How to Be a Sister

by Eileen Garvin

  Either way, she couldn’t hear me. She’d sit there with her eyes closed, banging her hands and feet against whatever she was standing closest to—the floor, the wall, the furniture, herself—not seeming to feel the pain. The force of her screaming was so great that I expected her uvula to emerge, bringing her esophagus, tonsils, and appendix right along with it. Every once in a while, Margaret would open her eyes and focus on whoever was foolish enough to be in the room with her. Our efforts to calm her usually did not comfort her, and so we were just as likely to become targets for her fists and feet. It was nothing personal; we were just in her space, and when her anxieties took over, we sometimes learned to get the hell out of the way, but often not.

  We called these episodes “tantrums,” which sounds so benign and friendly. Tantrums were what little kids had when they were whining for ice cream. Tantrum. The word has a nice little symphonic ring to it. It sounds like a small piece of Asian percussion, something that would be played during the special music section at Christmas mass. We needed a better word, but we didn’t have one, at least not a polite one we could use in front of other people.

  Sometimes it was hard to know what had set Margaret off in the first place, but this particular crisis had been about the Blue Goody, a small, cheap, plastic hairbrush with bristles on one side of it. Like so many things in our crowded household, it was the only one of its kind. One hairbrush in a house of seven people. My parents were trying to feed and clothe seven of us, and they were frugal people. So it seemed like there was one of everything in our house: THE hairbrush. THE hammer. THE thermos. This singularity carried a terrible significance: if you broke it, lost it, or failed to share it, forcing your parents to spend $1.06 on a new one at Rosauer’s grocery store, you would push the family over the brink of financial disaster and into a breakup of Dickensian proportions. Somehow I managed to believe this mythology even though my father was a senior partner in his obstetrics practice and we owned a lakeside summer home.

  But what caused Margaret to start screaming is really beside the point. Her tantrums were often not connected to anything that the rest of us could understand, even after they were over. She might scream for an entire Saturday afternoon, causing a complete uproar as people either fled, struggled with her, or turned the house upside down looking for whatever object it was that might comfort her—a dog tag in the secret pocket of my mother’s purse, the piece of metal from the center of the record player (which she called “the Spindle!”), or the tattered fragment of an album cover. And even when we never found the sought-after object, all of a sudden she could just wind down, take in a shaky breath, and say, “Okay, now. That’s better.” Then she’d go back to whatever it was she had been doing hours before as if nothing had happened. The rest of us would stagger around feeling like there had been a tornado and we were still pulling pieces of roofing and walls off our bodies and prying nails and staples out of our heads and hands.

  This is really the clincher. If you yell or cry because you want something or need something or lost something, the people around you want to help. Usually we can help each other, and we take turns comforting each other in this basic way. But if you can’t tell anyone what it is that you are screaming bloody murder about, no one has a prayer of helping you. The result is dual alienation. I have no doubt that the origins of my sister’s panicked rages were very concrete to her, but because she couldn’t explain them to me, there was a wall between us, and we were trapped on our respective sides.

  EVERYBODY IN THE neighborhood knew us, so whoever had called the police had to know that it was Margaret who was causing all the ruckus that day. Frankly, it’s a wonder the neighbors didn’t call the cops more often. That they didn’t made it quite a special occasion to see the men in blue on our block, so I’ll bet a lot of people were peeking out through their curtains when the big uniformed officer showed up on our front porch. I know that’s what I was doing. I saw the police car pull up to the curb as I stood next to my screaming sister in our bedroom, wondering who was in trouble. Then I realized he was coming to our house. I watched him come up the walk, and I pressed my nose against the screen as he disappeared under the eave on our porch. I heard the doorbell ring, and I ran to the top of the stairs to watch my kind, petite mother open the front door. From behind the screen, she tried to explain the situation in her calm, reasonable voice. He let her finish, looked at her like he’d heard it all before, and said something like, “Lady, I have to see for myself.” Mom wearily waved him up the stairway to our room, where Margaret had planted herself.

