Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  We passed that time digging through Grammee’s sewing room, which doubled as our bedroom, and her collection of spare buttons, ribbons, and fabric scraps. When we grew tired of that, we turned our attention to what we dubbed the memory cabinet. The memory cabinet was a large Victorian bureau that had been Pa’s mother’s. Inside its doors was a well-organized archaeological dig into our family’s younger lives. There were shelves with photo albums, yearbooks, shoe boxes full of postcards, and handwritten letters tied in packets with string. We flipped through pages, looking at photos of our mom in her puffy 1950s embroidered skirts and cat-eye glasses. Until we found one box filled with memories that Pa would have preferred we never find.

  It was Barbara who opened that box and began picking out photos, staring at them slowly, one by one, and asking, “What are these?” I looked. They were tiny black-and-white photos, but their smallness did nothing to diminish what we saw: mountains of bodies arranged in long rows; all naked, ribs protruding, limbs contorted. We dropped them back into the box, afraid to touch them. “Did Pa take these?” I asked Barbara. “Why would he have them?”

  “Pa, what are these?” was our first question when we heard the sound of his footsteps in the hall.

  He didn’t want to tell us the history of what he had seen as an American soldier helping to liberate Nordhausen, a Nazi death camp, at the end of World War II. The man who smiled and found “Happy Days” in small calamities did not want to talk to us about those days or that time. We hadn’t even known that he fought in the war. He left the details of the explanation to Grammee. He never hid his photos from us; they were there each time we looked. It was as if he had taken in the images of those suffering people and given them shelter in a solid wood cabinet deep inside the safe world of Midland.

  It seemed far away down the hall, but in reality our bedroom and Grammee and Pa’s room were so close that as we fell asleep, we could hear the murmurs of their conversation, soft whispers, and then the sound of Pa’s snores, punctuated by the occasional passing car, until we drifted off toward the morning. In the same way, I thought that the steady rhythm of our summers would continue indefinitely. Then our precious Pa began to change.

  It was small things at first: calling us by each other’s names, forgetting the name of the restaurant we had dined in for lunch, or not recalling the funny winning phrase from a Wheel of Fortune episode that we had watched together the night before. Then came the summer when we were twelve, the summer when our Pa was no longer Pa. This year, there would be no rides in the Buick, no trips to Johnny’s Barbecue, no lazy strolls around the block.

  We were there when Pa bolted out the front door and took off down the street, moving as if he were on a mission—but without any destination in mind. Grammee raced after him, her short legs rushing to keep up with his long strides. We followed her until we caught up with Pa. Even then, he wouldn’t slow down, wouldn’t listen to our pleading. Barbara and I looked at each other, confused and scared. We didn’t understand what was happening; it was as if someone had taken over our grandfather. Eventually, he grew exhausted and sat down on the curb. His breathing was rapid, his eyes vacant. Nothing could budge him. We tried to help Grammee lift him up to get him back home, but we couldn’t; our arms were too weak and he was too stubborn. Grammee rushed back to the house to call the fire department, while we waited, helpless, sitting beside him on the curb. Just as he had shown me such patience on our now long-ago car ride, it was our turn to be patient.

  It was the last walk we ever took.

  Even worse was the shame that settled over Pa. For a man who never punished us—who never inflicted shame—in that last year, he was overcome with it. He had moments when his brain believed that he had lost all his money to gambling. Thinking he was broke, he would beg my father for a loan. My dad would say, “Of course, Harold. We can do that,” trying to reassure Pa. He had fleeting moments of lucidity when he knew or seemed to know that he was in the grip of a disease. Lying in the twin beds of our room, Barbara and I heard him wake at night: We would hear Grammee’s gentle snores, and then the moment when the mattress would creak and the bed frame shudder and Pa would sit bolt upright. We held our breath and listened. He sobbed over what he had said or done. We heard Grammee try to console him, but he was inconsolable. The next morning, no one said a word. But we had heard everything.

