Lindsey, my sixteen-year old daughter, waved a pair of jeans at me. Their extremely wide bellbottom legs whipped back and forth like a surrender flag. “You should try these on,” she said.
We were at Free People, one of Lindsey’s favorite stores. Our official goal was to find a pair of nice jeans. Not for Lindsey, but for forty-something- year- old me. Our un-official goal was a day of mother-daughter bonding.
I’d never had a pair of “good” jeans before—good meaning designer jeans. But lately I’d attended lots of casual meetings with clients where it was okay to wear jeans. Being someone who, in her personal life, wears jeans almost every day, this was a fabulous turn of events. I’d never felt comfortable in skirts or suits. But work was still work—and the people I was meeting with were still clients. My perspective was that, as a sign of respect, my meeting attire should be a little more upscale than my usual—Gap, Old Navy, and Levis.
I looked at the jeans and imagined them swaying back and forth pendulum-like around my ankles. I knew they would look silly on me. But high school kids have very full schedules. It had taken several weeks to schedule a day where Lindsey didn’t have a paper to write, a field hockey game or volunteer activity to attend. If she liked the jeans, then I would at least attempt to like the jeans.
“I’ll try them on,” I said.
Lindsey smiled, then selected a flower print sun dress with tiers of ruffles and just a bit of lace trim for herself. She looked at home among the blousy tops and long sweaters meant to be worn with leggings. I on the other hand, looked like what I was—the mother of someone who fit the store’s target demographic. I did not belong.
A waif-like sales girl approached. “Can I start a dressing room?” she asked.
Lindsey handed her the sundress and I handed her the jeans. “You can put everything in one room,” Lindsey said.
My heart melted just a little and I had to stifle a smile. Lindsey was going to allow me in her dressing room! I loved being permitted to enter that small space, stand near my daughter, and help her decide which items were keepers and which would be relegated to the reject pile on the floor. When Lindsey was younger, we’d shared a single dressing room all the time. But not so much since she had become a teen.
Lindsey pulled back the tall, tassel-trimmed, purple velvet curtain that served as the dressing room door. Inside, the walls were papered with a pink and yellow fleur-de-lis pattern that reminded me of Toontown at Disneyland.
I tried on the jeans. As I expected, the bellbottoms swung from side to side like church bells, collecting lint off the carpet. Plus, they painfully squished my sagging behind, which hung too low for the jeans and reminded me, once again, that gravity is a harsh and persistent foe.
Meanwhile, the sundress looked as though it had been custom sewn to fit Lindsey’s petite curves. Then again, Lindsey had the kind of curves that would look good wearing a mail sack—or even a mailbox. It amazed me that someone this beautiful and perfect had been the result of the combination of her father’s and my incredibly ordinary gene pool.
“Will you buy this for me?” she asked.
I wanted to scream, “Yes! yes! yes!” but I held back. Ron and I had given Lindsey a generous monthly allowance that was supposed to cover her clothing purchases. But being a smart girl, she always tried to get me to spend more on her.
Lindsey gave me the puppy-dog eyes. The big sad ones that make her look a little like an anime character.
Weakening just a little, I glanced at the price tag. The dress was one hundred and fifty dollars. Painful, but not out of the question. Stand strong, I told myself. It’s for her own good. “You have your own money,” I said.
Lindsey pouted a little as she considered her options. She loved the dress, but not quite enough to pull out her own wallet. She took it off and put it down.
She gazed at the dress like a love that was destined not to be. “Let’s go,” she said.
Our next stop was the junior department at Saks Fifth Avenue. Lindsey’s shoulder-length brown hair flew and her eyes glowed like the Terminator as she led me through the throng of skinny girls with no behinds who were trying on tiny Alice+Olivia party dresses.
Lindsey strolled along the side of the jeans table display, amassing a pile of options for both of us to try on. Hudson, J Brand, Seven for All Mankind—all brands so cool that I’d never heard of any of them (I haven’t been up on hip jeans since 1980 when Guess was big).
A well-groomed twenty-something guy named Royce shimmied up to us and offered to start a dressing room. Royce wore slim black pants, a white shirt, a touch of mascara, and a baby-sized gold hoop earring. Lindsey and I followed Royce’s tiny derriere into the dressing room. He unlocked a wooden door at the end of the hall, piled the jeans on a square table adjacent to the three-way mirror, and tossed his head. “I’ll be back to see if you need another size or anything,” he said.
Lindsey and I both giggled. We liked Royce.
