pecan is mounted behind glass in a display case in Dr. Mott’s office entitled “Foreign Objects Removed from Children’s Bodies.” Under the pecan it reads, “Nut from Teensy Whitman’s leftnostril. June 18, 1930.” When we were growing up, this gave Teensy a sort of fame among school kids.
Teensy had a perfect body, and we all knew exactly what it looked like. One of her eccentricities (when the gang really got going, when the bourbon was flowing, when the time seemed right, when she received the call) was to stage an elaborately drawn-out, sexy, and very funny striptease. We had seen her do it at numerous Ya-Ya parties, and had heard talk about the time she did it at the Theodore Hotel during Caro and Blaine’s fifth-anniversary bash. We Petites Ya-Yas were taught to simply refer to it as Teensy’s deshabillage.
Teensy always wore the skimpiest swimsuits. The Ya-Yas called her the Bikini Queenie and she was the talk of Garnet parish with her risqué little numbers. I always imagined that she received those bikinis in the mail straight from Paris.
She swam only on her back. On her back in her un-Catholic bikini. Every once in a while she would give a furious flutter kick and white water would rise in a fume from her precious tiny toes. She’d cruise with this momentum for a while until she came to a standstill. Then, extending her arms wide in the water, she would gracefully move them as though she were conducting the legato movement of a water symphony. When she grew tired of that, she’d flip over and dive neatly into the water, her toes pointing up like arrows to the sky. Then she’d swim under water for what seemed like days, and we’d all place bets on where she’d surface. When her pretty black head popped up like a seal, we’d all say: “Where does Teensy put all that air?!”
Teensy always had money, and she gave it away to any of us who needed it. When her father died, he left her a fat bundle of Coca-Cola shares. Her husband, Chick, had inherited money as well, so much that the only reason he went downtown to his office was so he could drink coffee with the other men at the River Street Café. It was Teensy whostaked Lulu when she started her own interior-design business. And it was Teensy who—no questions asked—wired me $10,000 when I called her at the end of my first year in New York, broke and scared, with not a job in sight. Teensy is also the one who offered—she was fairly tipsy at the time—to pay for each and every Petite Ya-Ya to go into therapy. She made this offer at my high school graduation party, which was held to jointly honor Teensy’s son, Jacques, Caro’s son Turner, and me.
Not one of us took her up on the offer at the time, a fact I’ve often regretted, since it could have saved me enough money to buy a small country somewhere. Teensy’s only daughter, my childhood friend Genny, had by that time already undergone more therapy (both inpatient and out) than the rest of us could imagine. In fact, at the time we were graduating from high school, she was already in a private mental hospital for the second time. But that is another story. Her fine, fragile craziness that bordered on visionary reminded me of stories I’d heard about Genevieve, Teensy’s mother. That family had its share of sadness.
All of us, so interwoven, so braided, growing up Ya-Ya in that backwater, third-tier state, where our families were the haut monde , their sins charming and mostly unnamed. So many stories in the Ya-Ya clan.
When the Petites Ya-Yas—minus the Walker kids—showed up en masse at a performance of Women on the Cusp , I felt like I’d been granted a partial reprieve from my status of orphan. Even though Mama’s anger prevented the Ya-Yas themselves from seeing the play, the Petites Ya-Yas came. Somehow they even managed to check Genny out of McClean in Boston long enough to come.
Mama’s scrapbook is filled not only with her life and the lives of the Ya-Yas, but inevitably
Teensy had a perfect body, and we all knew exactly what it looked like. One of her eccentricities (when the gang really got going, when the bourbon was flowing, when the time seemed right, when she received the call) was to stage an elaborately drawn-out, sexy, and very funny striptease. We had seen her do it at numerous Ya-Ya parties, and had heard talk about the time she did it at the Theodore Hotel during Caro and Blaine’s fifth-anniversary bash. We Petites Ya-Yas were taught to simply refer to it as Teensy’s deshabillage.
Teensy always wore the skimpiest swimsuits. The Ya-Yas called her the Bikini Queenie and she was the talk of Garnet parish with her risqué little numbers. I always imagined that she received those bikinis in the mail straight from Paris.
She swam only on her back. On her back in her un-Catholic bikini. Every once in a while she would give a furious flutter kick and white water would rise in a fume from her precious tiny toes. She’d cruise with this momentum for a while until she came to a standstill. Then, extending her arms wide in the water, she would gracefully move them as though she were conducting the legato movement of a water symphony. When she grew tired of that, she’d flip over and dive neatly into the water, her toes pointing up like arrows to the sky. Then she’d swim under water for what seemed like days, and we’d all place bets on where she’d surface. When her pretty black head popped up like a seal, we’d all say: “Where does Teensy put all that air?!”
Teensy always had money, and she gave it away to any of us who needed it. When her father died, he left her a fat bundle of Coca-Cola shares. Her husband, Chick, had inherited money as well, so much that the only reason he went downtown to his office was so he could drink coffee with the other men at the River Street Café. It was Teensy whostaked Lulu when she started her own interior-design business. And it was Teensy who—no questions asked—wired me $10,000 when I called her at the end of my first year in New York, broke and scared, with not a job in sight. Teensy is also the one who offered—she was fairly tipsy at the time—to pay for each and every Petite Ya-Ya to go into therapy. She made this offer at my high school graduation party, which was held to jointly honor Teensy’s son, Jacques, Caro’s son Turner, and me.
Not one of us took her up on the offer at the time, a fact I’ve often regretted, since it could have saved me enough money to buy a small country somewhere. Teensy’s only daughter, my childhood friend Genny, had by that time already undergone more therapy (both inpatient and out) than the rest of us could imagine. In fact, at the time we were graduating from high school, she was already in a private mental hospital for the second time. But that is another story. Her fine, fragile craziness that bordered on visionary reminded me of stories I’d heard about Genevieve, Teensy’s mother. That family had its share of sadness.
All of us, so interwoven, so braided, growing up Ya-Ya in that backwater, third-tier state, where our families were the haut monde , their sins charming and mostly unnamed. So many stories in the Ya-Ya clan.
When the Petites Ya-Yas—minus the Walker kids—showed up en masse at a performance of Women on the Cusp , I felt like I’d been granted a partial reprieve from my status of orphan. Even though Mama’s anger prevented the Ya-Yas themselves from seeing the play, the Petites Ya-Yas came. Somehow they even managed to check Genny out of McClean in Boston long enough to come.
Mama’s scrapbook is filled not only with her life and the lives of the Ya-Yas, but inevitably
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