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

shut up?” I heard my big sister mutter, and then she looked at me out o“f the corner of her eye. My face was red with embarrassment and shame, but something more complicated, too. Regret, the desire to be understood as a better person, or the desire to have actually been a better person. Margaret was sitting in the big easy chair in my living room, refusing to come to the table and eat with the staff members of her group home who had agreed to stop by my house so that Margaret and I could have a nice family visit. Is that really what I had been hoping for when I made these plans? “Margaret, don’t you want a sandwich?” This question came from Tami, the lead staff person. My big sister just shook her head again and, looking at me again, said quietly, “Why don’t you shut up?”

MY SISTER MARGARET has a complicated memory full of hidden drawers and magic locks. Within it lies a strange ability to recall some bizarre minutiae and a failure to grasp many everyday occurrences, a quirk that is funny as often as it is heartbreaking. If I called her up right this minute, for example, she’d probably sit right next to the phone and just let it ring and ring. Maybe she would even get up and walk away from it. She has no social trigger, no urgency within her to respond to the sound of that shrill bell the way the rest of us do. This harbinger of communication simply holds no sway.

On the other hand, she might remind everybody, out of the blue, that our dachshund is dead. “Louie died,” she’ll say. “Louie’s dead.” It’s true, too, about Louie. In fact, Louie is long dead. He was already ancient by the time I was born, a nippy, grouchy miniature dachshund. Even so, I loved him with a child’s passion and mourned him when he died.

Years after his death, Margaret would poke her head in the kitchen door from the living room, where she was listening to her music, and say, “Hi, Mom. Hi. Mom . . . Mom? Louie died, Mom. Louie’s dead, Mom.” My mother didn’t even have to look up from whatever she was doing. She’d reply mechanically, “Yes, Margaret. Louie died.” And Margaret’s head would disappear back into the living room. My sister wasn’t fondly resurrecting his memory or sharing her grief about the loss of our first family pet. She just wanted to hear my mother repeat this phrase back to her. Louie died in the 1970s, and Margaret is still likely to bring up his death at Christmas dinner or Easter, for no apparent reason. “Louie died. Louie’s dead, Eileen. Eileen, Louie died,” she tells me. And she won’t let it drop until she gets someone to respond. “Yes, Margaret. That’s right. Louie died.” The idea is locked away inside her memory and pops up every once in a while like the alarm clock in the guest room that someone forgot to shut off.

Medical experts call this kind of thing echolalia, a behavior that is classified as a compulsion common to people with autism. Writer Kamran Nazeer, who has autism himself, describes it as a desire for local coherence: “a preference for a limited, immediate form of order as protection against complexity or confusion.”

That might be true about echolalia, but in our family the repetition of these phrases was often the only kind of conversation we could have with my sister, so we welcomed it. And throughout the years, these verbal tics, the things she remembered, piled up to become a kind of historical catalog for our family. As such I’ve come to think of Margaret as the archivist of the family history, which is not so much made up of a linear sequence of trips and celebrations, vacations, and holidays like normal families might have. Instead, our collective past is cobbled together out of the things that my sister said and did, then remembered—the bizarre and mundane, the hysterical and the heartbreaking.

So, for example, one Easter when my sister Ann called to invite me to dinner, I paused and then I said, “Eas-TER-mass!” and we both cracked up. We were both remembering a particular spring morning that my mother had been struggling to get Margaret ready for church. “Honey, it’s time to go to Easter mass.” Our sister was really irritated, pulling on her wrists, stamping her feet, resisting, and yelling, “Eas-TER-mass!” in an angry echo of our mother’s kind voice. None of us can say “Easter” anymore without at least thinking of this. Similarly, one recent summer I stood in the grocery store aisle next to my brother as we tried to choose a salad dressing. We both sang out, “WISH-bone!” and snickered at each other. Margaret used to say this, flinging one hand high in the air—happy or irritated, I can’t recall—but Larry and his law school housemates kept it alive all these years. So we stood there, two decades later, giggling to ourselves in the store. Now we were the ones being stared at, but we finally didn’t care.

Over the years these episodes became the unlikely family glue, sometimes because we were all laughing and at other times because we were all made miserable by whatever Margaret was saying; whatever the case, we were in it together, and it was often the only kind of family togetherness we really had. We were like survivors of the same hurricane, strangers who clung to each other in giddy relief after the storm had passed. Laughter was our way of finding some way through what would have otherwise been a dark and endless labyrinth of small disasters, like “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.”

This song was one of the lively secular tunes Margaret learned in her music class at the public school she attended. My Catholic school, which I was led to believe was superior in academics and spirituality, didn’t have