The Ten Best Days of My Life

by Adena Halpern

  “What if Adam and I fall in love? Isn’t there some sort of a thing like green-card status that would let me stay in seventh heaven where he is?”

  “That’s funny,” she laughed, then paused and looked at me seriously, shaking her head, “but, no, I’m afraid not.”

  “But I get to keep the house?”

  “Well, you’ll have a home. It’s not this house, though. You’ll be in an apartment and it will have a doorman. There’s a gym but no pool. There is a community pool, however, that I hear is quite lovely.”

  “A community pool? That’s disgusting. What about the clothes?”

  “Of course you’ll still be clothed. You won’t have a bedroom that’s a closet; you’ll have a regular closet, not a walk-in. Unfortunately, however, the best clothes are for those in seventh heaven. The clothes won’t be this year’s styles, they’ll be last year’s, but they’ll still fit and be reasonably well tailored.”

  “What about the shoes?”

  “Again, they’re last year’s styles. Oh, and they may pinch.”

  “Okay, but I’ll still be able to eat whatever I want.”

  “Well,” she paused. “Sure, you can eat whatever you want, but you’ll have to make it yourself. In fourth heaven the good news is that you can still eat whatever you want and you’ll never have high cholesterol or high blood pressure. Unfortunately, you will have to watch what you eat if you want to retain your figure.”

  “WHO CARES ABOUT HIGH CHOLESTEROL? Can’t we have a choice?”

  That’s when the anxiety started in.

  “My plasma screens?”

  “Analog tube.”

  “Dish?”

  “Basic cable.”

  “Peaches?”

  “She stays on the seventh plane. All dogs go to seventh heaven.”

  “I knew it!” I said, starting to cry. “I knew it was all too good to be true.”

  “Look, I’m not saying that it’s all bad,” she said, putting her arm around me as I sat looking over my three-thousand-calorie brunch. “It’s not over. All you have to do is pass the entrance exam and you can stay. They just want to make sure you were leading a life that was satisfying and would eventually lead to self-fulfillment.”

  I put my head in my hands.

  “Take today to think about it,” she said. “Remember, it’s not over. Think back on your life. Think about the steps you took in your life. Think about where you were going. You are a smart woman. You will figure out how to get through this exam.”

  “Well, what’s the exam? Are there athletics involved? I can’t climb a rope. Is there math? I suck at math! Is it like the SATs?” I’m gulping for air at this point, just barely holding back the panic attack.

  “It’s a simple essay, that’s all you have to do.”

  “Oh,” I said, taking a deep breath. “An essay, well, that shouldn’t be too hard. What’s the topic?”

  “The topic is, What were the ten best days of your life?”

  “But how can that be judged?” I asked after thinking about it for a moment. “I mean, isn’t that subjective?”

  “It’s judged by what those days tell us about where your life would have eventually taken you.”

  “I don’t know!” I screamed out. “Look, this is some kind of mistake. Isn’t there someone I could speak to about this? Where’s God or Mary or someone else higher up? There must be a supervisor that I could speak to about this!”

  “Look, I’ve got a new being I’ve got to look over, but I promise you it won’t be as bad as you think, and if you don’t pass, even the third or fourth plane of heaven is not so bad.”

  “The third plane? Now you’re talking third plane? This is getting worse by the second! What do you get there, a trash bag full of trendy styles from three years ago?”

  “It’s a tote bag, not a trash bag,” she answered, sounding offended.

  “I’m going to throw up,” I said, gagging and heading toward the sink.

  “Alex, calm down. You’ll be fine. Look, take today; look back on your life. You’ll be ready. I looked after you for a long time and I have all the confidence in you.”

  “But I want to stay here,” I shouted again, stomping my foot.

  “Write a good essay,” she said, taking a last bite of her waffle. “I left two notebooks upstairs in your bedroom. I’ll be back in two weeks to pick them up.”

  And with that, Deborah the bad-dye-job guardian angel left my Len Jacobs’s house. I didn’t bother to show her out.

