Living Legends The Irving Ya-Ya Sisterhood

My favorite nights in the world are the nights I have my girlfriends over. That is when I sleep the best, hardly a nightmare at all when my buddies are with me.

-Rebecca West, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood



Halfway down the hotel hallway I stopped looking up at the numbers on the doors and let the laughter guide me to room 753. The commotion sounded like the slumber parties my sister used to have, only this time I didn’t hear The Beatles blaring in the background. The Teenettes, an Irving version of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, were having a sleep-over at the Anatole. And 1 was invited.

To be truthful. I had trouble getting through the Divine Secrets, my primary preparation for the evening-that, and making a pointed effort to scrub my feet in case the Teenettes demanded to paint my toenails. Women in clumps can be persuasive.

Rebecca West’s best-selling novel seemed to assume that I already knew Thornton, La., and Caro and Teensy. and to hear women talk about the book, they did.

The racket momentarily subsided when Kathy Tyner opened the door.

She introduced me to a circle of smiling faces and freshly set hair. The Teenettes sat elbow to elbow on every padded surface-all of them ll;i^hinn m;itrhinp.7-caraU”Osiunie-jrvvelrv rings that Lee Saxon had brought from California. “I keep wanting to talk into mine,” one Teenette giggled. Tables were covered with soft drinks. coffee cups, fruit and cheese platters, a party-sized bag of Fritos Scoops, and a jar of olives with a plastic fork sticking out of it. Overnight bags, print wallets stuffed with pictures of children and grandchildren. and other Teenette memorabilia were scattered around. A framed wedding portrait sat on a side table next to a thick scrapbook of yellowed newspaper clippings and a high school annual. Room 753 was no longer the temporary home of a passing conventioneer: it was a clubhouse. Familiar roles rapidly became apparent, even to me, concerned as I was on keeping my shoes laced and my socks pulled high. Among the Teenettes, Kathy is the organizer; Sandy Rector, the wit and historian; Judy Norris, the class clown; Audrey Bellah. the beauty: Sylvia Boyle. “Miss Everything”; Dorothy Bauer, the quiet one; Jan Thomas, the sweet one. Marlene Miller is the Elizabeth Taylor of the Teenettes. When the Teenettes took turns describing their careers. Marlene. who lives on a farm in Salina, cheerfully confessed. “I guess getting married was my career.”

“So tell me,” I asked the group during a brief lull in the storm of conversation, “is it really true that girls sleep better at slumber parties?” My own memories of sleepovers were quite the opposite. To fall asleep among teenage boys is to risk waking beside dead possums. your tennis shoes filled with snakes.

Heads and hands signaled yes with drill team precision. When the Teenettes started having sleepovers, they were 12 years old and wore baby doll pajamas. They stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning. By high school they were up all night, sneaking out to sit in the street or ride with boys to visit the haunted houses on Lake Grapevine. After a gap of almost 40 years to raise families and build careers, the Teenettes are packing their favorite pillows again. “But we don’t stay up all night anymore,” Sylvia Boyle grinned. “We’re back to just staying up late.

“Listen,” she continued. “Sometimes I feel closer to this group than I do to my own sister. There’s no pretense here. We know everything about each other. With your girlfriends there’s no sibling rivalry. No one says, ’Momma always liked you better.’”

Affirming echoes bounced off the mini bar. “In this group there is something like unconditional love.” Kathy Tyner seconded. Kathy turned suddenly to Sylvia, “Do you realize thai every time we get together, somebody has something really serious going on in their life?”

Before Sylvia could respond. Peggy Price jumped in. “Whenever I asked Momma or Daddy if I could have someone sleep over.” Peggy laughed, her hand sweeping the circle, “I always meant 12 girls.” Evidently, Peggy’s mother was accustomed to preparing an extra plate, The girls loved her, and recount the memory of skinny dipping in the creek behind Peggy’s house on a morning when the neighboring Webb boys stared down from a bridge not realizing that the girls were up to their necks for a reason. Just then. Sylvia motioned across the circle to Jackie Dale, “She’s been

10 more slumber parties in the past two years than in all the years before.”

