How to Be a Sister

by Eileen Garvin

  “Hi, Eileen,” Margaret said brightly after a while, as if we had not been sitting there in silence for ten minutes.

  “Hi, Margs,” I said calmly, as if I had not just traveled sixteen hundred miles to take her out to lunch.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi, Margs,” I said.

  Another silent minute passed.

  “That’s Bobby Darrin,” she said.

  And sure enough, when I paused to listen, the buttery tones of Bobby Darrin came crooning out of the corner speaker. Just one file of the thousands in my sister’s mental archive of musicians and lyrics that spans decades. I remembered back when she was our house DJ, spinning records during all waking hours, forming the soundtrack of our childhood. Bobby Darrin was a favorite, as were the songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops, and the Electric Light Orchestra. One might hear “Hold on Tight to Your Dreams” on the heels of “What’s the Buzz” or “I’m Coming to Get You in a Taxi, Honey.”

  “Yes, that’s right, Margs. That’s Bobby Darrin.”

  “That’s Bobby Darrin, Eileen.”

  “Yep. That’s Bobby Darrin, Margs.”

  We listened together. “Oh, Louie Miller, he disappeared, babe! After drawin’ out all his hard-earned cash. And now MacHeath spends just like a sailor. Could it be our boy’s done something rash?”

  “Bobby Darrin,” Margaret whispered to herself and laughed quietly.

  Then all of a sudden she said, “Hi, there!” and she smiled at me. Right at me. Not looking sideways and then yanking her eyes back down to the counter like before. Her lovely hazel eyes looked right into my face. She smiled, as if welcoming me. “Hi, Eileen!” she said, like I’d just arrived, like I’d just pulled up in front of her house after she had not seen me in ages. “Hi, there, Eileen!” Like it was Christmas morning.

  I didn’t say anything, even though I felt like I might weep. I just smiled at her. I hummed a few bars of “Mack the Knife.” Still smiling, Margaret went back to the finger-pressing game, now alternating hands.

  “Do you want another Coke?”

  This question came from the server behind the counter, the one who was not supine in the corner. She must have been about twenty. Her long brunette hair was pulled back in a ponytail, out of her wide-set eyes and pretty face. She was tough, way too cool to be friendly. But I realized that when she asked this question, she was not asking me. She was looking at my sister. She was asking Margaret. For this, I suddenly loved her, this complete stranger.

  Often as soon as people pick up on Margaret’s weirdo vibe, they start directing their questions at whoever is with her. “Does she want French fries?” they’ll ask me nervously, glancing at her. “Does she bite?” they might as well be asking. They mean well. They’re just trying to get the food on the table. It throws off a server’s game when she tries to hand out a pair of menus and a customer shouts “No!” and shoves a menu back at her.

  Our waitress was smarter than most. When that had happened earlier, she just took a step back and then removed the offending menu without saying anything, letting us both order from mine. But here she was again, trying to treat my sister like a normal person.

  “Do you want another Coke?” she asked again, and waited. After a second, Margaret glanced up from the counter and said, “Yes!” She took one last slurp on her straw before shoving the glass across the counter.

  “Thanks,” I said as the young woman delivered the glass back across the counter. “What do you want to say, Margs?”

  “Thank you!” my sister said, as she grabbed the still-fizzing glass out of the young woman’s hand, slammed it down in front of her, and took a noisy pull on the straw.

  The young woman flicked her eyes at me, and the corners of her mouth jerked upward in a kind of smile. Maybe she understands that this is just how Margaret moves, I thought. Margaret shoves, yanks, slams, jerks, runs, and throws herself in and out of chairs and cars. It’s nothing personal. She’ll try to slow down if you remind her, but it just makes her nervous to try to do things at someone else’s pace.

  We sat in peaceful silence until the food arrived. I looked up in anticipation. The young woman smiled back at me as she set down my plate with a clunk. Then she tried to set down Margaret’s. My sister looked horrified. “No!” she cried, and pushed the plate away with a forceful hand. “No!” The big dinner plate was heaped with food, and because it was so heavy, the young woman kept trying to set it down. But Margaret was playing defense and her voice got louder. “No-eeeeee!” She shoved the plate away again. This time the server almost dropped it. I reached over and grabbed the plate and set it down next to me.

