"Read This" Book Club's "Dress Codes"

Nov. 21 -- The "Wine, Women, and Jeffrey," book club read The Secret Life of Bees for last month's installment of Good Morning America's "Read This!" book club series. Today, they're passing on the book club baton to the "Jazzy Page Turners" of Knoxville, Tenn.

The "Jazzy Page Turners," are group of eight women, most of them retired, who met in a jazzercise class.

They've been assigned, by "Wine, Women and Jeffrey," to read the Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine.

The poignant and tender memoir, by Noelle Howey, explores the author's coming of age as a young woman, at the same time her father was "coming of age" as a transsexual, and her mother was finding her independence.

Read chapter one of Howey's Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine, below.

Coming Out, 1986

My mother's hatchback was parked in Section B, Aisle 12, between a small pile of beer cans and a battered Plymouth that looked as though it belonged on cement blocks. We were quiet.

I don't remember whether we left the house in the late morning or the early afternoon; I don't know if it was a Saturday or a Sunday. I can't say what we discussed in the car on the way to the mall, or whether we simply drove in silence. I didn't ask why we were going shopping all of a sudden, though I assumed we were trying to get out of my father's way. He looked pretty tired.

I watched the raindrops meander, forging crooked, loosely braided paths up the windshield. I had always been mesmerized and perplexed by the way rain crawls up car windows.

"Honey, are you listening? Do you understand what I'm saying?" my mother asked.

It was cold, even for late autumn, even for Cleveland.

"Yes, of course," I scoffed, buttoning my jacket.

My mother twisted in her bucket seat to face me as head-on as possible. That couldn't have been comfortable.

"I think you're not quite taking this in," she said.

Today, out of nowhere, right after our usual bowls of cornflakes, my mother decided that I needed socks, underwear, scrunchies--immediately. She hustled me into the car. "We're going to Penney's over at Randall," she said. "I'm not spending ten dollars so you can tell Debbie that you have socks from the Gap."