One Saturday, when I was 10, my father told me in no uncertain terms to get into the Torino. We were going down to the grocery store to get flowers for my sister Sheila, he told me. When I asked him why, he said very sternly: “Because she’s a woman now.”
My sister was a woman now? What did that mean? Earlier in the day, she had just looked like Sheila to me, but now she was a woman. What happened?
The case seemed not only closed to my father, but I got the sense it was never going to open again. This was about all the information I was ever going to get from him regarding my sister’s fledgling womanhood, so we just sat in silence, sitting on our seatbelts and looking out the car windows, even though a whole series of questions were forming in my young mind. Now that she was a woman, would I have to do everything that Sheila told me to do? Was she taller? Did she still have to go to school? Would she have to get a job? Would she be getting married soon? And the questions didn’t just stop with Sheila, I wanted to know:
When I became a man, how would I know? Would it be announced? Would Mom have to take both Sheila and Lisa down to the grocery store and buy me something? What do you buy a new man? A hammer? Would I have to move out? Would I have to fight my dad? I was a mess.
My father drove us in the big Ford, all hard and country quiet and he seemed so angry, but I wasn’t sure why. Looking back, I’ll bet it was because Mom told him he was going to have to buy more than flowers.
One Saturday