“No!” said STEPHANIE, GLANCING DISMISSIVELY AT THE dress her mother was holding up for her inspection. They were standing in the junior department of Bloomingdale’s in the King of Prussia Mall. The hour was growing late.
For weeks now, mother and daughter had traipsed through the department stores and boutiques of South Jersey and Philadelphia, searching for that elusive garment: the bat mitzvah dress. Only last week there had been an exhausting outing to Franklin Mills, a carnivalesque sprawl of department store outlets, as large as a small city, where drastically reduced designer merchandise was thrown into large, unsifted heaps. Mother and daughter had spent hours digging in bins and pushing through racks without striking pay dirt.
There had already been two previous forays to the King of Prussia Mall, numerous jaunts to the nearby Cherry Hill Mall, and even pilgrimages to celebrated malls in northern New Jersey. To Carla, each mall appeared to contain more or less the same stores and the same merchandise, but Stephanie and her friends, attuned to the fine points of mall ecology, could discern subtle differences among them in the way a trained wine connoisseur could discern the differing qualities of a flight of chablis.
The King of Prussia Mall was the elite megamall of the region. Not to find a dress there was to arrive, more or less, at the fashion terminus, with nowhere left to go.
“Honey, you didn’t really look,” Carla protested now, holding the dress above the rack like a bullfighter trying to entice a bull, in this case a recalcitrant twelve-year-old. It seemed to be exactly what her daughter was looking for: black, cut on the bias, scooped neck, no ruffles.
“Puffed sleeves,” Stephanie noted succinctly.
Carla’s heart sank. They had seen countless dresses over the past few weeks, some quite lovely, but each with a fatal flaw that disqualified it—in this case, puffed sleeves.
With the bat mitzvah only a few months away, one might have expected Stephanie Goodman to be home, studying her Torah and haftorah portions so as to perform them flawlessly for the family and friends who would be gathered at great price to witness her induction into the religion of her forebears.
But to expect this would be naive. Only a handful of relatives, most of them deaf, had enough knowledge of Hebrew to critique Stephanie’s performance of the scripture, while everyone, down to her six-year-old cousin from East Brunswick, could pass judgment on the dress.
Still, there had to be a point when you said enough already!
“Stephanie,” said Carla, trying to take a casual, enticing tone, “why don’t you try the dress on? I have a feeling that the sleeves will flatten out when you wear it.”
Stephanie shot her mother an angry glance. “No!” she said, her voice growing shrill, “I won’t wear puffed sleeves. I’m not a Disney character.”
There was no arguing with this. Stephanie was at an awkward age when her body seemed to have been assembled by a dyslexic creator. Her feet were too big, her shoulders too narrow, her face too childish for the makeup she insisted on applying with a trowel every morning. The entire effect, though appealing in an
ungainly sort of way (at least to a mother), was in no sense Disney-esque.
Carla sighed and hung the rejected garment back on the rack. They would simply have to try again tomorrow. The trick now was to get out of the store without a scene.
“I’ll never find it!” Stephanie’s voice had become a plaintive whine as they walked past the makeup counters where young women proffered spritzes of perfume like barkers at a carnival. “I’ll never find one half as nice as Lisa’s!” Lisa’s, discovered in the backroom of Loehmann’s (akin to finding gold in the backyard), stood as the benchmark for the bat mitzvah dress among seventh-grade girls at the Cherry Hill middle school.
“You will, honey, you will,” said Carla reassuringly.
Yet to be honest about it, she had her doubts. They had inspected every dress in the numerous shopping emporiums of the Delaware Valley and would now have to retrace their steps in the hope of new inventory. This prospect made Carla want to sit down in the middle of the King of Prussia Mall and weep.
After hearing Dr. Samuels at the bookstore, she had proceeded to make an appointment. As he had warned, his schedule was heavily booked, and the first opening was four weeks from the day she called. Fortunately, that date was rapidly approaching, and she was relieved to think that on Thursday evening she would finally be reaping the benefits of Samuels’s much-touted sagacity. Perhaps he would have some ideas about how to handle her daughter’s exacting taste in a bat mitzvah dress—or, better yet, some tips on where they might find it.