Summer of '69(91)

“Hey, Jessie!” Pick calls out.

“Hey, Jessie,” the girl with him says.

Jessie storms upstairs to Little Fair without a word.

Uh-oh, Blair thinks. She strides over to the gate to let the happy couple through. “Hey, Pick,” she says. She offers her hand to the girl. “Hello there, I’m Blair.”

“Sabrina,” the girl says. She gives Blair a winning smile. She is all white teeth, blue eyes, small, perky breasts. She reminds Blair of a sugar cookie. “I’m Pick’s girlfriend.”

Pick’s girlfriend! This is the first Blair has heard of a girlfriend, though she realizes she has hardly paid attention to anyone but herself this summer.

“Nice to meet you,” Blair says. She supposes Jessie’s rebuff of these two can mean only one thing. “Where are you guys headed?”

“I’m going to make Sabrina some lunch,” Pick says. He nods at Little Fair. “Upstairs.”

“Your grandfather isn’t home,” Blair says. “So I’m going to have to put a damper on those plans, I’m afraid. I can’t let the two of you go up unchaperoned.”

Pick makes a face so familiar that Blair gets chills. She must be having flashbacks of Lorraine. “Jessie just went upstairs,” he says. “She can be our chaperone.”

“I’m taking Jessie out,” Blair says. “Sorry, Pick, I know it’s a drag, but those are the house rules. They’ve been in existence since I was your age. You guys are welcome to go to the big house. I believe both my mother and grandmother are around.”

Pick sighs. “No, thanks. I guess we’ll just go get a burger at the Charcoal Galley.”

Foiled! Blair thinks. But that’s quite all right. She can take Jessie to Cy’s Green Coffee Pot.

“Toodle-oo,” she says.



On the way down Main Street to Buttner’s, Blair tells Jessie, “So…I met Pick’s girlfriend.”

No response from her sister.

“She seemed nice.”

Jessie shrugs.

“She’s very pretty.”

“I guess,” Jessie says.

“Not as pretty as you, of course,” Blair says.

Jessie stops in her tracks. “Blair?”

“Yes?”

“Please stop.”

Blair feels a pain in her midsection, as though the words pierced her. “Okay, sorry, sorry.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Jessie says, and she flings open the door to Buttner’s.

Buttner’s smells the same, Blair thinks. Like the new leather of school shoes and the boiled wool of peacoats and the saleswomen’s perfume and floor polish. Blair has been coming to this store her entire life; she prefers it to any place in Boston, even Filene’s.

She leads Jessie back to the lingerie department and finds Miss Timsy, the same woman who fitted Blair for her bra twelve years earlier. Francesca Timsy is a spinster, a Nantucket native who lives with her sister, Donatella Timsy, in a tiny cottage on Farmer Street. Both Timsy sisters sing in the choir at St. Paul’s. They’re as old as the hills and yet, curiously, Miss Timsy looks exactly the same as she did twelve years ago—blue hair (set once a week at Claire Elaine’s Beauty Shop next door), steel-rimmed glasses, pencil skirt, and tape measure draped around her neck.

“Katie Nichols?” Miss Timsy says. “Is that you? You’re having another baby?”

Blair puts a hand on Miss Timsy’s stick-thin forearm. “It’s Blair Foley, Miss Timsy, Kate’s daughter. I’m pregnant with twins.” Blair is tickled to be mistaken for her glamorous mother, although she’s certain it’s because Miss Timsy is almost completely senile.

Miss Timsy seems to snap right back to the summer of 1969 because she says, “Oh, Blair, dear, of course. My eyes were playing tricks on me, not surprising with the heat we’ve been having. I heard you were pregnant with twins. Donatella ran into your mother at the market.”

“Well, we’re here today to get my sister Jessie a bra!” Blair says. Jessie curls into herself and Blair realizes her voice is louder than normal because she’s trying to accommodate Miss Timsy’s ancient ears. “Her first bra!”

Miss Timsy regards Jessie. “Sister?” she says. “This isn’t Kirby. Kirby’s blond.”

“This isn’t Kirby,” Blair says. She notices Jessie trying to make herself even smaller and she hopes she doesn’t have to run through the family calculus with Miss Timsy. “This is Jessica, the youngest.”

Thankfully, Miss Timsy has moved on to business. She eyes Jessie’s chest.

“Well, I can tell you’re going to have a magnificent bosom in a few short years. Come, let’s get you fitted.”

Jessie throws Blair a pleading look but Blair pretends not to see. Miss Timsy is a professional, and being fitted by her is a rite of passage. Blair survived; Kirby survived; Jessie will survive.

“I’ll be over in the layette section!” Blair calls out.

She meanders through the women’s department, admiring the fall fashions—out already, even though it’s only mid-July—and feels another sharp pain. She wonders if she’ll even fit into regular clothes by fall.

She moves on to the children’s section and is haunted by memories of back-to-school shopping with Kate and Exalta. She even remembers one year when Tiger was in a baby carriage, so Blair’s father must have still been alive. She remembers another year when she chose a paisley blouse that had a matching orange skirt but somehow the skirt hadn’t made it home to Brookline and Blair cried because she had wanted to wear the outfit on the first day of school. Kate had called Buttner’s and they mailed the skirt, but had it made it in time? Blair can’t remember. So much of what seems painfully important in the moment fades away. Jessie is embarrassed about being fitted for a bra now, but ten years from now when she has the magnificent bosom that Miss Timsy predicted, she’ll be buying black lace bras and push-up bras to impress her boyfriends, and maybe one afternoon, as she’s having brunch with girlfriends at the Marliave, she’ll tell them the story of getting her first bra at Buttner’s.