Easter Sunday, 1966.
My purse was shiny yellow vinyl. It held a quarter for the offering plate, and a special hankie that came with a story.
My mother was abandoned by her parents when she was eight. Six days after she was delivered to the grandmother who had agreed to raise her, the little girl held in her hand a square of soft linen embroidered with a dozen tiny French knots of lavender lilacs.
My great-grandmother knew lilacs were my mother’s favorite flower. Maybe a small piece of fabric full of them could make a little girl believe someone still loved her. At bedtime, Mom used to finger those knots like beads on a rosary until she fell asleep. When I was eight, she gave the hankie to me.
That’s a lot of life packed into a single hankie, but Mom’s stories were often like that, full of dips and turns that often left me wondering, as a child, if other families were as complicated as ours. Soon enough, I learned the answer is yes, always yes.
In 1966, Mom and I wore white gloves on Easter because Jackie Kennedy wore white gloves. The portrait of her husband, our murdered president, still hung in our dining room next to Jesus—the Jack-and-Jesus wall, Dad called it—and Mom regularly mentioned how Caroline Kennedy and I were just four months apart in age. She said this as if she were talking about a girl down the street and not someone whose life was worlds away.
For this Easter photo, my father had ordered us kids to gather around Mom and stand still.
Stand still.
Stand still.
His mantra whenever he held up the camera, which was often, and it scared me stiff when I was little. Every time he barked “stand still,” I’d hold my breath, with comical consequences. So many photos of big-eyed me looking like a human bullfrog, in plaid.
In this photo, I am eight years old, trying to mimic poses I saw in Teen Magazine and Seventeen. Left knee slightly bent, chin tucked down, eyes on the camera. Mom probably told me to stand straight. Her habit. She was four-feet-eleven and was constantly reminding her three daughters that she would “have given anything” to be tall like us. Occasionally someone will still note my posture. I always give credit to Mom. Gratitude has no expiration date, she taught us.
That’s my sister Toni to my left. She was four and devoted to me. Every weekday morning, I would leave for school, and she’d stand at the screen door wailing and screaming my name until I was out of sight.
“Conneeee! Conneeee!”
I used to feel bad for her, but it was nice to know someone hated to see me go. I always worry about being an imposition, which is probably why this memory has stayed with me. At least one person in my life could never get enough of me.
My brother Chuckie was three in this photo. A friend once told me that children don’t just push their parents’ buttons, they install them. Chuckie, right there. Dad said, “Stand still” and Chuckie decided on the spot that there’d be a price to pay. I wasn’t with my father when he picked up the photo order that included this picture, but I am certain he showed it to my mother and said, “Why does he always do this? Why can’t he just smile?”
My sister Leslie is missing from this picture, and I don’t know why but I mention it because she surely will when she sees this. “You had to pick this one?”
Les is the middle daughter. “Our sensitive one,” Mom used to tell everyone, and what did that make me?
Mom had no patience for such questions. “You’re the big sister,” she said, as if that explained why she felt comfortable casting me as a third-grade iron-willed matron. She never stopped believing in my power to influence my siblings. When we were all in our thirties, she still insisted it was up to me to set an example.
“No one cares, Mom.”
She reached up and pulled me down by my earlobe. Ouch, ouch, ouch.
“They’re watching your every move,” she said, in her best ghost-story voice. “I know, because I’m watching them.”
A year after this photo, we moved into the bigger house owned by the same landlord just a few yards up the shared, cinder driveway. A family with a baby girl moved into this one, and I babysat for her on Saturday mornings. Mom let them keep our fiberglass curtains—you can see a glimpse of them in the window—but you can bet the porch swing left with us.
I never got used to walking into that house without our family in it. An early lesson, perhaps, in how you can only ask so much of us when it comes to accepting change.
One autumn evening, soon after we moved, I stood next to Dad as he burned leaves in the rusty barrel next to our garage. I miss our old house, I told him.
He shook his head. “That was never our house,” he said. “Our house will be the one we own.” He’d work eight more years of overtime for that dream to come true.
One photo. So many stories.
You know how that goes.
Happy Easter to those who celebrate. If you are struggling, may the day land gently.
I love every memory you shared. This, however, is the line I will now borrow forever: children don’t just push their parents’ buttons, they install them.
I don't know how you make me cry so often! Beautiful!