  They Shoot People in Fourth Heaven, Don’t They?

  "For the last time, it’s nothing!” my grandmother said, trying to feed me her famous chopped liver. "It’s just a stupid test. What do you need that big house for anyway?” she said as I looked around her colonial oceanfront estate with its Kentucky bluegrass fields and horses in their stables.

  “But I don’t get Adam. I don’t get the clothes. I’ll have cellulite again!”

  “Jesus, Alexandra, if those are the things that were important to you in life, maybe you should be on a different plane.”

  “Grandma?” I said, starting to cry. “How could you even say a thing like that? What if you couldn’t have your old lemon yellow Cadillac? What if your hair was flat?”

  “So it’s flat. I still have you and Grandpa and uncle Morris and my parents and my friends.”

  She had a point there, and I felt like a spoiled brat, but, still, what was the difference from being on earth? What’s the point of heaven if there’s no incentive?

  “Why are you yelling at her? She’s upset,” my grandfather broke in. “She wants the heaven that she deserves.”

  “Because she’s acting like that’s all she wants, like heaven is some kind of free-for-all,” my grandmother fought back.

  “Alex,” my uncle Morris said, “all they want to know is if you feel you lived your life in a way that was fulfilling for you. They don’t understand why you never settled down or something. They want to know where you were going with your life.”

  And that’s when I knew I was doomed. Where was I going with my life before the MINI Cooper struck me? I had no idea what I was doing with my life. All that time worrying about what I was doing with my life. All the complaining to my girlfriends about the way my life was headed. All those times my parents sat me down and told me they were worried about where my life was heading. All those times I looked at myself and knew that I was lost, caught up in my own world of circles that led nowhere. It was all coming back to haunt me now.

  “You’re not stupid,” my grandmother said. “You are a smart young woman and the choices you made might not have been the best, but they want to know why you made them. If your motives were pure, you’ll be fine. You knew what you were doing. You knew what you wanted out of life. Write the essay and tell them what they want and be done with it already!”

  So I decided to go for it.

  I took the day and thought about it, and here’s what I wrote.

  1

  I’m going to start my first "best day” at conception. This is not to say I believe that life begins at conception. I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, and, as you might know, there’s a lot of talk about it down on earth. (Incidentally, I would really like to know the official answer, if you wouldn’t mind telling me sometime.)

  I’m starting out at conception because for me it was a lucky day, the first “best day,” if you will. Also, I think it’s going to give you a better picture of my life, what I did and why I did it and what was eventually going to lead to a fulfilled existence on earth (or would have if I hadn’t died so very young).

  See, I was a mistake, and a really good mistake if I do say so myself.

  My parents were told that they would never be able to conceive. Which one of my parents had the problem, I don’t know; no one would ever say. But if I were a betting woman, I’d go with my dad, and here’s why:

  In the late 1960s they didn’t have things like in vitro or test-tube this and su
rrogate-womb that. If you couldn’t have kids, you had two choices: adopt or don’t. By the time I came along, my parents had been married for about ten years, and in all that time it was the “barren couple” life for them.

  My dad, Bill Dorenfield, is a strong man. He’s a self-made man who started life without a dime. My grandfather, his father, was a door-to-door salesman who sold everything from pots and pans to children’s clothing. My dad used to say of my grandfather, “If he ever made a dime, somehow it would only amount to a nickel.” My grandfather wasn’t a drinker or a druggie or a gambler. Evidently, my grandfather was just really bad at making money (and if that’s hereditary, I definitely got the gene).

