“I hope she has a girl!” my mother growled. This vengeful prophecy was issued in response to my sister’s announcement of her out-of-wedlock (as they charmingly called it) pregnancy.
I was taken aback, not by the pregnancy, which I already knew about, but by the sentiment. Baby girls had always been highly prized in our family. My mother had wanted three, and was frankly disappointed by the appearance of my brother five years after me. Aunt Janice had two boys before scoring a girl—and even though pregnancy was somewhat of a risk to her health, she would’ve kept going if Amy hadn’t come along.
The sisters wanted daughters—but it was some kind of fantasy daughter they were after, some vague creature with curls and white gloves, remote from reality—or at least remote from ours. During our teenage years my mother would point to her friends’ well-turned-out daughters in comparison to us. Years later my sister and I finally went to the dictionary to look up “bandbox,” as in “Harriet always looks like she just stepped out of a bandbox.”
Linda looked like she just stepped out of a closet, which she had, after a fight with my mother: hair flying, cheeks ablaze, trails of mascara running down her cheeks. My mother may have given me looks and called me names–clumsy and stupid were her favorites–but what she did to Linda went way beyond.
I stood riveted in our shared bedroom witnessing one of their knock-down drag-out battles. My mother managed to back Linda into an open closet, slapping at her with both hands. Linda slapped right back. My mother clawed Linda’s throat with her long red fingernails. Linda’s nails, bitten to the quick, put her at a disadvantage. She was always trying to break the habit, and I can just imagine her long-nail revenge fantasies—but by the time she managed to stop biting her nails, the fight was long since over.
I stood in the middle of the room, clenching and unclenching my fists, powerless to stop them, somehow unable to leave or even to look away. Their faces were red and ugly with rage; they were both on the verge of tears. I was so choked up myself, I couldn’t even yell at them to stop.
Somehow it ended, and first my mother, then Linda, left the room. I turned to the mirror for reassurance that I existed. Staring at my reflection, I scrunched up my face and clawed at my image. I used to do this a lot, not just after their fights, fascinated by the way my acting-out gave rise to anger. Once, when Linda walked in on me, I quickly turned to her and chirped, “Look, I’m practicing to be a witch.”
“You don’t have to practice very hard,” she said, laughing hysterically at her joke. “Ha ha,” I said, pretending to be mad when what I felt was humiliated.
I was ten or eleven—we lived in a garden apartment in Glen Oaks, Queens—and Linda was fourteen. That is precisely why they fought—because Linda was fourteen and it was 1957, and Alan Freed was feeding the music of the ghetto to white teenagers, having dubbed it rock ‘n’ roll. My parents called it jungle music.
That music was what Linda lived for. On Saturday mornings she and Doris Friedman would get up before dawn, ride the subway to the Paramount Theater, and stand on line for Alan Freed’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Show. One Saturday they gave me the thrill of my life and took me with them.
Linda and Doris wore skin-tight black elastic pants with black turtleneck sweaters. Their hair was still in rollers, partially covered by scarves tied in some complicated hoodlum-girl fashion. While I trotted down to the bakery for onion rolls and chocolate milk, they sat on the pavement, securing our place in line, transforming themselves. They pulled out the hair curlers and threw them into their massive pocketbooks. Peering into hand mirrors, they applied dark black liner that curled upward at the ends of their lids, and thick mascara to their lashes. They colored their lips with Tattoo orange or pink—to this day I still remember the scent of Tattoo lipstick, which they let me wear as long as I didn’t tell.
By the time I returned with the rolls and milk, the line was around the block, and I had to seriously study faces to find them among the clones. They were casually smoking cigarettes.
“You smoke?” I almost dropped our breakfast. Linda, embarrassed by the titters of other kids, shush-shushed me, while Doris, who towered over both of us, ran her hand down the back of my head like I was some kind of pet. “Don’t tell,” she said, adding insult to injury. (As if!)
Linda no longer looked like my sister, but like every other girl in line. Her unique self had been replaced by Generic Teen. Not only that, but she personified the eternal Bad Girl, at that time in history known as tramp. It got her plenty of attention—which was of course the point. To this day Linda cherishes a grainy newspaper photo of herself, singing and clapping in her seat next to a horizontal, fainting Doris, captioned, One Girl Croons While the Other One Swoons.
