The nuns were even more fearful of Nikita Khrushchev, who had such deplorable manners that in 1960, at the UN General Assembly, he banged his shoe on the table. (His granddaughter, Nina, later explained that he’d taken it off, complaining that it was too tight.) The nuns considered his actions the height of barbarity, and if the Communists took over the country, Khrushchev would outlaw our faith and take away our shoes.
I’d watched President Kennedy’s Missile Crisis speech with my mother and the Avon lady. She’d dropped by to deliver my mother’s Topaz perfumed cream, which came in a yellow milk-glass jar. Since we were on the brink of nuclear war, my mother was having second thoughts about the body cream and wondered if she could return it. My mother didn’t like the Avon lady. She was beautiful and single and wore her platinum hair in a stylish chignon and owned a variety of high heels. She roomed with an elderly couple at the end of our block, and in addition to selling Avon products, she worked at a hospital not far from my father’s bank. After she asked him if he could give her a ride in the mornings, my mother thought her pushy and aggressive and wondered what the neighbors would think.
She was giving the Avon lady the cold shoulder when Kennedy came on TV.
He looked grim and puffy-eyed, not the way I remembered him when he was running for president and my mother and I saw him in person. Jackie was there, and it had just rained and the grass was soaking wet. I was pleased to see that she was wearing wedgies, although hers were more sophisticated than anything at Reinhold’s. Jackie, who was a size 10, favored low-heeled pumps by Ferragamo or Delman. In a letter to her personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, she wrote that she expected her shoes to be “elegant and timeless.” As Kennedy spoke, Jackie stood very still, her wedgies sinking lower and lower into the soggy grass. She didn’t take her eyes off her husband, even as her shoes were totally getting ruined, and afterward, she didn’t even glance down to check on them but continued to smile and shake everyone’s hand.
With all the talk of nuclear war and the Communists invading Andover, wedgies were the only bright spot in what was shaping up to be a very tumultuous year. With Nancy’s arrival, my parents turned the dining room into a nursery until they cound find a larger house. Not only was sister Emily continuing to find weird things in her food, she now had a weird thing in the dining room, and she wasn’t happy about it. At five, she was no longer the baby, but now occupied the unenviable spot of being the middle child.
At some point, my mother asked us to clean up our toys to make room for the baby’s paraphernalia. In the process of sorting through our things, my mother told me to put “Betty,” my nearly life-size doll, in the attic. Betty had been my companion for years, and while I was at the age when I didn’t actually play with her, I didn’t necessarily want her in the attic. Before I had a chance to voice my objections, Emily, who’d never shown any prior interest in Betty, decided that she wanted her. In retrospect, I understand what was happening. With a new baby in the house, my middle sister was consolidating her power base. If my mother had a baby, Emily needed a bigger one to equalize things. But as that kind of analysis was beyond me, I refused to yield the doll. We got into a tug-of-war, and in a perfect illustration of family typecasting, I emerged with Betty’s head, my sister with the body. With no one getting Betty “whole,” my mother sent her to the attic, where she remained, in two separate boxes, until she finally wound up at the dump.
Meanwhile, our dog Buff developed cataracts, a whitish blue seeping through his brown eyes like globs of spilled milk. Even though he couldn’t see, he regularly crossed a busy intersection, impregnating several dogs in the neighborhood. This was too much for my mother, who couldn’t take care of a baby and a blind dog, especially one whose morals were on par with Maria Goretti’s assassin. “That dog’s a sex maniac,” my mother complained. One of them had to go, and even though Emily voted for Nancy, my mother took the dog to the vet’s and we never saw him again.
With only a week to spare before confirmation, we finally made it to Reinhold’s.
“You’re a little late, aren’t you?” the salesman said. “There’s been a run on wedgies.”
He pulled out the Brannock Device to measure my foot, but given the urgent circumstances, I told him not to bother. “I’m a 7AAA,” I said as he disappeared into the back room, while I slumped in one of the metal chairs.
“This is a disaster,” I said. “I’m not going to be able to be confirmed without wedgies.”
“That’s ridiculous,” my mother replied. “You think God cares about wedgies?”
