The Stockings and Panties Saga

Prologue

A few months after my cousin Mandy’s husband, Mark, had lost his hard fought war with cancer, I dropped by for a visit. She was just finishing her two year old son’s bath, and after drying him off, my ill-informed cousin, not having the pleasure of growing up with brothers, sent him to his room saying, and I quote, “Kevin, go get your panties.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Boys wear underwear, not panties.” Thus saving the poor child from a lifetime of ridicule. Just ask Steve.

Chapter One
Feet

How, in a home with an equal number of boys and girls, my grandmother persisted in calling all underwear, “panties” and all socks, “stockings” is a mystery, but she did. In the 1950s my grandparents were constantly asking one of the older children to put Steve’s shoes and stockings back on. Steve (or Stevie), the youngest of ten children spanning a twenty year period, thought nothing of pulling off his sturdy, lace-up Buster Browns no sooner than they had been wrestled onto his feet. The older children quickly tired of this chore and devised a plan to ensure Steve would keep his shoes and stockings on. They convinced the gullible toddler that to show one’s bare feet was as unacceptable as parading naked through the house; like letting the whole world see you without your panties on. How many younger siblings have been scarred for life by the well-intentioned lies of their brothers and sisters? The ruse worked. Steve kept his shoes and stockings on and countless hours were saved when his siblings no longer had to re-shoe their baby brother.

The dye was cast; Steve now understood his feet to be objects of shame to be hidden from leering eyes. Occasionally he would let down his guard, as happened one afternoon as the family was gathered in the living room. The doorbell rang and Aunt Faye and Uncle Dump were in the room with Steve and his naked feet before he could flee. Quickly tucking the offending appendages under his bottom, he sat on the sofa as, one by one, his siblings deserted him, leaving him to listen to the incessant drone of the adult conversation. Finally, legs grown numb and lifeless hidden underneath his body, and unable to stand the idea of his brothers and sisters having unsupervised fun without him, he made a break for it. He threw his body from his perch on the couch and propelled himself from the room using his arms, feet still hidden from view, looking like a WWII amputee.

I can only guess at Aunt Faye’s thoughts upon seeing the child’s irregular retreat. “Poor addlepated boy; I suppose that’s what happens when one has a baby at age forty-six.”

Chapter Two
The Piano Standoff

Steve attended Kindergarten at the Catholic school where his mother, my grandmother, was the second grade teacher. One rainy day Sister Anna Benita marched the kindergarteners to the gymnasium for an indoor recess. The wooden floor of the gym was brand new so she instructed each five year old to remove his or her shoes before entering. What debauchery is this Steve must have thought? Sister may as well have announced they were spending recess at a nudist colony. Panicking as he neared the door, and his turn at removing his shoes, he vowed to remain chaste and not be forced into sin by this nun who was surely an emissary of the devil. When it was his turn to expose himself he made a break for it, seeking asylum beneath the grand piano at the far corner of the gym.

Sister deployed a khaki-clad envoy of parochial school uniformed boys to fetch Steve from his hideout. But the miniature troops were no match for him and the sturdy Buster Browns he had no intention of removing. He kicked and flailed and valiantly fought off the enemy. Sister brought in the “Big Gun,” Father Drury. Kindly Father tried negotiations to bring the skirmish to an end, but to no avail. Steve just scooted farther into the depths of his cave, out of reach of the priest’s long black-clad arm.

By this point, with recess ruined, Sister did the unthinkable and resorted to the slyest of strategies; using her secret weapon, she sent for Mrs. Owen, the second grade teacher. Mrs. Owen arrived on the scene, furious I’m sure at Sister Benita for pulling her from her classroom. (My grandmother had little patience for teachers who could not control their classroom, black-habited nuns included.) Mrs. Owen quickly surveyed the situation, seeing a posse of bare-foot youngsters circling the grand piano and her youngest child, terror-struck, but valiantly holding his position. To her credit (and Steve’s eternal foot-phobic salvation), she quickly grasped the root of the problem. Calmly extending her hand saying, “Come with me, Steven.”

