The Ten Best Days of My Life by Adena Halpern Read Free Book Online Page A

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.”
    â€œMaxine 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