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“If I had all I wanted to spend on her these last fifteen years, I could buy the store and then some,” my mother replied.
My father laughed and nodded. I caught the way they looked at each other when they thought I had looked away. They were both so happy.
I was like the prodigal daughter who had finally come home to her sexuality and femininity. I wanted to tell them not to get too excited about any of this. My only goal was to try to avoid unwanted attention.
Or was it more?
Go analyze yourself, Donna Ramanez, I told myself. Discover that you really want to please a boy, that despite your wonder-brain, you could finally have something of a normal relationship and explore your own romantic fantasies.
• • •
All the way to the store, as if she could read my mind, my mother talked about her earliest dates, how she agonized over her hair and makeup and especially what to wear every time she was asked out. She transitioned easily to her school prom and the high school heartthrob she had captured. She didn’t go into detail, but I had the suspicion that it was with him that she had lost her virginity. Of course, she talked about boyfriends after high school but wrote off every relationship as empty and shortsighted until she met my father.
My mother wasn’t quite as bad as my father when it came to talking about herself with me or expressing her opinions. However, she often paused, too, anticipating my rational disagreements, factually crushing her theories. But tonight I was just listening, listening and wondering if I would enjoy my life half as much as she seemed to be enjoying hers. Every one of her memories was like another jewel she kept on a charm bracelet. I didn’t even have the bracelet.
To please her, I tried on far too many things at the store. After a while, even the saleslady looked exhausted, but in the end, my mother bought me three pairs of shorts, three halters, new sandals, socks, two new bathing suits, a beach bag, beach towels, sunscreen, far sexier panties, a new bra, two different pairs of very stylish sunglasses, and two bathing suit cover-ups.
When I asked why I needed so many of each, she smiled and said, “For the next time, Donna. You don’t want to be wearing the same things all the time, do you?”
Next time? I wondered. I hadn’t given a thought to a next time or many next times. This was a one-off, almost an experiment to me rather than a date. I had already convinced myself either that I wouldn’t like it or that Greg wouldn’t like being with me when he had to spend so much time alone with me.
But I said nothing. I helped carry my packages to the car, wondering what I would do now. How would I know which item of clothing was the right one for the first time? When I asked, my mother laughed.
“You’re asking the wrong person. I doubt there’s anything I do that drives your father more crazy than dressing for a special occasion or even simply going out to dinner. Ordinarily, I try on three or four different outfits, dresses, shoes.”
“You do?”
Why wouldn’t she know exactly what to wear for any particular evening? I was totally unaware of what went on in my parents’ bedroom. It struck me that I seemed more like a houseguest than a daughter.
“What difference does it make if any one of them would work?”
“Of course it makes a difference. It’s all a matter of how you feel at the time, Donna. Sometimes one color appeals to you more than another at the moment.” She looked at me. “Now, don’t explain it with some psychological information,” she warned. “Some things should remain a mystery, and at the top of that list is what pleases and displeases a woman.”
I nodded, but for me, it was like listening to someone speak another language. Some things should remain a mystery? Why? How did you know what things should and shouldn’t? And why was some of this special only to women?
By the time we arrived home, I felt like I had been riding on a merry-go-round. Dazed, I started up to my room with my packages. My father pretended to be terrified of the bills, but I caught him and my mother smiling at each other, even holding hands, as if she had accomplished something close to sending a rocket to the moon. Surely they were putting too much hope into this, I feared. Right now, nothing seemed as threatening to me as disappointing them again.
It would be even worse than disappointing myself.
But I had no idea, no way of knowing how inadequate the word disappointing would be when it came to describing my day at the beach.
3
Greg always drove his father’s five-year-old green pickup truck. His father didn’t seem to care that his gardening machinery was locked in a cabinet behind the truck’s cab. Other boys might want their own cars, but Greg was proud of his father’s entrepreneurial spirit as the owner of a company with more than twenty employees, and his father was planning on expanding into landscape design and patio construction. Greg liked driving the truck. In the past, most
of the conversations we had were one-sided, with him describing his family. He had two younger sisters, Sofia in fifth grade and Martina in fourth. As if he were warning me about it, he claimed his mother was surely going to have another child.
“Don’t be surprised to hear my father wants a second son.”
“Why?”
“He knows I want to do something with computer technology. A man like my father expects his son to take over his growing business. He drops hints like why else would he do it? It’s everything for the family in my family,” Greg said.
He waited to see if I would be critical of that, but what it did was put me into deeper thought about myself, my family, and what the future would be. If anything, Greg’s family talk made me feel more inadequate. He wouldn’t believe that. In his mind, I was a true super-girl. He would tell me many times that someday he’d be able to brag that he knew me. With so many of the other students in my school seeing me as freakish, I let him load on the compliments. I never contradicted him.
I simply said, “We’ll see.”
That morning of my first date, after modeling for myself before my full-length mirror, I chose the emerald-green one-piece bathing suit, the dark brown sandals, and the pinkish cover-up and tied the matching headband around my pinned-up hair. That was my mother’s suggestion. I put a change of clothes in the beach bag, along with the sunscreen, my mobile phone, and two beach towels. Then I put on a pair of my new sunglasses and gazed at myself in the mirror as if I were looking through a window at another girl, amazed at what I saw.
