Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown

by Adena Halpern

  Laner, my mother, Amy, Julie, and I convened in my bedroom as I unveiled my creation.

  Silence filled the room. I caught my mother glancing at the jagged threads. Laner had this frozen blank smile on her face. Her mouth was agape.

  “You know what?” my mother said, “it’s actually adorable. I’m very proud.”

  “It’s just beautiful, Dean, good for you,” Laner said, kissing me on the cheek.

  “It’s really pretty,” Amy said.

  “It’s something you’ll never forget,” Julie said, and smiled.

  Were they lying? Sure they were, but even to this day they ould never tell me otherwise.

  As we entered the room, the ethereal white, gold mermaid, and black pouf promgoers surveyed the other dresses. One dress caught my eye. I took a closer look.... Melanie Kaplan was wearing exactly what I wanted! Where did she find it? China?

  I walked up to her and smiled as our crinoline poufs brushed up against each other.

  “Love your dress,” I said, smiling.

  “Your dress is really cool,” she replied with a polite grimace.

  “Yeah, I made it,” I tried to say proudly.

  “I got mine at John Wanamaker‘s,” she said as my world collapsed.

  As we grooved through the night, I tried not to think about my dress and began to truly enjoy myself, dancing with my friends and celebrating this last hurrah. By the end of the evening, some of the stitching had come undone, leaving a gaping hole on the side of the dress. By that time, I was done with the whole thing anyway.

  A year later, during winter break from my freshman year of college, I went with my parents to see Broadcast News. When the movie got to the scene where Holly Hunter gets dressed to go to the Correspondents’ Dinner with William Hurt, my mother and I started screaming so loud; we could not believe our eyes. Some of those in the theater told us to shut up, and if we could have stopped the movie for a second and explained our outburst, we would have. Holly Hunter was wearing the blue-and-white polka-dot Victor Costa dress.

  For those who have asked me through the years what I wore to my prom, after reading this story, you’re probably a little perplexed. Yes, I lied, and I apologize. I did not wear the Victor Costa blue-and-white polka-dot dress like I told you, the same one that Holly Hunter wore in Broadcast News. Now you know what I really wore.

  The Beautiful Boy in the 8-Ball Jacket

  first laid eyes on Adam in September of my freshman year of college, 1987. I was late in meeting a new friend for dinner and as I approached her dorm, I rushed up the stairs and into the lobby. As I followed a fellow student through the locked doors that led to the dorms, a voice from behind stopped me.

  “Excuse me,” I heard as I froze, letting the door lock in front of me, “do you have ID to get into this building?”

  “What?” I said, turning around and nervously fluffing my teased and Stiff Stuff-sprayed coif, “I’m here to see ...” (whatever her name was; I can’t remember).

  “Good for you,” he answered sarcastically, “but I’ll need to see some ID if you think you’re going anywhere.”

  I knew that I had forgotten my ID, but I looked through my canvas army surplus that doubled as a purse with REM and U2 pins on it as if maybe my ID wasn’t still on my dresser where I remembered leaving it. I had taken the wrong subway and crossed twelve blocks to get to my new friend’s dorm, and this guy was going to make me go back and get it?

  “I forgot it at my dorm,” I told him, hoping for sympathy.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Adena Halpern.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Hayden.”

  “What floor?”

  “Third.”

  “Well, I’m just going to have to pay you a visit sometime to make sure you really live there.” He smiled shyly as he winked.

  My jaw went slack as he came into focus.

  He was, in a word, gorgeous. Tall though, taller than I had ever been attracted to before, and he had this flawless olive complexion with these amazingly thick, dark, curly locks hanging in front of his brown eyes.

  “So you don’t really work the desk?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m just an innocent bystander, trying to make sure this dorm is safe.” He smiled as he unlocked the door to let me in. I smiled back as I walked through the door, and watched him as it separated us.

