“Oh, please.” Arlene grimaced, unbuttoning my dreams and slipping off our glamorous future. “I’m a doctor’s wife.”
We left Bloomingdale’s that day with my mother’s purchase of two turtleneck sweaters and a corduroy blazer. Whether it was my perseverance or Arlene’s realization that she had been suffering from an acute case of negative body image, she purchased for herself a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, much to my euphoric delight.
Two weeks later, Arlene was shopping in a plant store and tripped over a mislaid garden hose. As she fell to the concrete, the force of her fall tore holes in both knees of the jeans. My mother had chipped the bone in her right kneecap and was forced to wear a cast for six weeks. When I saw her throw the ruined jeans into the trash, I feared the worst; there would never be flash in her wardrobe again. The day she got the cast off, however, we went directly to Saks, where she bought a brand-new pair of Calvin Klein jeans. My opinion had counted.
These days, the Los Angeles Barneys department store is my home away from home. I love to arrive at Barney Greengrass, the restaurant inside Barneys, at 1:10 sharp to meet a friend for lunch. One o‘clock lunch is the busiest time at Barney Greengrass, and I need to see who’s lunching with whom and who’s wearing what. That’s why I like to get there a fashionable ten minutes late. Dressed in my most au courant (without looking like I mulled over outfits for an hour prior to lunch, of course), I send a kiss over to someone sitting at one table, tell another how fabulous she looks and ask if she’s lost weight, and finally sit down at my table, where the gossip comes to me.
After lunch, I consider it exercise when I take the long winding staircase through the floors of the department store. I stop at each department and take a once around: first floor, shoes and accessories; second floor, women’s couture; fourth floor, men’s ready-to-wear; and so on. Most people eat mashed potatoes or slip on some flannel pajamas to feel those bygone days of childhood comfort. The Los Angeles Barneys is my version of mashed potatoes and meat loaf.
Sometimes I see something that would look perfect for my mother, so I call her back in Philadelphia on my cell phone and describe it to her.
“It’s frilly, but it’s not. It’s simple yet frilly,” I tell her.
“It’s not too trendy, is it?” she asks.
“Trust me.”
“Send it out,” she tells me.
My mother and I don’t wear the same styles; we don’t share the same tastes, but we know which pants or skirt or blouse says “Arlene” or “Adena,” or “the new and improved Arlene” or “Adena.” It is a language that only she and I can speak, a bond between my mother and grandmother that began many years before I was born, which in turn was passed on to me.
The Devil Wore Treetorns
have the perfect solution to ending wars: Send the most popular tween girls from middle schools around the world to duke it out. Rather than using guns, explosives, and heavy artillery, all these girls need, these days, is a computer with IM capabilities, a phone, and most important, the must-have fashion item in the m ust-have color.
Back in my tween days we had the phone, scraps of notebook paper passed around a classroom and, of course, our vicious mouths to torture one another. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I now consider myself fortunate to have lived in that era, given the advancements in tween torment technology We didn’t have to have the right Prada bags or Manolo Blahniks that would have forced our parents to take second jobs. In 1981, we had ribbon belts and penny loafers and Levis and Treetorns with the boomerang logo or Stan Smith Adidas (short for “All Day I Dream About Sex,” we’d tease one another) with the black three-stripe accents and shoelaces with blue whales or green frogs printed on them.
I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life in the fall of 1980. I complained to my parents that my feet were in pain. My parents took me to an orthopedic surgeon friend of my dad’s who said that I had flat feet, which required a higher arch than my usual sneakers could provide. After the visit to the doctor, and much to my chagrin, my mother bought me deep blue Puma sneakers with a deep yellow swoosh logo. To be honest, I didn’t hate the sneakers. I actually thought they were kind of cute. I knew, however, that this was not the right fashion look that was required in the sixth grade at Welsh Valley Middle School. Curses to my feet for not allowing me to wear the white Treetorn tennis sneakers with the boomerang logo like all the other girls had. I had an inkling there would be trouble when I wore the Pumas to school. Had I known the pain I would have gone through as a result of having the wrong sneakers, I would have chosen the foot pain.
