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The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Growing Up with Norman: Difference between revisions
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{{Byline|last=Wasserman|first=Barbara Mailer|abstract=We sometimes walked around the streets of Brooklyn on cold winter days, carrying our ice skates and trying to find a tennis court that was flooded and frozen over. I remember nothing ever seemed to get frozen except our feet. A couple of years later, when he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, he got a book that diagrammed the fox trot and other dance steps with pictures of the feet, and we practiced together. I learned to dance. I’m afraid he didn’t.|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{Byline|last=Wasserman|first=Barbara Mailer|abstract=We sometimes walked around the streets of Brooklyn on cold winter days, carrying our ice skates and trying to find a tennis court that was flooded and frozen over. I remember nothing ever seemed to get frozen except our feet. A couple of years later, when he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, he got a book that diagrammed the fox trot and other dance steps with pictures of the feet, and we practiced together. I learned to dance. I’m afraid he didn’t.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr01was}} | ||
{{dc|dc=A|bout twenty-five years ago at a dinner party,}} I was asked by the man sitting next to me, “What was it like growing up as Norman Mailer’s sister?” | |||
If I had ever been asked this before, I had not considered it answerable. It was the kind of question that at best seemed desperate and at worst an invasion of privacy. My answers, if any, were probably flippant and dismissive. At this particular juncture of my life, however, I had heard enough tales from other women of how badly their brothers had treated them to have realized how lucky I had been to have Norman for my brother. For once I was delighted by the question. “It was wonderful,” I said. As an instance, I talked about how, when I was an early adolescent and awkward and unsure of myself, he kept telling me how attractive and intelligent I was. My dinner partner looked dismayed and said ruefully, “Oh I didn’t do that for my sister.” It was clear he wished he had, which sharpened my sense of how lucky I had been. | If I had ever been asked this before, I had not considered it answerable. It was the kind of question that at best seemed desperate and at worst an invasion of privacy. My answers, if any, were probably flippant and dismissive. At this particular juncture of my life, however, I had heard enough tales from other women of how badly their brothers had treated them to have realized how lucky I had been to have Norman for my brother. For once I was delighted by the question. “It was wonderful,” I said. As an instance, I talked about how, when I was an early adolescent and awkward and unsure of myself, he kept telling me how attractive and intelligent I was. My dinner partner looked dismayed and said ruefully, “Oh I didn’t do that for my sister.” It was clear he wished he had, which sharpened my sense of how lucky I had been. | ||
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[[Category:Memoirs (MR)]] | [[Category:Memoirs (MR)]] | ||