Ihad a temperature of a hundred and four and tonsillitis at my oldest sister Sandra’s first wedding. I was six years old at the time, which made her nineteen. My mother tells me that all I wanted was to get out of bed and put on my pearls and white gloves. In fact, my mother repeats this story whenever she feels that I no longer accessorize enough. All I remember from the entire nuptials, which took place in our home in Brooklyn, a sizable red brick corner Dutch colonial, was my older siblings, Bruce and Georgette, racing upstairs into my sickroom to let me know that Cousin So-and-So had just fallen through the floor while freely interpreting the hora.
My sister Sandra—known to the world as Sandra, never Sandy, from the day she left the Flatbush Dutch colonial—has always preferred that I not dwell on the wedding story. Frankly, my oldest sister prefers not to dwell on Brooklyn, our parents, anyone’s former marriages, or anything personal, including health and religion—and especially not the cousin who fell through the floor. (I never saw the hole, I never heard of any broken limbs, but I still choose to believe the story.) Even now, Sandra, from behind her desk at the penthouse offices of Clark & Weinstock, management consultants, advises, “If you really want to talk about me as a serious person, you have to think about how that story sounds and looks.”
It would be impossible not to talk about my sister as a serious person. She started college at sixteen and graduated with honors at nineteen. Over the course of three decades in mainstream—or, as she prefers, “blue chip”—corporate America, Sandra was the first female product-group manager at General Foods, in 1969; the first female president of a division of American Express, in 1980; and the first female to run corporate affairs as a senior officer at Citicorp, in 1989. In other words, she never had the luxury of not demanding to be taken seriously.
Two years after her first marriage, Sandra disappeared from my life: she moved to London. She was twenty-one and separated, and she began a career in advertising at the London Press Exchange. For me, “Sandra in London,” and even the very tasteful name of Meyer she’d acquired from her husband, became a mythical, glamorous alternative to the bouffant-hair-sprayed mothers at the Parent-Teacher Association, and even to our own mother, Lola, the Polish-born dancer, predestined to plié while broiling lamb chops in Brooklyn. I bragged to the girls’ baseball team that my big sister in Europe wrote the “little dab will do ya” Brylcreem jingle. Later, of course, I found out that she was actually an account executive, but it all certainly seemed far more desirable than growing up to chaperon the school trip to the Horowitz Margareten matzo factory.
Around the time that Sandra returned permanently from London, my family moved from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side. When I was in high school, she had a career-gal pad in the East Fifties and was commuting daily to General Foods, in White Plains. Shortly after the Civil Rights Act, the corporate food giant hired the first female Associate Product Manager/Postum and Toast ’em Pop Ups—my sister Sandra. Our family had cases of unopened Toast ’ems in the kitchen cabinets, and Sandra Meyer moved up to Marketing Manager/Maxwell House. In that position, she was in charge of the Maxwell House–Folgers coffee wars.
As far as I was concerned, my oldest sister personally sent Tang to the moon and plumped every raisin in Post Raisin Bran. When I visited her in her ever larger offices, she was always the only woman along her corridor who wasn’t sitting outside an office glued behind a typewriter and a telephone. Very grownup, very Darien-looking men named Ed, Rick, and Jim were always popping in and out. Somehow, the love-ins of the late sixties seemed to be eluding them. I always politely shook the gentlemen’s hands and couldn’t wait for them to leave, so I could talk to my sister some more about my prospects at the Horace Mann prom, which were surely more interesting than the marketing potential of Brim.
My mother often asked me if I thought Sandra would marry one of these Eds, Ricks, or Jims. I remember dinners at places like Le Pavillon with my parents, Bruce, Georgette, myself, and Sandra accompanied by various General Foods suits. Afterward, Lola would press me to determine whether the fella meant anything special to her eldest daughter. I never told her that I personally loved it that Sandra was single—partly because I knew those inspection dinners would stop as soon as she married again. I also never told her that my big sister advised me while I was still in high school to stay single until I was thirty unless I fell madly in love. Sex was one thing, and marriage was another, she said.
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Sandra finally married the handsomest man who came to dinner, a Robert Redford look-alike. When she gave birth to her first daughter, Jenifer, there was mandatory unpaid maternity leave at General Foods. Therefore, my sister hid her pregnancy until her next promotion was confirmed. Her efficiency in life management, however, never undermined her maternal commitment. In fact, if you asked my mother, the domestic dancer, and my oldest sister, the corporate player, what was the most important thing they’d done with their lives, they’d both say, “Having children.” However, my mother would say the answer was obvious, because “there’s no children like my children,” which I always thought should have been sung by Ethel Merman, while Sandra would clip, “Jenifer and Samantha are such capable and independent women.”
