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

order our lives. The core of each story remains the same, though we add and subtract layers depending on the audience, the weather, the balance of happiness and sadness on a given day. Margaret’s stories remained locked away inside her mind and heart. She tried to explain herself, but she often did not have access to the words, which frustrated her as much as it frustrated the people around her. She had tried to learn some things by rote to give us some satisfaction when we asked, but she often said these things at random, as if searching for what we wanted to hear.

What could I do about any or all of this?

These questions had been much easier to grapple with when I lived sixteen hundred miles away in New Mexico. The distance between us meant I didn’t have to do anything. I could just ruminate about Margaret, her autism, and everything that came with it—the guilt, the hilarity, the stress, and the plain bewilderment that had never seemed to diminish over the course of more than thirty years. But now I had decided to move closer to home. So what had been a two-leg airplane trip would soon shrink to an alarmingly short five-hour drive. The move would do away with all the easy excuses that I had never realized I relied on so much—excuses like Oh, it’s so far, or I don’t have the money to fly, or I wish I had more time off. The truth of the matter is that living so far away had provided me a safe haven from the demands of family and that nagging question that had been with me since birth: Just what are you going to do about Margaret, anyway?

AS I SAT there staring at Margaret’s front porch, I tried to tell myself I wasn’t going to figure it all out at once. That was the idea behind the lunch date—starting with something easy. People often say that if you break a problem down into its parts and deal with one part at a time, what seems impossible is actually easy. But then again, people who talk in clichés are apt to bring up those four blind guys who describe an elephant four different ways, depending on which part each has in his hands. That was a worrisome metaphor, as it made me fear I would never understand this family puzzle until it was too late. And as far as I could tell, an elephant was an elephant no matter which part you were holding on to. The elephant in our family room had never seemed bigger than how it looked from where I was sitting in my mother’s car.

But I realized that I couldn’t keep on living with this large animal, and I was tired of stepping around it. I felt like something had to give. I didn’t know precisely what to do but was smart enough to realize that what I had been doing for the past few years hadn’t worked. Before I made this trip, I had known that I wanted to see Margaret, but I couldn’t face another family gathering with the firebomb of my sister’s autism igniting again the pages of the family history. I’d thought anything had to be better than that. So I took a deep breath, picked up the phone, and called Margaret to ask if she wanted to go out for lunch with me, alone. After a few seconds of mutual anxiety-ridden silence, she mumbled yes and hung up on me.

Standing there with the phone in my hand, listening to the dial tone, I had let my thoughts run through the minefield of things that might go wrong during a lunch date with Margaret. I thought it all through. I surrendered myself to whatever might happen and wrote it down on my calendar: “Pick up Margaret for lunch, 11:45 AM, Friday.” And then I went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a stiff drink.

I grew up alongside my sister’s eccentricities, never really noticing how strange she could be, because I’d never known anything else. Just as I always knew to jump in the air to avoid being shocked by the shorted-out refrigerator at the lake house, and to move the cat out of the fruit basket before putting the bananas in it, I always knew that with Margaret along we were likely to be the center of attention at any public event, and not in a good way. When Margaret misbehaved, everyone would stare, and I always thought they were looking at me, too. Sometimes the faces were just curious; sometimes they were angry or afraid. After a while I felt like people were staring even when they weren’t. As we grew older and I passed her developmentally, I began to feel responsible for the staring.

It was confusing, at best, to be learning life’s rules and social graces alongside someone who consistently violated every one of them. We wandered through an etiquette desert without a guide. We needed an Emily Post of autism to lead us through the rough patches, but when she didn’t show up we forged ahead anyway. My siblings and I remain, as adults, a self-guided lot, still figuring things out as we go.

I often feel like this about my life: mapless, guideless, as if I am actually hammering the nails into the wood of the bridge I need to walk across one crappy, ramshackle board at a time. I always feel like I’m showing up just a bit unprepared in life, like everyone else got the memo or took the class while I was busy looking for someplace to park or finding the bathroom. I thought about that now as I sat outside Margaret’s house, trying to work up enough surrender to get out of the car and knock on the door.

Sitting in the car, I reminded myself that lunch was a fairly safe option. Everybody has to eat, right? So I