  I stood at the top of the stairs watching him climb. It was funny to see a big police officer shouldering his way up the narrow staircase to the second floor of our house, so out of place next to the delicate pencil portraits of our childhood faces in the stairwell. (There were only four; Margaret wouldn’t sit still for hers.) He ignored me as he passed, and I followed him into our peach-colored bedroom with frilly curtains and matching bedspreads, all hand sewn by my mother. Margaret was sitting on one of our twin beds, quiet for the moment and sweating. Clearly this didn’t look like a den of iniquity and torture. It looked like a little girl’s room. My mother came into the room and stood behind him and told Margaret that the nice man was worried about her. And then the nice man went over to where she was sitting to ask her if she was okay. He said something like, “Honey, are you okay? Are you hurt? Can you tell me what happened?”

  After a moment of silence, Margaret took a deep breath and looked at him. Then she reared back, grabbed a fistful of bedspread in each hand, and howled in his face: “WHEREEEEEEEEEE ISSSSSSSSSSSSSSS THE BLUUUUUUUUUUUUUE HAAAAAIR-RRRRRRRRBRUUUUUUUUUUUUSH! I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS! DO YOU WANT THE BLUE HAIRBRUSH? AAAAAAAAHHHHHH! AAAAAAAAHHHHH!” Then she threw herself backward on the bed, kicking her legs and thrashing around. The policeman fled, his white face a blur as he rushed by me in the doorway. Clearly he had been convinced that there was no law to be enforced here. I gave up, too, and went up to Michaela’s house. Later in the afternoon she and her parents escorted me home.

  Were Michaela’s parents coming to look at my family’s demons that day? Were they were luridly curious, genuinely concerned, or just being friendly? Whatever the case, I remember that it was nearing twilight as we headed down Wall Street. Walking in front with Michaela, I felt oddly formal with the adults in tow as we approached the front of my house. Perhaps that’s why I went to the front door, the same one the policeman had gone to, the one that the rest of us never used. I knew it would be locked, but instead of going around to the side door, where I knew my family would be gathered in front of the TV, I reached out and poked the doorbell, just like the cop had.

  My mother came to the front of the house and opened the screen door, met Michaela’s parents, and charmed them like she charmed everyone. Margaret, worn out from her afternoon of anxiety, came and stood behind her. At thirteen she was already taller than my mother. She wrapped one arm lovingly around our mother’s neck, smelled the back of her head, and rested her forehead on Mom’s shoulder. She watched Michaela’s parents and watched my mother, and I watched all of them. Every once in a while, Margaret would interject something like, “You don’t scream about the blue hairbrush, Mom.” Or, “That’s good being quiet now, Mom.” And my mother would agree with her. “Yes, Margaret. That is good behaving.”

  After they had chatted for a time, Michaela’s parents said good night and walked up the hill in the dark toward their house. I went in the house, my mother shut the door, and we all sat down for dinner. The next day at school Michaela told me that when they got home that night, her parents had taken down the For Sale sign that they had recently put up in the front yard and went inside. She said she didn’t know why. They didn’t move back to California. And the next time my mom went to the store, we got a new hairbrush. A brown Goody, with bristles all the way around.

  THE PAST ISN’T singular, a large block of was or wasn’t, did or didn’t, had or hadn’t. It includes many layer
s compressed over the years. Memory, ours and others, is accurate and misremembered, abandoned and reclaimed. It is like stone itself. If you cut a cross section, you can read the floods and the droughts, years of famine or plenty. In my own cross section I found marks made by these friends and neighbors I’d almost forgotten. And after all that time, I found some of what hadn’t been said to be what I treasured the most.

  In Oregon these days were long past from my life, the times when something as inconsequential as a misplaced hairbrush could cause enough of a crisis to marshal my family, the neighbors, and the Spokane Police Department to the same hopeless cause. But for years after I left home, I still lived in the shadow of the other shoe, waiting for some small disruption to swing the balance and make it drop, make the normal life I had struggled so hard to build fall apart in an instant. I felt this way even when I was old enough to know that people have to deal with their own demons, their own crying babies and screaming little girls.

