Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  In February 2016, my father’s good friend and partner in the Texas Rangers, Rusty Rose, killed himself. He was seventy-four, not seventeen. Rusty talked about his depression, and he defied what people thought depression is. He had a curiosity-driven, fulfilling life and he loved his kids. Dede—Rusty’s wife—told the minister that she wanted his suicide acknowledged at his funeral. My dad talked about it in his eulogy. At one point, the minister said something like, “We won’t brush this under the rug because people are uncomfortable. Depression is an illness. My God loves everyone. And I take that to mean that he loves Rusty, and Rusty is in heaven.” It was the opposite of what I had heard before, and it was freeing.

  About this same time, one of my friends suggested I go to a session with a healer. The healer asked me to gather photos of people I was close to who had passed away. My mother texted me a photo of her father, and my friend Lindsay sent one of Kyle. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t even tell her my name, I just showed the woman the photo. She looked at it and matter-of-factly said he had hanged himself in his closet. I started to cry, after all those years, in a recognition of having carried these memories for so long. She told me, “He has followed you everywhere, and he’s so proud of all that you’ve done. You’ve been all over the world and he’s gotten to go on this journey with you.” Then she said, “He says you can stop counting stars now.”

  The thing is, I had never told anyone about my wishing. In the beginning, I didn’t say anything because I was afraid that if I told someone else my wish, it wouldn’t come true. Then I didn’t tell anyone because it was private; it seemed like something that I shouldn’t admit. Not even to my sister. The only one who might have known was handsome, funny Kyle, up there among the stars.

  For most of my adult life, I’ve said yes to a lot of things that might sound scary, like starting a global organization. And my life has gone in directions I never could have expected back when I was young and planning my future date to the prom. Then, I thought I was going to be a fashion designer. But at a certain point I felt that I needed to do more, probably because of Kyle. I felt that if I was lucky enough to get the chance to live, I needed to take extra chances in return.

  A kind man once told me that in Japan, broken pottery is pieced back together using gold as the glue, highlighting the cracks, making them beautiful. And maybe that could be my heart—hurt and healed, but filled with gold because I’d known Kyle.

  Even though I may not need to, I still look up at the glittering darkness and wish on the night stars for Kyle. It is my way of reaching back to that now long-ago night and answering the phone.

  Bad Math

  JENNA

  Barbara is a genius. I have always known it. During a preschool tryout, my architect of a sister built a block tower worthy of Frank Gehry. My contribution was to demolish it, slamming my fist into the tower until the blocks flew across the rug. My mom said the teacher gasped at our “sisterly” interaction.

  No matter how much I might have wanted to be a student like Barbara, it wasn’t in my nature. Our shared DNA can express itself very differently! Even when we were toddlers, my sister woke up early and went to work on our porch: drawing and coloring. I preferred physical activity, zooming around our backyard on my tricycle. Also my fine motor skills were very slow to develop. I couldn’t hold a pair of scissors correctly until the third grade. At some point in elementary school, frustrated as I watched Barbara fly through work that took me far longer, I asked my mom and dad if there was something wrong with me. No, they said. We had you tested when you were younger.

  I was particularly frustrated by math, a subject in which my sister excelled. In third grade, I sat in the back of Mrs. Powell’s math class. Multiplication escaped me; I didn’t understand the steps. (It probably didn’t help that I was blind as a bat, and, without glasses, I could barely see the overhead projector.) While I was struggling to get through third-grade math, my sister placed sixth in a math competition for the entire city of Dallas. (She still has the fake gold trophy to prove it.)

  I shared my mother’s love of reading, but in the division of labor in the Bush household, those different parental skill sets meant my father took over math tutoring. The most obvious solution was for my dad to sit with me at the kitchen table and struggle through my homework. These evenings were not pretty; each repeated a similar pattern. My dad would patiently walk me through the steps of the math problems. But I was a resistant student, and eventually he would lose his temper. I responded by breaking into frustrated sobs, slamming my book down, and leaving the table. What neither of us could have imagined was that third-grade math would lead my dramatic self to learn what I considered a deep secret about my dad, and then to spend years of what I now know was totally unwarranted worry about my parents’ marriage. (How’s that for a completely unexpected answer to the vexing problem of double-digit multiplication?!)