“Are they your brother’s hand-me-downs or something?” Fern Schwartz, head of the popular girls, asked one day as I gave her an idol-worshipping hello in the hallway.
“They’re so retarded-looking,” Ali Rose commented.
“I know,” I said with a laugh. “They’re so ugly, but I have a corrective problem and when my parents took me to the hospital, the doctor said I couldn’t wear anything else,” I explained, hoping my doctor’s excuse would work.
“So you’re a retard and you need special shoes,” Anna Klem concluded as she laughed with the other girls. “Duh! Everyone knows that!”
This was what I meant in the beginning. Send these girls to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Anyone would beg to surrender under this torture.
“LOOK, SHOES ARE SHOES!” My mother had shouted, putting her Stan Smith tennis shoe—clad high-arched foot down when I refused to go to school the next morning. “YOU CAN’T WEAR WHAT ALL THE OTHER GIRLS ARE WEARING! YOU HAVE FLAT FEET! NOW, GET TO SCHOOL!”
“But I can‘t,” I said through real tears. “Fern Schwartz and the other girls said I was retarded because I didn’t have the shoes that they did.”
“WELL, YOU TELL THEM THAT THEY’RE RETARDED BACK!” My mother was never good with the comebacks.
That afternoon, Ali Rose drew a picture of me and passed it around math class. My blue Pumas in relation to her depiction of my body were four times the size. The caption on the top of the page read I’M RETARDO HALPERN, AND MY DOCTOR SAYS I HAVE TO WEAR THESE GAY SNEAKERS.
If this girl couldn’t have taken down Mussolini, I don’t know who could.
By Friday night, we got four phony phone calls between the hours of five and seven asking for “Retardo Halpern.” At 8 p.m., someone had ten large pizzas sent to my house. I was a mess from the abuse. I sat in my room, crying in fear of what would happen to me on Monday. By Saturday I was comatose.
At about eleven that Saturday morning, I was still in bed in the fetal position, clutching my Snoopy doll with my head under the covers when my father, Barry, knocked on the door.
“Do you want to talk about who you think sent the pizzas?” he asked, taking a seat on my bed.
“No, thank you,” I politely declined.
“Mom said some girls were being mean about your sneakers. Do you want to tell me who they were?”
“No, thank you,” I politely declined again.
I could sense Barry was at a loss for words.
“Hey,” he said with a little more energy as he rubbed my back through the comforter, “your brother and me are going into Ar-den-more to get a new net for the basketball hoop. Wanna come with us?”
“No, thank you,” I politely declined again.
“Come on,” he said, taking away the covers, “I think you need a present. Isn’t there something you want?”
“No, thank you.”
“I’m sure there must be something you want,” my dad almost begged, “what about that purse that Tracy had? I know you said you liked it. Come on, come with your brother and me.”
Truth was, I kind of did want a Bermuda bag like my friend Tracy Soss had, with that cool short wooden handle and interchangeable purse covers. Tracy went to a different school and told me that everyone at the Shipley School had one. “All you do is unhook these buttons,” she’d said, referring to the ones attached to the wooden handles, “and then they have all different colors and patterns that you can get. You can wear a different bag every day.” When I asked my mother about it repeatedly, she said, “Maybe,” but we never got around to it.
Ardmore, Pennsylvania, is a town outside Philadelphia, which to us suburban Phillites is the shopping mecca of the Main Line. I’d always called it Ar-den-more, which I thought was its actual name rather than the two syllable Ard-more, which became a Halpern in-joke and the only way we’ve ever referred to it to this day. The shopping areas are divided into two sections, which, when I was a kid, were only allowed to be visited on separate occasions because Lancaster Avenue, the busy thoroughfare that divided the two sections, was too dangerous to be crossed without parental supervision. This actually never made sense, since Lancaster Avenue didn’t actually cross the two sections, but we listened anyway. “Up Lancaster” was the phrase used to refer to the upper section, formally called Ardmore West, and the better-suited shopping area for the five dollars your parents gave you to use in the six or so hours they dropped you off.