  Then there was the one lunchtime in the yellow kitchen with its Formica counter, where nothing had changed since our mother was a girl. It was the same kitchen where on countless nights we had sat on our favorite stools and watched Grammee make her meat patties, little sirloins that she pounded down and cooked in a skillet until they tasted better than anything. It was the warm and familiar place where Barbara and I had made so many of our memories.

  I was twelve, in the sixth grade. The previous fall, we had transferred from a public school to an all-girls private school in Dallas. Walking down the school’s wide hallways was like visiting a foreign country; everything was bigger and shinier than in our old elementary school. The girls seemed smarter and fancier, brasher and bolder, prettier, and sometimes meaner. Every morning, when I got ready for school, buttoning my white starched shirt and tucking it into the plaid uniform skirt, I stared back into the mirror. My body had recently rounded in places that made me feel self-conscious and uncomfortable.

  In the spring, after a few months of addressing my insecurities by acting loud and interrupting teachers with practical jokes, I got my first middle-school boyfriend. His name was Eric, and he had asked me at a football game if I wanted to be his girlfriend. I said yes. For three weeks, we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and we ignored each other in perfect sixth-grade fashion, until one afternoon a group of us went swimming. Eric saw me in my bathing suit for the first time and he also saw the large café au lait birthmark I have on my leg. He broke up with me immediately after—and told everyone it was because of my unsightly birthmark. I was still smarting from this sixth-grade humiliation when Barbara and I arrived in Midland.

  At lunchtime, we sat on our stools as Grammee cooked and Pa drifted in and out of reality. Suddenly, he stared at us and said, “Who are you?” And before we could react, he looked over at Barbara, and said, “Oh yes, you’ve always been the prettier one.”

  I knew he didn’t mean it as soon as the words left his lips. I know now that he would have been more ashamed of saying this than of asking my father for a loan. But at that moment, to my vulnerable sixth-grade self, it was devastating to hear those words from a man who had shown me nothing but kindness, even when I most certainly deserved disciplining. Barbara looked over at me with hurt and sympathy in her eyes as I turned and bolted to our bedroom, to the familiar comfort of Grammee’s sewing piles and the memory cabinet, where the boxes, books, and albums always stayed the same. Eventually there was a knock on the door. Barbara and Grammee had come to wipe my eyes and nudge me back to the kitchen.

  That is the blunt cruelty of this disease. For years, the one memory I have wanted to erase is the memory of that last visit with Grammee and Pa in Midland.

  As the days passed, we realized that Pa didn’t even recognize Grammee. Who are you? he would ask. To hear him say that to our tiny grandmother—his wife of more than fifty years, who had held his hand as they buried three babies, and raised my mom—broke Barbara and me. We would escape to our room to compose ourselves. In the small house, we would hear our grandmother answer, repeatedly, patiently: I am the one who loves you. Always.

  That seemed to answer everything.

  Pa died the April after we turned thirteen, about three months after our dad was inaugurated governor of Texas. It signaled the end of our Midland summers, but more than that, our Midland lives, where we could watch the world spin by, rather than the other way around.

  Sweet, Sweet Fantasy

  BARBARA

  Having a grandfather who was once the head of the CIA sure helps foster an overactive imagination. When we were seven, we would beg Gampy to share any
and all classified information he possessed about alien life, to which he would reply that we lacked the right security clearance, before ruffling our hair and telling us, his “wieners” (yes, “wieners” means “grandkids” in the Bush family lexicon), to go out and play. But for several years, we couldn’t let the aliens go. We just had to know.

  Before the alien phase, we were a cat family. I don’t mean we had pet cats; instead, our four cats were of the human variety, all answering to our self-given cat names: Tommy Tough (Dad) and Stripes (Mom), plus the kittens, Marmalade (Jenna) and Rosebud (me). Jenna and I made up the cats, and our parents patiently played along. Ganny, an anticat woman to the core, was horrified when as little girls we’d respond only to “Kitty,” or, worse, “Here, kitty, kitty.” At that point, she would probably have been happy if aliens abducted her meowing granddaughters. But our cat world symbolized us as a tiny pack of four, a nuclear family that always wanted to be together.

