Lil’ Number ‘Leven
By Karol Maloy Haney 

There is a picture on the counter of the room where I work on projects.  It’s a black and white picture of a young family – a sailor in dress whites, an attractive woman in her early twenties, and a child.  The child is sitting between the man and woman squinting at the sun and wearing a wide ribbon in her hair.  It is my family when I was, as we said before we thought we ought to tell children everything about everything, “but a gleam in my father’s eye”.  It’s a sweet picture of my parents and their first born child, my sister, Janet.  The family story is that when I was brought home from the hospital and Janet was called over to see the new baby, her only comment was “Humph, it looks like a monkey to me”.

I don’t know if every child believes that their sibling is the favorite, but in our family, my mother and sister were very close.  After all, my dad was in the Navy during the first years of Janet’s life, and she and my mother had only each other.  In fact when I came along, that relationship was so well established that I kind of got “given” to my dad.  When Mom went to Lawton to do errands for the store or go to the bank, she and Janet always promised that if I would agree to stay with Dad, they would bring me a Little Golden Book.  I had a huge library of Little Golden Books.

Although I was truly a daddy’s girl and my dad and I spent a lot of time together, I was always faintly aware that if he’d had his choice, I would have been a boy.  I don’t know that to be a fact – I never did ask him, but he was a huge sports fan, a real “guy” guy and I think he’d have been very happy to have had a boy to do guy things with.  Not only was I not a boy, I was not a tomboy or even vaguely interested in sports, hunting, fishing or any of that stuff. 

But my sister was.  She was a basketball player.  She wore a jersey with  “11” on it and we went to every ballgame – no matter how near or far or cold, we went.  Cache didn’t have football in those days, so everyone went to the basketball games.  As soon as my parents closed the store on ballgame nights we’d head out to the game.  Early on, she only sat on the bench, but we were there.  Later she began to get to play more and more and I recall hearing folks in the stands yelling “Throw it to Lil’ Number “Leven!!” The next day, there would be long and detailed conversations between her and my dad about the game – what she did right, what she did wrong, when should she have passed it to Jo Ann or Mary Ann, when she should have “driven”.  I was the observer – watching them, listening to them talk that “game talk”, following them outside so that Dad could show her some moves at the goal he’d put up in the backyard. They spent hours practicing free throws and lay-ups. She played in the County Tournament and got her name in the paper – the Lawton paper.  I was in awe.  She was my sister, and she was practically famous.

After high school, she went to Cameron Junior College, lived in the dorm, and didn’t come home or call much.  My mother cried and cried - she missed her so much, and so did I.  Suddenly all parental eyes were on me and, frankly, I didn’t fare too well under such close scrutiny.   We were all accustomed to Janet cooking supper every night and suddenly the task fell to me.  I would go to the store after school each day and Mother would have a sack of groceries for me to take home and cook.  I learned by trial and error as I hadn’t paid much attention when Janet was doing the cooking.  My dad tried to keep his sense of humor in check about the meals I cooked but I remember a couple of times when he’d say something like “Cut me a slice of that gravy” or “pass me the main dish” (he often didn’t know what it was that we were eating). 

At school, people would say “Are you a ballplayer like your big sister?”   I wasn’t.  I guess we all missed her.  Then we went to everything at Cameron that she was in. She was on the drill team, so we went to the basketball and football games.  She was named honorary ROTC Captain, so we went to the ceremonies when she as given her commission. We were her personal fan club.  After she continued her education at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, we went there to see her.  She was the first to do everything – to graduate from high school, to graduate from Cameron, to go to a University and get a degree.  I guess you could say that I was always in her shadow.  She was called “Maloy” when she was in high school, so all the teachers called me “Little Maloy” when I got there. She blazed the trail, making it hard for me because everyone compared me to her. But she also made it easier because she had already broken in our parents to boyfriends, denting the car, coming home late, running out of gas – all the things I was to do also, but not get into nearly as much trouble.  Sisters always have a special bond.  Maybe because there were only the two of us, we were closer than many. 

Not that we always got along.  My mother worked each day at Ken’s Food Store, our family’s business, so I was left in Janet’s care after school.  We kept the telephone line hot, calling the store to tell on each other.  We had to ring Cora, the Cache operator, who would connect us to 5-2, which was the number for Ken’s.  We called so often that Cora told us to stop calling and bothering our mother (after which my mother promptly went up to the telephone office and told Cora that it was our phone and we would call on it as much as we liked).

Even though my sister and I had the usual sisterly fusses and fights, she was always there.  She laughed at me when I fell face down in the mud at Spring Lake Park, she made fun of me when I had my first boyfriend. She bribed me into letting her fix my hair by taking my turn at washing supper dishes.  She called me names, told on me, and got me in trouble – but she was there when I fell out of the back of the pickup, took me home and washed the blood off my legs. She taught me how to whistle in the back seat of the car at the Austin Drive Inn while our parents tried to listen to a scratchy speaker box hanging on the car door and she taught me how to make Tacos.  She cried with me when I came home to Cache with a new baby after having failed at what I can now call my “starter marriage”.  She was the one I held onto when we buried our father and then our mother.  She had a life before I came along, but in my life, she’s always been there. 

When you buy a plant, there is usually a little plastic stake in the soil that says something like “grows best with full sun” or “grows best with partial shade”.  I guess God knew that I would grow best in the shadow of Lil’ Number ‘Leven.