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

the middle of the night, or in the morning, and often for no discernable reason. Was it her diet? Was it her hormones? Was it her medication? Was it her autism? It was crazy-making to try to predict or resolve the issue that might be upsetting her. But as a child, somehow I felt like I was supposed to figure out what she needed. So did my other siblings. What was the magic trick we needed to do that would make her world right again? We tried everything, and when nothing worked, we tried it all again. What else do you do when someone is screaming bloody murder if not try to figure out how to make her stop? But we were children, not autism experts, and our efforts often seemed futile. Consequently, our collective childhood was marred by the anxiety that plagued my sister and her inability to communicate with the rest of us about what she needed. So now I watched her watching the road, saying nothing, and simply marveled. Deep down, though, I was still as edgy as ever.

I glanced over at her as I drove. Margaret is three years older than I am, which at the time put her at forty. She is taller than I am and heavier, having inherited what our family calls “the McGillicuddy figure.” That means she looks like the women on my maternal grandmother’s side: tall, large breasted, carrying a little potbelly, and pencil-thin legs. She wears her brunette hair in a short, stylish cut, which highlights her lovely green eyes. Margaret often stands with her hands clasped in front of her, over her large bosom, looking for all the world like the Venus of Willendorf.

In the previous decade or so, we’d gone through extended periods of time without seeing each other, and I had held this image of her in my mind’s eye. When I lived in New Mexico, the distance was an obstacle. As a poor graduate student, I had the time to travel but often lacked the funds. Then I got a job with decent pay and a measly two weeks off a year. Margaret could never travel alone, and even with a chaperone, unpredictable plane travel was an adventure that no one was eager to try with her, especially post-9/11. But here I was, living just five hours away, trying to connect with my sister. And with only her. One-on-one, to try to bookmark the past apart from the present, the way things had always been from the way I hoped they might be.

JUST AS I wanted an adult relationship with Ann, Larry, and Mike, I was looking for a change in my siblinghood with Margaret. In the recent past, visiting with my sister had left me feeling stressed, kind of like doing a beer bong and then getting on a roller coaster. It was her outbursts that got me. “Behavioral issues” was the polite term we used when we became adults. In plainer terms that meant a visit with my sister usually included one or all of the following: being spanked, hit on the head, spit on, shoved, ignored completely for the entire week, laughed at, or pinched in that tender area between chin and Adam’s apple. (This is probably not something many people worry about, the Neck Pinch. But if you take the time to locate this spot on your neck, you’ll notice that it is, in fact, a very tender piece of corporeal real estate. Now imagine that you are just sitting around, minding your own business, and suddenly you feel like that delicate part of your neck is caught in a car door. That’s what the Neck Pinch feels like.) All those things might be repeated, at random, for the duration of a given visit. Let’s just say it was difficult to relax and have fun under these circumstances, and it was even more difficult to feel warmth toward the perpetrator of such assaults, even though this might be the only time we’d get to see each other all year.

But all these possibilities were preferable to the screaming. When Margaret got really out of control, she screamed this kind of primal scream that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Actually it made the hair on my face stand up. And I didn’t even know I had hair on my face. This noise also made me sweat in a sudden burst—a sweaty outburst, if there is such a thing. Somewhere deep down inside, I felt I was supposed to do something drastic, like run back into the jungle and drown my baby monkeys because the end of the world was coming.

When Margaret screamed, it sounded like she was trying to turn herself inside out by the force of her voice. And if that didn’t work, she was going to keep screaming until she turned the rest of the world inside out. Often when she got like this, she simply couldn’t stop. And all I wanted to do was help her stop. But rushing to her aid felt like running back into a burning building to try to turn off the fire alarm and, in my experience, was about as useful. The last time I had tried to help when Margaret was freaking out like this, I had earned myself a twisted ankle and a bruise on the back of my head; Margaret shoved me over backward when I crouched down next to the chair she’d thrown herself into and tried to reason with her.

I didn’t know how often Margaret acted like this anymore. When we were younger, the screaming had been a part of everyday life, along with the maniacal barking of the dog, my sister’s incessant record-playing, and the whine of my father’s power tools in the basement. The combination often made me feel like hiding in a quiet corner, only I couldn’t find one in our crowded house. Margaret’s tantrums were definitely the