The shows were four- or five-hour marathons. First they gave us a movie, Love Me Tender with Elvis or Rock Around the Clock starring Bill Haley and the Comets. Halfway through, audience harrassment began, all of us clapping and stomping our feet, demanding rock ‘n’ roll, until the film credits finally rolled. Then came an astounding lineup of performers: Chuck Berry, The Coasters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, The Shirelles, The Platters, one group after another without pause or intermission, dozens of our favorite acts, almost all male except for one or two “girl groups.” The Coasters were funny, Frankie Lymon was adorable, Chuck was…to tell you the truth, Chuck Berry scared me a little. He got the loudest screams and applause when he duck-walked across the stage, one leg bent, the other straight out in front, his guitar bopping up and down to Maybelline or Sweet Little Sixteen or, what I now consider one of the greatest protest songs ever recorded, School Days. Chuck looked faintly menacing, pointing his guitar this way and that like a machine gun, and there was something violently sexual about his music.
(R&R Trivia: Bruce Springsteen encapsulated School Days in one sentence of No Surrender: We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.)
Now, of course, I know what scared me about Chuck Berry: his skin was so black it gleamed under the stage lights, and I had not seen all that many black faces in my short life (nor, by the way, did I see them in the audience). On the heels of that fear came the first intimations of white guilt: I somehow knew to be ashamed. Meanwhile, Linda went into paroxysms of ecstasy whenever Chuck Berry took the stage, and, since I wanted to be like my older sister, I screamed and clapped and pretended to love Chuck Berry too. (By the time I became a full-fledged teenager, I actually did.)
Emulating Linda was so much a part of me that I wasn’t even aware of doing it. As sisters we were typical to the point of banality: the younger one who worships the older, the older sister who alternately bullies and protects the younger one. The first thing Linda did when my parents brought me home from the hospital was to twist open a hairpin and scrape the sharp metal point down my cheek, drawing blood. She was three years old, and she’s been clawing at my face ever since.
When my daughter had a second son, I watched the first one’s reaction. For two years, Jonah had existed in a paradise where he was the central figure in his parents’ lives. Like many of their generation, Stacy and Sam are super conscious about how they treat their children. Their lives center around the kids in a way that neither mine nor my parents’ ever did, and the kids know they’re loved unconditionally twenty-four/seven. At two, Jonah’s personality reflected this conscientious parenting.
Then a baby came to live in his house, stealing some of the attention he’d come to see as rightfully his. He was devastated, and as his grandmother I was devastated for him. I decided that my role would be to feign disinterest in the new baby and keep right on behaving as if only Jonah existed. I would be the one person in his life who still thought the world revolved around him.
One morning we were all in the living room, Jonah playing with his trucks while Lowell, who was learning to crawl, climbed all over them, oblivious to Jonah’s distress. After a few minutes of this, Jonah raised his head to the ceiling and wailed plaintively, “I wish I could just be alone with my toys!” His situation struck me as tragedy on a par with Hamlet’s.
On another visit I brought him a record of rock ‘n’ roll songs, newly packaged for toddlers: ironically, some of that jungle music comes off sounding like nursery rhymes today. In no time I had Jonah enthusiastically singing, One two three o’clock four o’clock ROCK! When I was leaving for the airport on Sunday, he sat in his little rocking chair looking sadly down at the floor, and said in a near-whisper, “I’ll listen to rock ‘n’ roll.”
My feelings and behavior surprised me: after all, I am a second child, the second same-sex child just like Lowell, the little sister who bore the brunt of sibling rivalry. Jonah taught me what my birth must have been like for Linda—and the amount of attention available in our household was perhaps a tenth of what it is in Jonah’s. (Of course, when Lowell got older and Jonah started treating him like an annoying kid brother, my allegiances balanced out. These days I identify with the baby of the family.)
Understanding Linda’s situation doesn’t mean I forgave her; it isn’t possible to forgive someone who continues childhood behavior throughout adulthood.
It’s the night of our annual family reunion, an extravaganza organized by my grandfather and held in the ballroom of a posh New York hotel. We are grown women with children, Linda recently divorced from the father of her daughter—yes, she did have that girl—while I was still married.
My husband, habitually late, gets us to the party at the tail end of cocktail hour, by which time my mother is three sheets to the wind. A social drinker, she became wittier and more sarcastic once she’d had a few, and was a source of amusement at parties. On this night she’d been flitting about from one person or group to another with Aunt Janice in tow, loudly announcing, “This is my favorite sister,” or introducing my father as “my favorite husband.” When we sat down to dinner, my sister leaned over and, in a low voice, told me my mother had dragged her over to someone who’d asked, “Is this your favorite daughter?” My mother replied, “Oh no, that one isn’t here yet.”