  Like so many things in our lives, our imaginations began to form in Midland.

  When we were just past being toddlers, on rare snowy nights we would venture out after dusk under the streetlights to walk with our dad. The quiet of the evening paired with the comfort of our dad made the neighborhood like our own safe snow globe. Wrapped up in our down winter coats and hoods, arms sticking out of our sides like sausages due to all of the padding, we tramped over the frozen ground. Our handsome dad would point out the glistening trees and ice-crystal lace spreading over the glass windows. We’d carry bowls and fill them with small mounds of fresh, clean snow to cover in syrup as a special winter snack, our mom telling us how snow bowls were a favorite of the pioneer children who had headed west long before we arrived. On evenings without the magic of snow, our parents read us Grimm’s fairy tales—stories of fantasy and darkness that lit up our imaginations with wonder and even a touch of fear.

  We left Midland, but not our fantasy life, especially Jenna, whose imagination was anything but typical and who had a flair for drama that transformed whatever home we were in. We were never bored under the dome of Jenna’s expansive imagination, digging for buried treasure in our neighbor’s backyard; setting up a school; or playing orphaned pioneers, two barefoot girls lost in the unexplored patches of woods amid suburban, ranch-house Dallas. Together, we would go on nature walks in the side alleys as if they were treks in the Amazon. On hot, buggy nights, harkening back to our feline days, we howled at the summer moon. Jenna created such fantastical scenes with our dolls that Mom worried about her overactive imagination—until she read an interview with Toni Morrison’s mother describing Toni’s similar habits as a child.

  When we were nine, Jenna sought to display her talents on a bigger stage, begging my grandmother to let her perform a solo at the Republican National Convention. Her song of choice: “Put on a Happy Face”; her costume of choice: a clown. My grandmother’s firm No devastated Jenna. For days, she’d practice her performance over lunch, hoping she’d wow Ganny and convince her to relent. Fortunately for the sake of Jenna’s ego and the convention attendees and television viewers, Ganny did not. But that did not deter Jenna from orchestrating Bush family holiday specials, where she acted as our family’s director, casting me and our cousins in self-written plays. One Christmas, my dad was chosen to be the “Main Reindeer.” His part consisted of ferrying our then-chubby, freckle-faced, and redheaded cousin Pierce, aka Santa, around on his back.

  We never completely outgrew our imaginations. I think of Jenna and me during the 2004 election, standing at a Southwest Airlines gate, waiting to board a flight to Duluth, Minnesota. Softly, we played with the idea of dashing to the gate three doors down where the screen announced a departure to Honolulu. Or over to the international terminal where adventures to Istanbul, Singapore, and Madrid awaited. But, of course, we stuck with our campaign stop in Duluth, earning a few stares as we scanned our boarding passes and hoisted our carry-ons into the overhead bins. Aliens, perhaps, in our Boeing 737 spaceship?

  Excerpt from Barbara’s Toast at Jenna’s Wedding

  May 10, 2008

  Jenna was the girl who was so excited for life when we were little that she learned to crawl out of her crib and then taught and helped me crawl out of my crib every morning so we could play.

  She was the girl who “took care” of the class bully when we were two on mother’s day out.

  She was the girl who was so imaginative and loved telling stories. I know all of y’all know about the two books that she’s written, but I know ALL of the other stories she’s told. Growing up, long, drawn out, dramatic stories would unfold with Jenna’s Barbie and Ken.

  She is a girl who has always had such a huge imagination and has always entertained me and our friends with vivid, fabulous stories.

  One Valentine’s Day when we were in third grade, Jenna and I were so desperate to get our ears pierced. It was all we wanted. So, the night before Valentine’s Day, Jenna snuck out of our bed into the kitchen to check out the valentines that would be waiting for us the next morning. Excited, Jenna ran back into the room and told me that on the table were some sort of special pair of earrings for me that each said “Congratulations! You’re getting your ears pierced.” Well, I could hardly sleep all night, but the next morning we rushed into the kitchen for our presents and all I had was a measly chocolate rose.

