Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown Read Free Page B

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