The salesman was in the back room for longer than usual, and I was so nervous I was practically hyperventilating. My classmate Mary Kay Phinney, whose father owned the local TV and stereo shop, walked in the door. Though she lacked Hannah Howard’s Hollywood pedigree, she was blond and pretty and always had a tan. She needed wedgies too. I looked down at her feet. Luckily, they were smaller than mine.
“There’s been a run on wedgies,” I announced.
“There’s been a run on wedgies!” she yelled to her mother, who was pacifying her two younger children by shoving nickels into the gumball machine.
The salesman finally returned from the back room, carrying one box instead of the usual half a dozen. “I have good news and bad news,” he said. “The good news is that I have wedgies. The bad news is that the closest to your size is an 8A.”
“I’ll take them,” I said.
“You better try them on first,” my mother advised. “It would be terrible if you had to return them.” Even the salesman had to suppress a laugh, given my mother’s habit of returning practically every shoe she ever purchased.
I walked over to the fluoroscope and back. They felt pretty good. I figured my feet had probably grown.
“They’re perfect,” I said.
Afterward, we went across the street to the Dame Shoppe, where women purchased their “intimates” and men rarely ventured, unless it was Valentine’s Day and they were stuck for a gift. I’d never bought anything there, but my mother said I needed “hose.” I hadn’t thought much beyond wedgies, though I had a dim recollection of Sister Superior, after dragging one of the boys by the cheek into the cloakroom, telling us we could wear nylon stockings. I thought nylons were the most useless garments ever invented. My mother would buy a pair and immediately get a run in them. Though she’d try to stop it with clear nail polish, the run would keep running, and then she’d have to throw them in the trash. It was a constant source of frustration. While my father kept his socks for years, my mother, if she was lucky, kept her nylons for a week. There was something terribly unfair about this, but when I mentioned it to my mother, she said it was the price you paid for being a woman.
“Can I help you?” asked one of the saleswomen. She was standing in front of a glass counter containing bras with cups the size of beach balls. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, and my mother said it was rude to stare, but I couldn’t help it. I could have fit ten of my own breasts inside one cup and still have room for The Complete Jane Austen. I spotted Priscilla Lane—Mrs. Howard—walking into the store. My mother was shy so she didn’t say hello, but I waved. Mrs. Howard gave me a dazzling movie star smile and a smoky hello. She had a great husky voice that I hoped I’d have one day when I matured, smoked cigarettes, and fulfilled my lifelong dream of becoming an actress.
“We’d like a pair of nylons,” my mother said as Mrs. Howard perused a rack of lacy nightgowns. The saleswoman showed us several color samples ranging from nude to tangerine. We settled on nude, and then the woman pulled out a plastic box containing garter belts. “Do you want something plain or fancy?” she asked. I wanted neither. Though we’d learned about Newton’s law of gravity in science class, it hadn’t dawned on me that nylons wouldn’t stay up on their own. I selected a plain blue garter belt and just wanted to get out of there, but the saleswoman, staring at my chest, suggested to my mother that I needed a t
raining bra. “You wouldn’t want them to jiggle,” she whispered, bending over the counter to reveal her bottomless cleavage.
My breasts didn’t jiggle. They barely existed. And what did breasts need to be “trained” for? A sword fight with a baby?
The saleswoman handed me something that looked like a white wraparound bandage and told me to go into the dressing room and try it on. On one side was Mrs. Howard, on the other a woman being fitted for a nursing bra. Milk spillage? Did the saleswoman actually say, “Milk spillage”? My mother never nursed any of us, and I didn’t know any other mothers who’d dream of letting their children anywhere near their breasts. Hadn’t this woman ever heard of baby formula? You mixed it up, poured it into a bottle, and stuck it in the baby’s mouth, thereby doing away with bizarre problems like milk spillage. I was getting ill. Even my new wedgies didn’t compensate for the newfound horrors of becoming a woman.
“How ya’ doin’ in there, hon?” the saleswoman asked.
“I need more time,” I said, thinking in terms of decades.
I reluctantly took off my white Lollipop undershirt with its delightful pink rosebud and pulled the bra over my head. The saleswoman, overstepping all civilized notions of privacy, barged in and began fiddling with the bra. “There!” she said. “Now that really holds you in.” Bind was more like it. The bra flattened me so completely I could have been playing Viola disguised as Cesario in Twelfth Night.
