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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.

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.

“She's leaving to go to Macartneys?” he asked. Macartneys was a clothing store near Reinhold's.

“No, she's leaving you for Paul McCartney. Of the Beatles.”

He nodded his head and returned to the paper.

My mother's love affair with Paul did have some advantages. I never had to beg for Beatles albums. She bought them for me the minute they were released, along with all the special-edition fan magazines, as well as
16
and
Tiger Beat.
She knew that Pete Best had been the original drummer and that George was dating Pattie Boyd and that Ringo, whom she insisted on calling the Ugly One, had suffered pleurisy as a child. “They should have kept Pete,” she'd say. “At least he was cute.”

I had my own record player, a red one that you could snap shut and carry like a suitcase, and sometimes my mother and I would listen to
Meet the Beatles!
while sprawled across my canopy bed. Inevitably, she'd spoil the mood by pointing out my sloppy hospital corners or the pile of dirty clothes on the floor, and I'd threaten to pack up my record player and hit the road. She'd say, “You're lucky to have a mother, unlike Paul, who lost his own mother in 1956, when he was only fourteen.” And I'd say, “Yeah, but I bet you don't know how old she was when she died.” And she'd say, “Ha! She was forty-seven, and her name was Mary. Anything else you'd like to know?”

Bridget couldn't believe my mother was a Beatles fan. “My mom puts her fingers in her ears every time they come on the radio,” she said as we were waiting outside during a practice nuclear bomb evacuation. I warned her to lower her voice because our eighth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Ethelburger, was coming our way. She had heavily lidded eyes, a sloped neck, and thick, curved fingernails; she crept across the school yard on her short, stout legs, rocking from side to side. Since she taught geography and spoke endlessly of her fascination with the Galápagos Islands, we thought of her as an ancient tortoise that had over the centuries migrated to Massachusetts.

No one could decipher her foreign accent. Francis What's-His-Name came up with the brilliant idea that she was a Russian Jew. “How many Catholics do you know with the name Burger?” he asked. It didn't take long for Sister Ethelburger to go from being the world's biggest land tortoise to assuming the identity of Ethel Rosenberg, the famous spy. We didn't realize that the real Ethel Rosenberg had been dead for ten years, only that she'd given atomic secrets to the Russians. In our version, Ethelburger or Ethel
Berger,
had divorced Mr. Rosenberg, converted to Catholicism, and entered a convent, where her superior knowledge of nuclear weapons and endangered species had led to an assignment at St. Augustine's. When the Russians invaded, they'd get the shock of their lives when an elderly nun threatened to drop the A-bomb or a gigantic tortoise on their heads.

In between learning about the weather conditions on the Galápagos, my friends and I conspired to move to London, where we'd get jobs as models or at Biba, the famous fashion boutique. Ever since kindergarten, I'd had the same close friends—Mary, Agnes, and Susan. Agnes and Susan were best friends, while I was Agnes's runner-up. Not only was Agnes the smartest girl in class but also the one most likely to leave Andover for Greenwich Village and have love affairs with famous artists or heroin addicts. With her long brown hair and olive skin, she looked like Joan Baez and was always quoting Bob Dylan. One of her most enviable attributes, especially at a school that valued handwriting over actual writing, was her beautiful penmanship. Before one of the nuns confiscated it, she wrote with a cigarette-shaped pen that she occasionally “smoked,” driving the boys wild. She had no interest in her peers, however, setting her sights on older, more accomplished men, such as Dylan, or John Lennon, or the Central Catholic High School junior, who wore Jade East cologne. It had Oriental letters on the box and a strange musk smell that Agnes said was a powerful aphrodisiac.

Every spring, the Girl Scouts put on a show to entertain the Brownies, and Agnes thought it would be fun if we impersonated the Beatles. Since John was Agnes's favorite, she wanted to be him, while Susan claimed George, and Mary, who had brown eyes and was left-handed, seemed the logical choice for Paul. That left me with Ringo, who was nobody's favorite, except maybe his mother's, but if she was anything like mine, she probably liked Paul best.

Informed of the news, my mother reacted as if I'd had a sex-change operation and had actually become Ringo. “So you're the Ugly One?” she said. “You're the incredible sad sack with the big nose?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You should quit the band,” she advised. “They clearly don't appreciate you.”

Yoko Ono hadn't even appeared on the scene and my mother was all ready to break up the Beatles before we'd made our first appearance. “Ringo,” she repeated, shaking her head. “You'd better be careful not to sit on any damp stoops or you could get pleurisy.”

For the next two weeks, we practiced lip-synching to “She Loves You,” shaking our heads in unison as we mimed the falsetto
ooooohs.
I played percussion with two pencils, while the others played air guitar. It soon became evident that Mary was the breakout star. Her resemblance to Paul was uncanny. She must have practiced his mannerisms for hours, perfecting the way he cocked his head and jutted out his chin, casting his angelic eyes heavenward. When my mother caught us practicing in our basement, she nearly fainted. “It's remarkable,” she said. “It's Paul. It's really Paul.”

