I didn’t know very much about my older sisters Cheryl and Linda, what made them tick. They were both good in school, I knew that, and were generally very nice to me. Sometimes they jitterbugged together, not smiling, barefoot on the kitchen floor, Ricky Nelson or Fats Domino on their little suitcase-looking record player.
Cheryl had a boyfriend, Bob, who was tall and a little too handsome, played no baseball, and drove a car. I didn’t like him. Linda had a colored picture of the singer Fabian taped to the wall above her bed. He had the kind of face you’d love to slap.
Sometimes one of them would send me to the drugstore with a little folded-up note for the cashier, which read, simply: kotex.
And I knew they liked the movie West Side Story because they took a train downtown to see it three times, and afterwards went around singing:
Tonight, tonight won’t be just any night …
When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way …
Maria, I just met a girl named Maria …
They had a big glossy book from the movie, full of colored stills, and I remember looking through it carefully, trying to get a fix on these two. There were pictures of hoody-looking teenagers in tight clothes dancing hard. The guys all looked like they had jack-knives on them and the girls all looked impure.
There were also pictures of a clean-looking couple, Tony and Maria, singing together, gazing into each other’s eyes, apparently in love. The book said the movie was based on Romeo and Juliet, which I knew was a love story.
Love, love.
I studied one of the stills of Maria to see if I could imagine falling in love with her. She was in a white dress sitting on a fire escape singing down to me and I was down there singing up to her. We did that for a while. Then she sang for me to take my pants off, which I did, and she started singing like mad, and I went up there, singing.
But I knew that couldn’t be what Cheryl and Linda had in mind when they sang, Tonight, tonight won’t be just any night …