  When I received a B minus in math—my first B—my dad was disappointed, and he pushed me to do better. Always the instigator, I pushed back: I’m sure you got a B in elementary school too, Dad. (I had no idea that my dad was good enough with numbers to go to Harvard Business School; I didn’t know what Harvard was.) My dad wasn’t just going to give me his word that I was wrong, he was going to provide documentation. After a bit of hunting, he pulled out an old photo album that his mom had made for him, saving various memorabilia over the years. The dusty book was filled with report cards and black-and-white photos. He was right. He had made As.

  But the scrapbook didn’t end with his elementary or even high school years. On one of the pages was a tattered newspaper clipping. It was an engagement notice for George W. Bush, but the woman in the photo was young, blond, and not my mother. I looked at the man sitting next to me, my math book in his hand, and with all the indignation that my third-grade self could muster, I was outraged. How could my parents deceive Barbara and me? Math was forgotten, except for its clear connection to this terrible piece of information. Instead of doing my multiplication, I peppered my dad with endless questions, like a journalist-in-training. Was he still in love with her? Why didn’t they get married? What happened to the wedding china? He patiently answered each one. He had been twenty years old. She was a college student in Texas. They were too young, and yes they had picked out a wedding china pattern.

  For the next several years, my imagination was haunted by the smiling woman in the engagement photo. I was also fascinated by the fact that she had been blond, unlike my brunette mom. Disappointingly, my mom had no new information to add to my endless questions. My dad had been un-engaged for more than a decade before she met him. And she had never met his one-time fiancée.

  My non-mathematically inclined mind refused to be swayed by this new display of logic. For years, I had a recurring dream that my parents were divorcing, broken up by the beautiful blonde. I would wake in tears and head to their room in the middle of the night, begging to sleep between them. I was well past the age of toddlers sleeping with their parents; I was a tall ten years old, but I was insistent. (It says a lot about their relationship that a child crying about their doomed marriage didn’t in itself lead to a divorce!) On the plus side, it did remove math as the primary source of friction in our household.

  Ten years later, Barbara and I were home from college and up late watching TV. We were about to turn off the television when a promo for Inside Edition came on: the President’s ex-fiancée tells all. We rushed to get a VHS tape to record the interview. We couldn’t wait to hear what this woman, who could’ve been our mother, had to say. The next morning, we woke up our dad with the tape—this was before the era of Facebook and the widespread use of Google, which has made it possible for people to easily spy on their ex-girlfriends and boyfriends. Dad gave us a slight eye roll. (He might have been happier to talk about math.)

  My dad and I did have one more run-in over numbers. It was the spring of my junior year in high school, when thoughts of college dominated almost every conversation. I arr
ived home with some friends to discover that my sister had received her SAT scores. No surprise: She had done exceptionally well, as in she just missed one math problem! I thought to myself, We are twins, so our scores must not be that different. My dad knew better: Wait until your friends leave to call and get your score, Jenna! Listen to me and wait. Impulsivity is a weakness; plus, I firmly believed that even if I didn’t do as well as Barbara, I must have scored close, right? I ignored my dad and called to get my score. (This was back in the days when you called in, rather than logged on to get your numbers.) There are five stages to SAT grief: disbelief, then denial—it must be someone else’s score—then tears. Followed quickly by a somewhat humiliating exit from your friends and retreating to your room. And finally, five: the knowledge that you will be retaking the test, and signing up for SAT prep beforehand.

  In the intervening years, I have had one additional revelation about math. I, too, married a man with a business school degree, and I can say with absolute certainty when either Mila or Poppy come home with a math question, the first words out of my mouth will be: “Ask your dad.”

