The pride in my dad’s voice was almost painful for me to hear. Almost.
Our first stop was at an electronics store where Dad bought a pay-as-you-go cell phone. I was fine with him wanting me to have a phone while I was in California. It actually made sense. I knew Brady lived and breathed for his cell. When I’d called him from the shop on his last birthday, Brady told me how much he wished I had a cell phone so that he could talk to me whenever he wanted.
“You Amish are totally wrong about technology putting distance between people,” he had said. “If you had a cell, I could talk to you all the time.”
“Except you wouldn’t want to talk. You’d want to text.”
“It’s the same thing,” he shot back. “If you had a cell it would be like you’re just on the other side of town instead of the other side of the country. And with as often as I see you, it may as well be the other side of the universe.”
I had tried to explain that in Lancaster County, when you wanted to talk to someone, you went to them in person and talked to them. It kept the sense of community between you and your friends and neighbors and family strong and solid.
“Yeah, but I don’t live in Lancaster County.”
He had just made the case for why Amish families stay in their communities, but I didn’t point that out. Instead, I told him to call the shop phone as often as he liked, but he hardly ever did. He wanted to be able to text me now and then, and the shop phone wasn’t set up for that.
“Texting is how people my age communicate,” he had told me, more than once.
As it was after four o’clock my time, Dad suggested we eat first and then shop. We went to a Cheesecake Factory, and in between bites of flatbread pizza, something I had never had before, I programmed into the new cell phone the few numbers I would need as Dad dictated them to me: my dad’s and Liz’s numbers, Brady’s, the physician they used, the high school, a couple of neighbors, and the closest pizza place to their house that delivered.
Eight numbers.
Dad shook his head when I was done.
“Must be nice to just need eight telephone numbers to get by in life.”
“Ten, actually,” I corrected, adding in the numbers for Rachel and Daadi’s shop as well.
“Same difference.”
“Why? How many numbers do you have in yours?”
“Too many. I probably have more than a hundred in my contacts.”
I slipped the phone in my pocket without comment. I had never considered that a hundred phone numbers was the norm for the average cell phone user. Because my goal was to figure out where I belonged, I realized I needed to start making a list of things that were distinctive of ordinary life in the outside world. I mentally began the list so that later I could transfer it to the notebook.
People drive with their windows rolled up, no matter what the weather.
Used clothes are undesirable.
Young people text to communicate.
The number of contacts in your cell phone is too numerous to keep in your memory.
When we finished eating, we headed to Macy’s, where Dad bought me two pairs of jeans, a belt, and a package of colored T-shirts. I tried to use my own money, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Before we left the store, I went back into the dressing room and changed, folding my Amish clothes and stuffing them into the Macy’s bag. When I turned and regarded myself in the long mirror, I decided I looked pretty normal in the new clothes. The vibrant green in the shirt—a hue I hadn’t worn in years—brought out the same shade in my eyes.
But then I looked at my chestnut brown hair and realized that there was still one big problem. My clothes may be Englisch now, but my hairstyle was definitely still Amish. I pushed my bangs away from my face as best I could, telling myself that at least I worked primarily indoors in the buggy shop rather than out in the fields, so I didn’t have the telltale white forehead of an Amish farmer who labored all day in the sun with his hat on. I thought about asking my dad if we could go for a quick haircut too, but something about that seemed almost traitorous—not so much getting the cut as telling him I wanted one. I decided to wait and go myself in a few days, once he was out of town.
The clothes smelled new and their fabric was stiff on my skin, but I was relieved to be blending in better now. As Dad and I walked back to the car, people were no longer turning and staring at me—though one gaggle of teenage girls seemed to take an interest. I flashed them a friendly smile as we walked past, and the flirty looks they gave me in return nearly made me blush. A few of the Amish girls back home were known to be flirty too, but never to someone they didn’t already know and like. Add one more observation to the book.