Everyone from the nerds to the popular kids went Up Lancaster on the weekends, as there was never much to do being a suburban kid. My best childhood friends, not quite the most popular, but certainly not nerds, were Amy Chaikin and Julie Pelagatti. We’d spent countless Saturdays there shopping and flirting with the sixth-grade boys we liked at the time.
The first stop Up Lancaster was what had become the Birdcage of my tween days to see and be seen—the Roy Rogers fast food restaurant, for hamburgers, french fries, and gossip:
“Marci Kleinman went to second with Warren Patruli in the woods behind Mr. Frank’s English class,” Brooke Lewis whispered to us one day.
“What a slul,” we concluded.
Next we’d hit Sam Goody for 78s of Donna Summer’s “On the Radio” or Shaun Cassidy’s “Da Doo Run Run.” Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors was next door for chocolate-mint ice cream; a hobby shop for a paint-by-numbers set; the leather goods store to buy scrap strips of leather with your initials embossed into them; the MAB paint store to buy white cloth paint hats for twenty-five cents; a Wawa convenience store for Cokes and Cheetus; and our favorite, the Crystal Collage, a gift shop that sold Smurf figurines and pens with fuzzy pink or orange troll-like “hair” and glued-on plastic eyeballs on the tips. Fern Schwartz once told us that we could sit at her table in the cafeteria if we stole a Bonne Bell Lip Smackers from Crystal Collage for her. I was all ready to do it, but Amy Chaikin, forever the one who would never do anything dishonest, was completely against it. Julie Pelagatti couldn’t have cared less either way. She was the only tween who didn’t care if she was in the popular group or not, a source of strength I have forever admired.
The lower section of Ardmore, Suburban Square as it is called because it’s where small boutique clothing shops—including the Strawbridge & Clothier department store—lay in a square surrounding a cement park with tables and benches. Suburban Square was frequented less in those days since we didn’t have the know-how or funds to shop there without our parents. It was rare to go to Suburban Square, except if you were going to the Suburban Square movie theater, but that was torn down in the late seventies and made into a farmer’s market for vegetables and meats. And what ten- or eleven-year-old wants to spend their five dollars on that? Suburban Square used to make this big deal that it was the “first shopping center in the world,” and my brothers and I thought it was really cool because it was in the
Guinness World Records
book. A huge stink was made by some shopping place in Baltimore that they were the first, and it turned out that they were right—much to our dismay and sadness.
You never went to Ardmore with your parents on the weekend. If you needed clothes, you went after school on the weekdays. This particular Saturday was an exception, however, since I was so down in the dumps. I called Amy Chaikin, who informed me that Fern Schwartz would not be in Ardmore that Saturday, as she’d heard Fern and the other girls talking in Earth Science that they were going to the Ford dealership where Fern’s father worked to test-drive some cars and how cool were they at ten and eleven to be given the keys to brand-new cars? It was a few years before it occurred to me that they were totally lying about that.
So off we went in my father’s car, my brother Michael, my dad, and me to Ar-den-more. Although my brother complained, “Why does she have to come? I thought she couldn’t walk because of her flat feet.” My father explained to him that I was going through a very emotional time and it would be good for me. The whole drive over was spent in the backseat with my head hunched over as my dad and Michael sat in the front trying to decipher why the girls in my class sent the pizzas and Michael not being able to understand why we couldn’t have kept just one pie.
“They already made ‘em,” he complained, “what were they going to do with them?”
“I’m sure they get that kind of thing all the time, kids sending pizzas to some poor pathetic kid who’s on the outs with the other kids,” Barry said.
“Yeah, but we could have shown them that we really wanted the pizzas, and Dean could have gone to school on Monday and told them we really wanted the pizzas and how good they were. Couldn’t you, Dean?” he asked, turning to me.
I was out of answers by then.
The funny thing about shopping with my dad and brothers was that they put as much thought into something as useless as a rope-tied basketball net as my mother and I would to ponder over a certain sweater or pair of pants.
“This one’s regulated,” Michael said, handing it to my father, who compared its strength against another net.
“Yeah, but this one has this rubber coating,” my dad said, showing it to Michael, who carefully examined one next to the other. “That should hold better in the wintertime with the snow.”
“Yeah, but this one’s
regulated,”
Michael countered as my father continued to ponder.