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

never been anywhere else. I wondered if Ann looked at these items as a way to mark her place in the world, the touchstones she’d carefully collected to make herself at home no matter where on the globe she might be. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of crap that she hauls around out of habit and that she secretly wishes would get lost or damaged in the move.

As I lay there not sleeping, ruminating on her family’s travels, I was also thinking about how having children seems to make people’s guest rooms disappear. Suddenly all the bedrooms are chock-full of children. There is no sleeping space for visiting adults, so people like me get stuck out on the couch or some air mattress in the middle of the house while the children are all snuggled up in their private suites with extra pillows and the luxury of a door that closes. I’d driven three hundred miles that afternoon and was hoping for—no, expecting—a room of my own. I felt a bit like an old crone for thinking such things, but I also felt a bit like I’d been left out on the lawn with the sprinkler and scattered toys: Exposed. Neglected. Stepped on.

The soft mattress under me slanted down at the top, which made all the blood in my body rush toward my head. This was an uncomfortable sensation, to say the least, not to mention the fact that I could feel each horizontal steel bar beneath me. However, I had convinced myself that my position was probably not dangerous, unless my head slid farther down into the crease between the mattress and the back of the couch, causing the hide-a-bed to suddenly engage and put itself away. But I was trying not to let myself think about that sort of thing.

Mostly I couldn’t sleep because there was a pair of seven-year-old feet lodged in the middle of my spine. The feet belonged to my carrot-haired nephew, Tony, who had asked his mother if he could sleep in the hide-a-bed—what he called the Big Nana Pat Bed—with Auntie Eileen. She hadn’t actually cleared this request with me. She had just mentioned it with a smile and went to tuck him in, leaving me standing in the kitchen wondering to myself if there is a polite way to tell a seven-year-old that you don’t relish his nocturnal company. Turns out there isn’t. Besides, by the time I went to bed, Tony had been asleep for hours. Now here he was, snoring gently into my ear and digging his little toes into my road-weary back.

My nephew is an adorable little person. It’s just that I have long had a strong aversion to sharing a bed with anyone; even Brendan barely made the cut. As a child I was forced to share a room with two sisters until the oldest one, this kid’s mom, Ann, went away to college. That left Margaret and me bunking together for another five years until I left for school. Even after all this time, I still jealously guard my own space. When traveling with a large group of my girlfriends, I’d happily sleep on the floor before volunteering to share a bed. When they asked why, I tried to explain that I didn’t like to be looked at when I was sleeping. People told me that this was a rather ridiculous fear, because when people sleep together they are sleeping, not looking at each other. But those people never had to share a room with Margaret.

BEING WATCHED IN my sleep—it’s a worry I had nurtured nightly through the eighteen years I shared a room with my autistic sister, this kid’s other aunt, who was three years my senior and seemed to never sleep. She had disrupted my rest for nearly two decades with her nocturnal wanderings and strange whisperings. I often awoke to the sound of her feet thundering down the stairs to check on something, as she was wont to do in her compulsive and unpredictable nighttime travels. My older brothers and I would try to police this kind of activity, because we didn’t want her to wake up our dad, who was sleep deprived during the entire course of his career as an obstetrician and would come roaring up the stairs in that signature, Scary Dad in Underwear way that men of his generation had perfected. If he awoke, we were doomed.

Therefore, if one of us heard Margaret getting out of bed, we’d all leap up to chase her. Consequently, Margaret developed a habit of running and slamming doors behind her as she went, because she knew someone would be hot on her heels trying to get her to go back to bed. Even if we didn’t chase her, when we’d long given up on this tactic, she’d run and slam because she’d gotten used to doing so: Slap! Slam! Slam! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Her feet would hit the floor and she’d be out of bed, through two doors, down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen, and back again. As she thundered back up the stairs to the second floor, where we kids slept, I’d hear my mother’s quiet scolding, “Margaret, now, you go to bed!” Sometimes this was, in fact, my mother following Margaret up the stairs to make sure she went back to bed. But sometimes Margaret would rush back up the stairs on her own, scolding herself in a perfect imitation of our mother’s voice, saving Mom the trouble of getting out of bed. It was kind of like Gilligan hitting himself with Skipper’s hat when he knew he’d done something dumb.

Weekend mornings were worse, when I tried to make up for lost sleep. Margaret would roll out of bed much earlier than I did, anxiety propelling her into her clothes and down the stairs to the kitchen. And there she’d pace, waiting for the rest of us to follow her so that