Kathy O’Dell

What I Wasn’t. Having landed in my inbox a few weeks ago from the town historian in Arcade, New York, where my four siblings and I went to high school, this now sepia-toned yearbook page from 1953 triggered in me a mix of longing and relief. The white plastic spiral binding along the right edge kept my sisters in their place: Patty at the far right, top; Nancy at the bottom, second from the left. How gorgeous they are. How perfect their waves and curls. How blemish-free their complexion. How serene their expressions. How gracefully disciplined their pose. 1953: The year JFK and Jackie got married, Audrey Hepburn was on the cover of Life magazine, the Corvette was introduced, the Academy Awards were televised for the first time, President Eisenhower appointed Charlie Wilson Secretary of Defense, the Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C., restaurants could not refuse to serve blacks, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing for allegedly spying for the Soviet Union, and Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex was published in English in the U.S., introducing for the first time the phrase “women’s liberation.” I was three years old when these events took place and the picture of my sisters appeared in the Edacra (clever backwards spelling of Arcade). One decade later ushered in the cultural revolution of “The Sixties,” shaping my life in a very different way from my sisters’ path to adulthood. Now, almost six decades later, I simultaneously long for the model of elegance and beauty my sisters provided and am gratefully relieved over What I Wasn’t. I never wore the “A” (for Arcade). The orange A, set against the black of the cheerleader’s uniform, always looked like a tribute to Halloween—a fitting marker of very scary times.