I love all my siblings but M and I have a special bond, one
forged by the same traumatic, childhood experience – we both survived our
mother’s attempt to dress us in haute couture at holidays. (Or about as haute
couture as one can get in suburbia in the late fifties/early sixties off the
Sears sales rack.)
M and I dreaded major holidays because we knew that somewhere
lurking among the gaily-wrapped Christmas presents or among the
cellophane-covered Easter baskets were our dreaded holiday outfits.
Mom would pull them out with a flourish and force us to wear
them to church – stiff, itchy, girly dresses with big poufy sleeves and huge
sashes she would tie into enormous bows that bounced off our backsides like
old-fashioned bustles.
We weren’t allowed to complain that we hated the dresses or
that the material gave us rashes or that we hated the colors. They came in pink
and yellow – colors that never complimented our skin tones –, or worse yet, one
Christmas M and I had to wear outfits in fat, horizontal neon stripes; I was
orange and M was lime green. This may be
why we now have extensive wardrobes in basic black.
Sometimes she made us wear so many petticoats that we took up
most of the back seat of the Ford and more than our share of the church
pew. We looked like fat Q-tips. Sometimes
they had so many ruffles and so much lace that we looked like court jesters.
Oh but our misery didn’t end there – oh no, there were also HATS.
M and I inherited the thin, baby fine, Martinez hair. It has a mind of its own and refuses to be
styled, regardless how much goo or spray is loaded onto it. Mom would perch
these flat, little hats decorated in lace and ribbons and floppy flowers on our
heads. She would either pin them into
our scalp with mean, old hat pins or secure them with frilly ribbons under our
chins. I felt like Ma Kettle a ‘going to
market, and from the terror in my sister’s face, she wasn’t too happy either.
The piece de resistance of all the hats we wore over the years
was the furry, white headband Mom bought each of us one Christmas. The fake fur gave off so much static, it
hissed and crackled like a mean, old, alley cat. It even wrapped itself around
our stringy hair just like a cat does when it loves its master.
The headbands dug into our scalps, giving us headaches. They were so small that they would slowly work
their way up our heads, threatening to launch off at any moment, so Mom would
bobby pin them into our scalps, making the headache even worse. Our complaints were ignored; we were told to hush.
I decided to hide one of the hats (maybe throw it away) but
knew that I would be the unlucky one to have to wear the survivor, so I hid both
of them in a back bedroom under some blankets we never used and never
moved. Mom searched for them and
searched for them, accusing us of hiding them. I was able to lie my innocence
until she left me alone. In our hurry to get to church, Mom pulled out some
less offensive chapeaus, hats that Laura Ingalls probably wore in Little House
in the Prairie.
Our torture stopped when our baby sister came along. We were teenagers by then and more able to
resist, so Mom turned her attention to her.
The torture may have stopped but
not the memory.
When my sister and I get together it does not take long before
one of us will mention the hats and the outfits, and that’s all it takes to start
the laughter and to remind us of our special bond.
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