I read an anthology of teen short stories probably from the 1960s. The two stories I remember are:
1) a shy, plump girl named Becky loved to bake, but she agreed to take a role in the school play because she had a crush on a boy in the play. The role was motherly (or grandmotherly) so Becky felt she could pull it off even though she wasn’t an actress. The boy crush would come over to “rehearse” but really he was there to spend time with Becky and eat the yummy things that Becky baked. He finally admitted that Becky wasn’t a very good actress, but he wanted to date her because he felt so comfortable with her in her cozy kitchen.
2) A slim, athletic girl who always wore pedal pushers had a special word “v’standen” that she and her dad invented to show that they understood each other, no other words necessary. When she got dressed up in a strapless gown to go out on her first date, her dad made a cold remark about how she looked. He wasn’t actually being mean, he was just shocked at how his little tomboy had grown up. When she came down the stairs to greet her date, her father tried to stammer an apology. She told him “v’standen” and everything was good.
Note: This is NOT “Stories to Live By” from American Girl Magazine. I bought the book, but neither story is in it.
The book is For Girls Only, published 1957. The two stories you mention are The Enchanted Kitchen and Bittersweet.
I read that as a teen in the fifties or just possibly early sixties; I think it may have been a collection of short stories from SEVENTEEN magazine, but it isn’t SEVENTEEN FROM SEVENTEEN, since that was published in 1967 and I’d long since read it by then. My memory keeps saying NINETEEN FROM SEVENTEEN, but I can’t google any book of that title. I think there was also a story called “Mayday” in which the heroine’s love interest / young husband’s fighter had crashed, but “Mayday” was a special word between them as well.
I FOUND NINETEEN FROM SEVENTEEN, published by Lippencott in 1952, and I’m pretty sure that’s your anthology. Amazon has it at https://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Seventeen-Stories-Magazine/dp/B000FKMKPI/. I had to go through Goodreads to find it, where there’s a query about yet another short story from it that I remember. This collection didn’t have anything fluffy that I recall, and someone else said the same.
Mama Squirrel, you’re a wizard! You’re correct, and I’m wondering how you searched it? (I just read a hilarious capsule of the *very dated* plots of these stories at https://mondomolly.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/for-girls-only-edited-by-sylvie-schuman/).
Ann, you’re right that the stories were originally from Seventeen and elsewhere, but these particular stories were not included in Nineteen from Seventeen.
Well, it actually came up pretty quickly. I did a search on Google Books for vstanden (like that, no punctuation, even though the story says v’standen), and it was one of the first few suggestions. I clicked on it and tried a few other internal search words like kitchen and dance. It seemed to be the right collection, so I’m glad you confirmed it!