The Girls at the Beach

The Girls at the Beach

The other day Kim asked me if I thought my sisters would like to have a copy of a picture she found of the two of them in our mother’s hands, standing at the beach. Out mother had her hair being whipped about by the coastal breeze and the girls looked somewhat less than as exuberant as her. Kathy, the eldest, with her dark pixie haircut was looking up at her mother wondering what exactly they were doing out there in the wind. I imagined her less than thrilled that she and her younger sister Barbara were dressed in identical frilly frocks with clocks on them (of all things) that looked light and summery despite the scowl on Kathy’s puss. Barbara looked to be acting like Barbara with her toe pointed out like a ballet dancer at the bar while the barrette in her blonde hair pulled it back to reveal an adult-like level of furrowed-brow concern about something. She looks as though she had the weight of the world on her shoulders and she simply did not understand how our mother could be so cavalier about it all.

My sisters are here at my house this weekend, together with me for the first time in a long time. We guesstimate that the picture was taken in Florida, soon after I was born and before we all headed back to life in Caracas. That would peg my older sister at just over three years old and Barbara at between 18 months and two years old. If you told me it was indeed taken on some Venezuelan beach (which it might well have been) and that Kathy was four and a half and Barbara three (making me 18 months), I would nod knowingly and say that might be correct. I know my mother is not pregnant in the picture and she looks recovered enough from my birth to easily be well beyond the blessed event. I am not in the picture in any case, which means I was over slobbering myself in the arms of the governess, Maria, who either took the picture or was not far away. There is a famous family photo of me at eighteen months wearing my 18-month-old version of Tommy Bahama playing in the sand with my shock of blonde hair looking particularly JFK-like.

We seem to have a lot of pictures of the three of us as children in Venezuela, where my mother had a good, well-paying job with the Rockefeller Foundation, and were not yet stuck in the tropics of Costa Rica, the frigid ice-fishing winter of Wisconsin or the snowy hills of Maine. These were the predominant places we lived in the years following Venezuela. The family program ended in Rome, Italy, where we all three finished high school before heading back to the U.S. for college. There are a few occasional group photos from these other places, but none so professional or so purposeful in their recordation as these pictures from Venezuela. If my family has Halcyon Days, they are from Venezuela, not because I remember those as good times so much as because there was a decided effort to memorialize our small family unit as what can best be described as a meaningful memoir.

We were still a full nuclear family then with a father somewhere around and this wonderful governess Maria to help my mother be all she should be at the Foundation. If I were being CSI forensic about it, I would note that my sisters’ dresses depicted every manner of clock; mantle clocks, grandfather clocks, wall clocks and cuckoo clocks. This was clearly our time, not to be too obvious about it all. I would like to suggest that the facial expression of these three members of my nuclear family speak volumes about how I feel they felt about me. My mother was carefree and gay, telling me that the world would be my oyster and there were nothing but good times and adventure ahead for me. This look would become known as the “don’t worry, be happy” look popularized by Bobby McFerrin’s No.1 hit song years later. As for my sisters, I somehow feel that they spent way too much time and still do, worrying about me. What I see in their expressions is that Kathy has no clue why I do what I do and Barbara is just generally concerned on my behalf. I will note for the record that my mother had a talon-like grip on the forearms of both girls and that may have had something to do with those looks of displeasure and concern. Kathy would have been in shock that she was getting treated badly for reasons that must really have something to do with something I had done. Barbara, on the other hand, just has that “why me?” look about her with that all-knowing sad eyes suggesting that it must have been because of me. You see, both of my sisters always thought I got the best part of whatever deal was going down because I was the only boy in the family.

At that very moment I was probably off obliviously eating sand or wetting my pants with a vague far-off look of satisfaction in my eye. But my sisters assumed that I was up to no good, and more specifically, working somehow against their best interests. I can understand this more than they may realize. I know that my mother was 49.9% male and I got all of that attention, while they had to split the remaining 50.1% female side of her psyche amongst the two of them. This was a better deal than most people get because 49.9% of my mother was enough for several people. And here’s perhaps the biggest thing, the parts of my mother that I most admire and try to emulate are the parts that were squarely lodged in that 49.9%, so I was getting the best of the best.

But we have all survived the last sixty-six years and are all here to tell the tales. While we have all lived our own lives and made our own choices, good and bad, when we come together we are still three musketeers that got dragged around three continents by a wind-blown and smiling mother who saw nothing but the good things in life. We share a mutual and rabid admiration for that Wild-haired woman who taught us all how to make the most of our lives whether it was a day at the beach or a night in the swamp.