My middle sister was the wild one in the family. While a student at conservative, catholic Cardinal Gibbons High she hung out with the trashy public school kids. My parents worried because her new friends were girls who wore too much makeup and smoked and drank. They hung around with older boys who slicked back their hair and drove fast cars and had too much money. Candles were lighted and rosaries were recited until my sister outgrew this phase of her life. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when she was engaged at 19 and married at 20.
Fast-forward 35 years. Now, newly widowed and with a surplus of both time and money on her hands, my sister moved to a condo on the beach. Not long after getting settled, she called me to cancel dinner with me. “I’m having dinner with some of the girls from the condo,” she said. She told me she didn’t want to but it would be rude to shun her new neighbors.
Thus began a pattern in our lives, of my playing second fiddle to the “condo ladies.” A group of divorced or widowed women in their 50’s and 60’s, they traveled in a pack, like aging sorority sisters, descending on restaurants, clubs, shopping malls and theatres en masse, making sure to get home before dark.
The condo ladies were an odd bunch. They had penthouse apartments with no furniture inside and Infinitis that they could barely make the payments on. For the most part, they were unemployed and, although they shamelessly lied about their ages they eagerly anticipated turning 62, when they could collect Social Security, and then 65, when they qualified for Medicare. In the meantime ,their boyfriends kept them fed, drunk and entertained, in return for favors that I’d rather not contemplate.
The condo ladies took my sister under their wing. In a blink of an eye, my sister was sporting a new hairstyle, darker and thicker than her usual, and she started discussing plastic surgery, pulling her eyes back until she looked Korean and lifting her chins up to show me how young she would look. Shopping trips to the Galleria Mall resulted in Capri pants and floral tops and purses the size of a suitcase. A makeover at Bloomies brought out her eyes and cheekbones and her lips developed a provocative pout.
I finally met the Condo Ladies when I was at her apartment one afternoon. Stunned, I realized they had made my sister over in a near total likeness of themselves. They had the same hair, the same makeup, the same clothes. Living in East Ft Lauderdale, we all know women who have had some work done, but these women had been rebuilt. They arrived en masse, drinks in one hand and cigarettes in the other, and in deep, gravelly voices insisted my sister and I come down to happy hour in the condo clubhouse to meet their boyfriends.
The boyfriends were considerably older than the women, which makes sense, my sister’s friend Lenore told me, because 60 year old men want 35 year old girlfriends. These men were deeply tanned and had jet black hair that they wore slicked back like George Hamilton. They often had only one eyebrow, and sported eyeglasses in the style favored by Ari Onassis. They wore topsiders with khaki shorts to display their withered legs and polo shirts that clung to their massive beer guts. Several of these men could still drive at night, so they were quite popular. They drove fast cars, Lexus being the model of choice, and had lots of money that they made in real estate or waste management or construction. Some of these guys had wives, some had girlfriends, a couple, it was rumored, had boyfriends and at least one, an exhausted looking octogenarian named Sal, reportedly had one of each.
The more things change the more they stay the same. I ducked out of happy hour as fast as humanly possible, and left my sister and her new friends discussing where they would go for dinner and then breakfast. Of course, I reported directly back to my mother, the same way I did when my sister was in high school and I was an obnoxious middle-school kid. Candles have been lighted. Rosaries are being said. We’re hoping that this phase of her life will pass too.