14

That night Al slept with her shoes tucked under her pillow.

“I didn’t sleep very well,” she told me next morning. “They were awfully lumpy. But every time I woke up I reached under to make sure they were there. I’ll probably grow up having a shoe fetish.”

What I should do is carry a small notebook around, and every time Al uses a word I don’t understand, I should write it down to look up when I get home. I should, but I know I never will.

“Do you think I should kiss them?” Al said. I didn’t think she meant her shoes. “Not when I get there. That’s too soon. But when I leave. Of course I’ll kiss my father and maybe Louise. Women kiss each other more. But the boys. I don’t know.”

“Play it by ear,” I said.

After school Al went home and had a couple of trial runs on her shoes.

“They’re coming,” she said later. “Slow but sure.”

“Maybe you should turn on a record and practice walking around in time to the music,” I said. “Hold your arms out like those showgirls we saw in that old movie last week.”

Al’s eyes lighted up. “Yeah, I could practice walking down the service stairs balancing a book on my head. Maybe Mr. Ogilvy would hold the door open into the lobby and I could walk right through and out onto the street.”

“That’d really shake some people up,” I said.

“Listen, you want to come shopping with me today?” Al asked. “My mother gave me her charge plate. She said I could send a dress home, only she reserves the right to return it if she doesn’t like it.” Al made a face. “I think what she has in mind is something that will make me look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

“My mother’s big on smocking,” I said. “She says I used to look adorable in my little smocked dresses with matching panties. ‘It’s too bad girls don’t dress like that any more. All they wear is jeans.’”

“My mother thinks it’s a pity that jeans have taken over the earth,” Al agreed.

Going shopping with Al was an experience. We must’ve covered every junior miss, teen, and young sophisticate department in town. Each dress Al tried on was worse than the last. Every time she got one zipped up and looked at herself in the mirror, she’d become more depressed.

“I look as if I’m six months’ pregnant in this one,” she said, puffing out her cheeks and crossing her eyes at herself.

The saleslady, who wasn’t sure whether we would rip off a few garments if she turned her back, made little cooing noises.

“You look perfectly sweet,” she said firmly.

Al peered out from a ruff of white organdy.

“You know who you look like?” I said. “Mary Queen of Scots.”

“That does it,” Al said. “What I need is to look like Mary Queen of Scots. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm isn’t enough.”

The saleslady had given up the idea of making a sale. She gathered up all of the rejected finery.

“When I was your age,” she said, “girls wanted to look feminine and pretty, not like hooligans.”

“What’s a hooligan?” Al asked her, taking off her Mary Queen of Scots outfit.

The lady pretended she hadn’t heard. She glided off in the pursuit of fresher prospects.

We started down on the escalator. On the third floor, Al spied a sort of one-shouldered, blue beach dress on a model.

“How much is that?” she asked the salesman.

“I beg your pardon?” the man said.

“How much is that dress?” Al pointed to it.

“I don’t work here,” the man said apologetically. “I’m waiting for my wife.”

“I can’t stand the kind of man who waits while his wife tries on clothes,” Al said as we zapped back on the escalator. “I’m not going to marry the kind of man who’ll do that. If I feel like buying a tangerine-colored G-string, I’ll go ahead and buy it and not have my husband approve.”

“You’d be a smash in one of those,” I said. We stopped at the hat bar to try on a few hats. I found a green one with a feather that wasn’t bad. A Robin Hood hat. Al tried on a black job with a big floppy brim. She pulled it down on either side of her face and sucked in her cheeks.

“Alms for the poor,” she said in a sing-song.

“Get lost,” a voice said.

The girl behind the counter was a vision. Her eye liner was coordinated with her eye shadow, which was coordinated with her nail polish.

We took off the hats.

“Who said that?” Al asked, looking around. “It couldn’t have been her,” she said, pointing to the girl, “because I don’t think she’s real. She’s made of plastic. They do wonderful things with plastic these days.”

We both stared.

“I said get lost, you two,” the girl said out of one corner of her mouth.

“I’m going to bring George—that’s my husband, George—back to try on that black hat for him,” Al said to me. “I do hope when I bring him they have somebody to wait on us. It’s terrible, the lack of salespeople today.”

Al and I sailed off and went through the revolving door twice on our way out.