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

mind was elsewhere, thinking about the hairbrush and the crisis its loss had caused. The cop crossed the room and squatted down next to the bed so that he was on the same level as Margaret. You could tell he was a nice guy. He was young, earnest, and handsome. He wanted to know if my sister was all right. Everything was going to be just fine, he wanted her to know. Could she tell him what had happened? My sister turned her head to look at him and took a deep breath.

THE DAY THE cops came to our house happened to be the same day that my friend Michaela’s parents decided not to move back to California. I’m not saying these two events were related, but back then this kind of coincidence took on magical significance for me and helped explain away the unending small and terrible crises that autism wreaked on my family. Decades later, I was surprised that I remembered this particular day at all but saw that I was arrested by the power of small kindnesses of friends and neighbors. I saw how they made indelible marks on our lives.

Childhood can seem interminable. When I was ten it seemed impossible that anything in our neighborhood would ever change. The houses of the people around us formed the edges of our universe and delineated how people viewed our family. The redbrick ranch next door was a rental property, usually occupied by people who were friendly but kept a polite distance and never stayed long. Two doors down lived our surrogate grandparents, people who always had time for us and opened the door before we even had a chance to knock; we knew we were loved by the Henrys.

The Waldrons, across the street, were older and less interested in playing with us, but always kind. The Reimans gave us stale suckers when we came over to watch game shows; their elegant, shabby house was slowly falling apart and smelled of mothballs. Another neighbor always smiled and waved, but she gossiped about us and told people that my parents were getting a divorce because of my sister. The end of one block had a Boo Radley house that scared the beejezus out of me. Huge, overgrown bushes hid the dark front porch. I could always hear the big dogs they kept in the backyard barking as I walked by. But like the house in Harper Lee’s book, it was really just a sad house. In it lived a pretty mom who worked too hard and didn’t have a husband to help her with her two wild boys. I only saw her walking to and from her car on her way to work. She never spoke to us and seemed not to notice if we waved.

There were many other people in between in this quiet middle-class neighborhood—genuine friends of my parents who cared about me and my brothers and sisters and managed to accept Margaret on some level, despite her differences. The Youngs and the Harms, my parents’ sailing friends, knew her and watched out for her, just like they watched out for the rest of us.

Margaret formed her own special relationships with people, too. The Waldrons supplied bananas to my silent sister, who would pop across the street every now and again. The Henrys treated her like the rest of us, welcoming her into the house and spoiling her with soda and candy. So what if she gobbled hers up and forgot to say thank you? They understood.

Years later we found out that she had often dropped in on the Bateses, a family down the block. Their kids were teenagers when we were in grade school and intimidated the rest of us, but Margaret watched TV with them and made herself peanut butter sandwiches in their kitchen.

An older couple down the bay at our lake house later told us that Margaret would come by and make cookies with them when she was an adolescent. Those were the times when she disappeared for what seemed like forever and scared everybody. No wonder she couldn’t hear us calling. She was busy mixing cookie dough.

As a child, Margaret did not talk much and could not explain herself. So I imagine these secret friends of hers had been surprised the first time she walked in without knocking and helped herself to a snack. But for some reason they were all able to transcend the gaps of regular communication and connect on some level. She formed this social network on her own, without any of us knowing. Did she consider these people her friends, or was it more simple: the house with soda, the people with the bananas, the teenagers with the peanut butter, Deanna McRae with the Percy Faith record?

The McRae household next door had a big and long-lasting impact on my sister, and on me, too. Smaller and tidier than our big, crazy place, the McRae house was my extended living room for more than a decade. Vanessa McRae, my age, instantly became my favorite person in the universe one summer day in 1978 when she moved in next door. And I loved being around her family, too. Their household of four was so calm compared to ours, and that order came from the lady of the house—Deanna McRae. At five foot two and one hundred pounds, she scared the pants off me when I first met her.

When Deanna got mad at her kids, everybody in the neighborhood knew it. I can still hear the sound of her voice the day she told Vanessa and her brother, Jason, that they had to be in by five o’clock for dinner. “VanesSA! Ja-SON! FIVE o’clock! Do you hear me!?” I can hear it now as if I’m still perched in the maple tree I had hidden in. She was so mad at her kids that day that I just assumed I was gonna get it, too. But she