MY SISTER IRENE: LOST IN THE FIFTIES
Good afternoon,
everyone. Thank you for coming.
My sister Irene and
I were adversaries from the time we shared hand-washed diapers from
Mom’s old galvanized washboard and tub. Over the years, we’ve
partaken in the pain and joy of every emotion, from playful teasing
to blatant animosity. The same is true of our younger sibling, Allen.
Once, he and Irene went for over twenty years without sharing a
single thought or word, with neither feeling any loss or less
spiritual enrichment for the lack of it. My punishment for being the
middle child has been to listen to them tear each other apart, point
an assortment of fingers and draw stubborn lines of alienation.
Not that I am
blameless, I admit. Yet, somehow Irene and I have grown closer over
the past decade, enjoying humorous little barbs and sharing even a
few belly laughs, the most recent of which were a couple of limericks
I wrote and sent for her enjoyment. Her response was that she would
have them engraved on my tombstone. Silly girl! Had she forgotten
that she was threatening the master of monkeyshines, the high priest
of pranks and the grand fool of tomfoolery?
As Oscar Levant
said, she was a virgin long before it was fashionable. Her children
and I suspect she still is, except for maybe that one time when she
was twelve and had that bicycle accident. She had always been slight
of frame, a physical characteristic that throughout her life made her
seem locked in the body of an eternal prepubescent. Her breasts, when
they finally appeared, sent her running in proud fulfillment to the
store to purchase a bra, a girl’s official badge of entry into
adolescence. Her exuberance turned into tears when the sales clerk
said she only needed a training bra. I’d never heard of such a
thing. Those things needed training? Was I, a year younger than Sis,
destined to a similar fate? A training jock? How would I know when I
needed one? Where would I buy one? I could only trust that Mom knew.
My heart swelled with premature pride at the thought of growing large
enough to require the benefits of a training jock. I hoped it would
be soon. That would show those bullying linebackers in the Phys-Ed
locker room when I dressed out for class!
The appearance of
the training bra on the clothesline in our backyard engendered a wave
of gossip that traveled through the neighborhood with the speed of
light and the force of a tsunami. Irene has breasts! There was
no ignoring the impact these three words had on the adolescent males
in our community. Irene waited impatiently for them to line up and
perform the ritual dances of courtship. To her chagrin, not even
Carlos, a hot Latino and the horniest stud in our neighborhood, took
note. Irene sashayed along the sidewalks, her chest puffed out in a
fashion that made one wonder if such a feat were anatomically
possible. It must have been painful, I thought. With her contrived
posture, what she had managed to grow flattened against her ribcage
and disappeared, leaving only the outline and wrinkles of the
superfluous training bra as a reminder that she was now, officially,
a woman. As if to further illustrate the fact, she developed an
unusual wiggle in her carriage. I knew Mom was taking Sis to a
chiropractor to see if he could ease the pains of womanhood she had
suddenly developed. Maybe this was a result of his realignment of her
bones, which is what she told me when I asked if she was sick. Aware
of the frequency of the nocturnal emissions I was experiencing,
mostly self-induced, I wondered if my bones required realignment,
too.
Allen and I made the most of her lack of success with her new
accoutrements. At every opportunity, we suggested that she had been
wearing her training bra backwards and didn’t even know it. With
the limited vocabulary and inexperienced mind of a twelve-year-old
boy, I was unable to understand the mechanics of bra sizing; even
with the training bra, there was this thing called cup size. Ignorant
as I was, I could agree that there should be some allowance for
various stages of development and that, in cases such as Irene’s,
beginning breast sizes should more properly be described as saucers
or shallow dishes rather than cups. Further, it seems that regardless
of whatever size we can imagine, we continue to use the term cup in
preference to graduating to something like a bowl. Size “A” cup.
Why not size “A” bowl after an agreed upon maximum cup size? In
many cases, it was deliciously appropriate. Also, why were letters of
the alphabet pressed into service to describe the size of a breast?
Wouldn’t numbers do? Those double letters were absolutely
mystifying. Were they indicative of greater weight? Girth? Perkiness?
Nipple size? Milk-producing capacity? Some subjective esthetic
quality? Whatever it was, it had garnered sufficient notice to bring
about the bestowal of a second letter in describing some attribute.
