Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown

by Adena Halpern

  I got home first that night. Pete told me he was having a quick drink with a screenwriter. I was watching Entertainment Tonight. Mary Hart was reporting on the fact that since the war in Iraq had recently begun, stars were planning on dressing down in a more subdued tone for the Oscars that Sunday night. I was taking off my jeans and black sweater for the time being until we were going to dinner, leaving on the white button-down, and throwing on my black Juicy velvet sweats. I watched Bob Goen reporting that Tobey Maguire had signed on to appear in the sequel of Spider-Man despite a back injury. My stomach was starting to growl in the middle of the report, so I went down to the kitchen to grab some tortilla chips to tide me over until we went to dinner. As I was eating out of the pantry closet, Pete came home.

  He had a really nice smile on his face. He seemed like he was in a really good mood—more than usual, but not enough to take note of as he hugged and kissed me hello and grabbed some chips for himself. I was telling him about the crappy meeting I’d had with a network that didn’t like the way we were promoting their shows. I still had my head in the pantry, using a shelf as my table as I opened a jar of salsa and began to dip. I was really hungry, and some chips that hadn’t made it to my mouth instead fell on the floor.

  “You know, you’re adorable,” he said and smiled as I was in the middle of telling him about my day. This stopped me in my eating/work-gripe frenzy as I turned to give him a smile full of chips. He kissed me on the cheek.

  He had actually mentioned to me a week before that he didn’t like the fact that I had a habit of eating a meal out of the refrigerator or from the pantry. That night he thought it was adorable Men. They can be so finicky sometimes.

  I continued to eat my salsa and chips out of the pantry closet and continued to go on about my day.

  “The jerks don’t want to pay us what they owe us,” I told Pete. “That’s what’s behind this,” I said with a mouthful. Just then, I dripped some of the salsa onto my white button-down shirt and let out a pissed-off bellow.

  “Son of a bitch!” I shouted as I turned around to grab a paper towel to swipe the salsa off my shirt. These were the last words I would articulate before turning around again and seeing Pete down on one knee with the six-carat emerald-cut diamond engagement ring from Tiffany’s.

  “I was going to wait until this weekend”—he smiled brightly—“and I was going to do all this stuff—take you out to a nice place, get some roses, have some guy playing the violin.... Seeing you standing there though, I just thought that this was the most appropriate way to ask you. Dean ... Adena, will you marry me?”

  I was numb in my tracks, and yet my senses were on highest alert. I could feel the wet salsa sticking the white button-down shirt to my chest. Some tortilla crumbs were underneath my bare feet. I had a slight wedgie from my boy-cut sheers, and Entertainment Tonight was announcing the birthdays of Holly Hunter, Spike Lee, and Carl Reiner.

  He wanted to marry me. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. Why me? Who was I to be asked such a question, and with salsa on my white shirt no less? What did I have that the others didn’t? Me? Are you sure?

  “Are you sure?” I blurted out with this smiling, perplexed look on my face as he remained in place, bent on one knee holding the ring to my face. I took a step forward and another chip speared its way into my foot.

  “I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he whispered in that positive, matter-of-fact tone I’d come to love.

  Who was I to turn such a thing down?

  Was I making too much out of it? Sure, he was asking me to marry him, and this was a huge deal, but billions of other people, even the people closest to me, had been asked this same question and they seemed to take it off the cuff. They went on with their lives, had children, and no one ever mentioned, “I couldn’t believe he wanted to marry me.”

  Still, the thought of the words “I want to spend the rest of my life with you” had me shaking and crying and unable to speak. What a statement. What a beautiful, unselfish, loving, trusting statement.

  So I nodded my head and accepted his proposal.

  The ring looked incredibly obnoxious on the tiny fourth finger of my left hand. I would have to start getting manicures on a regular basis. “Why did the ring have to be so big?” I thought to myself. “I’ll have to drag my arm across the floor. I’ll look like the hunchback of Notre Dame with amazing jewelry. I could blind someone with this thing. I’m just going to tell him it’s too big.” This was what was going through my mind as we kissed madly. “You’re out of your mind!” I could hear generations of women in my family screaming. “We’ve never heard of such a thing. You’re upset that the diamond is too big? This should be a problem for you? How did you get into this family?”

  “Do you like the ring?” he whispered, admiring it on my finger.

  “It’s the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen,” I cried.

  “The thing looks like ten carats on you.” He laughed, taking my hand. “If I’d known it was going to look so big, I could have gotten you one carat and saved the money.”

  Relaxed Fit

  hen you are newly engaged and gearing up to plan a wedding, start prenatal vitamins, have children, and start a new phase in your life, a full-time job—if you can swing it—is out of the question. It just takes up too much time. This was the reasoning that Pete and I had when I quit my job with Promo House.

  “There’s just too much that has to be done,” Pete reasoned, “and your work is going to suffer for it.”

  “I just feel like I’ll he wasting your time,” I told my boss. “Even as I’m telling you this, my mind is going back and forth between lemon- or cream-colored napkins for the wedding reception.”

  The twenty-four-year-olds were ready to sit shivah for me.

