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

Margaret, worn out from her afternoon of anxiety, came and stood behind her. At thirteen she was already taller than my mother. She wrapped one arm lovingly around our mother’s neck, smelled the back of her head, and rested her forehead on Mom’s shoulder. She watched Michaela’s parents and watched my mother, and I watched all of them. Every once in a while, Margaret would interject something like, “You don’t scream about the blue hairbrush, Mom.” Or, “That’s good being quiet now, Mom.” And my mother would agree with her. “Yes, Margaret. That is good behaving.”

After they had chatted for a time, Michaela’s parents said good night and walked up the hill in the dark toward their house. I went in the house, my mother shut the door, and we all sat down for dinner. The next day at school Michaela told me that when they got home that night, her parents had taken down the For Sale sign that they had recently put up in the front yard and went inside. She said she didn’t know why. They didn’t move back to California. And the next time my mom went to the store, we got a new hairbrush. A brown Goody, with bristles all the way around.

THE PAST ISN’T singular, a large block of was or wasn’t, did or didn’t, had or hadn’t. It includes many layers compressed over the years. Memory, ours and others, is accurate and misremembered, abandoned and reclaimed. It is like stone itself. If you cut a cross section, you can read the floods and the droughts, years of famine or plenty. In my own cross section I found marks made by these friends and neighbors I’d almost forgotten. And after all that time, I found some of what hadn’t been said to be what I treasured the most.

In Oregon these days were long past from my life, the times when something as inconsequential as a misplaced hairbrush could cause enough of a crisis to marshal my family, the neighbors, and the Spokane Police Department to the same hopeless cause. But for years after I left home, I still lived in the shadow of the other shoe, waiting for some small disruption to swing the balance and make it drop, make the normal life I had struggled so hard to build fall apart in an instant. I felt this way even when I was old enough to know that people have to deal with their own demons, their own crying babies and screaming little girls.

Even Margaret. For all of our efforts, I can’t believe we ever really helped my sister find any peace of mind. Margaret held the key that eluded the rest of us, and when she was able to open the door and return to the regular world, she did it of her own accord, not because of anything we did or didn’t do to help her. When I saw her that first summer after I moved to Oregon, I was more certain of that than anything. I could see that she continued to struggle with the same kinds of things every day, but I knew there was less tumultuousness in her life, and I was happy for her, because she deserved peace of mind more than anyone I knew.

From my old neighborhood, my life moved on: Spokane, Seattle, England, American Samoa, Spain, New Mexico. I watched people come and go from my life, and talismans helped me remember. When I got married, Deanna and Vanessa gave me my own candy jar as a shower gift, generously stuffed with my favorite sweets. I brought that memory of my childhood into my first married home. By the time Margaret first came to visit me there in Albuquerque, the jar had been broken, elbowed off the counter by my lanky husband, who didn’t think I would notice its absence if he didn’t say anything about it. I cried for hours. But lots of things got broken there, and everywhere else I lived. Like the Blue Goody hairbrush, though, these things are nothing more than plastic and glass—replaceable and inconsequential when compared to our memories and the people in our lives, who we struggle to love and be loved by, with their imperfections and through our own.

Sometimes sitting on my porch at night in Oregon, I could hear the frog families croaking across the fence line, the sound of a lone dog barking once, twice, three times. Across the river I heard the whistle of the train as it sped along the Columbia River Gorge, moving east toward Spokane and ever forward in time. I heard the voices of neighborhood children calling to each other across their yards in the darkness. I remembered what I had had before and what I had still, and I held it all in the unbreakable jar of my heart.

8.

the know-nothing aunt

Often we save our best manners for company and even for strangers, giving less than our best to our families and friends. How unfortunate that is, since these are the relationships that matter most in our lives.

 

—On Relationships, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

I COULDN’T SLEEP, PARTLY because I was in a strange bed. From a horizontal vantage point on the hide-a-bed in my sister Ann’s living room, I lay awake for hours gazing at framed pictures, carved wooden figurines, and shapely Asian ceramic bowls—the trappings of a life that had taken Ann from a small town in Washington State to Germany and then the Mojave Desert and Boston and China and back to the United States again. I was thinking about the work it must have taken to haul these items from place to place as the U.S. Army moved her family around so frequently over the past two decades. Even though they had been living in this particular house for only a couple of months, this stuff was there, hammered and hung, measured and straightened, looking like it had