Although I had two older sisters, I grew up feeling alone. We were five years apart and I was the youngest. My sisters called me the baby, and while that was a non-negotiable fact, I was smart and recognized any time my older sister lied to my parents, and knew how my middle sister let boys squeeze her boobs, and cast evil looks my way from across the room as she giggled on the telephone. She sounded so incredibly dumb, and I told her so, which always ended with a series of shrieks. “Mommy, tell her to get out of here!” But I could go nowhere except to a vacant lot outside our house where I did spend considerable time removed from my sisters’ endless posing and making weird faces in the mirror. “Are you kissing yourself or your boyfriend?” My older sister turned rapidly away from the mirror and told me to shut up. “You’re such a baby.”
Crammed into a single bedroom with one closet, our lack of space contributed to our general discomfort. We lived on the third floor of an apartment which was built sometime after World War II as veterans traded their dog tags for wedding rings and families needed a place to call home. While my sisters and I shared the one bedroom, my parents slept on a roll-away couch in the living room. In the morning, we took turns pounding on the bathroom door. “Hurry up. I have to use it!”
My mother, a woman with a sweet disposition and a rake of curly hair, considered herself a natural beauty. As such, she had no use for cosmetics or fingernail polish or perfume, although her Silent Night powder that she used after every shower did have an unmistakable scent. She was the family’s designated negotiator, and my father deferred to her in all matters “Jeanne, you do it.” But as capable as my mother was, raising three girls over an expanse of fifteen years had worn her out, and she would just as soon, not do it. After all, I was her “change of life” baby, born at a time when her generation had finished bearing children. She’d bend down to my five-year-old self, brush my ponytail and softly suggested, “Why don’t you go outside and play.” Which I was always happy to do, released from Saturday morning chores, dusting furniture and whatever else my sisters wanted to palm off on me “You’re such a baby.”