  “See you around, Miss Halpern,” the beautiful, taller-than-I‘d-ever-dated boy said as he continued to smile and walk away. As he turned to walk out of the building, my heart swooned. On the back of his red-white-and-black-patched leather jacket, a huge circled 8, like a pool-table 8-ball, was emblazoned. It was meant to be. Eight was my lucky number.

  I ran up the stairs to my friend’s dorm room.

  “OK,” I screamed, out of breath, “I totally just met my new boyfriend!”

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  “Tall guy. Dark. He had a big eight on the back of his jacket.”

  Her face soured.

  “Adam?”

  “Is that his name?”

  “No way. You do not want to go out with him. He’s bad news.”

  “Why?” I said as my heart began to hurt.

  “He’s just ... he’s such a poser! He walks around with that 8-ball jacket like he owns New York. He thinks he’s so cool!”

  That was the end of my friendship with her.

  Adam got my number from student services and called me the very next day. We set a date for coffee the following afternoon.

  As was the case so many times in my many short years of life, I had nothing to wear. If Adam was cool enough to wear that 8-ball jacket, there were cooler things to come. I looked into my closet. No to the Levi’s with the hole in the butt; no to the stirrup leggings; and definitely no to the Girbaud white parachute pants when I tried them on. My roommate said I looked like the Pills-bury Doughboy in them.

  I decided on a black-and-white-checked poufy skirt, which hit just above the knee. I had gotten it at my favorite store, Mooshka, in Philadelphia before I left for school. I matched it with an Esprit cotton off-the-shoulder black top, because I always thought I had sexy shoulders. I teased my hair as high as it would go, gelled it with Tenex, sprayed it with Stiff Stuff, and put on my Janet “Miss Jackson if you’re nasty” immensely huge hoop earrings that I had looped my parents’ house key on, and was set to go.

  As I opened the door to my dorm room to greet him, the eighties were over.

  Except for the 8-ball and red-and-white patches, he was head-to-toe black. Cool black: black jeans, black T-shirt, black shoes. I was Cindy Lauper who had stuck her finger in an electric socket. He was even taller and leaner and more muscular than I remembered him being, and I immediately regretted wearing my Chinese silk slipper flats.

  Standing in front of me was the epitome of sleek and with-it, and I felt like I looked like yesterday’s decade.

  As we walked outside, Adam reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He talked all the way down Third Avenue, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. All I could think of was how amazing he looked in those sunglasses, all the while worrying that some passerby smoking a cigarette might get too close to me and set my hair on fire from the inestimable amount of flammable product I’d put in it. The sun was beating into my eyes, my legs were glowing they were so white, pebbles were lodging themselves inside my slippers, and I only really came to consciousness when Adam stopped me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Can I just say”—he smiled sweetly—“you have the most amazing eyes.”

  By the following week, the Tenex was thrown out, the Stiff Stuff bottle was being used as a doorstop in my dorm hallway, and heading down University Place were two slick lovers in Ray-Ban sunglasses and black leather jackets—his with a circled 8-ball emblazoned on the back—holding hands. The five-foot-tall girl had on black leggings, a black T-shirt, and her blond hair was sleek and straight. The six-foot-two-inch, tall
er-than-tall, olive-skinned boy wore his Levi’s with his wallet attached to a silver chain hanging out of his pocket. As he scooped her up in his arms and kissed her, she was sure that they were the snappiest dressed, most in-love couple that New York City had ever seen.

  My Life in Six-Inch Heels

  he greatest thing about Adam was that he never noticed my obvious foibles. He never commented on my practically transparent pale skin, or the year I had to spend growing out my damaged split ends from all the teasing and hair spray. He never mentioned that I had a couple of pounds to lose, but he did grab my waist when I finally did lose those pounds and said, “I have to watch out for the other guys because my girlfriend is getting sexier looking every day.” All of those things, however, were a distant second to what really bothered me and what didn’t faze him.