  Me Without You

  BARBARA

  My family may seem like risk-takers, but they are even more strongly creatures of habit. My parents like to return to the same people and places year after year: Spring was Texas Rangers training camp in Florida; summer was Maine. Every one of our vacations was centered around baseball or visiting our cousins. I’m lucky to have grown up with such a tight-knit family. Still, as a teenager, I had yet to take my own adventure, and I wanted to test my limits, to figure out what I was made of and what I could do without a safety net. To be alone.

  That changed the year Jenna and I turned sixteen. For each of her grandchildren’s sixteenth birthdays, Ganny would take them on a trip outside the United States. It was a rite of passage—the first time we’d travel for exploration’s sake, as well as the first time we’d have our grandmother all to ourselves. We were thrilled. Ganny jokingly told us she traveled in pajamas to be more comfortable on overnight flights, and our mouths dropped open in horror, our too-cool-for-school sixteen-year-old selves imagining walking through the airport with our grandmother in her PJs. Ganny showed up well dressed, and we set off for Italy, to Rome, Florence, and Venice.

  Traveling with Ganny was an experience totally different from our family visits in Maine. There were not twelve other grandkids running in and out of a room. For the first time we had her undivided attention as we ate at traditional Italian restaurants, meandered through museums, or rode in gondolas along Venetian canals. We were straddling that line of childhood and adulthood, fumbling with how to act mature for our grandmother. She was impressed with our table talk about the books we were reading in high school, but terribly annoyed by our obsession with taking pictures of Italian street cats.

  Because she was a former first lady, Ganny was trailed by an Italian security detail, one of whom was movie star handsome. She loved that Jenna and I would giggle and blush whenever we saw him, and we did—until he smiled back at us, revealing a mouthful of black teeth from smoking one too many cigarettes.

  One of the most defining moments of my life happened when we walked down a side street near the center of Rome at midday. We stumbled upon a group of teenage students our age, clustered outside a school. They were carrying on an animated conversation that slid effortlessly from Italian, to English, to French. Scarves were tied fashionably around their necks, and bags slung over their shoulders. A few had cigarettes casually perched between their fingers. I was in awe. This was certainly not the culture at Austin High—our big public high school that felt like it was made-for-TV with the classic assortment of cheerleaders, jocks, nerds, and a marching band. It could have easily been West Beverly or Bayside High.

  From the moment we boarded our return flight, I was determined to go back, and to do it soon. At sixteen, I was like a rom-com cliché of the Midwestern girl getting off the bus in New York and gazing in awe at the skyscrapers of Manhattan, or the southern girl arriving amid the swank and swagger of Los Angeles and Hollywood. I had traveled to a few other cities in the United States, but Italy was a different magnitude, and it was also a place that I happened to discover at exactly the right time in my life.

  When I was very small, I thought Midland was the center of Texas and Texas was the center of everything. I couldn’t imagine anyone or anything beyond this desert town, until an older man in the Dallas airport asked five-year-old me where I was from, and when I said, “Midland,” he shot back a quizzical look and asked exactly where “Midland” was. That was my first clue that there was more beyond our seemingly endless horizon.

  My first idea of what that “more” might be came from Grammee, who had a subscription to National Geographic. Grammee was curious to see the world, but because of her generation and circumstances, she did her exploring through a magazine. I sat in her Midland house and pored over the pages. I was enamored with the photographs, and my young mind began to dream of seeing the destinations in person. Then, in Mrs. Willoughby’s second-grade class in suburban Dallas, we learned about the continents. When it came time for presentations, I chose Africa for my continent and Iceland for my country, imagining a land covered in glittering bluish ice, much like Narnia. I didn’t simply cut out my photos and color my poster and write my sentences. I became obsessed with the concept of widely spaced continents with oceans pitching and rolling and breaking in between. I wondered what this would mean for my life, storing away the facts on languages, capitals, and populations in a deep crevice of my mind, filed under “to return to when older.”

  Now I had decided that I wanted to return to Rome.