  Even Margaret. For all of our efforts, I can’t believe we ever really helped my sister find any peace of mind. Margaret held the key that eluded the rest of us, and when she was able to open the door and return to the regular world, she did it of her own accord, not because of anything we did or didn’t do to help her. When I saw her that first summer after I moved to Oregon, I was more certain of that than anything. I could see that she continued to struggle with the same kinds of things every day, but I knew there was less tumultuousness in her life, and I was happy for her, because she deserved peace of mind more than anyone I knew.

  From my old neighborhood, my life moved on: Spokane, Seattle, England, American Samoa, Spain, New Mexico. I watched people come and go from my life, and talismans helped me remember. When I got married, Deanna and Vanessa gave me my own candy jar as a shower gift, generously stuffed with my favorite sweets. I brought that memory of my childhood into my first married home. By the time Margaret first came to visit me there in Albuquerque, the jar had been broken, elbowed off the counter by my lanky husband, who didn’t think I would notice its absence if he didn’t say anything about it. I cried for hours. But lots of things got broken there, and everywhere else I lived. Like the Blue Goody hairbrush, though, these things are nothing more than plastic and glass—replaceable and inconsequential when compared to our memories and the people in our lives, who we struggle to love and be loved by, with their imperfections and through our own.

  Sometimes sitting on my porch at night in Oregon, I could hear the frog families croaking across the fence line, the sound of a lone dog barking once, twice, three times. Across the river I heard the whistle of the train as it sped along the Columbia River Gorge, moving east toward Spokane and ever forward in time. I heard the voices of neighborhood children calling to each other across their yards in the darkness. I remembered what I had had before and what I had still, and I held it all in the unbreakable jar of my heart.

  8.

  the know-nothing aunt

  Often we save our best manners for company and even for strangers, giving less than our best to our families and friends. How unfortunate that is, since these are the relationships that matter most in our lives.

  —On Relationships, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

  I COULDN’T SLEEP, PARTLY because I was in a strange bed. From a horizontal vantage point on the hide-a-bed in my sister Ann’s living room, I lay awake for hours gazing at framed pictures, carved wooden figurines, and shapely Asian ceramic bowls—the trappings of a life that had taken Ann from a small town in Washington State to Germany and then the Mojave Desert and Boston and China and back to the United States again. I was thinking about the work it must have taken to haul these items from place to place as the U.S. Army moved her family around so frequently over the past two decades. Even though they had been living in this particular house for only a couple of months, this stuff was there, hammered and hung, measured and straightened, looking like it had never been anywhere else. I wondered if Ann looked at these items as a way to mark her place in the world, the touchstones she’d carefully collected to make herself at home no matter where on the globe she might be. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of crap that she hauls around out of habit and that she secretly wishes would get lost or damaged in the move.

  As I lay there not sleeping, ruminating on her family’s travels, I was also thinking about how having children seems to make people’s guest rooms disappear. Suddenly all the bedrooms are chock-full of children. There is no sleeping space for visiting adults, so people like me get stuck out on the couch or some air mattress in the middle of the house while the children are all snuggled up in their private suites with extra pillows and the luxury of a door that closes. I’d driven three hundred miles that afternoon and was hoping for—no, expecting—a room of my own. I felt a bit like an old crone for thinking such things, but I also felt a bit like I’d been left out on the lawn with the sprinkler and scattered toys: Exposed. Neglected. Stepped on.

  The soft mattress under me slanted down at the top, which made all the blood in my body rush toward my head. This was an uncomfortable sensation, to say the least, not to mention the fact that I could feel each horizontal steel bar beneath me. However, I had convinced myself that my position was probably not dangerous, unless my head slid farther down into the crease between the mattress and the back of the couch, causing the hide-a-bed to suddenly engage and put itself away. But I was trying not to let myself think about that sort of thing.

