Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

patrons, was vaster than any public space I had ever seen. The spectacle was dazzling—the world’s largest theater orchestra, plus the Rockettes, the world’s finest precision dancers, and a movie,
In the Good Old Summertime
, with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, on the world’s largest screen. After the movie, we went to Toffenetti’s for ice cream. As we sipped our sodas, I noticed that the eyes of four boys at the next table were fixed on my sister. They were dressed in white uniforms—Annapolis boys, it turned out—and they whispered together, casting sidelong glances at our table. As we were about to leave, a big teddy bear arrived for me with a note saying they hoped I’d grow up to be as beautiful as my mother. I could not help feeling a rush of joy at the thought that these handsome fellows assumed I was Charlotte’s child and that I might someday look like her. I fervently wished at that moment that I had a mother who looked like my older sister instead of a grandmother.
    Much later that night, I was abruptly awakened by athunderclap and a flash of lightning outside. The rumble of the storm grew more and more insistent and I could not go to sleep. I called to my mother, and straightaway she appeared in her thin blue robe, to rearrange my bedding and stroke my forehead, her warm, familiar voice gently comforting me. I remembered the four cadets earlier in the day and my guilty wish for a different mother. Tears came into my eyes, and a deep sense of shame that lay like a physical weight on my chest. “Don’t be frightened,” my mother said. “The storm will pass in a few minutes, and I’ll stay with you till it does.”
    I F C HARLOTTE was a distant ideal, living as she did away from home through most of my childhood, Jeanne was an everyday presence. For as long as I can remember, she was a surrogate mother, looking out for me, taking care of me when our mother was sick. The nearly ten-year gap in our ages eliminated the potential for competition and defined our roles: she was the grown-up; I was the kid sister. Loving, patient, and gentle, she gave to me more than I gave her in return. Whatever hesitations she must have had about taking responsibility for me, she always made me feel as if she had been waiting for a little sister all her life.
    In the summer of 1949, Jeanne was sixteen, about to enter her junior year in high school. She was one of the top students in her class: vice-president of the student organization, treasurer of her Hi-Y club, president of the dramatic club, and leader of a service organization that gathered canned goods for needy families in the Deep South and knitted afghans for veterans’ hospitals. Though I had no idea why the people in the Deep South needed food, I got so caught up in the canned-goods drive that, each time I went to the corner store for my mother, I would bringhome an extra can of soup and hide it under my bed. When my hidden cans added up to a dozen, I proudly presented them to my sister as my contribution to the overall effort, taking immense pleasure in the thought that my hoarded cans would soon appear on the kitchen table of families far away.
    I tagged along with Jeanne everywhere—to the movies, the beach, the houses of her friends. There must have been times when I aggravated her, but she was never openly resentful, and only rarely bossy. On rainy Saturdays, she patiently took me with her to the movies, where she and her girlfriends talked with each other and flirted with the boys. We had two movie theaters in Rockville Centre: the Strand, which had once been a vaudeville house, boasting a live orchestra and a Wurlitzer pipe organ, and the newer Fantasy Theatre, an ornate picture palace designed in an Egyptian motif at the time King Tut’s tomb was found, with a deep balcony, lush carpeting, and matrons dressed in black. As long as I kept relatively quiet and curbed my natural tendency to plunge into any conversation—especially when the boys turned