Unsure if his mother is his savior or his executioner, but relieved to be finished with his standoff, he forfeits his position and crawls out from under the piano. Will she make him take off his shoes and stockings in front of his classmates, Sister Benita, and Father Drury? No, Steve didn’t have to expose his feet that day. She gently led him to her classroom to spend the remainder of his recess with second graders, and you can be sure she lit into her older children at home that evening.

Chapter Three
Ozelia Made Me Do It

In my grandmother’s 1950s, pink brick, ranch-style house there are three bedrooms. The parents’ room, the girls’ room, which at one time held an assortment of beds all covered with pink Sears and Roebuck rib cord bedspreads, and the boys’ room, also full of beds but the Sears and Roebuck rib cord bedspreads were used for covers or kicked to the floor, depending on the season. (Interestingly, neither Steve nor I can recall the color of these bedspreads, further testament to the fact that the beds were rarely made. We think they may have been blue or green or brown.)

After my grandfather’s death my grandmother still had a house full of children, Sam and Steve being the two youngest. When I consider all of the mischief they were into or could have gotten into, it surprises me that my grandmother focused on the state of their bedroom, specifically their dresser drawers. (After all – they were already famous for shooting each other with homemade match guns and burning down the backyard fence.)

My grandmother had better things to do than clean house. She raised ten children, taught school, took a ceramics class, tried to learn Spanish, and loved to read. Cleaning house was not in her repertoire. She always had help. Beginning with the young girls who “lived in” and helped with the babies to the women who came once a week to clean her house and do the ironing. (And the forced labor of her own children.) In the late 1950s through the 1960s the housekeeper’s name was Ozelia. Ozelia also cleaned for my mother and even though I was very young, I remember her well, a tall, thin, black woman who smelled of bitter sweat and Pine-Sol. At some point, Ozelia proclaimed she would no longer clean the boys’ room. The boys lived like most adolescent and teenage boys, they were pigs. Smelly socks, P.F. Flyers, and underwear were strewn ankle-deep across the floor. Beds unmade, drawers left open with clothes spilling out, closets full of athletic equipment, bongo drums, and Mad Magazines.

Ozelia refused to enter the boys’ room and my grandmother began making threats. “If you boys can’t keep these drawers closed, I’m giving the dresser to Ozelia.” Why she focused on the open drawers of the mahogany chifferobe when there was so much mess to choose from is still a mystery. There are many truths I know about my grandmother, two are: she does not make idle threats and she would not willingly give away good furniture. The latter leads me to believe she was coerced by Ozelia to follow through on her threat.

Of course, Sam and Steve continued to live like slobs, pulling their clothes from the ever gaping jaws of the bureau. One fateful day, they arrived home to find their room spotless. Beds were made, no clothes on the floor, no stench of sweaty socks, and no dresser. In place of the missing dresser there were four Libby’s green bean boxes neatly covered with yellow floral-print contact paper and written with black Magic Marker in my grandmother’s perfect penmanship, “Steve’s Stockings,” “Sam’s Stockings,” “Steve’s Panties,” and “Sam’s Panties.” Ozelia owned the dresser.

Chapter Four
Football

Over the years my uncles, Sam and Steve, spent time living with older siblings so they would have more supervision and the influence of a man during their formative years. Sam spent a year with his brother, Don and his family in Arizona, and Steve spent some time with his sister, Sandra and her family, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In eighth grade Steve moved back home and re-entered the Catholic school where his mother was still teaching second grade. As an eighth grader he made the Junior Varsity football team. This was quite an honor and Steve was well on his way to re-inventing himself after his time away in Tulsa; hanging out with the high school football players, weight-training, and showing his prowess on the field. Finding out he could be a big fish in the high school pond was heady.

In the locker room one afternoon following practice, Steve couldn’t find his socks. Suspecting a prank perpetrated by the upper classmen, and not wanting to fall for it, he calls them out. “Okay, guys, very funny. Now give me my stockings back. Who took my stockings? This isn’t funny!”

But it was funny, it was hilarious – to the other guys. “Stockings?” they asked in disbelief. What high school boy wore stockings? I wonder how long it took him to live that one down?

Epilog

Kevin, you owe me – big time!