Chapter 15

“This is torture,” Sherry mumbled.

Sherry didn’t know if someone could actually die of boredom, but knew that she was close to finding out. In another five or ten minutes, she’d have a data point resolving that question. Unfortunately, if her hypothesis was true, she wouldn’t survive to pass that data point on to anyone.

“This is boring,” she muttered for the hundredth time.

She was shopping with Otterly and her mother. There was nothing she could imagine that could possibly be worse than that.

She looked around the store for something that might be interesting, but there wasn’t anything to be found. She was stuck in a bizarre land with nothing but a sea of racks containing outfits by various designers. She’d been standing there for more than an hour while Otterly tried on one outfit after another. On the other hand, her mother was merrily running to and fro bringing dresses for Otterly to try on.

She tried calculating how many operations a computer could perform in the time spent in the store, but the number was almost unimaginably large. It was a mental operation that was intended to suck up a couple of seconds of her thought processes, but even that didn’t help. How could anyone try on so many outfits and still not pick one?

Her mother said, “You could act interested.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Sherry growled.

“We’re here to buy a dress for Otterly’s first date. This is a landmark event and you could at least take a little interest in it,” her mother said.

“I’m trying, but...”

“But what?”

“It’s just a dress,” Sherry said letting a bit of her frustration show in her voice.

“What’s that mean?” her mother asked.

“It means that it is just some cloth sewed together by slave labor working in a sweat shop located in some oriental country,” Sherry said.

“How can you say that?”

Sherry said, “Easily. It’s true.”

“This is THE DRESS she’s going to wear on her first date!”

Sherry said, “And all the guy is going to be thinking about during the date is getting her out of it.”

“Really?” her mother asked brightening up considerably.

“Mother!”

“That’s what the guy is supposed to want,” her mother said pointedly.

Looking for a way to escape this nightmare, Sherry said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“It’s over there,” her mother replied pointing off in the general direction of the back of the store.

“I’ll be right back,” Sherry said.

When her cell phone started ringing, Sherry put down the optical router that she had been looking at. It was a much faster one than what they had already installed in the house. Considering how much data flowed around the house, she knew it was only a matter of time before they would have to upgrade their network. Of course, they would go with a commercial router and it would be many times faster than the one she was looking at now.

Sherry answered her cell phone, “What?”

“Where are you?”

“Uh ... I’m still in the bathroom,” Sherry answered looking around the electronics store a little guiltily.

“No, you’re not. I already checked.”

Sherry said, “I didn’t find one in the store.”

“We’ve selected three possible dresses. You should be here to help make the final decision.”

“I pick the one that shows the least amount of skin,” Sherry answered.

Her attention was being drawn to a box five feet away. It was a high capacity solid state hard drive. It was a half of a petabyte. She knew that one of the online places probably had drives of higher capacity, but this one would do for Otterly’s computer.

“You’ve got to see her in it,” her mother said.

“Okay, I’ll be there in a minute,” Sherry said.

Sherry arrived at the changing room to discover that three dresses had some how or another transformed into three dozen dresses. There was a huge stack of dresses piled on a chair by the changing room with her mother guarding it like someone would come over and steal one of them.

Sherry picked up the top dress and said, “I like this one.”

“That’s ugly. Put it aside,” her mother said.

“How about we take this one,” Sherry asked holding up the next dress in the stack.

“That would never do,” Otterly said.

“This one?” Sherry asked holding up the third.

“No,” her mother said.

“I like this one,” Sherry said.

“That makes me look like an old maid,” Otterly said.

Her mother chimed in, “She’s right. It would make her look like an old maid.”

Having figured out the name of this game, Sherry picked up another outfit, held it up, inspected it closely. It wasn’t a bad looking dress. At least, it covered all of the important parts. She tossed it aside.

Her mother asked, “What’s the matter with that one?”

With a look of disgust on her face, Sherry said, “I’d rather die than see her in that one.”

“That’s my favorite,” Otterly said grabbing the dress.

Her mother said, “I love that one.”

“Over my dead body,” Sherry said.

“I want it,” Otterly said.

