Still Pushed Around by a Big Sister

My big sister, Myrna Lou, called from Chicago last night. Nobody calls her Myrna Lou anymore. And nobody but Myrna Lou calls me Alice Joyce. Ever.

For 14 years, we shared a room, two crazy parents and familial chaos. Then we moved uptown and got separate rooms; she got married; the parents calmed down, and then they died.

Now, 2,000 miles apart, we talk on the phone six times a year. Just like a Pacific Bell commercial. And that’s what’s left of the family that sculpted my psyche and still haunts my dreams.

“Alice was a weird nocturnal thing,” my sister told someone, describing me as a child. I reminded her that my insomnia began when she would wake me each night at midnight claiming a man was trying to climb in the window. Then she’d say to me in a solemn voice, “Go into the kitchen and get the knives, Al.”

Seven years old, sweating with terror, I’d come back from the kitchen with a handful of steak knives. Myrna Lou would be snoring by then. I’d lie awake the rest of the night, watching the window, waiting for the man.

I brought up the man-at-the-window again when we had our big fight in ’72. My father was gone. My mother was in the hospital. And Myrna Lou and I were screaming at each other in the car

coming in from the airport where she’d just picked me up. I was feeling my Berkeley oats. She was trying to raise a family.

“How could you vote for Nixon? You’ve gone nuts, Myrna!”

“Yeah? Well you’re the one with the insomnia, Alice.”

“Because I had to share a room with a crazy maniac like you,” I screamed, “. . . who hallucinated men at the window and is now a Republican.”

“Look, Alice,” she shot back, “if you don’t like this country, you can leave it.”

“Look, pal, I’m the one out there working and contributing to the society. You’re the suburban matron with the maid.”

That was it. She pulled the Buick Riviera to the side of the road. I got out and hitchhiked to my mother’s apartment. We didn’t speak again until the funeral, a couple of years later.

I hated her after that fight as much as I had idolized her years before. In 1955, when I was 11 and she was 16, I thought she was the coolest kitty-cat on Earth.

She worked after school at Mar-Rue’s Shoppe selling cashmere sweaters, but never brought home a paycheck. All her salary was reinvested in her own cashmere collection. She had 50 of them: 30 pullovers, 15 cardigans, a boat neck, a cowl and three argyles.

She had a boyfriend named Norman Baum, whom we called “The Bomb.” The Bomb called Myrna “Baby” and made her stop calling me “Little Walrus.” He helped her buy the first car ever owned by a member of our family. It was a red ’53 Ford convertible that Myrna named Desiree.

Norman did something to the muffler so you could hear Desiree coming a mile away. Myrna dyed her hair flaming red to go with the car. When my father tried to stop Norman from taking Myrna out one night, The Bomb threatened to punch my father out. I watched Myrna and her hepcat boyfriend walk out the door while my father stood there fuming. I thought to myself: Cool, Daddy-o.

After Myrna broke up with Norman and gave him back his ID bracelet, she had a million boyfriends. Sometimes when they’d call up, I’d pretend I was older and they’d talk sexy to me.

One of them was a record promoter named Don Neff who claimed he actually knew Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Even when Don Neff found out I was 12, he’d still call up and talk sexy to me. I thought that was so kind of him.

Myrna was listening to Eddie Fisher and Joni James, but also to some real-gone music by Bill Haley and the Comets. She showed me a dance called the dirty boogie that you could do to music like that.

By the time she started college, Myrna was driving a white Plymouth Fury with swivel bucket seats. She broke up with an incredibly rich guy whose father owned half the town. He called up, and I had to tell him she refused to speak to him.

“That’s what I get for crossing the tracks,” he said to me.

On Sunday mornings, I’d sit in Myrna’s room and she’d read to me from her diary about her date the night before--the orchid corsage, the show at Mister Kelly’s or the Blue Note, the fight in the car about “going all the way.” She was a drama major and once wrote something I’ll never forget.

“Some day, some distant day,” she penned, “Myrna shall burst forth like a thousand Roman candles.”

On Valentine’s Day, 1960, Myrna got married. I was a bridesmaid. I wore a pink cocktail dress and carried a heart-shaped bouquet of pink tea roses. Each table had a pink, heart-shaped ice cream cake that said “Myrna and Arthur.”

Three years later, she had a house in the suburbs and two babies. She was square. She was boring. It took me 20 years and a few kids of my own to forgive her.

So yesterday, she called to tell me that she’d decided not to go to her high school’s 30th reunion. “I look sensational, but why go back and flaunt it? It would be like returning to the scene of an accident.”

An accident--the place where she varoomed up in Desiree wearing her mint-green cashmere sweater set and kissed The Bomb goodby? Say it ain’t so, Myrn. I worshiped that accident.

Her youngest was graduated from college this year. “I shed a tear when he moved out,” she said, “and then I put some stuff into his closet.”

Myrna started working this year for the first time since she got married. She is a publicist for a hand surgeon and loves her work. Medical publicity is a growing field.

It’s not a thousand Roman candles, but Myrna feels successful.

“Write about me, Al,” she said last night, “tell my story.”