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Due to our legendary Brownies appearance, we were deluged with offers to perform at kids' birthday parties, so we officially became the Beatle Girls. Mary immersed herself completely in the role, carrying a picture of Jane Asher in her wallet and talking in a Liverpool-by-way-of-Boston accent. No one dared criticize, though, because she was the big draw, the fabbest of the Fab Four.

We bought silver ID bracelets with our designated Beatles name on it, although I cheated and had mine engraved PAUL. On weekends, we strolled around town in our Beatles outfits, hoping to attract attention. Though I was tired of being the Ugly One, I loved my Beatle boots, which despite their two-inch Cuban heels were comfortable even when running away from our fans. One Saturday, we caused a near riot in the frozen food section of the Andover Co-Op. The Brownie with the Etch A Sketch screamed,
“Look! It's the Beatle Girls!”
and Brownies came out of nowhere, chasing us out of the supermarket and down Main Street. It was straight out of
A Hard Day's Night
and we were totally exhilarated, although we feigned annoyance because we were losing our privacy and soon we wouldn't be able to go anywhere without getting mobbed. “
We need to tyke a 'olidye wiff our birds
,” Mary said. “
Some place pryvit, like the Galápagos
.”

There was some discussion about getting Beatles haircuts, but none of us wanted to go that far. When I mentioned it to my mother, she didn't think it was such a bad idea. “After all, you have the boots. Why not the hair?” My mother never liked my hair; it was now medium length and naturally straight, which in her mind meant lacking body.

For years she'd been getting perms from Mrs. Godfrey and anything that wasn't tight and curly read “limp.” “Why not go to Mrs. Godfrey's and let her take a look,” she suggested.

Many of the top British models were wearing their hair in a Vidal Sassoon bob, and I thought it might look cute on me. Armed with a stack of fashion magazines, I told Mrs. Godfrey exactly what I wanted: “Something mod and totally fab.” She glanced at the pictures, assuring me that she could easily do any of the styles. Something told me it was a big mistake to let Mrs. Godfrey go anywhere near my head, but since fame had already gone to my head, I wasn't thinking clearly. She began chopping and chopping, and when she was finished, I didn't look like a British model. I didn't look fab. I looked like Moe of the Three Stooges
.
Not wanting to offend Mrs. Godfrey, who was a perfectly nice woman even if she wasn't Vidal Sassoon, I pronounced it “different.”

“It's certainly ‘mod,'” she said.

To my mother's eyes, it was worse than mod. It was the dreaded word:
limp
.

“Are you thinking of a perm?” Mrs. Godfrey asked.

My mother nodded.

Two hours later, I arrived home with short curly hair, which, had it been longer, would have counted as Andover's first Afro. “Why is your hair all frizzy?” Bumpa wanted to know. I stared at my mother. “Blame her,” I said. It went through my mind that she did it on purpose to get Paul all to herself. When she came upstairs to ask if I wanted to listen to
A Hard Day's Night,
I told her to leave.

“What happened to you?” Agnes said when I walked into the school yard the next morning. “Did you get electrocuted or something?” All Mary could say was “
Blimey!
”

During English, Sister Superior charged into the classroom with some “very disturbing news.” We figured the gig was up for Ethel Berger and that she'd be carted away to prison for being a Russian spy and a terrible geography teacher. “I would like to see the Beatle Girls,” she said. Thinking she wanted to book us for a performance, Agnes reached for her calendar, but Sister Superior began tapping her wooden clicker against her palm. One by one, we slowly stood up.

“Where's the other Beatle Girl?” Sister Superior asked.

“I think they're all accounted for,” Ethel Berger said.

“But aren't there five Beatles?”

“No, you're thinking of the Dave Clark Five,” Bridget offered. “Or maybe you think Pete Best's still in the band, but he's not.”

“Enough!” Sister Superior said. “Now what in the name of all the saints and angels in heaven do you think you're doing impersonating those hoodlums?”

“The Beatles aren't hoods,” Bridget said. “They're rockers who went mod.”

“Go to my office, Bridget. I'll deal with you later.”