  All my life Jenna entertained me with hilarious antics like that, mainly because she wanted so badly for her stories to be true…

  Mothership

  JENNA

  My mother was a librarian and an only child—a combination that sometimes made it hard to relate to her point of view. In her twenties, she named her cat Dewey, after the Dewey decimal system. When I was little, I was a daddy’s girl. I didn’t always understand my mom; more precisely, I didn’t think she got me.

  Growing up without a sibling made Barbara’s and my antics sometimes baffling to her. When we were in high school, she hated when we let friends borrow our clothes. Nervous that we would get caught, we would sneak shirts and tops into our backpacks to give to friends who asked to borrow them for a dance or a date. They would return them in the same concealed way, inside their overnight bags when they came to spend the night. My mother told me later that she had no experience with trading or even stealing clothes as Barbara and I often did.

  Solitude was an integral part of my mother’s childhood. She was often alone, comforted by the beloved characters in her books. Barbara and I had a completely different experience of childhood. Being part of a set from birth meant that we always had a playmate and that alone time was hard to come by. In moments of mischief, we enabled each other. We have the same sense of humor; when my mother scolded one of us, the other often laughed hysterically, which only encouraged more bad behavior. It was almost always two against one. We were too young and immature to consider how much my mother had wanted and wished for siblings of her own, to see how the bond between Barbara and me might have made her feel like an outsider, alone.

  Barbara and I were energetic kids. My grandmother wrote as much in her memoir: “George’s twins were wild. At one time they stuffed the toilet with paper, and I was up to my elbows pulling it out. I couldn’t help but wonder if any other First Lady–elects had spent their morning unstuffing the toilet.” But Ganny lived with our energy only in small bursts; our mom was surrounded by it every day.

  Looking back now, what probably saved her, and us, was that my mom is preternaturally calm. Even in moments of panic. The night before my wedding, just as we had done countless nights before, Barbara had slept next to me in my bed. I stretched and turned to nudge her as my mom burst into the room: “Girls…wake up! Today is the day! Out of bed! Time for breakfast,” she said. Then, without any drop in enthusiasm, she added, “There was a slight hiccup, but all is well. We have taken care of it!”

  “What hiccup?” I asked, waking up fully.

  “Oh, well, a little tornado came right through the ranch overnight. It knocked over the tent, but e
verything is completely fine.” Only my mother could deliver the news of a tornado as if she were telling us that she had run out of toast, so we’d have to have cereal for breakfast.

  Opening her eyes, Barbara laughed and asked: “Mom, are you on something to relax you?”

  And the truth is, she wasn’t. She is just remarkably even-tempered and able to manage everything. Strong and gentle at the same time.

  She can make the best of any situation. When as girls we had to go to Atlanta to appear with Gampy when he ran for reelection, she made a big deal about it being our first trip to Georgia, and she honed in on one of our favorite pastimes: food. We are a family that loves food. We plan trips, vacations, and, yes, campaign stops around meals. She got us excited by describing the great southern food in Atlanta, especially grits and biscuits, until we could practically taste the butter melting in our mouths. But campaigns are not luxurious—when you stay somewhere, it’s usually a run-down motel, which is precisely where we ended up, in a room with two double beds. I slept next to my mom, and midway through the night, one side of our bed collapsed, sending us rolling like logs toward the floor. After our crash landing, my mom, our own version of MacGyver, got up without her contacts and felt around, trying clumsily to fix the bed. She couldn’t, so we slept on the slant, nearly on top of each other, for the rest of the night. And to make matters worse, the free motel breakfast had neither grits nor biscuits. The fact that I remember this story with love says everything about my mom.

  As teenagers, when we would come to her with teenager-sized problems, she always said: “I promise. There are very, very few things worth worrying about.” And she was right. Now, I wonder if her advice was because she had already worried about heartbreaking things and knew what it was to feel overwhelming pain. She saw our anxieties for what they were: childlike.