  “Will you just leave a pair of your shoes here?” Jesse cried. “Just so a part of you is with us.”

  My co-thirtysomethings thought I was out of my mind.

  “Getting ready for a wedding is no reason to give up your life,” Julian scolded. “You are going to hate shopping all day. What are you going to do when the wedding is over?”

  “I’ll have babies and go to PTA meetings. This part of my life is over,” I scolded back. “I’ve worked my butt off, literally, for the last fifteen years. It’s time to do something else.”

  “That’s the thing,” Paula said. “You won’t be doing anything else. Trust me; first you’ll plan your days, but slowly you’re going to find yourself watching HBO in the middle of the afternoon. Four o‘clock after Oprah is a killer; I know this from maternity leave,” she said, clutching her heart. “It’s the longest part of life you’ll ever experience when you have nothing to do. You’ll get to that four o’clock hour one day when it’s another four hours from dinner and there’s nothing else to do. Take my advice; pray for something good on HBO. That’s the best you can hope for.”

  So I stopped speaking to them until I couldn’t take the grief anymore and called up one day, telling them I would freelance whenever they needed me.

  The strange phenomenon about quitting or being fired from a job is all those clothes, which are just not needed anymore. There is too much in your closet that just doesn’t need be there. All those clothes you bought in order to wear a different outfit each day is now unnecessary, since the same pair of jeans can be worn for months on end. And why not? No one except your loved one sees you on a daily basis.

  You know when you find a really good-fitting T-shirt or a pair of pants and you buy five of them in an array of colors? The one T-shirt or pair of pants that you favored over the others is the one that gets worn. The others? Donate them. You’re never going to wear them again unless you drop a jar of chocolate syrup on the outfit you normally wear (like I did). When you don’t have a job, there aren’t enough people in the world who are going to see you wear the same thing twice.

  At first you continue to set your alarm to 7 a.m. You jump out of bed with the world as your playground and w
onder, “Shall it be the museum today? How about a nice matinee after the gym?” You try to make plans with your stay-at-home-mom girlfriends, but they don’t have time for an afternoon matinee or lunch or anything else. There’s soccer practice to drive to, ballet lessons, piano lessons, and tutors to tend to. “You’ll find that out soon enough,” they tell me.

  Pretty soon, you realize that the wedding preparations are taking no time at all. Instead of meeting the florist and the cake baker in one day, mix it up. “I’m busy that Monday with the florist,” you tell the baker, “Tuesday is better for me.”

  Pretty soon, the flowers are picked, the cake is decided on, it’s too much of a pain to drive to the gym and, before you know it, Paula’s prediction comes true. You find yourself sitting in front of the television at four in the afternoon in the same shirt and pants you’ve been wearing for the last five days, and you’re ticked off because there’s nothing on HBO.

  So you clean out your closet ... for the tenth time.

  Tradition

  eidi was twenty-six when she got engaged. The engagement party was a Sunday-morning brunch, and Serena and I went shopping with her. She decided on a dress from Bebe in white with red cherries on it. We looked everywhere for shoes, and we finally found the perfect pair in white with red piping on them at the Macy’s in the Century City Mall. You’d never seen an outfit more put-together. The shoes and dress were like a match made in perfect-for-a-daytime-engagement-brunch heaven. The only problem was, the shoes were $500—more than our weekly paycheck at the time. Serena and I took a huddle and wondered if we might all pitch in for them together and make the shoes her engagement present. That’s when a sneaky woman, though not sneaky-looking at all, more like a mom in her mid-fifties with a pink sweatsuit on, whispered to us as the salesman walked away. “Pssst, tape ‘em up and return them after you wear them,” she said.

  “What? What do you mean ‘tape ’em up’?” Serena and I inquired.

  “You put Scotch tape on the bottom of the shoes, and then you can walk all over the place and not scuff them up. Take the tape off afterward, and the heels are like new.”

  This was the smartest thing that Serena and I had ever heard. Heidi thought so too when we told her.

  “Are you sure they don’t scuff?” Heidi inquired.

  “I’ve been doing it for years,” the woman said as she handed a pair of Yves Saint Laurent black pumps to a salesman. “I’ll take them,” she said, winking at us.

  It was worth a try, and they did look perfect with the dress.... We decided to go for the crime.

  At the engagement brunch, everyone loved Heidi’s outfit. “Those shoes are perfect,” guests told her as she winked at us.

  After the brunch, Serena and I went back to Heidi’s apartment, where we carefully took off the now-soiled tape. Underneath it was a gorgeous, spotless heel. The problem now was the grief in bringing the shoes back. Should we go back to the same Macy’s in the Century City Mall? Maybe bring them to the Macy’s at the Beverly Center?

  “No,” I said creating the perfect crime, “let’s bring them to the Macy’s in Westwood. No one goes there.” Which they didn‘t, and the Macy’s in Westwood closed soon afterward.

  Then Heidi got a pang of fear.

  “I can’t go. I can’t do it,” she cried. “You do it.”

  “Why should I do it?” I countered. “They’re your shoes.”