Lindsey grabbed a pair of Joe’s jeans and wiggled into them. She posed hands-on-hips in front of the three-way mirror, tilted her head down and turned her eyes up. “What do you think?” she said.
It was a perfect fit. Lindsey glowed.
“You’re beautiful and the jeans look good too,” I said.
Lindsey blushed.
I dove into my stash, attacking the pile top-to-bottom. Unfortunately, trendy jeans are not my friends. Each pair I tried made me feel even more conspicuous and ridiculous. In skin-tight skinny jeans I was a Chihuahua wearing a red satin jacket with its nails painted to match.
A few of the pairs would have fit, if the waists hadn’t been so low. Even in the dressing room I could feel a breeze blowing down my butt crack. Worn by a teen like Lindsey, these pants defied gravity. On me, even the pairs that fit comfortably slid down my hips when I walked. I knew a teenage girl has a different body shape than a forty-something woman, but how anyone—of any age—keeps these low-rise jeans hovering was a mystery to me. (It also occurred to me that I couldn’t keep a hula-hoop up either. Perhaps the two skills were related).
The next size smaller stayed up, but pushed the loose skin on my stomach into a paunch that protruded over the pants. The crotch was so snug that I would have had to re-adjust myself as often as a baseball player just to make it down the stairs.
“You look great,” Lindsey said, eyeing me and grinning as though I were a craft project she’d spent hours creating. I felt both flattered and ridiculous.
How should I respond? I wondered. I wanted to like the jeans just to please Lindsey. But they were just too tight. When I couldn’t come up with anything better, I decided to go with honesty. “I feel like a sausage about to burst out of its casing,” I said.
Lindsey rolled her eyes. “That’s the way they’re supposed to fit.”
I sighed in frustration.
With renewed determination, Lindsey asked Royce to deliver more styles. Boot cut, skinny, flare, straight, ultra low rise, boyfriend—I tried them all, as Lindsey directed.
After rejecting a dozen or so pairs, I finally found one that wasn’t too bad. Not unbelievably comfortable, but no stomach roll in the front and no draft whistling through the Grand Canyon.
Then I saw the price. One-hundred and ninety-eight dollars.
I felt woozy. The room spun. The most I’d ever spent on jeans was eighty-nine dollars, and that was a special treat I justified by wearing those jeans four days a week for the following three years. One hundred and ninety-eight dollars was too much.
Of course I’d bought Lindsey jeans this expensive on a couple of occasions—once for her birthday and once for Hanukkah. But somehow it seemed different when the jeans were for her.
I wasn’t sure why, but I felt an obligation to be conservative and practical if the purchase was for me. For this much money, you could buy six pairs of jeans at Old Navy or two bags of groceries at Whole Foods, I told myself.
“I am sure we can find a pair of jeans that is just as good for less money,” I said.
Lindsey looked disappointed. Then the glow returned to her eyes. “One more store,” she said.
Lindsey led me up Newbury Street to a store called Second Time Around. “Resale goes upscale,” said the sign. I knew about consignment stores, but I’d never been in one before. Who would wear used clothes? I thought.
As we perused the racks of clothes, I recognized familiar brands—Ralph Lauren, Theory. Not that I owned any of them, but I knew that each of them usually came with a fairly hefty price tag. At Second Time Around, the clothes were still in great condition, but the prices were about a quarter of the original cost. I felt encouraged.
When we got to the jeans rack, I found a pair of those same one hundred and ninety-eight dollar jeans. Only here, they were priced at forty dollars. I pounced quickly to beat the other shoppers to the prize.
Lindsey accompanied me into the dressing room. The jeans fit even better that the new ones in the department store: the previous owner had pre-stretched the butt for me. Wearing them, I felt taller, smarter, younger and better looking—a self-delusion which made them perfect for work.
Lindsey nodded with approval, which made me feel even better. “They look great. Are you gonna get them?” Lindsey asked.
I hesitated. Of course I wanted the jeans. But more than that, I wanted my day with Lindsey to continue.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe, I have to think about it,” I said.
“Well hurry up, and decide. I want to go back to Free People and look at that dress again,” said Lindsey.
I decided to buy the jeans. There was no reason not to. Right fit, right price. But I grimaced at the mention of Free People. I was too tired for more giant bellbottoms and purple velvet curtains. But then I remembered what waited for me inside that overdone dressing room—more time spent being a part of Lindsey’s inner world.
“I think you should try the sundress on again,” I said.
“Will you pay for it?” Lindsey asked.
“We’ll see,” I said. But we both knew that Lindsey had me. She was going to get the dress—and I was paying.