I wish that my sister would tell me what toll her life has taken on her. Rather, I wish I could get an illogical, non-positioned answer. But I suppose it’s no different than when I’m asked if I think of myself as a woman playwright. Frankly, there’s really no discussion in either case. My sister would say that life takes its toll, male or female, period. I heartily disagree. I can’t help but wonder what difference it would have made in my sister’s personal or corporate life if she had been a man. Of course, Sandra would say that if you’re a player, gender shouldn’t be an issue. But, for my generation, gender is the issue.
After my sister’s second marriage dissolved, she went to American Express as Vice-President, Worldwide Card Product Marketing. In my mind, she and Lou Gerstner, now the chairman of I.B.M., spent lunches at the Four Seasons devising new uses for the gold card. At that time, my sister fell madly in love—the sort of love she advised me to wait for—with Andrew Kershaw, then the chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, North America. Andrew died in her house in Pound Ridge six weeks before the wedding. I waited with Sandra in her Madison Avenue apartment while lawyers arrived to take the paintings he’d brought with him back to his first wife, in Toronto. Like a good baby sister, I remained in the background for the entire event. I wanted to take care of her without her knowing what I was doing. My sister and I stay within our defined boundaries. She’s capable. I’m funny. Except for when I’m surprisingly capable and she’s inexplicably funny.
Our mother referred to Sandra when we were growing up as Strazac, which means “fireman” but which Mother, for reasons of her own, translated as “a general in the Polish Army.” Even as a child, Sandra liked to be in charge. For the record, I was called Epidemic, because I was always hanging around and was impossible to send off to bed. Georgette was known as Gorgeous, for the obvious reasons, and Bruce remained Bruce. When I look at pictures of Sandra from college, I see a rather delicate-looking young American girl with beaming brown eyes and lovely tapered hands. No one would mistake her for a Polish general, but, of course, I’m not often confused with black cholera or influenza, either. A few years ago, when Sandra was a senior corporate officer at Citibank, she broke her leg, and a day after surgery, when a nurse came into her hospital room to change her I.V., Sandra snapped at her, “Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m on a business call!” This sort of will is beyond any strazac, or Poland would never have been divided. This sort of determination, I’m sure, is responsible for a very well-placed corporate lawyer’s telling me that my sister saved John Reed’s job at Citibank during its financial crisis. John Reed is—“of course,” as my sister would say—the chairman. What my sister won’t discuss is why so many of her male corporate contemporaries have become chairmen and she has not. My sister is a strong woman but not an angry one. Ultimately, she’s a team player.
My favorite Sandra story is another one she would prefer I not tell. Sandra came home twice from Europe during her five years away. During one of those visits, I was a third grader at the Yeshiva Flatbush. (I feel Sandra already blushing.) Every Saturday, I took dancing classes at the June Taylor School, in Manhattan, rather than attend temple services. In order for Sandra and me to get to know each other, my mother suggested that Sandra pick me up from school and take me to Howard Johnson’s for a grilled-cheese sandwich and on to Radio City for the stage spectacular and a Doris Day film.
My phantom neo-British sister in the gray flannel suit arrived at the school of dance, immediately warned me “Don’t tell Mother,” and hustled me off to the House of Chan for spareribs and shrimp with lobster sauce. Neither dish was on the rabbi’s recommended dietary list at the yeshiva. I was terrified that a burning bush or two stone tablets would come hurtling through the House of Chan’s window. But I was with my glamorous big sister, who everyone told me was so brilliant, so I cleaned my plate.
After lunch, we skipped Radio City; Sandra had no interest in the Rockettes or Doris Day. We went to the Sutton Theatre, on East Fifty-seventh Street, which seemed to me the ultimate in style: they served demitasse in the lobby. The feature film was “Expresso Bongo,” starring Laurence Harvey as Cliff Richard’s tawdry musical agent. All I remember is a number in a strip joint with girls dancing in mini-kilts and no tops. I knew that in whatever Doris Day movie we were meant to be going to she would be wearing a top.
I never told my mother, but I loved everything about that afternoon. My big sister Sandra showed me that women, especially a female general with an epidemic, could go anywhere. ♦
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