worn and torn to tatters, but he was still wearing it. Whether it was the memory of his first love, or the fact that he had nothing else to wear and didn’t care, I’d never ask him. David was never the type to divulge girly things like that.

“Hey, Sugar?” Laner said with a laugh, “you think he’d be mad if you wanted to borrow this now?”

emember when young women started doubling men’s boxer shorts for actual shorts? You saw sorority girls wearing them with sayings printed on them stating something like GAMMA GIRLS KICK BUTT!

Well, guess what. I started that.

Thank you. No applause, please.

I really did, though. You can ask Amy Chaikin or Julie Pelagatti. Ask my parents; they’ll tell you, “Oh yes, she started that. She was at the fashion forefront on that craze.”

I don’t know what gave me the idea to go into my father’s drawers drawer and cop a pair of his boxer shorts. He really couldn’t understand it either.

“What’s the matter with her?” my father asked my mother. “She keeps taking my underwear. That’s not normal.”

“She’s a teenager,” my mother declared. “I used to wear poodles on my skirts when I was her age.”

“You can’t compare poodle skirts to a fourteen-year-old girl taking her fathers underwear,” he complained.

I wore them anyway—not to school or anything, maybe to the Wawa convenience store for more Ring Dings, but that’s about it. Since they were a little big in the waist, I folded the fabric over and fastened it with a safety pin, thus covering up the front hole pocket—a double bonus. It looked ridiculous, but man it was comfortable, and it hid all my bad parts, which at that time I thought were many.

“Dave and Lou saw Adena in Wawa wearing my underwear,” my father complained to my mother. “I get patient referrals from those guys. She is not to wear my underwear anymore. I don’t understand it, Arlene. We buy that girl all these nice clothes—I see the credit card bills—and she insists on wearing my underwear!”

“It’s a phase,” my mother told him. “She just got her period and she doesn’t like the way she looks. I wore my cashmere sweaters a size too big.”

“You can’t compare cashmere sweaters to wearing my underwear! This has got to stop! ADENA!” he screamed to me from the kitchen.

I was in the family room in his boxer shorts and an extra large T-shirt eating some Jiffy Pop popcorn and watching Knots Landing.

“What?” I griped with a mouth full of corn.