  “Got it,” I said.

  The young woman stood there for a second staring at us like she was trying to figure out what she had done wrong. She looked down at the steaming plate, loaded with a hearty chicken sandwich and French fries, trying to determine the source of my sister’s horror. I was puzzled, too.

  “Don’t you want your sandwich?” I asked Margaret.

  “NothankyouEileen!” she said in one breath, staring at the counter. She sounded panicked.

  “Maybe later,” I said to the waitress, so that she would know it wasn’t her fault. She started to smile. But then Margaret gave the plate another shove. “NO!” The smile disappeared and the server backed away from us. I moved the plate over to the left of me, out of Margaret’s reach, feeling depressed. Forget about making polite conversation. If we couldn’t even manage to have lunch together like normal people, what in the hell was I supposed to do with her? How was I supposed to be part of her life? Maybe I should just give up this experiment and stay away. Margaret glanced at the plate on the far side of me with menace.

  Why? Why? I didn’t know, and worse, she couldn’t tell me. It would seem reasonable to assume that if you ordered food at a diner it would probably show up in front of you. It also seemed reasonable that, in ordering it, you implied that you wanted to eat it. But my reasoning skills often backfired when I was trying to figure out what my sister wanted or needed. I would even go so far as to say that most of the time I didn’t understand what my sister was thinking, and every time I failed, I felt my heart break a little more. Or maybe I should say I felt the heartbreak I continue to have, because it’s been this way for a very long time. This is the chasm between us, a great, yawning disconnect that neither one of us can breach. But if it felt shitty, it also felt familiar, which was some kind of cold comfort.

  THIS WAS HOW I had felt on our bike ride the year before during my spring break from grad school. I’d thought it would be a sure thing, something we could do together that she would really enjoy. Half a mile from the house, Margaret had stopped her bike and stood over it, bawling. She just cried and cried without making any noise, which I somehow hated even more than her screaming. Every once in a while she would lift up her T-shirt and wipe her streaming face. I just stood there feeling helpless, her sadness a physical weight on my chest as I watched her silent and terrible sorrow. I knew I couldn’t do anything to help, but I tried anyway, feeling useless, like I often did.

  “What’s the matter, Margaret?” I asked.

  “You’re crying!”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “You’re sad,” she said, trying to give me an answer.

  “Why are you sad?”

  “Hi, Eileen!” she said to me, smiling through her tears.

  “Do you want to go back to the house?” I asked.

  “No!”

  “Do you want to go for a bike ride?”

  Silence.

  This is what it feels like to be unable to comfort your family, people so close to you genetically. It seems a given that you should be able to reach each other in this most basic way. But nothing I did seemed to make a difference in moments like these.

  So we sat there for a while with the wind in our faces. It started to rain a little bit, but we just stood there. We kept our hands on the handlebars and our feet on the pave
ment, standing on the pedestrian overpass down by the Spokane River. After a while, Margaret took a deep breath, exhaled, wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and rode on without saying anything. Later, when we got back to the house and one of the staff members asked if we’d had a good time, Margaret’s answer was unequivocal: “Yes!”

  SO AS WE sat there on our stools, I didn’t know what to say, as usual. But I was learning what to do. Wait. Shut up. Wait some more. Be kind by being quiet. I couldn’t fix my sister. And as much as I wanted to, I usually couldn’t make her feel better. But I could sit with her in her sorrow, in her silence, with her cooling chicken sandwich, in her struggle to allow me to invade her routine so that I could be a part of her life.

  In the spirit of shutting up and waiting, I finished my lunch in silence while Margaret finished her final Coke. About the time I finished eating, the cook groaned, rolled over, and went outside to smoke a cigarette. I got a box for Margaret’s food and paid the bill. “Thanks,” I said to our server, who had recovered her composure and was able to act like it was perfectly normal to order food, try to throw it behind the counter, let it get cold, and then take it in a to-go box. “No problem,” she said.

