MY SISTER’S VERSION IS NOT MINE. Different because we grew up in the same household, not in spite of it, our looks back on life can be seen through one lens or the other–or both. Even the simplest stuff can have two versions, I’ve discovered, and while I’m getting more accustomed to the idea, I am deeply moved by the truth that for long periods of our lives I held my version against hers as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth. Take for instance those early traumatic experiences. I suspect we may differ, even on those. I don’t know.

In a comment here, Jean L asks if we script these posts about my version and hers of our memories. We don’t. I write one and Margaret reacts. Margaret has no idea what topic I’ll bring to this public airing until she reads it online.

Perhaps the first trauma I remember was the child who was hit by the car right in front of our house. Dragged the length of our property line and dying in the street, there are fewer emotional Polaroids that bubble up in my head in such intense color. One neighbor brought sawdust to soak up the blood. Someone brought a blanket.

I have always considered it a tremendous mark of character that our mother neither made us go out and look at the accident, nor forbid us from looking through the bay window out onto the sadness as its tragedy unfolded. My across the street neighbors-my best friends-were marched out by their mother and made to stand over the scene until its completion, including watching the small body being loaded into the ambulance, and the delivery and spreading of the sawdust. The mother insisted that it taught them to ride their bicycles more safely. A devout Catholic, their mother was very much about consequences.

Even then I was grateful for our mother’s position on this: Not one to shield us, and not one to deny, disinclined to overexpose us to things that were horrific, she wanted us to empathize without being terrorized. I have always thought it a correct lesson.

That’s my version of it–and of her–at that time.

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YOU KNOW YOU’RE A SISTER when you’re trying on a bra, and every bra nightmare you’re ever had comes sling-shotting back at your self-esteem as if loaded and launched from a 44DD, and you start to get just the eensiest bit hostile in the dressing room at the pooches and the pouches, and how you look nothing whatever like a Victoria’s Secret model, and you leave 19 bras in the dressing room, buying none, and go crying to the car and call your sister.

“Shopping for a bra,” may be the single worst phrase in the retail lexicon. Substitute, “purse,” or “shoes,” or even “sex toy,” and few if any of us feel the tiny slivers of icy humiliation that run right up the collective female spine when the word “bra” is tossed into that quote.

It’s not that I haven’t had a good fit or two along the way. There was large, red-haired Orthodox Jewish man at Manhattan’s famous Orchard Corset (where Madonna is said to have gotten her Gaultier pointy-cups), all those years ago, who simply glanced at my fully clothed chest, called out a size I’d never in my life imagined being, and then handed me what turned out to be the single, comfortable, properly-fitting bra of my life. Problem was, it was ugly. Medievally ugly. But comfortable. Such kind comfort sonnets are written about. But fetishically grotesque. So ugly was this bra that no one ever saw me in it, despite the fact that I wore it all the time. Relentlessly kind but hideous, it was the Shrek of bras.

What followed are years of misery, after I refused to go back for more ugly bras (and there was that little tiny issue of calling out my size in the store), and instead again set out on my own into dressing rooms, almost always emerging with exactly the wrong thing and, of course, buying it anyway, and calling my sister to kvetch.

Last week was stacking up to be no different. My arms loaded with bras of all shapes (and the wrong size), I stomped into the Macy’s dressing room, expecting the worst, and got it. But this time, my teenage daughter was in the next dressing room, and despite my previous personal experiences, I knew I had one of those chances to change the course of history. This was confirmed after seeing the slump in my daughter’s mood after her own dressing room try-on. And so we left Macy’s and walked the mall. And while I have no more faith in the Victoria’s Secret Angel than the next woman, something made me stop, think, and calmly stroll into the place, go up to a saleswoman, and say the following thing:

“Please help me.”

My daughter looked stricken. Was her mother really going to talk about breasts with a stranger? Yes, apparently I was.

It took six trips and maybe 25 bras, including a recognition that yes, I was choosing the wrong cup size, wrong band size, as well as the wrong styles, until I hit what could have been the really big snag.

“This fits,” I told her, as I took the bra back to the saleswoman, “but I’m pooching out a little under the arms,” to which the wise woman arched an eyebrow toward the enormous black and white photograph of the near-naked model in a heavenly-hovering mode just above us, and said, “Everybody does a little. Everybody.”

Later, at home, I dialed Margaret and told her the tale: I had new bras for the first time in years; my daughter had learned the lesson that you ask for help even when the subject is your own breasts; and that you do not leave empty-handed, no matter how hard it might seem, to which Margaret said the two loveliest words a sister can say:

“Good job.”

You know you’re a sister when that happens.

We’re collecting sisters’ versions of when we know we’re not out there on our own. What’s yours?

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