Pumps and Pearls

The women in my family – all dead now, of course – bore a striking resemblance to each other while they lived.

My grandmother, her sister, and both their daughters were frighteningly alike physically and always at odds emotionally. I wonder that we managed to survive some of those summer vacations, particularly when Nana's only brother and his wife were added to the mix. If there was one thing that united the women, it was a far reaching and long standing dislike of the former headmistress, the dreaded sister-in-law, my Aunt Helen.

In a family of hard drinking, not afraid to get their hands dirty, mostly un-playtex'd and loud women who were raising clearly hooligan children, there just was no comfortable place for Helen. She lived to be proper, thrived on her Back Bay-ness and Beacon Hill upbringing.

Take away her pumps and pearls, my Aunt Elaine said once, and all you've got left is Miss Clairol with a face lift.

And perfect nails, my mother, whose own were bitten to the quick, added nastily.

Born to wealth and privilege, that one, Nana said bitterly, Used every bit of the hot water to take a bath last night. Can't think why in the world she married into this family.

My Aunt Zel, the only petite one in the bunch and crippled since childhood – polio had left her with a deformed foot and a severe limp despite the cruel othopedic shoes she always wore and though her husband made jokes about not marrying her just to go dancing, she was sensitive about it – trilled a little laugh, perfect for her tiny, elf-like form.

She needed a retirement fund, said the least venomous among us and didn't even blush.

My mother and her cousin, so alike they were often mistaken for sisters, laughed outloud.

Is this what I'll be when I'm old, I found myself thinking, a small, chubby woman with crepe paper skin and an acid tongue?

It seems so.  Nothing predicts likes genetics and nothing unites us like a common enemy.