“No,” Sherry said.

“Let’s buy it,” Otterly said.

“Okay,” her mother said.

“No.”

“It’s the dress I want to wear on my first date,” Otterly said.

Sherry picked up another dress and said, “How about this one?”

“No. I’ve made up my mind,” Otterly said.

Sherry argued against it for another minute before giving in gracefully. The fact was that she actually liked the dress, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She had a feeling that her mother and daughter would reject anything she said that she liked on the general basis that she had lousy taste in clothes.

She stood off to the side while her mother and daughter went through the process of paying for the dress. She would have gone up there with the card in hand and gotten through the transaction in a minute. The two women chatted with the woman behind the register for ten minutes about the various designers who had dresses in the store. Not for the first time that day, she was left looking up at the lights of the store wondering about the wiring of the place. That was how low she had sunk in terms of trying to find something interesting in that store.

She followed her mother and daughter out of the store. They were chatting like a pair of magpies while Sherry felt that her brain was melting and would soon run out her ears.

Interrupting the discussion, she said, “I’m glad that’s over. Let’s go home.”

Otterly said, “We can’t go home yet.”

“Now we have to find shoes,” her mother said.

“She’s got shoes,” Sherry said.

Sherry was rather remarkable in her attitude towards shoes as far as the majority of women were concerned. She usually wore sneakers and owned one pair of flats. That was the extent of her shoe collection – a pair of sneakers and a pair of sandals.

Otterly rolled her eyes and said, “None that go with this dress.”

“You’ve got a ton of shoes. I’m sure that one pair will go with that dress,” Sherry said.

Her mother said, “Don’t mind your mother. She’s always had a horrible sense of fashion.”

“I’m practical,” Sherry said.

“You dress like a beggar,” Otterly said.

“I’ll have you know that I’m wearing a coordinated outfit,” Sherry said.

It was true, she was wearing a coordinated outfit. She was wearing a tee shirt, jeans, a baseball cap, and her sneakers. Her tee shirt had the slogan, “Software Engineers shall conquer the world.” Her cap had the slogan, “Gaming made me dictator of a third world country.”

“Oh, please. Not that,” Sherry’s mother said.

Sherry shuffled along behind them like a condemned prisoner making the walk to the gallows. She could just picture the trips from one shoe store to the next and watching Otterly try on a dozen different shoes at each place. She knew that she was supposed to sit there and go ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over each pair, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

At the first shoe store, the back of the chair was so low that she couldn’t even slouch down in it. She sat there like a bump on a log while her mother shuttled shoes from display to sales person, the sales person ran off to get a box of shoes, and then returned for Otterly to try on another candidate.

She muttered, “This is torture!”

“Mother! We’re shopping for clothes. This is supposed to be fun,” Otterly said exasperated.

“It isn’t fun,” Sherry said.

“It’s a whole lot more fun than going to an electronics place. Jeeze, you and Dad just stand around reading boxes.”

“That’s because electronic things are more interesting than clothes.”

“We’re trying to find the perfect outfit for your daughter’s first date.”

Sherry asked, “What’s the big deal about this whole dating thing?”

“Huh?” Otterly asked as if the question itself had short-circuited her mental processes.

Sherry’s mother turned to stare at her incredulously. She couldn’t imagine anyone, particularly a woman, asking a dumb question like that. For a young woman, a date was everything.

Seeing their reaction, Sherry said, “Your father and I never dated.”

“You and Dad are weird,” Otterly said. She wasn’t being critical, just stating a fact that was well accepted in the neighborhood.

“I don’t know where I went wrong with you. You’re just not right in the head...” her mother said, “ ... and Alex isn’t any better.”

“Hey, we’re perfect together,” Sherry said.

Otterly said, “It’s a miracle I was born.”

“I’m convinced it was a case of virgin birth,” Sherry’s mother said.

“Why do you think that?” Sherry asked.

Otterly said, “In order to have babies, you have to have sex. You and Dad don’t have sex.”

Sherry’s mother said, “You two are cold fish when it comes to romance.”

“Why do you say that?” Sherry asked.