  It was not uncommon for some jerk-off, sometimes drunk, though most times sober, to come up to us and ask, “How do you two have sex if she’s so short and you’re so tall?” Even though Adam always gave the same answer, “Very well, thank you,” it still bothered me to no end. I’d raise my voice at Adam afterward and say, “Why didn’t you belt the guy?” Adam would say, “What do I care what he thinks?” The problem was, I cared. Adam was a foot and two inches taller than me. As much as it bothered me, it was what it was and there was nothing I could do about it but try to make up for my height with my one-and-a-half-inch cowboy boots and forget about it. Still, whenever the subject would come up, like when the ubiquitous schmuck would approach us, it was something that truly irked me.

  In the spring of 1990, my junior and Adam’s senior year of college, we had just left a matinee showing of Jules et Jim at the Bleecker Street Cinema. Adam was a film student who had dreams of moving to Hollywood and becoming the next Martin Scorsese, and I was his faithful girl who loved the movies as much as he did. As we threw on our requisite shades and leather jackets (the 8-ball jacket by this point had been put in the closet for posterity and had been replaced with a motorcycle jacket; I wore a simple one with black buttons) we decided to walk into SoHo for shopping and coffee.

  We drifted into a shoe store, and Adam tried on size-thirteen black Doc Martens and I glanced over to the women’s rack. Perched in the middle of motorcycle boots and Converse All-Stars was a particular shoe that caught my eye. It was a pair of six-inch platform sandals to be exact: black, faux suede, size five—my size. I took off my one-and-a-half-inch-heeled black cowboy boots and slipped into the six-inch platform sandals. Suddenly I was up with the rest of the world. The air seemed clearer. I had to put on my Ray-Bans because the light seemed brighter.

  “What do you think of these?” Adam asked. I looked down at his shoes and then up to his face. It was incredible. The strain in my neck was gone.

  “Your shoes are really cool,” I said. “What do you think of these?”

  He looked down at my sandals and then into my eyes.

  “They make you look tall,” he said.

  “We’ll take both pairs,” I said to the saleswoman.

  For the next week, the only time I took those sandals off was to go to sleep. I had gone from the middle of Adam’s chest to almost close to his shoulder. We could practically dance cheek-to-cheek, and I didn’t have to stand on a chair to do it. The best part, though, was what I thought of as I threw my arm over Adam’s shoulder as we walked into Nell’s nightclub that night: Since my pants were long enough to go over the shoes, no drunken putz in a dark bar would ever know the difference.

  After two months, Adam threw away his Doc Martens because they were giving him blisters I wore those sandals, even in the winter with snow on the ground, for the next three years. I’d had the soles re-stitched four times before they died a horrific death involving a tree stump during a hike in the Santa Monica mountains.

  These days, I don’t care what anyone else thinks about my shoes. I don’t feel comfortable unless I’m in a heel that could give me a nosebleed from the altitude. My brother calls them “stilts.” Random people come up to me on the street and ask me how I can walk in them. I’ve had my boots called “a KISS reunion.” If friends mention me in conversation and the other person is cloudy as to who I am, my friend will say, “She always wears high heels,” and the person will remember.

  On a shoe hunt, if a salesperson asks if they can help me, I always say the same thing: “Show me your highest heel.” Ninety-eight percent of the time, the heels aren’t high enough, so I’m left with a surprisingly pitiful number of shoes in my closet for a Jewish princess with a shopping addiction.

  Now that I’ve been walking in heels for so long, I have trouble walking in flats. Last September, my neighbors were having their living room painted and I went over to spy. I had just come from the gym, the only place I’ll be seen in flats. While doing my best impression of Gladys Kravitz from Bewitched I tripped over one of their steps in the front yard and fractured my metatarsal bone in two places. I had to wear a cast for six weeks. When my neighbors came out to help me, one of them said, “She’s in sneakers, too. This girl really can’t survive without those heels.”

