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

purse, brushed past me, and got in the car, slamming the door as hard as she could. Then she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the drive, which was really lovely.

Margaret does not talk much. She is definitely not on my top ten list of great conversationalists. If you ask her a question, she is apt to answer yes or no at random. So the questions “Do you want eggs or pancakes?” and “Are you going to stop spitting, or do we have to leave right now?” will elicit the same answer: “Yes?! No?!” So I wasn’t surprised or put off by her silence. Which isn’t the same thing as saying I didn’t wish for more. I hadn’t seen my sister for months. Given the choice, I’d like to know what was going on in her life and her heart. What had she been up to since we last saw each other? What was making her happy? Or sad? What had she been doing with her housemates on the weekends? But these are the kinds of questions my sister simply couldn’t answer. I had to make do with the limited information I got from the staff members at her house, who saw her every day. I had to hope that she was finding joy in her own way.

ALTHOUGH I WISHED for a foray into my sister’s thoughts, part of me didn’t mind Margaret’s quiet on this particular day. I think we could all use a bit more silence, frankly. The world is a noisy place, becoming ever more cacophonous with our cell phones, laptops, and iPods. My father-in-law can’t sleep unless the television set is on. My husband likes to read his e-mail and talk to me over breakfast while he listens to NPR and sends text messages to his chess club members. My nephews play Xbox for hours at a time and watch the same movies over and over again, often wandering away from the TV halfway through the film, leaving the volume up. I’m frequently in the car with friends or family and realize that everyone but me is talking on the phone.

I’m misplaced in the technology generation. I usually drive my car with the radio off. I recently drove thirty-two hundred miles alone without even popping in a CD. I work in a quiet room, the silence broken every now and again by the sound of my dog snorting herself awake or the cat crying to be let out, and then in, and then out again. I leave my phone off when I’m driving, writing, or—wonder of wonders—talking to another live person. Often I’ll have several messages when I turn it back on, but none of them urgent, unless you count the ones from Brendan demanding to know why my phone is off.

I grew up in a noisy household, which is part of the reason I crave quiet. But there is something more there, and it’s about observing human behavior, the nonspeaking parts of communication. The beauty of the pause, the nonverbal cue, escaped me in my younger years, but I appreciate these elements more and more as I age. I learned from Navajo students at the University of New Mexico how abrupt and foreign an Anglo style of communication could seem. To them, Anglo students and teachers talked too much and too fast. While the Navajos were waiting quietly for what they deemed the appropriate cultural pause so they could respond to a question, the Anglos would get nervous about the quiet and start chattering again, asking more questions. Then the Navajo students would have to wait some more, prompting more nervous chatter and an unfortunate cycle of miscommunication.

When I taught fourth grade in American Samoa my students clued me in a bit about nonverbal communication by teaching me that an eyebrow waggle means “yes.” As I’d stand there, hands on my hips, demanding a verbal response, they’d crack up, thinking it was hilarious that I didn’t know what they were “saying.” I just wasn’t listening. I hadn’t learned how yet.

My raucous, crowded childhood had given way to a life full of quiet and space and time, three things I’d never thought I’d have so much of. And though I’d been years away from that chaos and close quarters with four siblings, the sense of tension and disruption had stayed with me all along, and I was still trying to shake it.

AFTER ABOUT A half an hour of complete silence in the car, Margaret looked over at me and said, “Hi, Eileen!” Then she went back to looking out the window. I laughed to myself, thinking about how this quiet car ride with my sister was full of irony for me. After all, one of the reasons that my childhood home had been so loud was because of this sister who was now riding along beside me in such a state of tranquility. This scene I was experiencing was one I might have fantasized about, but had never really expected: my quiet big sister.

We drove up U.S. Route 2 to State Route 206 and north out of Spokane as KPBX played Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Margaret looked out the window and watched the scenery as her neighborhood in the quaint college district gave way to strip malls and Chinese restaurants, then big-box shopping centers. Beyond that were the rural outcroppings that had become housing developments, sparsely inhabited, then the last few working family farms, then forest. We entered Mount Spokane State Park and wound up the narrow road toward the ski area. Margaret didn’t say a word. Now and then she pressed a finger against the window and whispered something to herself. I’ve been through a lot with Margaret—violent outbursts, public nudity, explosive vomiting in restaurants—but nothing in our past could have prepared me for this long silence.

During our childhood, Margaret’s autism had made her prone to frequent, unpredictable, violent tantrums. They might occur during dinner, in