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Though it's nice to be tall when you're older, it's a handicap when you're towering above the majority of available partners. For the rest of the semester, I danced with other tall girls, or girls with premature acne, girls with weird hair, girls with thick eyeglasses, fat girls, skinny girls. We took turns leading so we wouldn't alienate the boys even further when and if we ever got a chance to dance with them.

We progressed from the waltz to the foxtrot and then to the rhumba. One afternoon, as a special surprise, we even learned the Mexican hat dance. During the last class of the semester, when I'd all but written off the whole experience, Nathan asked me to dance. I was over the moon. He only came up to my shoulder, but I tried through my untested powers of mental telepathy to convince him that I was cute and petite. After we finished the foxtrot, I thanked him for the dance. As we were all leaving, I saw him huddled together with his friends and I waved good-bye—a bold move for me. Afterward, I heard him say, “What a scarecrow!”

When my mother came to pick me up, I started to cry and told her I hated the November Club and everything it represented.

“What does it represent?” she asked. “The foxtrot? What's so awful about that? We paid good money for you to learn how to dance, and now you're hysterical? Really, Patricia.”

When I got home, I exiled my patent-leather flats to the inner reaches of my closet. They were no longer shoes but clumps of hay that could easily be made into a scarecrow whose purpose was to frighten away cute boys with impeccable manners. To this day, I still can't foxtrot, or make small talk, but I do like patent leather.

Richard Cardinal Cushing, who had offered the invocation at President Kennedy's inaugural, was set to preside at our confirmation, and we had spent hours practicing. He was required to give each confirmand a symbolic slap on the cheek as a reminder that we had to be strong in defense of our faith. The Cuban Missile Crisis had happened six months earlier and the nuns were obsessed with Castro. In case he showed up in Andover wearing battle fatigues and chomping on a cigar, we had our instructions. Even if he threatened to pull out our fingernails or tongues, we had to resist committing a sacrilegious act, such as spitting on the crucifix or stomping on Communion wafers. It was a test of our will, and like Maria Goretti, we could respond only one way: “Death—but not sin.”

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 training 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.