How to Be a Sister

by Eileen Garvin

  HIKING, WE MADE it about halfway into the 3.5-mile loop, which is to say that if we turned around there, we would end up covering the same distance as if we’d completed the loop, but without the satisfaction of going full circle. But by the time we reached this place in time and caloric output, there was no convincing Margaret that up is the same as down. She had had enough.

  “Lunch?” she asked. “You’re gonna have lunch, Eileen?”

  The problem with lunch was that it was fifteen miles back in the other direction. Hindsight told me I should have turned around at the trailhead, eaten lunch, and come back this way before attempting to hike. But I didn’t. So there we were.

  “After the hike, Margs.”

  We walked on in silence.

  “You’re gonna have lunch, Eileen.” This no longer sounded like a question.

  “How about a snack, Margs?” I dug in my pack and handed her another Luna bar. She looked down at it, and then she looked at me. The Luna bar bounced off my forehead and landed in the bushes.

  “You don’t want the Luna bar, Margs?” Like I was just guessing.

  “No! You don’t want the Luna bar. Lu-NA bar! Lu-NA-bar!”

  Now she was pissed. She let fly with a string of nonsense words and extraterrestrial noises that were so familiar to me. She kicked her legs against the trail and flung one arm high in the air, ending with an angry “WHHH-HOOA!” I was still in denial.

  “How about some trail mix?”

  She grabbed the bag from me. I could tell she was hungry in that urgent way that you get hungry when you’re out of shape and asking your body to do something it’s not prepared for. She started shoving chocolate drops in her mouth. I knew I shouldn’t be, but I was annoyed. “Margaret, eat some raisins and nuts, too.”

  She complied, but avoided the other dried fruit or chucked it onto the trail, where Dizzy happily chased after it. Margaret was breathing hard and not smiling anymore. It was clear to me that our hike was over. I surrendered.

  “Do you want to go to lunch, Margs?” I asked.

  “Yes!” Her face lit up, and she jumped to her feet and started walking down the trail, abandoning the trail mix, her CamelBak, and me.

  My sister was not much for transitions. On or off. Going or staying. Clothed or suddenly quite naked. These things happened fast. In her mind, we should have been back in the car already. Hurrying so that I wouldn’t lose sight of her, I packed up everything she had left behind, stuffed it into my pack, and started down the trail behind her.

  Dizzy was joyful, sensing the turnaround, and bounded along behind Margaret. I was disappointed and trying not to be. I mean, who really cared if we finished the loop? Would that have meant the hike was “successful”? Would that have meant Margaret had a good time, that I was, by that measure, a “good sister?” Was she even aware of my being here? Was she just somewhere else in her head? How was I supposed to even begin to connect with her if we couldn’t talk or sustain some kind of mutual activity anyway? This was probably just my own low blood sugar talking, but I was discouraged. No, discouraged doesn’t capture it. I was being a sore loser, a poor sport. I wasn’t getting my way, and I was pissed. I still seemed to be hung up on some expectation I’d had about how great everything would be for me, for Margaret, if I just tried a little harder to make things work. We headed down the hill, and I moved out in front, grumbling to myself. What I didn’t ask myself outright but was working toward was, Why bother? Why did I even make the trip? Six hundred miles round-trip for what? What kind of relationship could I honestly expect to have with my sister, and why shouldn’t I just throw in the towel? If she didn’t care, why the hell should I waste any more time than I already had?

  I heard my sister stop on the path behind me. I turned around and looked at her. She glanced over her shoulder, then back at me.

  “Dizzy,” she said, and pointed into the brush.

  My dog, who had been off her leash, was nowhere to be seen. She’d disappeared off the trail into the bushes, chasing a chipmunk, perhaps, or, more likely, a phantom crust of sandwich. Margaret turned around now and was gazing into the wall of green surrounding us, silent and waiting. It dawned on me that she was waiting for Dizzy. She was worried about my little dog, or something like worried, and wanted to make sure Dizzy wouldn’t be left behind. She understood that we three were together. This went straight to my heart.

