How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin (icecream ebook reader .TXT) 📗

Their graceful flight paths reminded me of my childhood and the endless hours of summer sunshine during which I had had no greater responsibility than to sit on the dock and watch the birds. Of course, I was supposed to be watching my big sister, too. That much was always understood, if unspoken. Before I was conscious of being conscious, I knew enough to worry about losing track of Margaret. We siblings were all equally terrified when she wandered off on her own. Where did she go, and who was going to get in trouble for it?

My Birds of Oregon book told me that the birds I had watched as a child were the subtle-colored cliff swallow and the brighter, blue-feathered tree swallow. Arriving each spring at our lake cabin, we always found a new nest above the front door, created before we finished our own migration for the year, putting the boat in the water and navigating the icy spring waters of Lake Coeur d’Alene, our life jackets bunched up around our small ears. Swallow eggs incubate for only about two weeks, and the babies stay in the nest for about three more. Compared to our human lives, the entire childhood period of these little creatures is truncated into just a month and a half, which makes me realize I must have been watching many different bird families each summer above the front door, not just one. But at my house it was definitely only one family, the same family.

That’s part of what is so difficult about being a child in a big family: Wherever you go, there your siblings are. The ill-informed (probably “only children” themselves) might argue that this is the magical part of being a big family. But I’ll bet those people have never had to engage in a physical battle for couch space. As children, my siblings and I were afflicted by the constant and involuntary presence of one another. We crowded together around the same sticky dinner table, fought for position in front of the TV, and struggled for our hard-won minutes in the lukewarm shower while someone else was banging on the bathroom door. We loved each other, but that concept was buried deep during the moments that we battled tooth and nail for the last bottle of Pop Shop pop.

By the time I’d moved to Oregon, those days were long gone, and now we had to go out of our way to get in one another’s lives. As adults, my brothers and sisters and I inflicted ourselves on each other by choice. One way we did this was by forcing one another to participate in our hobbies. This was why I was willing to watch The Lord of the Rings with my oldest sister Ann’s family ad infinitum. And why I let Ann pay for me to get a French manicure for my birthday, even though whenever I looked at my nails I felt like a hooker. It’s also the reason why Ann, who now lived a couple of hours away from me, agreed to come to my book club. I had told her—my beautiful, conservative, army-wife sister—that we would be camping, but maybe I just assumed she’d infer the rest—that anyone who would camp out in the woods for book club would necessarily be a bunch of tree-hugging liberals. If she didn’t suspect, it didn’t show; she was so gracious at the all-organic potluck and our ensuing discussion about the evils of the logging industry. She didn’t even bat an eye when, after we’d eaten our s’mores and the kids were tucked in, someone lit up a joint; she just excused herself politely and went to bed.

SINCE I’D MOVED back to the Pacific Northwest, it was easier to connect with my siblings, at least geographically. But getting together with Ann, for example, was much easier than trying to spend time with Margaret. For one thing, Ann would answer the phone when it rang and usually didn’t hang up on me. Moreover, with Margaret this kind of interest-sharing business was fairly one-sided. With her autism, she didn’t have the kind of empathy that would make her suffer through something she didn’t feel like doing just for the sake of another person’s happiness (as Ann did by riding in my dog-hair-covered van into the darkening Gifford Pinchot Wilderness with my beloved mutt Dizzy inching deeper into her lap with every mile). That’s simply too abstract a concept. But I had non-autistic friends and relatives who were less empathetic than she was, so I wasn’t ready to give up on this project, not quite yet. I decided that the next time I went home, I was going to try to get Margaret to go hiking with me.

I had tried it once before, the summer before I moved back to the Northwest and was home visiting. Hiking was something Margaret and I had never discussed, so I didn’t know if she knew exactly what I meant when I asked her to go, but she was game to try. At least that’s the way it seemed before she slammed down the phone. “You’re going hiking with Eileen! OKAY!” SLAM!

As with our then-recent lunch date, I found myself focusing on low expectations. Just get there first and see what happens, I told myself on the car ride from northern Oregon to eastern Washington. On the appointed day, I drove five hours to get to her house, knocked on the door, and waited for her to open up. She yanked the door open and peered out at me through the screen. She didn’t say anything. There was no “Hi! How are you! How was your trip? Come on in while I grab my things.” We don’t have those bridges of small talk, no stepping-stones of cheek kissing and shoulder squeezing. She just looked at me for a few long, silent seconds. Then she said, “You’re going hiking, Eileen?” When I said yes, she grabbed her