Yet, why hadn’t they just upgraded the admirable double-D to an E
and reassigned the E to an F, etc., etc.? There were plenty of
letters left in the alphabet. Picture, if you will, a size N, as some
lesser known manufacturers currently do. As for the double-D, the
sheer whispered mention of a double-D cup brought a rise in more than
the attention of a young, excitable lad such as myself; for whatever
it was, I was sure that “double-D” meant it was twice as good as
your ordinary, garden-variety D-cup. I even pondered the possibility
of mixing letters, such as AD, BC, or DA and wondered what they might
mean. Even though I began these studies when I was young, throughout
my life, I never seemed to have an appropriate amount of time to
become a serious student of the subject, and so it remains unresolved
to this day. I do admit to an occasional spate of joyous ogling.
Allen and I were not the two brightest rats in the maze when it came
to girls, a condition I blame on my mother who, figuring that by
keeping us boys ignorant of things sexual, she would be protected
from some mistake one of her stupid sons might make in the throes of
ecstasy or in the heat of curious experimentation. Where there is
ignorance, there is fear. I suspect Mom was determined to scare us
boys into life-long celibacy. Irene got her obligatory copy of What
Every Young Girl Should Know, apparently packaged with her first
box of sanitary napkins, gift-wrapped in unlabeled and
oh-so-sanitary-and-secretive-dark-purple paper. I was probably just
as interested in the book as she, but it disappeared within scant
seconds of its appearance in our house. Surely, there must be
something similar for boys, I thought. Would I get mine “when the
time was right?” Or maybe I could check out a copy at the school
library. Nah, forget that. Besides The Hardy Boys, The
Bobsey Twins, and selected copies of National Geographic,
there was nothing interesting in the library. Even with reference
books, you have to already know what you want to look up before you
can look it up. If you already know, why look it up? I was just a
kid. I could have asked the librarian, but what would I say? “Can
you help me, please? I’m looking for a book about bosoms.”
Perhaps I could have disguised my intentions and asked, “Can you
recommend a book about the history of bras?” Without the benefit of
a book, or the explicit guidance of my parents, which was certainly
not forthcoming, even to this day I’m not exactly certain that I’m
performing my conjugal duties properly. I certainly am satisfied, and
my wife, good woman that she is, would probably scream and wildly
thrust her pelvis at the appropriate time anyway, ensuring that I
incurred the greatest psychological satisfaction for my efforts.
Damn! If I’d only had a book! I think the preface of What
Every Young Girl Should Know should include—maybe already
includes—the sentiment, “Consider yourself lucky. Boys don’t
have a book like this.”
Concerned as I was
about the perceived deficit in my education, I worried more about
Allen. He was a happy-go-lucky kid and I thought he probably never
encountered the same questions and emotions as I. Ironically, he
fathered six children. I had none. I guess he found a book somewhere,
or had sufficient courage to ask the librarian where to find one. Or
maybe there is some obscure advantage to having one’s adenoids and
tonsils removed at an early age.
Of all the times a girl has to concern herself with modesty, none
seems to rival a young maiden’s decision to wear a strapless
evening gown for the first time. Dateless but hopeful, Irene prepared
herself for the prom by dragging Mom to JC Penney and leafing through
all the McCall Pattern books. A decision made years earlier
had already mandated that the gown be strapless, full length, have a
tight bodice and waist that flowed down to several yards of material
that would swirl around her feet as she danced. It would be made of
blue satin and organdy and the countless yards of underskirts would
be white. The picture on the front of the pattern envelope looked
suspiciously like Cinderella in her ball gown. By definition, isn’t
every girl at the prom just like Cinderella, virginity and sexual
preference aside, of course? Oh, all right, I’ll give you sexual
preference, but remember that Cinderella was searching for her Prince
Charming, not Princess Charming. Mom made the gown, a grand job that
transformed my ugly-duckling sibling into a socially presentable
young lady. An unequivocal success. Still, ill at ease as she was
with risk-taking, or perhaps due to the perceived danger of
accidentally exposing her bosoms, she tugged uncomfortably at the
bodice. I couldn’t understand her concern. Wasn’t the hint of
exposure or the amount of exposure the purpose of a strapless dress?
Wasn’t there supposed to be a spark of excitement in just the
possibility of an accidental—or even better—a purposeful
exposure? What was her problem? I ventured that her real concern was
that it would slip off and no one would notice. What difference did
it make, anyway? She still had no date. Unless she was worried that
one of the two other girls she was attending the prom with was going
to rip off her dress, what was all the moaning about? The next time I
saw the garment, two small, puffy sleeves sat firmly on her shoulders
and apparently provided the amount of security she required. To my
knowledge, no one saw her breasts that night, not accidentally or
intentionally.