  “Dizzy!” I called.

  “Dizzy!” Margaret called. “Dizzy! Where’s Dizzy?” She was not using her pissed-off alien voice, but her regular voice.

  “Dizzy! Here Diz!”

  “Where’s Dizzy?”

  “Dizzy, come! Dizzy!”

  Soon, we heard the beat of small paws, and Dizzy’s head emerged from a thicket of thimbleberries with great verve. “Ta-da!” she seemed to be saying. “Here I am!”

  “There’s Dizzy!” I said.

  “There she is!” my sister said. “There’s Dizzy!” She gave Dizzy a pat as my dog leaped back onto the trail and bounded past us. We continued on in a happy silence punctuated by the sound of our eight feet. We reached the bottom of the trail and headed to the van. As we crossed the parking lot, I reached into my bag and took Dizzy’s leash out of my pack. Wordlessly, Margaret took it out of my hand, bent down, and clipped it onto Dizzy’s collar as if it were something she did every day, and led my dancing little dog toward the van. A trio once more, our hearts were lighter: Margaret’s because we were getting ever closer to lunch, Dizzy’s because she’d found some delectable and unmentionable snack in the brush, and me because it always made me feel happy when someone loved my dog. That much my sister could give me.

  LUNCH WASEASY. We ate at a favorite family burger joint in Coeur d’Alene, happily getting a place at the counter after a brief wait. We hunched over our burgers in a companionable silence. The place was full of regulars, the air steamy with the scent of grilling meat. Nobody was talking much, as they were too focused on eating what was in front of them and trying to decide if they should give up their barstool or order another greasy delight. A few tourists wandered in and started wondering aloud if it was worth the wait and why they didn’t serve French fries here. Everybody at the counter, except for Margaret, rolled their eyes and kept chewing.

  Later, we stood on the sidewalk outside the diner. “What’s next, Margaret?” We consulted our list.

  “Shop!” she read.

  “Okay, shop it is.”

  I didn’t know why I had put shopping on the list, except that it seemed like a normal activity, something to extend our visit together. We walked down Sherman Avenue, a street that had become busier every year. Herds of tourist families waddled past, sucking on waffle ice cream cones, or stood in the middle of the crosswalk arguing about where to go next, oblivious to the idling traffic waiting for them to proceed. It seemed like every block had a couple of new restaurants, rock ’n’ roll blaring out onto the patio, young people drinking beer and shrieking with laughter. Margaret and I were both unnerved. We both have trouble with noise, although Margaret, having autism, is usually the more intolerant one. After all, I am supposed to be the normal one.

  We took a left and moved down a quieter street. Some parts of the town looked exactly the same as they had when we first started coming here in 1973. Like us, some things had remained the same as others changed. Change isn’t always good or bad, I thought. It’s finding the balance that matters, and remembering to appreciate where you are when you’re there.

  Margaret hadn’t looked at me since we’d left the burger joint. “Shop!” I heard her say under her breath. “You’re going shopping! Shopping!” As if she were saying, “Ah, shit!” Who was I kidding? I’d always hated shopping almost as much as she did.

  “What do you think, Margaret? Do you want to go home?”

  And suddenly her face was awash in sunshine. “Yes, please, Eileen!”

  Back at the van, we climbed in and headed west into a light rain. Neither of us said a word all the way home. We wer
e full. We were tired. It was enough. As I dropped Margaret off at her house, I felt happy that I’d made the trip. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t finished the hike. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t gone shopping, like normal sisters. I was no longer mad that on the way to lunch Margaret had reached over and shoved me, as I knew she would, just as I headed into a curve on the highway going about eighty miles an hour. That she immediately threw her arms around my neck in apology didn’t help much, being nearly as dangerous as the shove, but I’d managed to keep the van on the road.