  My dad says that he can’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t work. My dad loves to work (guess that skips a generation) . He would tell me stories of how, as a young kid growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1930s, he’d get up before dawn with my grandfather and they’d drive deep into the farmlands of Pennsylvania or the opposite way through New Jersey to the shore and the farmlands and then work their way back to West Philly. Along the way, they stopped at homes and sold whatever my grandfather had to sell that day. This was coming out of the Depression and into World War II, and, as my dad tells it, bringing a young child along on the sales calls ensured “a couple of suckers” who felt bad for them. Sometimes my dad would play the part of the motherless child. Sometimes he would cough on cue, as the sickly kid who could get some medicine if the poor sucker would just buy the pot and pan set or the frilly little girl’s dress, even if they didn’t have a little girl. This was also the time that my grandfather gave my dad, as he put it, “the best piece of advice anyone could give.”

  “It’s never going to be any of this crap we’re selling that’s going to make us rich,” he’d tell my dad. “When you get old enough, start buying land.”

  I know, so Grapes of Wrath. I think it’s safe to say, though, that neither my grandfather nor my dad ever picked up that book for pleasure. Therefore, even if my grandfather couldn’t sell anything and never read a book, he was still a smart man.

  Now, on the other hand, my dad said he learned early on that my grandfather’s way of selling—“Oh, you’re not interested? Well, have a nice day”—was not the way to sell. My dad figured out that the longer he pestered the people, the higher his success rate. Finally, the people would get exasperated and buy something. My grandfather called my dad his lucky charm, though to hear my dad tell the story luck had nothing to do with it. It was sheer perseverance. The selling with my grandfather went on for years, and in all that time my dad still got straight As in school. He didn’t really have any friends, at least none that I ever heard about; they came later with the money he made. He was never one to participate in sports. He was a strong-headed young man who refused to let anything get in his way when it came to making a buck.

  This is why I believe that it was my father who was incapable of producing offspring. My dad has always been incapable of admitting weakness or failure, so if it wasn’t his problem, wouldn’t they have just owned up to it being my mom? She’s a very open person about that sort of thing. But really, though, is it weakness or failure when it’s just some stupid mechanical problem? Why, anyway, does it always seem less terrible of a thing if the woman can’t have children? I’ve never understood it. What makes a man less manly if his sperm doesn’t swim?

  Anyway, after high school my dad put himself through the University of Pennsylvania and then went on to business school at Wharton, and he eventually became one of the most successful real estate developers in the United States, if not the world.

  Through all of his hardheadedness and his determination to make something of himself, there was one weakness in his life (well, except, of course, the obvious sluggish sperm setback).

  Now, Achilles had his heel. Superman had his kryptonite. I had the entire third floor at Barneys New York (ha!). My dad’s weakness: my mother.

  Maxine Elaine Firestein was born into a middle-class family in the Wynnefield section of Philadelphia nine years after my dad was born. Like my own father, my mother’s father worked his way through school and became an accountant. They weren’t rich-rich or anything like that, but they were comfortable enough to have their own detached home, a car, and cashmere sweaters (the rage in the 1950s), whereas my father grew up with his family, including two younger sisters, in a one-bedroom apartment in West Philadelphia.

  Maxine was the only child of Evelyn and Harry Firestein and, to hear my dad and others tell it, “the prettiest thing for miles and miles and miles.”

  “Maxine was the Grace Kelly of our neighborhood,” my mom’s friend Sally LaFair would tell me. She really was, though. She still is.

  It always kind of irked me that I look more like my dad. My mom has this porcelain skin and these cheekbones that go on for days. Unlike my mom’s, my skin could take on a nice tan, but when you have a mother who glows, you hate that your skin can tan. I’ve tried to find the cheekbones in me, but all I ever feel is flat bone.

  My mom’s hair shines, not one split end, ever, and she somehow never shows her roots, even though she dyes her hair blonde now. I had only split ends, not a clean end in sight. Roots grew in the second I paid the hairdresser’s bill.

  My mom could always eat whatever she wanted and never gain weight. I would look at a hot fudge sundae and gain five pounds. At sixty-five, she still has a perfect figure. I hadn’t left the house without wearing a body shaper since I was fourteen.

  My mom was also the most popular girl at Overbrook High School. I was not the most popular girl at the Friends School. Dana Stanbury was, and although Dana and I were friends, I was a follower and not the leader.