As much as Irene seemed to personify the essence of prudence,
decency and virtuousness, she was a relentless, tattling bitch when
it came to us boys. Chronologically our elder, she was the
self-appointed overseer of Allen and my worlds. In the daily absence
of our working parents, the values of deportment were interpreted as
she perceived, and obviously to her advantage. I can’t fault her
for being selective in what she told; she told everything. I suspect
that in today’s world, she would produce a video copy of our
activities to validate her claims. For the record, I never said we
were angels. Allen and I lived our lives attended by this miniature
nanny ripped from the black depths of an Orwellian mind.
At the end of her first year of college, Sis got married—to a
career Marine non-com no less. It’s difficult to imagine what
defenses a shy, introverted girl from a poor family could put up
against a spit-shinned, hell’s-fire Texan who was a gung-ho marine
on top of it all. There was nothing in Irene’s upbringing or
education to prepare her for the—pardon the expression—social
intercourse between herself and this military interloper from the
dirt farmlands of the Texas Panhandle. It seemed there was little in
common for them to share; but that was when Irene stepped up to the
plate, broke from her shell and applied the know-it-all attitude she
always used on us boys to her marriage. She shrugged off her shyness,
started talking, and never stopped. Rudy, a nickname she gave her
husband—I’m not sure why; something to do with farting and
belching. Rudy stuck his head in a western novel and pretty much kept
it there throughout their marriage, except for any sporting
broadcast. Rudy, a true sports fan, would watch anything from
tiddlywinks to tidewater crabbing and everything in between. Irene
followed his interests as if they were conjoined twins. While passing
through California one time on my way to the Orient, I stopped to
visit Sis and Rudy and was treated to an evening at the roller-derby
rink where they knew the names of all the players and argued
vociferously with another fan seated nearby over obscure infractions
of the rules. I remembered how Dad was heartbroken when Sis left home
without her violin. He had spent four, hard-earned dollars an hour
each week for five years—a goodly sum for a poor family of five in
the early fifties—for violin lessons. I can’t contemplate what
his reaction would have been to the price of admission to a roller
derby game.
As with most
contemporary families, we drifted apart, following the progress of
each other’s lives through our occasional conversations with Mom.
Imagine my surprise when we met after fifteen years and I realized
that my innocent, virtuous sister, from the same pee-poor family as
I, was capable of being as potty-mouthed as any sailor I ever met,
politically two steps to the right of Hitler and as gung-ho for the
Corps as her husband. I fully expected to see portraits of William F.
Buckley, Jr., Colonel Oliver North, and G. Gordon Liddy hanging in
their home along with copies of The National Review and What
every Young Girl Should Know conspicuously displayed side by side
on their coffee table; and maybe, on a pedestal near the entryway,
there would be a bust of Dick Cheney.
From childhood, Irene wanted to be a schoolteacher. When her husband
retired from service, they both went back to college and got their
teaching certificates along with their daughter. The three of them
moved to Texas and taught at the same high school, which was as near
the Mexican-U.S. border as you can get without needing a passport or
a daily swim across the Rio Grande to get to work. Her subject: Home
Economics; everything a young girl needs to know, but not even close
to what the young, border-town señoritas take interest in
nowadays. Aside from introducing them to the concept of moral values,
I always wondered what an anal-retentive, stuck-in-the-fifties girl
could teach the youth of today.
She lost Rudy to
cancer several years back. He fought the brave fight, but in the end,
she took him home to die beside her in the bed they had shared all
their lives.
When she had a
stroke and her doctor put her in the hospital, I knew how she felt.
I, too, was alone when I underwent quadruple, cardiac-by-pass
surgery. We kept in touch by phone throughout her recovery and I was
pleased that the stroke left her with no handicaps. Like Allen later
observed, though, “Would it have been too much to ask for at least
a partial loss of speech?”
When next I saw
her, from what I could tell her breasts still hadn’t grown. But
that was all right. I never needed a training jock, either.
I want to thank
both of you for coming to pay your respects today. Allen says he has
nothing to say. As for me, I’m proud of Sis today. This is the
longest I have ever been able to speak in her presence without being
corrected or interrupted.
I’m going to miss
her.
Love you, Sis.
