Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir

“Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir,” this year’s “recommended read” at Target Stores and already optioned for a film to be produced by Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria, is the story of boomer author Heather Summerhayes Cariou’s life together with her sister Pam. When Heather was six and Pam was four, Pam was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis. At the time, Heather promised to die with her sister … but as she writes in this excerpt about a lighthearted reminiscence, by the time they were both teenagers, Pam helped her sister survive!

By January of 1969 I smoked Craven Menthols, hung out at Tim Horton Donuts, and thought I was something else. At the very least, I was trying awfully hard to be something else.

I was a sixteen-year-old virgin, into Simon and Garfunkel, and heavy petting with my new boyfriend Sandy. I wore thick black eyeliner, over-plucked eyebrows, frosted lipstick, hotpants and miniskirts. I stuck my paltry chest out as far as I could without being obvious.

Wishing I were Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore, I took to wearing a cheap dynel “fall”, a wig that fell straight to my shoulders from a black velvet headband, curling at the ends into a neat flip. Purchased with a postdated check, without my mother’s permission, I snuck it out of the house every morning in a brown paper bag, furtively bobby-pinning it to my scalp in the school bathroom.

Flinging the shiny strands of fake hair from my shoulders and puffing with mannered gestures on my cigarettes, I sat long hours at the donut shop with my friends from the Drama Club, bragging that someday I was getting out of this town, I was going to Broadway and hitting it big. I drank innumerable cups of coffee, extra light with two packs of sugar, and wrote Rod McKuen rip-off poetry on paper napkins.

Out of the corner
of my eye
i see myself
in that dark corner
huddled all curled up afraid
of all the people and the light

but when i turn to face myself
my image disappears
and i stand looking
into empty corners
all the time …

The postdated check cleared the bank prior to the automatic deposit from my part-time job at Woolco. When the check bounced, the bank phoned my mother. I found this out after I was yanked out of history class and hauled down to the nurse’s office to take my mother’s call. My heart pounded and my hand went clammy on the receiver as I said hello. Having been told only that it was an emergency, I expected to hear that Pam had been rushed to the hospital. Instead my mother began to rant that young women who bounced checks to purchase forbidden hairpieces were headed for a life of crime. I gritted my teeth. She had a good mind to call the police, she said, and send them right over to arrest me. My eyes turned hot and wet.

“Is there anything wrong?” asked the nurse when I hung up.

“It’s my sister,” I lied.

“Oh dear. I hope she’ll be all right.”

By the time I got home from school a modicum of reason had prevailed, and my parents settled for house arrest. My reaction was by now, standard.

“I HATE you,” I screamed, blasting up the stairs to my room in tears, slamming the door in my usual fashion, this time so hard it blew through the frame and stuck so that I couldn’t get back out.

“Good,” said my father, surveying the damage from the other side of the door, “you can stay in there ‘til you’ve had a chance to think things through.”

My sister understood better than anyone what had happened and why, and it was she who rescued me, prying the door open with a screwdriver.

“I don’t know why you bought that stupid wig in the first place.”

“Because, I’m ugly.”

“No you’re not,” she said. “You just think you are.”

Available at Amazon: Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir

Tags: Heather Summerhayes Cariou, Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister’s Memoir

Category: Baby Boomers, Family & Children, Heather Summerhayes Cariou