“You four are a total disgrace to womanhood.” Sister Superior stared at me. “And
you
? I suppose this is the latest Beatle hairdo?”

“Not really.”

“You don't even look like a girl anymore. Boys, would you marry someone with hair like this?”

The boys, deliberating for all of a second, held their noses and screamed, “
Pee-Yew!
” Francis What's-His-Name screamed the loudest, and from then on, I never used my middle name, not even the first initial.

“This charade has gone on long enough,” Sister Superior said. “I am officially disbanding the Beatle Girls. Tomorrow, I want you to bring in your Beatles costumes and whatever else you have, and they will be confiscated.” Afterward, she made the rounds of all the younger grades, informing them that the Beatle Girls were dead. I'd heard that some of the Brownies cried, but they quickly got over it. The next day, I handed over my plastic rings, my white dickey, and my Beatle boots. I'd left my Paul ID bracelet at home, but Sister Superior didn't seem to notice.

“That's 'orrible about your boots, mate,” said Mary, who was still clinging to the last vestiges of fame.

Word must have gotten around, because my mother seemed to know all the details when I got home. My grandfather was waiting for me with my usual snack of a Hostess Yodel and milk.

“I hear the Beatles have been disbanded,” she said. “What was the offense?”

“You're looking at it,” I said, pointing to my hair.

“That's nonsense, Patricia. It had nothing to do with your hair. I heard Sister Superior took away all your things, including your boots. They cost good money, you know. That's the last time you are ever going to talk me into getting you a pair of stupid shoes.”

Now my Beatle boots were stupid. She'd loved the Beatles. Had Sister Superior gotten to her too? While my mother's infatuation with Paul had been annoying, it had elevated her briefly into the realm of extraordinary, and now she was just a plain, unimaginative housewife. “I don't want my Yodel,” I said, stomping upstairs.

We didn't speak for the next three days, and then one afternoon, I found my Beatle boots in my closet. “I told Sister Superior you needed them because of your foot problems,” my mother explained.

That night, I took off my Paul ID bracelet and placed it on her pillow. It was the least I could do for a fellow Beatles fan.

A Ghillie Out of Water

S
t. Augustine's ended at eighth grade, and instead of following my friends to neighboring Catholic schools, I enrolled at Andover Junior High. It was a huge gamble. The nuns had brainwashed us into thinking the public school kids were practically devil worshippers, and we were advised to avoid them in case we caught their “spiritual disease.” The only public school kid I knew was my epileptic neighbor, whose brother rode a Harley with the Hell's Angels, so I feared the worst.

To bolster my self-confidence, I immersed myself in fashion magazines, which Bumpa bought for me out of his small Brooks School pension, warning me to keep it a secret from my mother. With the advent of the Swinging Sixties and its emphasis on youth, high heels were out and Courrèges-style go-go boots and girlish flats were in. Soon, Twiggy would replace Jean Shrimpton as the model everyone wanted to look like and even mature women aspired to her waifish appearance.

It was either in
Mademoiselle
or
Seventeen
that I spotted the perfect “back-to-school” outfit: a corduroy dress with a rounded collar and Empire waist, textured stockings, and lace-up ghillies. These were similar to my old schoolmate's sword-dancing shoes. Who knew she was such a trendsetter? The salesman at Reinhold's had never heard of ghillies, advising me to stick with Bass Weejuns. “That's what the girls at the junior high are wearing,” he said smugly. “You'll see . . .”

Most people thought that Weejuns were named after an Indian tribe, probably because the name sounded like the pejorative
Injun
. In fact, the word was a slang term for Norwegian fishermen, whose locally crafted moccasins were “discovered” in the late nineteenth century when British anglers went salmon fishing in the fjords. By the 1930s, wealthy Americans and Europeans were traveling to Norway, and after the slippers were spotted in Palm Beach,
Esquire
magazine, along with Rogers Peet, the men's clothing company, collaborated with Bass to make a sturdier version. It ultimately became the penny loafer, and an Ivy League staple.