  Mostly I couldn’t sleep because there was a pair of seven-year-old feet lodged in the middle of my spine. The feet belonged to my carrot-haired nephew, Tony, who had asked his mother if he could sleep in the hide-a-bed—what he called the Big Nana Pat Bed—with Auntie Eileen. She hadn’t actually cleared this request with me. She had just mentioned it with a smile and went to tuck him in, leaving me standing in the kitchen wondering to myself if there is a polite way to tell a seven-year-old that you don’t relish his nocturnal company. Turns out there isn’t. Besides, by the time I went to bed, Tony had been asleep for hours. Now here he was, snoring gently into my ear and digging his little toes into my road-weary back.

  My nephew is an adorable little person. It’s just that I have long had a strong aversion to sharing a bed with anyone; even Brendan barely made the cut. As a child I was forced to share a room with two sisters until the oldest one, this kid’s mom, Ann, went away to college. That left Margaret and me bunking together for another five years until I left for school. Even after all this time, I still jealously guard my own space. When traveling with a large group of my girlfriends, I’d happily sleep on the floor before volunteering to share a bed. When they asked why, I tried to explain that I didn’t like to be looked at when I was sleeping. People told me that this was a rather ridiculous fear, because when people sleep together they are sleeping, not looking at each other. But those people never had to share a room with Margaret.

  BEING WATCHED IN my sleep—it’s a worry I had nurtured nightly through the eighteen years I shared a room with my autistic sister, this kid’s other aunt, who was three years my senior and seemed to never sleep. She had disrupted my rest for nearly two decades with her nocturnal wanderings and strange whisperings. I often awoke to the sound of her feet thundering down the stairs to check on something, as she was wont to do in her compulsive and unpredictable nighttime travels. My older brothers and I would try to police this kind of activity, because we didn’t want her to wake up our dad, who was sleep deprived during the entire course of his career as an obstetrician and would come roaring up the stairs in that signature, Scary Dad in Underwear way that men of his generation had perfected. If he awoke, we were doomed.

  Therefore, if one of us heard Margaret getting out of bed, we’d all leap up to chase her. Consequently, Margaret developed a habit of running and slamming doors behind her as she went, because she knew someone would be hot on her heels trying to get her to go back to bed. Even if we didn’t chase her, when we’d long given up on this tactic, she’d run and slam bec
ause she’d gotten used to doing so: Slap! Slam! Slam! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Her feet would hit the floor and she’d be out of bed, through two doors, down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen, and back again. As she thundered back up the stairs to the second floor, where we kids slept, I’d hear my mother’s quiet scolding, “Margaret, now, you go to bed!” Sometimes this was, in fact, my mother following Margaret up the stairs to make sure she went back to bed. But sometimes Margaret would rush back up the stairs on her own, scolding herself in a perfect imitation of our mother’s voice, saving Mom the trouble of getting out of bed. It was kind of like Gilligan hitting himself with Skipper’s hat when he knew he’d done something dumb.

  Weekend mornings were worse, when I tried to make up for lost sleep. Margaret would roll out of bed much earlier than I did, anxiety propelling her into her clothes and down the stairs to the kitchen. And there she’d pace, waiting for the rest of us to follow her so that she could begin another daylong session of record playing from the eclectic family collection. Bay City Rollers. Electric Light Orchestra. Roger Whittaker. Carmina Burana. There was little peace to be had in a house with five children living in it, and my sister’s habits just increased the sense of chaos. Even so, our mother did what she could to set some kind of boundary with the records. Margaret was allowed to turn on her music, “When the other kids get up.”

  Of course, as I’ve said before, waiting for anything was very difficult for Margaret. Her anxiety-fueled pacing and talking to my mother shook the walls and rattled the doorknobs, but, to be fair, the music stayed off. Sometimes I’d lie there listening to her ask my mother, “You’re going to play the music, Mom?” and my mother would answer, “When the other kids get up.” I’d hear Margaret walk away and sit on the couch with a thump, and about ten seconds would pass before she’d get up, hurry into the kitchen, and ask, “You’re going to play the music, Mom?” My mother would repeat the same answer, cheerfully, endlessly it seemed.