  My mom got straight As in school. I slipped by.

  They practically held out the red carpet on her first day at University of Pennsylvania. I got in when someone left the back door open.

  My mom is the nicest person in the entire world. She takes in stray dogs. I bought Peaches for $800.

  Everyone in Philadelphia at that time knew that the girl to get was Maxine Elaine Firestein, with her perfect figure, her perfect clothes, and her perfect bubbly personality. My dad took note.

  My mom says that the first time she ever saw my dad was in Bonwit Teller on Chestnut Street. She was shopping with my grandmother one day, at the scarf counter on the first floor, and he approached them. What she didn’t know (but would find out later) was that my dad had spotted her many months before.

  It was at the Latin Casino, some nightclub they used to go to then. My mom, of course, was with a date, and my dad was alone by the bar when he spotted her. He said he’d never seen a woman more beautiful: her blonde curls, the way her black strapless hugged her body. She was the main hottie of the Latin Casino.

  By the time he approached my mom in Bonwit Teller, Dad had become something of a mini-mogul, buying small properties here and there. He wasn’t rich at this point, but he was on his way. He had just moved his parents and two sisters into a bigger, two-bedroom apartment, in fact.

  Unfortunately, both of his parents died before I was born, so I never knew them. (Hey wait, don’t I get to meet them now? What’s up with that?)

  Anyway, here’s how they met. By the way, this is my favorite story ever. I think I had my mother tell me this story about fifty thousand times, so you’ll notice that I really know the particulars:

  It was December 1958, and it was one of those bitter cold days where anything that’s not covered, like your ears or your nose, is instantly freezing. My grandmother and my mother were doing some Christmas shopping. (Yes, I know, my whole family is Jewish, but what can I say? We always celebrated Christmas, too. Knowing my family, I chalk it up to embracing any excuse to get together and give presents and eat. Plus, my grandparents’ faith was really lax. My parents definitely followed their lead.) Anyway, by the time they got to Bonwit’s on Chestnut Street, they decided that anything they had to buy they’d buy there, because the thought of walkin
g outside again still made my mom shiver every time she told me the story. The thing you also have to remember, it was different in those days. A department store was a destination and not just a store you popped into for some panty hose. My grandmother and mother always looked starry eyed when they told me about Bonwit’s. You’d start out with lunch and then work your way through the store. All the salesladies knew you by name and knew your taste, not like now when you have to hunt someone down to open up a dressing room. There were lots and lots of Christmas presents to buy that year. The people in my grandpop’s accounting firm, cousins, neighbors, and friends. Both my grandmother and my mother had been invited to so many Christmas parties that year, so buying some new dresses was also high on the list.

  My mom always says that had she not met my father that day, she still would have remembered it as being one of the most special days she ever had.

  “Everything about that day was magical,” she’d say with her eyes shining. “The store was full of people and everyone had the same problem of what to buy for who and, of course, what to buy for themselves, so there was a lot of chatter and comparing what other people were buying.” My mom forced my grandmother to buy a black-sequined chiffon dress with bell sleeves for New Year’s Eve. She always says, “I’ll never forget how beautiful she looked in that dress as she stood on the boxed step in front of the three-way mirror. The tailor worked around her, cinching in her waist and gathering the full crinolines underneath. ” My mom bought a maroon eyelet dress with a teardrop front and spaghetti straps. Then they went into the lingerie department and fitted that dress with more crinolines than you would have thought possible. She said she looked like a flower in full bloom, but not in a good way, which is when she’d always tell me a fact of life that, as much as I try to remember it, I always forget: moderation is the key.

  So, after lunch, they went down to the first floor where they decided on scarves for all of the secretaries in Grandpop’s office. My grandmother and mom were deliberating between a sky blue scarf or one with little orange polka dots for Miss DeMarco, Grandpop’s secretary at the time, when Mom heard this strong voice say, “Nothing could make you look more beautiful.”