Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown by Adena Halpern Read Free Book Online

with Laner in the laundry room, as I was wont to do as she folded some clothes that David had dropped off. I saw her take the sweater, mangled and pilled, out of the washing machine. “Why I’m doing this, I don’t know,” she said as she placed the seriously decomposed sweater vest on a hanger to air-dry. The sweater had been worn and torn to tatters, but he was still wearing it. Whether it was the memory of his first love, or the fact that he had nothing else to wear and didn’t care, I’d never ask him. David was never the type to divulge girly things like that.
    “Hey, Sugar?” Laner said with a laugh, “you think he’d be mad if you wanted to borrow this now?”

A Shorts Story
    emember when young women started doubling men’s boxer shorts for actual shorts? You saw sorority girls wearing them with sayings printed on them stating something like GAMMA GIRLS KICK BUTT!
    Well, guess what. I started that.
    Thank you. No applause, please.
    I really did, though. You can ask Amy Chaikin or Julie Pelagatti. Ask my parents; they’ll tell you, “Oh yes, she started that. She was at the fashion forefront on that craze.”
    I don’t know what gave me the idea to go into my father’s drawers drawer and cop a pair of his boxer shorts. He really couldn’t understand it either.
    “What’s the matter with her?” my father asked my mother. “She keeps taking my underwear. That’s not normal.”
    “She’s a teenager,” my mother declared. “I used to wear poodles on my skirts when I was her age.”
    “You can’t compare poodle skirts to a fourteen-year-old girl taking her fathers underwear,” he complained.
    I wore them anyway—not to school or anything, maybe to the Wawa convenience store for more Ring Dings, but that’s about it. Since they were a little big in the waist, I folded the fabric over and fastened it with a safety pin, thus covering up the front hole pocket—a double bonus. It looked ridiculous, but man it was comfortable, and it hid all my bad parts, which at that time I thought were many.
    “Dave and Lou saw Adena in Wawa wearing my underwear,” my father complained to my mother. “I get patient referrals from those guys. She is not to wear my underwear anymore. I don’t understand it, Arlene. We buy that girl all these nice clothes—I see the credit card bills—and she insists on wearing my underwear!”
    “It’s a phase,” my mother told him. “She just got her period and she doesn’t like the way she looks. I wore my cashmere sweaters a size too big.”
    “You can’t compare cashmere sweaters to wearing my underwear! This has got to stop! ADENA!” he screamed to me from the kitchen.
    I was in the family room in his boxer shorts and an extra large T-shirt eating some Jiffy Pop popcorn and watching Knots Landing.
    “What?” I griped with a mouth full of corn.
    “Get into the kitchen. Now!” he yelled.
    I slumped in, bowl of popcorn in hand.
    “I’m only going to say this once,” he said, giving me his angry, two-fingered point. When my father pointed at you with both his index and middle finger, you knew he was serious. “Fourteen-year-old girls are not supposed to wear their fathers’ underwear. I work day and night so you have all those nice clothes in that closet of yours. I see you wear my underwear again, and you’re going to be punished.”
    Can you imagine?
    “Are you coming to the party this weekend?” a friend would ask. “Can‘t,” I’d have to tell them, “I’m grounded for wearing my father’s underwear.”
    So I bought my own boxer shorts, same brand as my dad’s—Hanes—in his size.
    “Whose are they?” my dad asked as I walked by, chomping on a Ring Ding.
    “They’re mine,” 1 muttered through the chocolate cake and whipped cream center in true teen-angst form as I went into my room and shut the door.
    It was around that time that I had my first major crush. Stanley Denton didn’t go to my school; he went to Lower Merion High School.