  What did matter was that we’d both done our best to spend the afternoon together. That made me feel happy, and I was pretty sure it made Margaret happy, too. She grinned and waved energetically at me as I stood on her porch saying good-bye. “Okay! Thanks for the lunch! Thank you very much for coming, Eileen! G’bye, Dizzy!” And still waving and grinning madly, she slammed the door in my face.

  MONTHSPASSED. The summer had flown by and I hadn’t gone to visit again. I’d spoken to Margaret, briefly, over the phone. I’d made plans with one of her staff members to bring her down to my house for a visit. This would take some doing. Logistically, it called for a two-and-a-half-hour drive on my part to meet Margaret and Clifford, who had volunteered to drive her halfway in his own car. Then we would head to my house for the afternoon, evening, and the next day and night. The day after that, we would head back to the same meeting place after lunch, where I would drop her off. In my head this all sounded great. I had activities planned that I hoped would please us both. But I was also back to the not knowing, the uncertainty of the future. This was an experiment, and I had no way of knowing what would really happen once she got here or how either of us would feel until we were living through it together.

  I WAS OUT in the yard again at the beginning of fall. The sun and water of a gorgeous summer had turned the backyard into a jungle. High over my head, the fennel waved its fragrant plumes in the air. The yarrow had spread itself the length of the beds. Lemon balm rose, leggy and dry, up past my waist. Sunflowers loomed well over seven feet, their heavy heads nodding in the afternoon wind. I knew what I needed to do without anyone telling me, and yet it seemed impossible—impossible, that is, until I began. For hours I cut and cleared, removing any leaf or stalk that seemed to have spent itself. My piles turned into mounds and filled the back of the pickup truck.

  When it was over, I knew I had done the right thing. The plants that were still standing seemed to be stretching themselves out, taking in the sun and the air. The pruning made the yard seem more open, sparer. There was a beauty in the spaces between things. But there were a few spots, here and there, that simply looked empty. Beds, for example, where I dug out hundreds of iris rhizomes because they took too much water, created too much mess, sapped my energy. Those spots seemed like holes, gaping and wanting. I didn’t yet know what would go there, what would happen next. Something good, I was sure, would happen in those spaces. Some beautiful plants would eventually take the place of that emptiness and would teach me something else I never knew about color and fragrance and growth. I would just have to wait and see what happened. After all, there was no rush.

  Like my life, this was just another season.

  10.

  life is a bowl of spaghetti

  There are gentle ways to acclimate your visitor to the way things are in your household and help her fit right in without causing annoyance or conflict on either side. . . . This in no way means that you can insist that she do everything your way—after all, she is your guest and her happiness and comfort are important, too.

  —On House Guests, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

  MARGARET WASSCREAMING, and the whole world stopped. We were trapped, all of us, inside the sound of her voice, a piercing, anguished wailing that felt like it would never stop. Somehow I couldn’t remember the sound of the world before, when it had been quiet and calm, when we had all been walking down the street together just talking, the five of us. Before we got in the car. Before Margaret had started screaming.

  My mother was in the driver’s seat, sitting across from Margaret. Mom was speaking, but I couldn’t hear the sound of her voice or make out what she was trying to say. Her face looked calm from where I was jammed between Brendan and his best friend, Rob, in the backseat of my mother’s ancient Mercedes. We were on our way to dinner. We had been on our way to dinner. And then Margaret couldn’t find the case to the tape she had been listening to all day—Ravel’s Bolero. Then the world tilted, and we were all trapped by the panicked loss of a piece of plastic.