  I learned that the school we had seen in Rome, St. Stephen’s, accepted boarders. In Austin I got my application materials together, meticulously filled out each form, and mailed them off, without asking for my parents’ permission. At night, I’d dream about living in Rome: my first longing for a city, not a person. When the acceptance letter arrived, my dad remembers that I didn’t so much as ask for his and my mom’s approval as inform them I was going. A couple of years ago, he recalled, “How could we say no, when she had already completed everything a parent would usually do?”

  Until that fall, there had never been a school year that did not start with both Jenna and me walking through the same door together. We were so in tune and so close that we met and made our friends at the same time; each of us had a constant companion during those unfamiliar experiences that give most kids sweat-inducing anxiety. Yet now I wanted to try separation. Let me explain: I was three years old and it was Halloween. Jenna was dressed as a clown, and I was a star baby. In the grainy home video, my dad panned the camera to me and asked, “What’s your name, little girl?” Before I could even open my mouth to answer, Jenna jumped in front of me for center-stage position. My constant sidekick sure made life fun, but I was eager to find my own voice. To stand alone. Rome would be my test.

  The flight itself was almost a disaster. I was ticketed from Dallas to Rome, with a stopover in Frankfurt, Germany. When the plane landed, I got off, but I couldn’t make sense of the German signs—eingang, tor, ausfahrt. Too shy to ask for help until the last minute, I wandered the airport holding back tears, almost missing my connection. Half tempted to turn around and go home, I was worried that I lacked the bravery to attend school in another country. When I finally landed in Rome, I was too scrawny to pull my heavy bag off the conveyor belt in baggage claim. Thankfully, another passenger hauled it off after watching me struggle, fail, and then chase it as it rotated around, my heart beating furiously. Unbeknownst to me, with that fear I was falling in love. In love with being scared and unsure; in love with being far outside my comfort zone.

  In Rome, everything was different; even the ordinary seemed grander. The school was housed inside a cavernous former convent near the Circo Massimo and the Colosseum. The countries that were once dollops of color on a pull-down map in my tenth-grade geography class came to l
ife via newly made school friends from Kuwait, Chad, and Japan. My roommate, and soon-to-be best friend, was Josefine—a six-foot-tall brown-haired girl from Sweden. She wore all black with bright white Superga sneakers (always bright white—I’m still not sure how she kept them so clean), forecasting a trend that would arrive in the United States a decade later. Très European. We were free to wander the Spanish Steps and Trastevere until our 7 p.m. weekday curfew. Josefine and I would jog throughout the old city, listening to mixtapes we’d made for each other of Ani DiFranco on our bright yellow Sony Walkmans. We’d do our homework in the orangerie outside Casa Borghese. Bold Italian teenage boys would chase after us and scream out “Americana! Americana!” We would meet friends for coffee at our local bar (I’d never touched coffee in Texas), ride around on the back of motos to go watch fútbol games, or take buses across Rome.

  After years of riding around in the backseats of cars in Texas, I adored public transportation. I was so enthralled with the bus that I’d often miss my stop or get lost down a back alley. Kind bus drivers would arrive at the end of their route with me still dreamily gazing out the window in the back. In broken English they’d tell me I’d ridden too far. I would rush to get home before curfew (often not making it), secretly adoring the romantic experience of getting lost and the adrenaline rush of having to navigate my way back before the school gates closed.

  Josefine and I took the train across the country to visit our friend Orlando’s family in Tuscany. We wandered through fields and vineyards and ate huge Italian meals, while pantomiming conversations with his non-English-speaking nonna. After a long weekend of wine and beauty, we both fell asleep on our train back from Tuscany, only to be awakened by an Italian conductor who also did not speak English. Words were lost in translation, but it was clear we were no longer meant to be on the train. Without the train ever coming to a halt, he hoisted our bags up and threw them out the door; we jumped off, following them into a field, and turned around to see a smiling conductor shouting, “Grazie, bellas,” as he shrank farther into the distance.