I figured it was only fair: Linda had remained Daddy’s Little Girl even after I came along. I imagine that my mother, determined not to concede another daughter to him, made me her favorite. Thus, it makes perfect sense that, after my father died, Linda began to fight me tooth and nail for Mommy. Having been a sometimes loyal sister in childhood, and my best friend and only support during my nightmare entry into motherhood, Linda now regressed, picking up where she’d left off with the hairpin.
In 1986 my mother took us to Hawaii. The year before, it had been Paris; she had decided to use her not insubstantial widowhood money to travel with her daughters–a well-intentioned plan, but ultimately as much of a fantasy as her bandbox. To begin with, Linda and I barely knew each other: in the early 70s she’d moved with her second husband to California, and we had little contact.
Mother’s Day happened to fall on the first Sunday of our ten-day Hawaaian tour, something I’d failed to realize or plan for. Linda, on the other hand, came prepared with a card and gift. Not having money to buy one myself, I rewrote the corny old poem that spells out MOTHER (“M is for the many things she gave me…”), turning it into a satire of our trip to that point. When I gave it to my mother the next morning, she read it out loud, laughing with delight. A few minutes later, when she went into the bathroom, Linda leaned close to me and spat, “You tryin’ to show me up?” This, from a woman in her forties.
Until that moment, I’d been honestly unaware that a rivalry even existed. I have since tried, in and out of therapy, to pinpoint the ways in which I may have contributed to this, but I still don’t see it. Sure, when Linda told me the favorite-daughter story I was secretly pleased, even as I reassured her with, “Oh, she’s just drunk.” I certainly did not write that poem to make Linda look bad–in fact, when she presented my mother with her gift, a bold-colored billowy blouse that almost screamed out Made for Rhoda, I felt inadequate with my pathetic poem.
When my mother died and I went through her clothes, I found dozens and dozens of blouses like the one Linda gave her that Mother’s Day—it turned out she’d been sending gifts on even the most trivial occasions. Besides the blouses there were colorful scarves, costume jewelry, and kitschy chachkalas that unerringly matched my mother’s passions in some way. It was hard to believe this deluge of gifts had passed between women who used to beat one another up in the closet. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, their relationship had changed.
How was it possible? I wondered, remembering the intensity of my mother’s abuse and the pure hatred it inspired. Not only had my mother berated Linda in private, she had openly complained to anyone who’d listen. Her chief confidante, of course, was Aunt Janice, whose family followed ours with every move, so that the sisters always lived within walking distance of one another. First in the courtyards of Glen Oaks, and later on our Long Island lawn, they would sit outside on folding chairs, unmindful that we could hear them through the open windows. Words drifted up on the summer breeze, words like disgusting, and tramp attached to Linda’s name. Janice somehow managed to support my mother without actually dissing Linda. The same cannot be said for our extended family.
Most Sundays we drove into Manhattan, to the huge Upper West Side apartment where my great-aunt Ettie lived with her husband and mother, my great-grandmother. It was the meeting place for my mother’s clan: my grandfather and his third wife, his two brothers with their wives and kids, assorted relatives I never got straight. Sooner or later Linda would get bored and turn on the radio, the signal for my mother to begin her litany.
I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of Grampa, tracing designs in the embossed carpet with my finger, while he and everyone else spiritedly critiqued Linda’s hair, makeup, choice of friends, choice of music. Eventually Linda would unplug the radio and retreat to the tiny room behind the kitchen that had once housed the maid—the “colored girl.” (I don’t know if Aunt Ettie ever had a maid, but every big Upper West Side apartment had a room for one.) Meanwhile, the criticism continued unabated. Although I was uncomfortable, even embarrassed for my relatives’ rude behavior, from my position on the floor I learned valuable lessons. I learned how to deceive them, to gain their approval while cultivating a secret identity. I saw that Linda’s mistake was primarily her appearance—it broadcast who she was. So I cultivated the girl-next-door look, and was more or less ignored, even when my adolescence overlapped with Linda’s. So obsessed were they with my sister that I got away with murder.
By the time I was fifteen I was even wilder than Linda, yet was never suspected of anything more delinquent than letting my friends copy my homework. Who’s stupid now? I would think every time I told them I was babysitting, or doing homework with Kathy, and then went out drinking, using a fake ID, with my friends.
After all, it was the only satisfaction available to me—pride in my cleverness. I simply could not, no matter what I did, grab their attention. I could not get them to see me—until, following in Linda’s footsteps, I got pregnant.