Right before school started, I convinced my mother to take me to the Northshore Shopping Center, one of the first and largest malls in New England. In addition to dozens of stores, it also had a bowling alley, a twin cinema, a kiddie amusement park, and Mt. Carmel Chapel, the first religious sanctuary ever to grace a shopping complex. The mall was in Peabody, so “going to Peabody” became synonymous with shopping. En route, we passed the town of Danvers, which since the late nineteenth century had been home to the state mental hospital, previously known as the Danvers Lunatic Asylum. Just as
Peabody
was code for going shopping,
Danvers
was code for going crazy. As if having a mental institution in the town wasn't creepy enough, Danvers, in its earliest incarnation as Salem Village, had hosted the witchcraft trials. Women were banned from wearing high heels, which were considered the work of the devil.

Nancy, who was three at the time, was sitting on Bumpa's lap in the backseat. Except for our mutual antagonism toward our mother, we had little in common. Nancy's grooming habits were abominable. Having been exposed to Mrs. Godfrey in utero, she'd learned at a very early age never to let anyone near her head. If my mother attempted to untangle one of the many knots dotting her stringy hair, she'd scream so loudly my mother feared the neighbors would call the police. My mother spent so much time worrying about the neighbors, we could have been back in old Salem. In my mother's defense, Nancy's hair did give the appearance of demonic possession, but you had to admire her for not buckling to social convention.

Once we parked the car in the huge lot, Bumpa went off to buy S. S. Pierce orange marmalade, which he spread on his English muffin each morning. I headed to the shoe department at Jordan Marsh, pretending that the woman and ratty-haired kid were taking a break from the mental hospital's production of
Oliver.

“Oh, this is too much,” my mother said as Nancy grabbed a pair of high heels and took off with them. “We're all going to wind up in jail.”

While my mother chased Nancy, I found a salesman and asked if they stocked ghillies. I had my magazine ready in case he gave me a blank stare, but he asked, “What color?” I hadn't anticipated having a choice, so I was temporarily overwhelmed.

“I'll bring them all
out so you can see
everything
,” he said. I'd never knowingly met a homosexual. I didn't even know what the word meant, but he wasn't like any of the boring Reinhold's salesmen, whose sartorial choices leaned toward wrinkled shirts and brown pants. He was wearing a suit, with a colorful pocket square, and a gold pinkie ring. His thick black eyebrows were quite stunning, right down to the pronounced arch. When Nancy returned from her wild shoplifting spree, my mother having returned the heels to their proper place, I was in the process of deciding between taupe or dark brown suede. “Of course brown is more practical,” the salesman was saying, “but taupe is
très chic
.”

“I'm afraid taupe is going to get too dirty,” my mother said, trying not to stare at his brows. “She has foot problems, so she's very hard on her shoes. I think we should go with brown.”

“Big mistake!” he said. “Brown is common, and clearly your daughter is not.”

I loved the man! Who cared that his brows looked like Elizabeth Taylor's?

“But taupe gets dirty,” my mother said weakly.

“Taupe,” he pronounced, “is
divine
!”

Except on the late-night movies, my mother had never heard
divine
uttered with such theatrical finesse and authority. There was no arguing with him. The shoes were mine.

Since they were more expensive than my mother had anticipated, she reluctantly put them on her Jordan's charge. It was supposed to be used only in the case of a “dire emergency,” although what kind of situation would be so calamitous that you'd need a department store charge was something I never figured out. But that wasn't my business. The important thing was that my father hated credit cards. He hated them more than turnips, which was the only food he disliked. My father paid his bills the day they arrived and didn't believe in racking up debt. My mother's view of finance was a little fuzzier. Every Monday, my father “deposited” her allowance in the “Sock Trust Company,” which was located in his top bureau drawer. She didn't have to deal with checks. All she had to do was unfold a pair of freshly laundered socks, and like magic, the money appeared.

We met up with my grandfather at the Mt. Carmel Chapel, where he was deep in prayer. He was a very religious man and a soft touch for charity. He'd recently “adopted” a girl from South Africa through a Catholic relief organization. Every month, he sent money to the girl's family, and Mosa sent letters and pictures back. She wanted to go to school in the United States, and my mother was afraid she'd show up at our doorstep one day. There was only one African American family in Andover. They'd lived in the town for several generations, but we never saw them. “I'm not sure how she'll fit in,” my mother said, looking at a blurry picture of Mosa standing next to a goat.

