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

bear, right there in the kitchen. I wasn’t even sure my dad knew where the kitchen was, let alone how the thing worked.

Michaela’s mom also “worked outside the home,” as they said back then. She always looked really nice and carried a briefcase. I felt sorry for her because she had to go to work instead of staying home as my mom did in her T-shirts and jeans. It never occurred to me that she might have liked her job or that my own mother might have sometimes prayed to Jesus for a professional life that would help her escape a houseful of children.

Whatever the case, these parents were a different breed than I was used to. On the day that the police marched up our front walk, I’d been over at Michaela’s house all afternoon. Right before dinner her folks announced that they would walk me home, which struck me as odd. They had never walked me home before, so I figured I must be in some kind of trouble. Nobody walked children home in my neighborhood. (The closest thing for me was being regularly escorted to the front door by one particular mom who had a harder time hiding her irritation with me when it was time to go home.) Back then we ran to and from our friends’ houses, morning or evening, and nobody worried about us. Sandy Young and I regularly stood at the pine tree between our houses in the hard dark, one foot on the trunk, and raced each other home, thrilled and terrified to be alone in the darkness, but at the same time knowing we were safe.

Maybe Michaela’s parents just wanted to get some exercise, even though this was the eighties, before people knew that exercise was good for you. Whatever the case, there they were, strolling down the hill with their daughter and me on a warm spring evening as if it were something they did every day. That was a Californian for you. They were also holding hands, which made me feel really sorry for Michaela.

Looking back I have to wonder if I said something to make Michaela’s parents feel like they should walk me home and see for themselves what was really going on at the Garvin house. It wasn’t like me to talk about Margaret’s behavior and how it often made me feel like I was roller-skating on a tightrope near the edge of a cliff. It was such a part of my life back then that to talk about it would have seemed as superfluous as telling someone that my family was Irish Catholic—why state the obvious? But maybe when I went to their house that day seeking a little peace and quiet, I happened to mention that someone had called the cops on my sister. Ha, ha, isn’t that funny, I might have said.

MOST PEOPLE, I imagine, are alarmed by screaming. That’s the point, after all; this is how we human beings sound the alarm. The difference between my sister’s screaming and the other screaming I’ve heard since is a measure of quality and quantity. When Margaret had a tantrum, she could hold out for hours.

As a child I spent a lot of time watching her, trying to calm her down, wishing she would stop, but nothing I did seemed to make any difference. I tried comforting her, but often found it difficult to speak in a soothing voice when she was yelling, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! NOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOO!” in my face. I felt like I did when a fire engine went by, only this fire engine wasn’t going anywhere, so the blaring wasn’t getting any quieter. Standing there next to my own personal four-alarm fire, I struggled to figure out how to turn off the siren. I’d alternate between pleading with her to be quiet and yelling at her.

Either way, she couldn’t hear me. She’d sit there with her eyes closed, banging her hands and feet against whatever she was standing closest to—the floor, the wall, the furniture, herself—not seeming to feel the pain. The force of her screaming was so great that I expected her uvula to emerge, bringing her esophagus, tonsils, and appendix right along with it. Every once in a while, Margaret would open her eyes and focus on whoever was foolish enough to be in the room with her. Our efforts to calm her usually did not comfort her, and so we were just as likely to become targets for her fists and feet. It was nothing personal; we were just in her space, and when her anxieties took over, we sometimes learned to get the hell out of the way, but often not.

We called these episodes “tantrums,” which sounds so benign and friendly. Tantrums were what little kids had when they were whining for ice cream. Tantrum. The word has a nice little symphonic ring to it. It sounds like a small piece of Asian percussion, something that would be played during the special music section at Christmas mass. We needed a better word, but we didn’t have one, at least not a polite one we could use in front of other people.

Sometimes it was hard to know what had set Margaret off in the first place, but this particular crisis had been about the Blue Goody, a small, cheap, plastic hairbrush with bristles on one side of it. Like so many things in our crowded household, it was the only one of its kind. One hairbrush in a house of seven people. My parents were trying to feed and clothe seven of us, and they were frugal people. So it seemed like there was one of everything in our house: THE hairbrush. THE hammer. THE thermos. This singularity carried a terrible significance: if you broke it, lost it, or failed to share it, forcing your parents to spend $1.06 on a new one at Rosauer’s grocery store, you would push the family over the brink of financial