to boys.
The mall has changed quite a bit in the past thirty years; Woolworth’s is gone, as are Waxi Maxi’s Record Shop, Peoples Drug Store, i Natural Cosmetics, the Magic Pan, and the Roy Rogers fast food restaurant. Now there’s California Pizza Kitchen, Ann Taylor, Steve Madden, Coach, and Nordstrom. It’s gone from a typical seventies suburban hangout to a pretty high-end shopping galleria.
And for her sixteenth birthday, Nordstrom Café was where Amy decided she wanted me to take her and Cam for lunch.
Nordstrom Café is awesome, I’m always surprised how much I like the food there, but Amy is not a fool—she knew if she got me into Nordstrom, she would leave with a nice bagful of things from the Brass Plum area. Cam did too. Look, I can’t wear most of that stuff myself anymore, but it is fun to buy it.
So after a small shopping extravaganza, we made our way to the café with our bags and sat down in a big round booth that had enough room for us and our purchases.
“I’m totally wearing this blue shirt to school tomorrow,” Cam said, stirring her tomato soup with a crust of bread.
“Wait, the blue shirt?” The blue shirt was kind of low in the front. It was for nighttime. Or maybe for someone older. Why had I allowed her to get that blue shirt? “That’s not really appropriate for school.”
“It is if you want Mason Bindeman to notice you,” Amy said with a giggle.
“ Who ? Mason who ?” It sounded like a soap opera name.
“Bindeman,” Cam said, with a touch of exaggerated patience. “He’s a senior. I have, like, two weeks to make an impression before he’s gone forever.”
“Oh. I see. And I just purchased an incredibly low-cut shirt to help you achieve that.”
She smiled and reached over to pat my arm. “Thank you, Mommy.”
“You were taking advantage of my momentary lapse in maturity.”
Cam nodded. “I’ve learned to spot those and get while the getting’s good.”
“And you were complicit in this,” I said to Amy, remembering how she’d pointed out the cute little pastel cardigans they had hanging on a rack near the dressing room.
Amy smiled. “Did I do something wrong?”
I sighed. This was an argument for another day. Tomorrow, to be specific. Not now. “So who is Mason ? Wasn’t it some guy named Phillip last week?”
“Ugh, he is such a jerk.” Cam rolled her eyes. “We went out for, like, ten minutes and he expected me to totally give it up.”
“He expected—”
“She didn’t ,” Amy said quickly, and suddenly I wished Rick were here to mediate this conversation.
“Well, duh , that’s my point,” Cam said. “If he can’t understand why I might want to wait a little bit longer, then forget it.”
“How much longer?” I found myself asking.
Cam leveled a gaze of pity on me. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
All right, if my mother had asked the same question of me at the same age, what would I have said? At sixteen Nate and I were seriously hot and heavy together wherever we could find a little privacy. It was a wonder I’d never had a pregnancy scare. No matter what happened during the day, or even during the night, I always knew that at the end of it, there would be no stresses, no Real Life issues, no big problems—at the end of every night the only thing that was looming was the fact that we were going to have steaming hot sex.
And it occurred to me, at this inopportune moment, that I really missed that.
Amy must have misinterpreted the look on my face, because she gave a shout of laughter and said, “Ohmigod, Erin, she’s totally kidding !”
I looked at Cam and could tell, I knew right down in my heart, that that was the truth. She wasn’t anywhere near the same place I’d been at her age. My daughter—and Amy, her best friend and potentially my future stepdaughter—was not emotionally and physically entangled with anyone, much less one guy who, two years into a seriously intense
The mall has changed quite a bit in the past thirty years; Woolworth’s is gone, as are Waxi Maxi’s Record Shop, Peoples Drug Store, i Natural Cosmetics, the Magic Pan, and the Roy Rogers fast food restaurant. Now there’s California Pizza Kitchen, Ann Taylor, Steve Madden, Coach, and Nordstrom. It’s gone from a typical seventies suburban hangout to a pretty high-end shopping galleria.
And for her sixteenth birthday, Nordstrom Café was where Amy decided she wanted me to take her and Cam for lunch.
Nordstrom Café is awesome, I’m always surprised how much I like the food there, but Amy is not a fool—she knew if she got me into Nordstrom, she would leave with a nice bagful of things from the Brass Plum area. Cam did too. Look, I can’t wear most of that stuff myself anymore, but it is fun to buy it.
So after a small shopping extravaganza, we made our way to the café with our bags and sat down in a big round booth that had enough room for us and our purchases.
“I’m totally wearing this blue shirt to school tomorrow,” Cam said, stirring her tomato soup with a crust of bread.
“Wait, the blue shirt?” The blue shirt was kind of low in the front. It was for nighttime. Or maybe for someone older. Why had I allowed her to get that blue shirt? “That’s not really appropriate for school.”
“It is if you want Mason Bindeman to notice you,” Amy said with a giggle.
“ Who ? Mason who ?” It sounded like a soap opera name.
“Bindeman,” Cam said, with a touch of exaggerated patience. “He’s a senior. I have, like, two weeks to make an impression before he’s gone forever.”
“Oh. I see. And I just purchased an incredibly low-cut shirt to help you achieve that.”
She smiled and reached over to pat my arm. “Thank you, Mommy.”
“You were taking advantage of my momentary lapse in maturity.”
Cam nodded. “I’ve learned to spot those and get while the getting’s good.”
“And you were complicit in this,” I said to Amy, remembering how she’d pointed out the cute little pastel cardigans they had hanging on a rack near the dressing room.
Amy smiled. “Did I do something wrong?”
I sighed. This was an argument for another day. Tomorrow, to be specific. Not now. “So who is Mason ? Wasn’t it some guy named Phillip last week?”
“Ugh, he is such a jerk.” Cam rolled her eyes. “We went out for, like, ten minutes and he expected me to totally give it up.”
“He expected—”
“She didn’t ,” Amy said quickly, and suddenly I wished Rick were here to mediate this conversation.
“Well, duh , that’s my point,” Cam said. “If he can’t understand why I might want to wait a little bit longer, then forget it.”
“How much longer?” I found myself asking.
Cam leveled a gaze of pity on me. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
All right, if my mother had asked the same question of me at the same age, what would I have said? At sixteen Nate and I were seriously hot and heavy together wherever we could find a little privacy. It was a wonder I’d never had a pregnancy scare. No matter what happened during the day, or even during the night, I always knew that at the end of it, there would be no stresses, no Real Life issues, no big problems—at the end of every night the only thing that was looming was the fact that we were going to have steaming hot sex.
And it occurred to me, at this inopportune moment, that I really missed that.
Amy must have misinterpreted the look on my face, because she gave a shout of laughter and said, “Ohmigod, Erin, she’s totally kidding !”
I looked at Cam and could tell, I knew right down in my heart, that that was the truth. She wasn’t anywhere near the same place I’d been at her age. My daughter—and Amy, her best friend and potentially my future stepdaughter—was not emotionally and physically entangled with anyone, much less one guy who, two years into a seriously intense
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