While my grandfather finished up his prayers, Nancy managed to get into the box of blueberry muffins he'd picked up at Jordan's bakery. The muffins had gigantic tops coated with at least a half cup of sugar, and the blueberries were hot and gooey. “You can't eat muffins in church,” my mother whispered, yanking her outside. Nancy didn't like to be pulled any more than she liked getting her hair brushed. Assuming a defensive crouch, she flopped on the floor of the Catholic bookstore and wouldn't get up until my mother bribed her with a St. Christopher key ring.

“Did you get the shoes?” my grandfather asked as we walked to the car.

“She thinks money grows on trees,” my mother said.

“No, I don't. It grows in socks.”

“Shhhh!” she whispered, as if we were discussing a money-laundering scheme instead of one that involved actual laundry. “All I can say is that you better live and die in those ghillies.”

I died in them. I died a thousand deaths and that was only the first day of school. The salesman at Reinhold's had been right. The girls at the junior high weren't wearing ghillies. They weren't wearing mod dresses or textured tights. They were wearing Bass Weejuns, along with cable cardigans and floral print dresses and A-line skirts. The most popular brand was The Villager, the brainchild of Max Raab, a Jewish Philadelphian who was known as the Dean of the Prep Look. A man of widely divergent interests, he not only popularized the conventional WASP style, but he also optioned Anthony Burgess's
A Clockwork Orange,
about futuristic gang violence in England. He'd wanted the Beatles to star in it, but when that didn't work out for reasons obvious to any Beatles fan, he hooked up with the director Stanley Kubrick and served as the film's executive producer.

The girl opposite me kept staring at my shoes in a way that made me feel even more self-conscious. She was wearing a blue dress decorated with pink ladybugs and Weejuns. Her long dark hair had a low side-part, and she'd tucked a portion of it behind her ears. I glanced around the classroom. Half the girls had the exact same hairstyle with the exact same side-part. Though my perm had grown out, my hair was still very short. Mrs. Godfrey had given me a pair of fake pearls for eighth-grade graduation, and I was so touched I sacrificed myself to her scissors. To call the result Twiggy-esque would have given the erroneous impression that I actually had hair.

“I think I need Weejuns,” I said when I came home after school.

My mother looked as if her head was about to spiral off her neck and go into orbit. “Weejuns?” she shouted. “Are you crazy? We just bought you those ghillies. What do you expect us to do with them?”

“Maybe we can send them to Mosa,” suggested Bumpa, who was grinding lamb for shepherd's pie, while Emily monitored for eyeballs.

“Dad, they're taupe!” my mother said.

“What's wrong with that?”

“Mosa lives in a mud hut! They'll be filthy in two seconds.”

At that moment, my piano teacher, Miss Wilhelmina Hagenauer, arrived at the door. She'd also been my mother's piano teacher and still only charged only $2 a lesson, including gas. Miss Hagenauer was in her mid-seventies and, as my grandfather put it, “bigger than a grand piano.” In addition, she suffered from narcolepsy, and at the beginning of every lesson, she'd always ask for a pot of very strong tea and then spend the next hour dozing. By the time she taught Nancy, she didn't even bother with the tea and went straight to sleep. As a result, none of us ever learned to read music, but for some mysterious reason, we all played extremely well. Miss Hagenauer hoped I'd go to the New England Conservatory of Music, where if nothing else I'd finally learn the difference between a half and quarter note.

After my lesson, my mother paid Miss Hagenauer, who tucked the money into a paisley case that contained an embroidered hankie and two automatic pencils. As she was getting ready to leave, she asked how I liked my new school. “She hates the ghillies,” my mother said. Miss Hagenauer, who was slightly disoriented from sleeping through my rousing performance of Chopin's Polonaise Militaire, thought
ghillies
was slang for
girls
. “It takes time to adjust,” she advised. “I'm sure these ‘ghillies' are perfectly nice once you get to know them.”