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

looks tasty sitting across from the table!” She never demonstrated that she understood the relationships; she just echoed what she’d heard.

This all happened decades ago, and yet, when I recently asked her about the sheep, she said, without missing a beat, “The sheep is between the table and the hamburger,” and she gave me a little smile. When we were kids, we asked her this question over and over again, and she’d give the same answer, and we’d all fall apart laughing. My sister laughed right along with us. I really don’t know why she thought it was funny, but at least we were laughing together, which was just this side of normal. Whatever the reason, the sheep, the table, and the hamburger have stuck around over the years, a testament to Margaret’s memory and to our history together, if nothing else.

AS AN ADULT, it horrifies me to think about the things we taught Margaret to parrot, intentionally and unintentionally. “Neal Diamond is a foxy woman” was one of them. “This is the fucking shit” was a favorite of mine that Margaret picked up on her own and would intone at random. “Larry’s wearing Crustos!” she’d sing, along with “Larry push a penis!” also inspired by our teenaged bathroom humor. “Well, Mike!” she’ll still say, perfectly mimicking my mother’s surprise at something our brother did years ago that no one can remember.

These phrases were our common language when we couldn’t share much of anything else. And they linger still. Just the other day, when I was riding my mountain bike way too fast and nearly crashed into a tree, a Margaret-ism sprang unbidden to my lips from deep inside my own memory: “SOME-in-a-BITCH!” I yelled and laughed out loud in the woods all by myself. And one recent morning as I waited sleepily in front of the toaster with a jar of Adams peanut butter in my hand, I thought to myself, “PEA-nut butter and JE-lly!” in a familiar sing-song voice and snorted so hard that my coffee came out my nose.

Yes, we teased her, but we loved our sister and fiercely defended her from outsiders, like the unkind neighbor kids who heckled my silent sister for riding her bike on the sidewalk as she bashed her front wheel up, over, and down off of each non-bike-friendly curb. Or the kids at school who made “retard” jokes. Then there was that scary neighbor mom who chased Margaret out of her house in a bath towel. My sister had simply let herself in to make a (PEA-NUT butter and JE-lly!) sandwich while this woman was soaking in the tub. At the time, I remember wondering what she was doing taking a bath in the middle of the day anyway. And it was just a sandwich!

It occurred to me recently that the rest of us thought these things—like the sheep and Peter COW-ten-table—were funny because we could control them. We knew Margaret wouldn’t pull out the pot warning unless we conjured it. She wouldn’t unleash this particular phrase in public unless we hit the spring lock in her mind that released it. It was like a magic trick we were all in on. And maybe it was somehow a comfort for all the things she did say in public, the endless things she did let loose on us. This comforting certainty was as significant as it was unusual; our collective childhood was full of the unpredictable from our sister—an infinite number of mortifying episodes in silent churches, crowded malls, and sacred ceremonies. They are seared into my memory because of what I like to call the Oh, No Moment—the instant it became clear that Margaret was about to explode with mirth, anger, or impatience and that all eyes were about to turn to us.

Margaret always seemed to get revved up exactly when we wished she’d just be quiet and blend in. This kind of thing was especially hard when we were teenagers—a time in life that is difficult enough by itself. I grew adept at pretending that whatever was happening wasn’t happening to me; I became a kind of silent observer in my own life. Shopping with Margaret during a visit with our Portland cousins was such an occasion. They took us to a brand-new atrium-like shopping mall downtown, the kind with a big escalator in the middle and three open floors rising up in a large, echoey glass arch. As we stepped onto the escalator on the top floor, Margaret leaned out over the rail, looked into that wide-open space teeming with people, and hollered, “Get your hands out of your pants!”

She loved yelling this sentence and yelled it all the time. The first time she had heard it, I’m sure, it was probably a quiet reprimand from my mother, a woman of infinite patience, who worried about Margaret’s habit of standing around with her hand down her waistband. She wasn’t touching herself or anything. She was just standing there with one hand inside her pants, like little kids will do, like my sixth-grade math teacher did, as a matter of fact. But my mom was always working on the little graces to try to help Margaret blend in more. “Life is going to be hard enough for her,” Mom would say.

Somehow, unaccountably, this gentle correction had become translated into a command of Wizard of Oz–like proportions in my sister’s head. “Get your HAAAAANDS! Outta your PAAAAANTS!” she boomed, holding on to the last word, loving the echo in the mall. When my brothers and I shushed her, she started cackling and yelled it again: “Get your HAAAAANDS! Outta your PAAAAANTS! Get your HAAAAANDS! Outta your PAAAAANTS!” She kept yelling until she was laughing too hard to get the words out. She doubled over, hanging on to us as the escalator descended, helpless with laughter. “Get your ha! Ha! Ha hahahahahahaha! Get your hands! Hahahahaha!”

My brothers and I felt like the whole world was watching as the