THE SWEET-16 BLAZER

"I was impossible to shop for. Verrry picky."

This was the mid 1980s, Staten Island. Most girls had long teased hair and wore poofy dresses to their sweet 16. That wasn’t my style. I wasn’t into pink, lace, beading, or tulle. So I was impossible to shop for. Verrry picky. It was hard to be an individual back then.

I was shopping with my mom when I saw the blazer. Right there I knew nothing else would do. I could picture the whole Sweet 16 outfit: black satin pencil skirt, gold sequined tube top, pointy red flats, all topped off with that blazer. But it was expensive. $100! So we didn’t buy it. We went home, where my grandmother was watching my little brothers and sister. 

My grandmother was tough, she didn’t like when the boys were wild, she would yell, but when my mom came home she would say we were angels. She was not a good cook—she would serve us blueberries and sour cream for dinner (although she did teach me how to make matzo brei, and each week when my uncle took her out to eat she saved the baked potato and made herself home fries the next day). She liked to dress nicely. When she died I wanted her shoes, but in the Jewish tradition there’s a superstition about wearing the shoes of the dead, so my mom said no.

My grandmother was needy with my mom, who was her oldest child, bossier with my aunt, who was the youngest, and my uncle, the middle child, could do no wrong—but with her grandchildren she made it about us. She listened to us and supported us and loved us. Not that she didn’t have her moments—“What are you doing, you moron!”—which we laugh about to this day. But she was almost always on my side. And that night when we came home from shopping, she told my mom to let me get the blazer, and that was that.

—Suzanne Hassler