  Before the screaming started, I had been experiencing a family visit. I can’t say “enjoying,” because that isn’t really accurate. This was the mid-90s, and my mother had driven herself and my sister across Washington State to come stay with me in Seattle. Bolero was blaring out of the speakers when they pulled up to the curb outside my apartment on Capitol Hill. The car was still moving when Margaret threw open the car door to greet me, and the crescendo of Ravel’s march came with her. It was like a parade. “Hi, Eileen! You’re going to see the Space Needle!” Margaret said. Without having to ask, I figured they had probably listened to Bolero over and over again during the three-hundred-mile drive—through the desert, across the Columbia River, up into the mountains, over the pass, and down into Puget Sound. And I knew then that Bolero would be our soundtrack for the week. This was my sister’s way. She’d choose a theme song—or, if we were luckier, a whole theme record—which she would compulsively play again and again for a period that might last days, or, in some cases, years.

  I stood on the curb feeling depressed as I watched my sister climb out of the car. I knew Margaret had been looking forward to this visit. With her severe autism, my sister does not have a long list of hobbies. It was difficult for us to find activities to share with each other. But car travel she loved. The elevator in the Space Needle, ditto. The Seattle Aquarium, the monorail, seeing me—it all seemed like a perfect combination, for her at least. But even with her excitement on the first day, I knew from experience what a challenge she could be as a guest. I knew what kinds of things could happen. As they eventually did: The case to the Bolero tape had gone missing, and she had just lost her shit.

  We were all locked into the car. Even if the door locks hadn’t been automatic, none of us would have been able to move anyway. The force of my sister’s rage had rendered everyone immobile as we watched her sound off. Margaret screamed with her whole body, her entire, powerful 180-pound body. Her torso was the instrument of her rage. Her mouth was open wide, and the scream went on and on in between breaths. She arched her back and launched herself against the back of her seat, slamming herself against it so hard that I thought she might join us in the backseat. Eyes closed, she kicked her feet, grabbed the sun visor, the glove box, anything she could put her hands on. Her cry, which had started as a question, had become a howl of despair. It was like being in a tornado. We were all just sitting there, packed into the car like pickles in a mason jar, watching. Even though I couldn’t hear her, I knew my mother was trying to reason with Margaret, but I doubted my sister could hear anything at all. The old sedan rocked from side to side with the force of my sister’s rage. Brendan and Rob looked terrified, and I couldn’t quite believe that the police hadn’t arrived yet.

  Why did she need the tape case? I would never know the answer to that. But the loss had set off an uncontrollable, raging panic. I had lived with her for eighteen years, shared a bedroom, a bathroom, hundreds of holidays and special occasions. My parents had lived with her for twenty-one years. Nobody had figured it out. What were we supposed to do? Why was she doing it? When would she stop? What should we do next time? We couldn’t actually ask these questions when we were in the thick of it, because the screaming was all we could think about. It was like being caught in an avalanche: You can’t recall what you learned in snow safety class, because you are too busy fighting to stay alive. Even by the time I had moved to Oregon, I hadn’t found the answers to th
ese questions. But I could say this much: It was quite something to be in the same situation time and time again and never find the way to deal with it, never feel like what I was doing was the right thing to do. This continued failure weighed on me.

  Objects had always anchored my sister. The chair went here. The hardback copy of Heidi went on the table at an angle. The Ella Fitzgerald Porgy and Bess record was always in precisely this spot. And the winter boots were in the front closet in a row. The Ravel tape case was important for some unexplainable reason. But that reason, unknowable to the rest of us, kept the car from sliding off the road, kept the sky from falling, and kept the sea off the shore. Without it, there was no hope. That much I could see from where I was sitting.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, I unfroze and unlocked my door, opening it into the other world outside the car. I felt the rush of cool, salty air from Puget Sound, and we all suddenly remembered to breathe. Rob, Brendan, and I started hunting for the tape case. We searched the backseat and floor several times, with no luck. “But it’s a car, for Christ’s sake, not a football field,” I said. “It’s got to be in here somewhere.” Then suddenly Rob plucked it off the floor with two fingers and held it up in front of him, marveling at it like it had fallen from the sky. Margaret snatched it from his fingers, and the screaming stopped like a turned-off faucet. “It was just lying down there,” Rob said with wonder in the quiet car.