  “Are you ready to go?” I asked my big sister. These words were like some kind of abracadabra. Margaret jumped down from her stool, grabbed her fanny pack, sucked in her tummy, threw the straps around her waist, and snapped the clasp shut. Then she headed for the door at full tilt. But when she got there she stopped abruptly and turned. She looked directly at the young woman behind the counter and broke into a radiant smile.

  “Okay! G-bye! Thank you very much for the lunch! Haveaniceday! G-bye!”

  Margaret shouted this in one breath, all the time smiling and waving madly. The young woman smiled a real smile and waved back, shyly, uncertain under the weight of such gratitude. Suddenly she was beautiful, her face reflecting my sister’s strange and simple joy. “You’re welcome,” she said.

  She got it right, Margaret, some of the time, anyway. She knew she was supposed to say thank you for food and hospitality even if she didn’t appear to accept them. Besides, most of us don’t get it right all of the time, do we?

  And that helped me, seeing someone else understand Margaret for a minute, recognizing her attempt to sustain a normal exchange, however brief, seeing the kindness that strangers are capable of. Maybe it’s not so complicated. We might not ever be like normal sisters, but what does that mean anyway?

  My whole life with Margaret I’d always felt like we were in a hurry. But now I wanted to think I was trying to learn to follow her at my own pace and let her go at her own. So when we first got to Arnie’s and she raced across the parking lot, her pink and purple Windbreaker flapping in the breeze, I followed behind and made sure to watch for cars. But I didn’t chase her. And I didn’t try to get her to slow down. I let her go in and be the first one through the door of the café, ringing the bells over the door with a bit more force than they were probably used to. I let her go in, knowing that she might just stand there and stare if someone asked her a question and that people might feel awkward when she didn’t answer. It’s that thing about transitions; they aren’t always smooth, but they have to happen if you want to leave the place you are and get to another. I let her go. I just let her go. I was beginning to realize that her life was her own, and that I was no parachute.

  Margaret slammed the door behind her, and the bells jangled. I was right on her tail as she raced toward the car. The wind ruffled her short hair and caught her Windbreaker, making it billow like a kite. She grinned at me over the top of the car as she waited for me to unlock the door so that she could get in and turn the key for me. As I smiled back, I thought, There might be hope for us after all.

  3.

  let her eat cake

  The good guest is almost invisible, enjoying him- or herself, communing with fellow guests, and, most of all, enjoying the generous hospitality of the hosts.

  —On Wedding Guests, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

  THE SUMMER OF the chicken sandwich ended. After my visit, I flew back to New Mexico, said good-bye to my friends, packed up my things, and drove a quaking U-Haul from south to north with one nervous dog, two angry cats, and my spouse, Brendan, who insisted on playing his guitar in the truck cab, so I had to drive for thirteen hundred miles with one hand guarding the right side of my head. Now we all lived in Oregon, a mere five hours from my childhood home. I was nearer to the family tree, but not much closer to figuring out what I was supposed to do about Margaret.

  She was on my mind a lot that first year, even at the most unlikely times, like when I was supposed to be working. Jobs were scarce in the beautiful little tourist town I moved to, so I took any kind of work I could get, including teaching English to migrant fruit pickers and working in a brownie factory, although I was trained for neither. I also wrote some stories for the local newspaper. They asked me to do a couple of features for the bridal guide, the kind of pieces that the regular staff would refuse to do, the kind of story I had balked at when I was a salaried newspaper person myself. But as the new freelancer in town, I was grateful to be working at all. So I knew I should be paying attention to my assignment instead of letting my mind wander to my big sister. But I just couldn’t help myself. She ran amok in my imagination, just as she had in my life.