  Was it Adam’s taller-than-tall height that caused me to desire a more elevated existence? No. It was, however, the final straw. Truthfully, I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t hate my height. At my high school graduation, out of three hundred kids, I was the first to graduate in my class because they lined us up by size. The laughs that came from the crowd when the principal asked for the shortest first.... I still have nightmares. I had been called the dreaded “Teenie Weenie Deanie” way too many times to mention. By the time I finished college, I was sure that I had spent more money on alterations than I did on my tuition.

  I fear the day I have to go to a foot doctor and he tells me I can’t wear high heels anymore. I will never stand again. I’ll be one of those divas who lounges in bed all day, and friends and fans can all come to me. I’ll have to buy pink boas to wear over my night-gowns and turn my bedroom into a lair of lust with peacock feathers and satin. If I have to go to the bathroom or run to the fridge, I’ll wait until everyone leaves. Then again, I’d miss too many great parties. Maybe I can persuade Mr. Louboutin to make orthopedic heels.

  Los Angeles-Just One Look

  n the summer of 1991, I graduated from college and moved to L.A. to be with my college sweetheart. Since Adam was a year ahead of me in school, he had already moved a year before. I did not want to move to Los Angeles. I had come to love New York and all the fashions it had to offer. Although I had visited Adam a few times during the year, fashion had not been on my mind. He was. At that point in my life, if Adam had wanted me to join him in the Hare Krishnas, I would have found a way to work with my bald head and toga.

  I really loved my style in the early nineties. I was really into tight-as-could-be Levi’s paired with Lycra ballet tops that fit my twenty-year-old (never-been-to-a-gym-and-didn‘t-need-it-and-should-have-relished-the-experience-more) body, and of course, my six-inch platform sandals. I had become a hip chick. SoHo and any piece of clothing it sold was my utopian paradise.

  As I headed out of the airport terminal to wait for Adam, I took out the small wire-rim Ray-Ban sunglasses he’d asked me to pick up for him that he couldn’t find in Los Angeles. As cool as we were in New York, we’d be cooler in L.A.

  When I saw Adam drive up to the terminal and get out of his beat-up Volvo, a voice I’d never heard before popped into my head.

  “Go back into the airport, get back on the plane, and go back to New York,” the voice inside me said as my taller-than-tall boyfriend in the yellow-and-orange-flowered Hawaiian shirt grabbed me and kissed me.

  “Tell him it’s for your own good, and go back into the airport and go right back to New York,” the voice said again as I ran my fingers through the greasy gunk that compressed his luscious locks of dark curls.

  “Your hair,” I said, wiping the grime off my hand and onto his Hawaiian shirt. “What’s with your hair?”

  “You like it?” he sa
id, smoothing it back. “It’s the look here.”

  “Go back into the airport! Just say you made a mistake and go back!” the voice shouted in my head.

  “It’s OK, I guess,” I said with a face that told him just the opposite.

  “It’s different here because of the weather,” he said, taking my suitcase and throwing it into the trunk. “It’s nothing like New York.”

  As we drove back to the apartment we’d now call ours, the voice inside me had calmed down long enough for me to hear Adam say, “So guess what? How would you like to go to a movie premiere tonight? My boss gave me his tickets.”

  A movie premiere? I suddenly loved Los Angeles. My next thought, what to wear, was immediately followed by the. voice in my head starting to rant again.

  “Can it!” I told the voice.

  This was 1991, a few years before E! Entertainment Network, so the closest I got to seeing a movie premiere was either seeing it on Entertainment Tonight or watching the old clips of stars like Lana Turner and Frank Sinatra get out of long limousines and adjust their fox stoles and tuxedo jackets.

  “I don’t think I have anything to wear,” I told him.

  “You just wear whatever,” he said, “This is L.A. It’s all about the comfort and none of that New York posing.”

  “So I can just wear jeans?” I asked him, thinking that I could pair it with a black ballet top.