IN MEMORY OF MY SISTER, BECKY.  

 My sister, Becky, loved her Petticoats.

      Boys who are sneaky always get caught in the end.

 

       
It was the beginning of school in the 1950’s and my sister and I were going to be together at Bolton High School.  Well, together doesn’t really apply here.  We would be attending the same school would be more accurate.  I was new to high school and had very few friends from Junior high because my hair was different. It was peroxided.  You see, the summer just before I went to Junior high, sister wanted the two of us to peroxide our hair.  She said it was the popular thing to do. “Let’s do yours first,” she said, “then I’ll do mine.”  That was a huge mistake because she did mine and then decided she didn’t want to do hers. I got to the eighth grade at the new Junior high and no one else had peroxided hair.  My junior high year was miserable.  There was a lot of hatred toward my big sis those years.   

So here I was beginning high school with few friends, and she had tons.  She was totally immersed in running with the popular crowd and didn’t want to be saddled with a little brother spying on her.  I was too shy at that time anyway to be social. I know that you find this impossible to believe that moi could be shy, but I was.  It wasn’t until later that I discovered it wasn’t necessarily a shyness.  I was just introverted.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  

Becky was a lot like daddy.  She loved having people around all the time.  She was very social. She belonged to clubs and hung out with the cool crowd at lunch.  I loved to have a lot of alone time. 

      

 In the 1950’s petticoats and saddle oxfords were the thing to wear.  The more layers the better on the petticoats.  I believe she probably had five or six layers, which was probably the norm, but I didn’t make it a habit to find out how many layers the other girls wore.  So, a five-yard skirt needed five net petticoats to achieve the Victorian volume, I’m told.  Of course, they had to be starched to achieve the look they so desired.  So, five petticoats made of 100 yards of netting was uncommon but not unheard of.  My sister’s skirts stood out like the Egyptian pyramids.  To watch the girls sit in those layers of clothing was a wonder to behold. One could never attempt to sit if their hands were holding books or something because it required both hands to press down on the skirt as they rear ended the desk.  If they didn’t their entire body would disappear behind a mountain of tulle.  I believe those school desks with that little shelf for us to write on was solely there to hold those layers of tulle in check.  Some of those girls would pop out of those desks like a jack-in-the-box.  They looked like a spring had become uncoiled.  Poof and all that fluff expanded as they stood.  I often wondered why the girls wore their petticoats one day and a straight skirt the next.  I later heard it was because the starched petticoats scratched their legs.

            These petticoats took up a lot of space at home.  Becky did have a lot of closet space, but I don’t think they ever saw the inside of her closet, especially during the school week.  Those petticoats just stood at attention around her room like sentinels on duty.  My brother tried to use them as temporary cages for pets he always brought home.

            Thankfully, these undergarments didn’t need to be washed on a regular basis but when they did, then Saturdays were the day.  We shared a bathroom, and she had a standing reservation for her washing days.  My brother and I were out of luck for using that bathroom those days.  Thankfully, we were boys living in the country and knew how to take care of business outdoors, you know what I mean?

            The room looked like a rainbow of clothes piled on the floor. Tulle everywhere in several shades of color.  Becky hand washed each one of these in the bathtub and then ironed and starched them.  She used Sta Flo extra strength.  The industrial kind…undiluted.  They were as stiff as some of those women I knew at church. After starching them they needed to be dried.

 

  These were the years daddy loved camellias. 

We had around seventy bushes planted around the yard and around our patio.  Becky reserved the six ones closest to our house as her drying rack.  These were placed on top of the camellia bushes so they could keep their shape.  She dared us to get near them as they dried in the hot sun. 

We had so many bushes that once she invited her whole gaggle of friends to a petticoat drying party.  They enjoyed washing and drying and starching and talking about boys and all the other girl stuff they talk about while they rolled their hair with those brush rollers or juice cans secured with bobby pins. I laughed watching them sitting around the patio wearing straight skirts in their curlers with scarves to keep them from sticking their heads, sipping lemonade while they waited for their petticoats to dry. My brother and I would sometimes climb a tree and throw things at them, but they were so full of themselves they never noticed. 

These camellia bushes are the same ones I was put in charge of watering on Saturdays.  On days when her friends weren’t there, I spent my weekend with a hose and a timer, per orders from the Senator, watering each one five minutes each at the base of each plant.  So, on petticoat days I made sure I watered those petticoat bushes, as soon as Becky left with her friends or had her nose in a book, not from the base but by spraying them all over.  My sister once asked mama for more starch because for some reason her petticoats were not as stiff as she intended.    Thankfully all that starch didn’t affect daddy’s beautiful camellias. 

Sweet revenge from a sneaky brother who was embarrassed in junior high because his sister used him as a Guinea pig by peroxiding his hair.

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