They Left Me On the Side of the Road

I guess it could have been worse: I could have been ditched there without the beer I was holding. I mean, that one beer would have gotten me at least 50 yards down the perfectly manicured road, and I guess I could have started walking... But I was wearing a sun dress that barely covered my ass and a cowboy hat that I had only just purchased, in desperate sun-shading need, from Walgreens and I was carrying a beer at 2 in the afternoon. So mostly I hid behind a palm frond and waited for my sisters to come driving back -- in my father's Caddie laughing like they were the FUNNIEST PEOPLE ON EARTH.

It was the Second Annual Suburban Housewives Lost Weekend to my dad's house in South Carolina. The trip includes all the requisites of a journey like this: cocktails, shopping, poolside crossword doing, beachside people watching and me, the little sister, being mercilessly teased and ultimately left on the side of the road. In a stripper hat holding a cheap beer. On a street in a community that probably has a Neighborhood Watch for Tasteless Vacationing Broads.

It wasn't all like this. I got my shots in. When we ogled watched some beach volleyball at the local Tiki Bar, I laughed at one sister for clutching her purse so tightly I thought her hands might lose their blood supply and simply fall off. "This is the kind of place with thieves," she whispered, all shifty-eyed and wishing she had mace. And when another sister appeared with what can only be described as bedazzled resort wear slacks for an event at The Club, I couldn't contain my eye-ball rolling and too-cool-for-school grimace. (Meanwhile, I was wearing dirty white sneakers with a dress because my cheap leather sandals had dyed the soles of my feet orange.)

We tried on dresses and skirts and all kinds of bedazzled resort wear while packed in one tiny dressing room together, piles of clothes at our feet, elbows and credit cards and compliments ("no, really, that barely shows any back fat!") flying around at the same time. We floated around the pool and decided our children were all perfect and fine and everyone was going to be okay. We let each other sleep or cry or tell bad jokes and we three, and my dad and his wife, we laughed. A lot.

My father sat from his perch, literal and symbolic, and watched in bemused and somewhat horrified amazement. It's rare that we're together like this. And it's been such a long, long time since we lived in a house as a family: thirty years in fact. When I was ten, my middle sister moved away to boarding school and three years after that they were both gone to college. Granted, there were many times together after they shipped out -- a trip to Rome and Egypt when I was in middle school, long weekends in the summer when every part of my regular life shifted because they were home, weddings, funerals, and when they gathered us to tell our father was leaving.

But we only get the Annual Lost weekend, well, annually.

My father must be surprised that his oldest daughters still ditch his 40-year-old youngest at the side of the road and still find these pranks completely pee-in-the-pants hysterical. He must be surprised that we smoke and drink and swear and sometimes nearly pee in our pants with laughter in front of him without fear of grave punishment. He must wonder how it all came to this, thirty years after the family dinners happened every night and nearly 18 years since his first grand child was born. He must wonder how all that time and all that growing-up and all those dollars in fancy educations could result in a weekend like this. He watches his middle-aged daughters lounging by his pool in messes of their own making, committing their immature hi-jinks, and enjoying themselves with loud-mouth abandon.

I hope he is happy.

Because I was.