22. Nuts from the Same Tree

My sister Missy has always been the gold standard for beauty in our family. Even today, nearly eighty, she is a beautiful woman. Carrying the same genes as Missy could be difficult for Maureen and me. We were always comparing ourselves to her and feeling as though we came up short. 

With her hair perfectly curled and with just the right amount of makeup, Missy seemed to rise out of the pages of a fashion magazine. When she was sixteen, she accidentally dropped her ring in the mailbox at the corner of Kanawha and 38th Streets. She stopped the postman, but he said once it was in there, it was under the protection of the U.S. Postal Service. He couldn’t give it to her. She followed him to the post office and found someone who would give her the ring.

A columnist for the Daily News heard the story and included it and her photo in the paper a couple of days later. You can bet if she weren’t so pretty that story and photo would never have run.

Maureen and I threw on whatever clothes were clean and sometimes remembered to brush our hair. There was no way we could compete with Missy.

The winter of Missy’s third grade was particularly stormy. Snow piled up on the edges of the streets, creating drifts to wade across when the children walked to school. Mom thought the brown wool snow pants that Joe had outgrown were in fine shape for Missy. Missy was mortified. She wasn’t going to let the entire world see her walk to school in those old, brown snow pants. No way. She left the house on those cold mornings, and as soon as she was out of sight of Mom, she ripped those snow pants off and stuffed them into her book bag. It couldn’t possibly be cold enough to make her keep them on.

Another of Missy’s signature traits is a wicked sense of humor — and I mean that in the most complimentary sense of the word “wicked.” When they were very young, Missy pretended to eat soap while she and Maureen were in the bathtub one night. “Yum. This is delicious.” “Really?” said Moe. “Yes. I’d give you some, but I want it all for myself.” Finally, Missy gave Moe the soap, and she took a big bite. Tears streamed down Maureen’s flushed cheeks.

One afternoon a couple of years later Missy and Maureen were helping Mom carry groceries in from the car. The very last bag was deep in the trunk. Missy told Moe to climb in and hand her the bag. When Maureen got all the way in, Missy slammed the trunk shut and laughed devilishly. Missy may say she didn’t leave Maureen in there very long, but Maureen might disagree. 

Joe and Missy were the best of friends growing up. Once when our family lived on 13th Street in Arlington, they were playing in the street with other kids from the block. Joe and Missy had been told before not to give each other bike rides. But this time Dad wasn’t home, and Mom was busy making dinner and watching Kevin, who was an infant. Joe thought that if Missy wanted a ride up the block there would be no harm done.

Missy hopped on Joe’s bike just as Dad rounded the corner at an unusually early hour. They blissfully rode up the street not noticing Dad a half block behind them. By the time they all got home, Dad was livid. In front of the neighborhood kids, Dad pointed at the front door and yelled, “Inside. Now.” Missy and Joe scurried inside. 

In retelling this story, Missy always says the next part was the worst of the whole ordeal. As the kids stood in the street staring into the Reillys’ front windows, Dad carefully pulled down the shades. The neighborhood kids knew Missy and Joe were getting spankings. The pain of humiliation far outlived the pain of the spanking.

When Missy was sixteen, she came home from school. Mom was in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee. “I’m going to be in the school musical,” she said. “You are?” Mom asked. “Yeah, It’s called Bells Are Ringing. I’m the lead. I’m going to sing, The Party’s Over.” “What? Can you sing?” Mom asked. Mom said later that she was so nervous when Missy took the stage, she could barely breathe. But Missy seemed completely at ease. And she sang beautifully.

A couple of decades later, Mom and Dad were at the beach with Missy, her husband Lewis and their kids. After dinner the kids went to bed, and the adults sat in the living room talking. At some point, Mom said, “Missy, why don’t you sing us a song?” Lewis turned to Mom, and said, “Can she sing?” “Oh, yes, She can sing.” Lewis sat in amazement, listening to his wife do something he had never heard before.

By the time Missy was in her mid-twenties, she was a single mother of two toddlers, working in a restaurant downtown called Bixby’s, which my brother Dennis managed. Her marriage to the girls’ dad had ended in divorce when Marjorie and Gigi were one and two. Missy and the girls moved back to Jocelyn Street for a while. 

At about that time Brian got a job at Bixby’s as a busboy. He was thirteen. His first shift was a dinner shift, and Missy drove him downtown on Reno Road. Reno is a three-lane road and, at that time, the center lane ran downtown in the morning and uptown in the afternoon. But that was no deterrent to Missy. She pulled into the center lane and put the pedal to the metal. Oncoming traffic be damned. (I’m assuming Mom taught her how to drive.)

“You have to be twice as good as everyone else,” Missy said. “You’re a Reilly. Everyone will be expecting you to have it easier, so Dennis and I will cut you no slack. No slack, Brian!” she yelled, although he was right next to her. “All I could think was ‘I hope I live to do a good job,’” Brian remembers. The hill between Porter and Ordway Streets was particularly steep, and there was no way to see over it. Brian closed his eyes as the car sped up the hill. “You’ll know you’ve succeeded when you’re the one all the waiters want to work with,” Missy said.

Brian and Missy survived that trip and each successive trip that summer, Brian sitting calmly in the passenger seat and Missy barreling down the center lane of Reno Road. That summer Brian went from being low man on the totem pole to being the busboy all the waiters wanted to work with in about a month.

For many years, Missy has dedicated her life to overturning Roe v. Wade. She’s been arrested several times. She ran for vice president on an anti-abortion platform with the activist Randall Terry. It’s something that she and I have only spoken of once. She has her views, and I have mine. We had too much respect and love for each other to risk the schism that a frank conversation might have opened up, a schism that we might not be able to reach across after such a talk.

But one night when I had come up to D.C. from Charlottesville without John, she invited me to stay in her apartment. Late in the evening the subject came up. There were a couple of very difficult moments, but we were both able to keep our emotions and tempers in check. We listened to each other and tried to speak with kindness and love, in spite of our divergent views. At midnight we both climbed into her king-sized bed. We lay there for an hour and talked, not about abortion, but about kids and neighbors and silly things. We laughed. And then we fell asleep.

The next morning I told her how grateful I was for that conversation. I thought we had navigated it pretty well. When I mentioned laughing in bed before we fell asleep, she said, “I didn’t want us to go to sleep with those as our last words.” It was such a sweet thought, and it made me realize how grateful — how blessed — I am to have her as my sister.

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The photo at the top of the post is of Missy with her five children, l-r: Reilly, Marjorie, Gigi, Madeline, and John.