Mrs. Howard and I emerged from the dressing room at the same time. She had something black and slinky in her arms. I stepped on her foot and in the midst of apologizing dropped my training bra. She picked it up for me. “Oh, thanks,” I said casually, as if shopping for brassieres was something I did all the time.
“I’ll die before wearing this thing,” I whispered to my mother, who was debating whether she needed a new girdle to get herself back into pre-Nancy shape.
“You could use a girdle too,” she said.
I was a gawky five feet eight and weighed 110 pounds. Nothing jiggled, nothing wiggled, nothing moved at all.
“I don’t want a girdle,” I said. “I don’t want a bra. I don’t even want these stupid nylons or this garter belt.” My mother gave me the death stare. I was causing a scene. In a store. With a movie star nearby.
“Why do you have to make such a big deal out of everything?” my mother whispered loud enough for the saleswoman to overhear.
“You’re just overwhelmed, hon,” the saleswoman said. “It’s like when I had my first baby and I was screaming, ‘Just knock me out, because this kid is ripping me apart.’”
Yeah, just like that.
On confirmation day, I couldn’t attach the nylons to the garters, and my mother said, “You’d better learn because they’re now a part of you.” She wasn’t kidding. Within minutes, they’d left figure-eight marks on my thighs. With the slippery hose, my wedgies were now too big and I could barely keep them on.
With his Kodak Instamatic in hand, Daddy asked me to go outside so he could take a picture to commemorate the day. I followed him out to the front lawn, where he usually took all our pictures, posing us next to the cherry blossom trees, which depending on the season and Daddy’s eye were either gloriously in bloom or not in the photo at all. Since he didn’t like to impose himself on people, he never set up his shots properly, and if somebody was blinking or grimacing or looking away, he still snapped the picture. Photography was too intimate an activity for him and he could do it only by doing it quickly. And yet, away from us, removed from direct personal contact, he’d spend hours pasting the photographs into albums, writing, in his perfect script, little notes, such as Patricia celebrates her First Communion or Patricia on her sixth birthday. He’d date everything, every single picture, so we’d have a record, a history, and I loved looking at the albums. They were among my favorite items in the house.
“Okay,” Daddy said, “why don’t you stand in front of the cherry blossoms?”
I straightened my regulation red skullcap, smoothed my hair, and squinted into the direct sunlight. Daddy took the picture so fast I wondered if he even caught a glimpse of me through the viewfinder. “I think it’s going to be a good one,” he said. He always said that after taking a photograph. I think it’s going to be a good one.
Meanwhile, my mother ran around the house doing whatever she did to make us late, while we all sat in the car. Bumpa rolled his eyes, and my father held his breath. I kept waiting for him to exhale, but his face kept getting redder and redder and I thought he’d explode right in the driver’s seat, on my confirmation day. Finally, my mother came out and my father literally breathed a sigh of relief. She patted her heart, as if her habitual tardiness were killing her instead of us.
Nancy and Emily were crying. Nancy was upset because Emily had pinched her, and Emily was upset because my mother had yelled at her, and I was upset because my wedgies were too big and I hated my confirmation name—Frances. With all the focus on shoes, I hadn’t paid much attention to selecting a middle name. It was supposed to honor a saint, one whose virtues we could emulate. Because I wanted to live beyond the age of twelve, Maria was out. I finally opted for Frances because I had a crush on a boy named Francis, whose last name I can’t remember. He wasn’t even that cute and was constantly getting into trouble for making wisecracks. In second grade, Sister Margaret threw him in a trash can and put the lid on it and he stayed in there for several hours without making a sound. Perhaps it was then I developed my crush, or several years later, when he defended a boy who had the weird habit of collapsing on the floor every time he had to diagram a sentence at the blackboard. Clearly, the boy had psychological issues, but since psychology wasn’t in the nuns’ vocabulary, they hit him with a ruler instead. Once when he wouldn’t get up, Francis carried him back to his desk and offered him water from his thermos. Afterward, the nun dumped Francis in the trash again, so I suppose he did exhibit saintly qualities in the face of persecution. Still, I wished I’d chosen Hayley.