  As I worked my way through the interviews for the bridal stories, one wedding planner made a really big impression on me with her kind of no-bullshit approach to putting on the Big White Dress Show. She was very tall, blonde, and had that kind of Germanic competence that made me believe she was capable of just about anything. If the bridal party got caught in traffic, she could pick up the limo with one hand and wade to safety. That’s the impression Teresa made. Maybe that’s why I found myself dying to ask her the most inappropriate questions during our interview.

  The topic of my story was second weddings, and we had kind of wandered into the territory of difficult relatives. I found myself wanting to ask, “So what would you do, then, after seating the ex-stepmother-in-law of the bride, I mean, and somebody started, I don’t know, running around the church and singing or something? Or what if somebody started laughing really hard during the vows? A guest, I mean. An adult. How would you handle that?”

  I really did want to know the answers. Teresa seemed like she might be the one person who could help me sort out what had happened in my own past. Hashing things out with her might be a kind of bridal morbidity and mortality session, like what hospitals have to assess why people died. Although it wouldn’t change what had already happened, I was comforted by the thought that somebody else might have known how to handle things. In the end, however, I figured this line of questioning could kill the flow of the interview, so I didn’t ask.

  I thought about my own wedding, years before. It was hard to believe that I was no longer in my twenties, but back then it was harder for me to believe that I’d ever get married at all. I was shocked by the fact that I liked anyone enough to spend seven days a week with him without wanting to do him bodily harm. I’m not the most patient person, and this was, after all, a man who borrowed my toothbrush, lost my apartment keys, frequently stepped on me as he was crossing a room, elbowed me in the face every time he put on his seat belt, locked me out of the apartment for hours at a time, or, alternatively, left my apartment door wide open when he left so that any of the junkies in my building could have let themselves in to make a sandwich or smoke some crack. This was Brendan—generally an hour late for everything while I was fifteen minutes early. Somehow, it seemed, we belonged together.

  Like many young people, I hadn’t given much thought to the marriage part of things. I figured that would take care of itself. I had more important things on my mind. I was worried about the wedding, the cake, my sister, and her autism. And not necessarily in that order.

  MARGARET WOULD APPEAR to love weddings. She shows great enthusiasm whenever the topic comes up. But the truth is, Margaret loves wedding cake
. To her, the entire affair—the invitations, the fancy clothes, the sacred vows, the touching family photos, the lavish banquet, the general hullabaloo—is meaningless, tiresome filler. She focuses her energies completely upon that magic moment during the reception when the lovely couple finally cuts the goddamn cake and lets everyone else have a piece. Nothing wrong with that, is there? The trouble is, everything that happens before the fork hits the plate doesn’t interest her much. It’s downtime, really. A tedious waiting period most often filled, depending on her mood, with laughter or tears, and not the quiet, happy, wedding kind.

  When we were growing up, I don’t recall that Margaret made a scene at anyone’s wedding reception. Which isn’t to claim that she didn’t make any memorable fuss. It’s just that by that point in the evening she had so much competition that it’s likely any outburst might have gone unnoticed. Irish Catholic receptions are really just one big scene, after all—a big drinking, fighting, dancing scene. More than once I heard my grandmother say on the way to the car after one of these high-energy, boozy affairs, “Oh, wasn’t that lovely! And nobody fell down.” Her parents owned a tavern after (and during) Prohibition, which is one reason she didn’t drink until she was almost seventy; this woman has seen it all, so she knows what she is talking about.

  But wedding ceremonies, even for rowdy Irish Catholics like us, are supposed to be different. The marriage rites are generally a time of quiet and reverence, a time to focus on the sacred union between two people who have chosen to (try to) spend (they hope) the rest of their lives together.

  Weddings can range widely within an acceptable scope of good taste—religious versus secular, indoor or outdoor, tuxes and silk as opposed to beach attire are just a few types that come to mind. However, I can say with some certainty that most marriage ceremonies don’t include a rousing, hand-clapping solo of “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” from one of the guests. I was almost a teenager before I realized that this kind of musical interlude was not common at nuptial services. No, in fact, this kind of thing was actually viewed as a disruption, the kind engineered by my sister Margaret.