Bumpa made me a cardboard drum set, painting
The Beatles
on the front. I was dying to get a pair of Beatle boots, which I hoped would compensate for the psychological damage that would ultimately result from being Ringo.

“Beatle boots—are you crazy?” was my mother's first reaction. Her second was “Your father is going to have
plenty
to say about that!” Eventually, I wore her down, and we went off to Reinhold's.

“What kind of girl wants Beatle boots?” the salesman asked.

“Girls who impersonate Ringo,” my mother said. “He's the Ugly One.”

“They're all ugly,” he said. “That hair! It's a disgrace.”

“Particularly Ringo's,” she said.

Fed up with the way they were dumping on my alter ego, I blurted out that my mother was in love with Paul. Her face turned bright red. Realizing that I might have jeopardized my Beatle boots, I added, “You know, of Peter, Paul and Mary.” The salesman started singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” encouraging my mother to join in. She only knew that Puff lived by the sea and nothing about Jackie Paper or the land called Hana Lee. For a major Peter, Paul and Mary fan, it was a pretty weak showing, and the salesman looked suspicious.

I reminded him that we'd come for Beatle boots, and he told me they didn't make them for ladies but that he'd try to find a men's pair. “This is getting worse by the minute,” my mother whispered. “Now you're going to be wearing men's shoes. Your father is so upset he can hardly speak.”

“He doesn't anyway.”

The salesman had no concept of Beatles footwear, presenting me with several pairs of construction boots. Since we were years away from the Village People, I showed him a picture I'd torn out from a Beatles magazine. The salesman put on his glasses to study it. “These are like flamenco boots,” he said. “You know,
Olé!
”
After he disappeared into the stockroom, I asked my mother for some change so I could get a ring from the vending machine. I already had seven, but Ringo wore four on each hand, so I was short one. You never knew what was going to slide down the chute, and I got a plastic tarantula, a devil, and a Rat Fink before scoring big with a skull ring.

“You may be in luck,” the salesman said. Opening the first box, he pulled out a black boot with elastic inserts, a side zipper, and a two-inch Cuban heel. After referencing my
Beatles
magazine, I said, “That's it!” The boots even fit.

On the day of the performance, we wore white dickeys, navy blazers, and black slacks, tucking our hair inside our collars to make it look shorter. I was the only one with Beatle boots. Agnes said that since I was behind a fake drum set, nobody would see my feet, but I told her it was important to get into character. The Brownies were in the school auditorium, waiting for the show to begin, while we stood backstage with one of our classmates, who was preparing to do her famous Scottish sword dance. Ellie was dressed in the traditional costume of tartan skirt, white frilly blouse, velvet tam, and lace-up shoes known as ghillies.

There are some people who shouldn't be around swords, and Ellie was one of them. Though agile and light on her feet, she suffered from stage fright and reached levels of near hysteria whenever she had to perform. Her mother was usually on hand to calm her down. “You can do it, you can do it,” she kept whispering as her daughter stood shaking in a corner. Because we'd seen her do it a dozen times, we wished she'd dispense with the theatrics and just get on with it. The Brownies were getting restless. Finally, hoisting the two giant swords over her shoulders, she strode onstage and one of the Brownies, thinking she was about to be slaughtered, ran for the exit.

Ellie placed the swords in a cross formation while her mother played recorded bagpipe music. With her arms flung high, she began dancing counterclockwise around the swords before stepping inside them. The goal was not to touch the blades or inflict self-injury. From backstage, we heard the sounds of metal grating against metal. She kept tripping, and I pictured the girl in
The
Red Shoes
with her feet all bloodied, or worse, with no feet. Ellie limped off the stage, telling her mother that she needed to go to the emergency room.

After the Brownie leader announced that we'd be taking a short break, the rumor spread that the Scottish dancer was dead. “This is a disaster,” Agnes said. “The Brownies are crying.”

After the swords were removed, I set up my cardboard drum set and sat on a folding metal chair, while the other girls stood in front of me. As the Brownie leader pulled open the curtain, she cried, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!” When the Brownies realized we weren't the real thing, they went back to sniffling and comparing merit badges. One fiddled with an Etch A Sketch. The school janitor was in charge of our music, and after we gave him a sign, he placed the needle on the 45 of “She Loves You.” When one of the Brownies noticed Mary's startling resemblance to Paul, she let out a scream, setting off a chain reaction. Shaking her head during the
ooooh
part, Mary caused such a sensation that the Brownie with the Etch A Sketch rushed the stage and had to be restrained.

After the performance, the Brownies crowded around Mary, referring to her as Mr. McCartney and asking for her autograph. Things grew so unruly that the Brownie leader suggested we leave the building, and as we ran out, we could hear the girls chanting, “Paul, Paul, Paul . . .”