My mother took out her compact and powdered her nose, which she claimed I disfigured when I accidentally kicked it with my foot. It happened when I was a baby, so it wasn’t premeditated or deliberate, but my mother talked about the assault as if I’d been plotting it from conception. “See, one nostril is crooked,” she said. “It was never like that.”
Both of her nostrils looked fine. They weren’t things of great beauty, but whose were?
At church, we formed a processional behind the cardinal, who wore a mitered hat and carried a crook-shaped crosier. Some of the other girls hadn’t taken nylons into consideration when buying their wedgies, and we slipped and slid all the way down the aisle. At one point, I stepped out of my shoe and Bridget nearly fell into me, and Francis What’s-His-Name laughed.
The cardinal, who had already attended several confirmations that day and was due to preside over several more, quickly got down to business. In a sharp nasal voice, he told us that the word confirmation meant a “strengthening” and just as everyone born into the world reached physical maturity, everyone born to the spiritual life through baptism reached spiritual maturity. We had to be ready, with both our bodies and souls, to uphold the true religion. With our sponsors in tow—I’d selected Bumpa—we headed up to the altar to become “soldiers of Christ.” Kneeling down at the railing, I steeled myself for “the slap,” but the cardinal merely tapped my cheek and then anointed my forehead with oil. As I returned to my seat, I waited for a sign that I’d reached maturity, but the only visible evidence was the run in my nylon stocking galloping at full speed up my leg.
5
Beatle Boots
A few months ago, I was having lunch with my friend Jennifer at the original P. J. Clarke’s, where the restaurant’s deceased mascot—Skippy the dog—is now a piece of taxidermy above the handicapped bathroom. Jennifer, who has great taste, casually mentioned that she’d recently bought a new pair of boots at a store called R. M.
Williams. We were sitting at the discreet table Jackie Onassis was said to prefer, and I’d ordered an organic turkey burger. Since I’m mostly a vegetarian, I felt guilty, as if I’d just gobbled down a Big Mac, or Skippy. After a strong cup of American coffee, I sprinted from P.J.’s to R.M.’s. Normally, a longhorn steer insignia would have put me off, but now that I was a carnivore, I eagerly walked inside. To my delight and utter surprise, I found Beatle boots.
While the Beatles aren’t generally associated with the Australian outback, their boots were a modification of Victorian paddock, or jodhpur, boots. These were designed with elastic siding to make them easier to remove. In the 1950s and ’60s, when King’s Road became a hub for creative artists known as the Chelsea set, fashion designers and models adopted the paddock boot, which was renamed the Chelsea boot. The Beatles, collaborating with the bespoke footwear company Annello & Davide, added a Cuban heel, and the Beatle boot was born.
Paul was my mother’s favorite Beatle, which really annoyed me because he was my “fave” too. Parents were supposed to hate the Beatles, not love their music and moon over their photographs. “Don’t you think their hair is too long?” I’d say, hoping she’d agree with the majority of older Americans and criticize them for looking like girls. But she thought they were adorable, the kind of boys you’d take home to mother, especially if the mother had a huge crush on one of them. I warned her that Paul’s choirboy looks were deceiving, but she claimed I was being “uptight.” Suddenly I was the conservative one, criticizing Paul for smoking too much and having a “dark side.” “He’s worse than Elvis,” I said. “At least he fought for his country and made inspirational movies like G.I. Blues.”
My mother hated Elvis. She didn’t like Frank Sinatra, either, and she’d been too young to appreciate the first pop sensation—the 1920s megaphone crooner, Rudy Vallee. But now, at forty-four, with three kids, including a two-year-old, she was in the throes of Beatlemania. “Do you think Paul is going to marry Jane Asher?” she’d ask, and I’d have to remind her that she was far too old for him. She’d remind me that while I was closer to his age, I had the disadvantage of being only thirteen and that unless I moved to a country that looked favorably upon child brides, I wouldn’t be walking down the aisle anytime soon. Things got so competitive that at one point I told my father that she was in love with someone else. He was reading The Boston Globe, so I had to repeat it three times.
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