Love, Loss, and What I Wore (5 page)

Her showroom took the entire second floor of 22 East 65th Street. Dora and her parents lived on the third floor. Seamstresses, who did exquisite beading, worked in the back room on the second floor, surrounded by mannequins padded with tissue paper to duplicate the full figures of customers.

Dora’s mother always hired beautiful models to show the clothes. The models changed behind a mirrored screen with cupids on it. Dora’s mother loved cupids.

Dora’s father’s name was Harry. He drank martinis and listened to WQXR.

We bought our make-up at Liggett’s Drug Store on the corner of 65th and Madison. We’d sit at the counter and order grilled-cheese sandwiches and cherry Cokes while we talked about what color nail polish to buy.

Typical underwear we wore on a date: girdle, garter belt, and stockings with seams. If we had our periods, we also wore a sanitary belt and a Kotex or Modess pad. We wore underpants over everything, then a half-slip, then a crinoline.

Crinoline petticoat worn under skirts and dresses to make them stand out. Often we wore several crinolines.

If you forgot to wear a half-slip, the crinolines would frequently make runs in your stockings.

Dora’s mother lent me this gown when Dora and I went to the Choate School for Boys in Connecticut for the weekend. The dress was mauve satin with delicate beadwork on the bodice. It had a long train.

We carried our evening dresses (we each took up two evening dresses) in a huge black-zippered dress bag.

Dora had a real date for the weekend with a boy named Lee. We used to laugh at him because he thought he was very good looking (we didn’t) and his clothes smelled from mothballs. He was very, very rich.

Dora fixed me up with a blind date. Whenever Dora went someplace special, her mother would say, “Take Gingy along.” So Dora had arranged for the blind date.

We took the train from Grand Central to Choate. It was full of other girls also going for the weekend. They were very preppy and gave us mean looks.

My blind date was named Jim. I didn’t like him. I met another boy, also named Jim, and liked him. We necked a lot.

My evening dresses were much too sophisticated for Choate. Some of the preppy girls called us whores. Probably because of the dresses and the necking.

The Jim I liked wrote me love letters for several months after the weekend. I got embarrassed when I read them.

This was the other evening dress I took to Choate—black taffeta. I remember also wearing it to the Horace Mann senior prom. I went with a boy named Larry Janos. After the prom, we went to the Copacabana on 60th Street off Fifth Avenue, double-dating with Larry’s best friend, David, and his girlfriend.

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were the attraction. We sat ringside, drank Tom Collinses, and smoked Pall Malls. I stole a Copacabana ashtray.

For another prom I had a teal-blue ankle-length ballerina dress with a full tulle skirt worn with several crinolines. I don’t remember the boy I went with or the prom, just the dress.

Babbie had a beautiful ice-green flapper dress with silver beads from when she was young. She kept it in her drawer. I wore it to a costume party at Dora’s and the silver beads kept falling off.

In another drawer, she kept a long, thick, auburn braid that my mother had saved from when she was young and had cut her hair. It was about fourteen inches in length, and I sometimes wore it as a chignon.

For my Hunter College High School senior photograph in the 1953 yearbook, I wore a white dotted-swiss blouse with large, bouffant sleeves.

I wore it backwards because I thought the neck looked more attractive on me that way.

This is the coral wool jersey dress I bought for a New Year’s Eve date with George Feifer, in 1954. I was madly in love with George.

I saw it in the window of a store on 58th Street and Lexington Avenue and admired its boat neck and princess styling.

I had planned to go “all the way” with George that night but it didn’t happen.

We went to a party in Passaic, New Jersey. My friend Marion Brody—we both went to Simmons College in Boston—came too. I got her a date with a friend of George’s.

I thought after we drove Marion home we would have a wonderful opportunity to “do it.” But we had car trouble and George was driving. He had to drop me off first.