  “Technically, they’re Macy’s.”

  “No, technically, they’re yours, and soon half of mine,” Heidi’s fiancé Eric announced to us as he entered the conversation.

  “You do it, Serena,” we said.

  “Are you crazy?” She winced. “I’m not doing that.”

  “Would Shawn do it?” Heidi asked, meaning Serena’s fiancé.

  “Shawney?” Serena cooed on the phone. “Would you return a pair of shoes for Heidi?”

  We never heard an answer.

  “This is stupid,” Eric said as he grabbed the box of shoes. “I’ll return them.”

  We watched Eric go on his way, and the three of us went back to sorting Heidi’s engagement gifts. An hour later, Eric came home. His face was white.

  “They knew you taped them,” he said. “You made me feel like a criminal!”

  Thoughts of the woman in Macy‘s, the day of the crime, came into our heads. Could this have been a setup?

  “They finally took them back after I made them believe I had no idea what they were talking about, but don’t ever do that again.” He sighed, going into the bedroom and shutting the door.

  We never taped shoes again. The fear of returning them scared us out of a life of crime.

  When Serena got engaged to Shawn that same year, after hours‘, days’, and weeks’ worth of shopping, Serena bought a cream-colored suit jacket with a matching skirt.

  “Go to my tailor,” I told Serena. “She’s really good.” She was. I really liked that tailor and took all of my clothes to her. Unfortunately, she closed down at some point through the years and I had to switch, but this was long before that happened.

  “SHE SHORTENED THE SKIRT TO MY ASS!” Serena called, yelling at me. “SHE RUINED MY OUTFIT!”

  I hopped into my car immediately and sped over to Serena’s apartment, where I found her practically comatose.

  “It’s not that bad,” Shawn kept saying over and over, trying to calm her down.

  “I like the length,” I told her.

  Truthfully, the skirt was way too short—tragically short—but I’d never let her know until now. She’s always had an amazing body, so it really didn’t make that much of a difference. Had I told the truth at the time, though, the whole engagement party and possibly the wedding would have been canceled. I had forgotten the whole reason I went to that tailor in the first place. Serena’s engagement took place during my short-skirt era, when I liked having my clothes shortened to the ass. Maybe I was the tailor’s only happy customer and that’s why she had to go out of business.

  Ten years after these stories became dinner-party fodder, it was finally my turn to find the engagement outfit, and I did not want Lina coming with us.

  “She knows what fits you,” Pete complained.

  “It’s a sacred thing!” I told him. “Parties and benefits are one thing; this is something close friends do together.”

  “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” he reasoned. “Don’t you want to look good? Don’t you want to be a showstopper at your engagement party?”

  Of course I wanted to be a showstopper; of course I wanted to be the greatest-looking engaged woman that ever got engaged. But tradition was tradition.

  “Tradition is tradition!” I yelled.

  “At least let her come with you!” he said.

  It was like taking your little sister with you if you ever had one—your 5’6”, obnoxious, opinionated, glass-is-half-empty, thinks-she-knows-you-better-than-you-know-yourself, tells-everyone-in-hearing-distance-that-you-have-no-ass (and how thank God she got you out of those stripper heels) little sister, and the only thing you can do is give her the finger behind her back every time she turns around.

  “I love it!” Heidi said as she whipped out her boob to breast-teed her latest newborn.

  “It’s perfect!” Serena said, beaming.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Lina said sulkily about my white Costume National pantsuit, “Casper the Friendly Ghost is now a fashion statement.”

  “The hippos are in full bloom,” she said of the flowered Eduardo Lucero floor-length dress.

  “If you can wear her dresses,” she said of another designer, “then you know she’s marketing to the masses now.”

  I looked over at the girls.

  “If you don’t do it, I will,” Serena mouthed.

  “If I didn’t have a child attached to my breast, I’d knock her to the ground,” Heidi vowed.

  We knew what had to be done, and I wanted to be the one to do it.

  “Lina, could I speak to you privately for
just a second?” I asked her politely.

  “Oh, the bride is getting nervous,” she said, smirking at my closest friends. “Every bride bitches me out by now.”

  “No, I’m not turning into a bitch,” I calmly said, “hut I think that you are.”

  “Look, the truth hurts,” Lina said with a laugh. “If you can’t take it, I don’t have to stay.”

  “OK, then, thanks for everything and good luck,” I said peacefully.

  “Pete isn’t going to like this.”

  “I’ll deal with my fiancé, thank you,” I told her

  “Good luck,” she said, giving my body the last once-over she’d ever give. “And I really mean that.” Then she walked out of the store.

  Five minutes later, I had purchased the white Costume National pantsuit.

  And we all loved it, except for Pete.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he screamed at me, standing in the driveway in his Banjo-fur sweater when the girls and I drove up to my home with smiles on our faces.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, getting out of the car.

  “Ladies,” he tried to say calmly, though it was obvious he was not, “I need to speak with Adena. Can she call you later?”

  We all had nervous smiles on our faces, unable to decide what to do.

  “Ladies, really, I’m very upset right now and I really need to speak with her, so if you could ... ?”