The mood shifted so suddenly that I was briefly stranded on the bridge with the unsuspecting Webb boys. “My daddy was pretty protective of me.” Jackie said, her voice slowly cracking. “I was in Parkland Hospital for

11 months in an iron lung. Polio. 1 was com pletely paralyzed and couldn’t talk because I had had a tracheotomy. All around me chil dren were slipping away.” Teenettes seated on either side of Jackie reached over and squeezed her hand. “I didn’t think I was going to make it.” she stammered, staring down. “Then, one day, I jerked my leg up and cut my knee on the top of the iron lung. I wasn’t paralyzed anymore. Eventually I made it home to a rocking bed. The rocking bed assist ed my breathing.”

For a moment the room was perfectly still. 1 stared down at the charm bracelet that I was holding. It had been given to Marlene Miller at the end of the 9th grade when she moved with her family to California. Jackie saw me studying the copper disks. On each was engraved the first name of a Teenette. “Linda Ford died of bone cancer,” Jackie continued, motioning me through the disks with a tip of her head. “She was 16.1 always thought that she was an angel. She left when her time was done.”



ABRUPTLY, THE CONVERSATION SWUNG in the direction of the Irving Youth Center where Trini Lopez made his start and where dances were held on the weekends, chaperoned by a woman named Miss Cissna. “Miss Cissna would stamp our hands and smell the breath of the boys,” Sylvia declared.

“No, she didn’t.” Sandy objected. “One of the requirements for that job was that the chaperone have no sense of smell whatsoever!” As historian of the Teenettes, Sandy’s recollection rules. At one point in the evening, we quizzed her on the high school addresses of the assembled. She rattled them off as though she was holding a phone book from 1957.

Peggy turned to Sandy. They were sitting together on a couch. “What time was your curfew?” Sandy’s answer was muffled in the backwash of the spiked punch/Miss Cissna controversy. Sylvia answered for Sandy. The Teenettes do that a lot, which is reasonable because, in a sense, they’ve lived one life. “Sandy had to get married to get to stay up until 10 p.m.”

“So, did you all ever take a blood oath?” I asked. In the Divine Secrets, the Ya-Yas contrive a bizarre bonding ritual. Men don’t prick their fingers and mash them together. They find a third party, like an animal, and prick it until it dies. In a chorus, the Teenettes answered, “No. We never had to.” Sandy tried to elaborate. “But we did all dance with Michael….” She was heckled into submission before she could spit out his last name,

“You can’t tell Michael’s last name!”

“He’s still around!”

“He was always around!”

All night long the conversation lurched from comedy to tragedy to comedy. Just when I was on the verge of calling the front desk for a pallet of Kleenex, someone would break into a doo-wah song by Fred Simmons and the Checkers. Kathy and Belveree Dickson were the Checkers.

Late in the night, the circle dissolved into clusters of threes and fours. Some of the Teenettes excused themselves to change into matching black night shirts, each emblazoned with the names of the entire group in gold lettering. Sylvia. Kathy, Belveree, and Judy Norris sat near a table overlooking Stemmons Freeway, the cars still racing at 1:20 a.m. When Judy started riffing about massages, I inched for the door. My note pad had worn out its ability to inhibit their behavior. Besides, I hadn’t exactly planned on spending the night. “You can give me a massage,” she said, eyes locked on me but instructing an imagined masseur, “just don’t look at me.”

The subject of massages led to deeper tissue: living wills and whole body parts. “I told my family,” Judy dared, “Til kill you if you give my guts away!’” If Judy’s a little edgy over the dissemination of her organs, it’s because she’s already weathered some harvesting. “I’ve just got the one big kidney now. I tell them at work. ’If you ever have to do CPR on me, for God’s sake do it tinder a sheet. I don’t want anyone seeing me with my shirt up and wires stuck to my chest.”’

I heard the words “bra size” shoot across the room followed close behind by heavy laughter and I knew it was time to go. Bui I had one last question, so I delivered it standing: “What do your husbands think when you get together?”

“My husband loves ii when I come here,” someone answered from inside a swarm. “I go home happy.”

Sylvia elaborated. “When we went back to our 30th high school reunion in 1991,” she explained. “Some of us girls danced the jitterbug.”^ hear her talk, dancing the jitterbug with your buddies sounded like the most natural thing in the world. “My husband asked me about it when we got home. He said, ’Honey, who was that woman at the reunion? The one you saw from across the room, ran toward, hugged, burst into tears with, and then started dancing with? Who was she?’” It was Belveree.

I don’t understand crying and dancing conducted in close proximity to each other any more than Sylvia’s husband. But by the time I pulled into the driveway, the porch 1ight burning for me, I knew this: It has something to do with love.