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

There was so much I didn’t know. I still didn’t know how to play chess, and I didn’t care if I ever did. I didn’t know what it took to raise a child to feel loved and safe and independent. I didn’t know what Margaret’s life was really like, if she was happy, if she thought of me. I’d often wished I could have found more reserves of humor and laughter for her, for me, when we were sharing a house. I tried to remember when I first got the notion that I was responsible for her behavior and for her future. I asked myself if all that time I thought I was working so hard to help her had made any difference at all. I wondered if I had really done anything at all besides worry. Some of these were questions I was not sure I wanted to know the answers to.

There were a few things I did know. I was pretty sure I’d never be a mother, but I also knew what it was to be an aunt and a sister, and that meant a great deal to me. I loved watching my sister and her husband succeed at this important task. I was also beginning to realize that our lives are our own to shape and heal as well as we are able. If we are lucky, we have people we love and call family. As for my siblings, I was learning to hope that I could have adult relationships with each of them now that we lived closer. And I had decided to try to let go of my expectations about what those relationships should be like. I’d decided to just see what would happen. As for all those things that remained mysterious and unknown, I could only hope that I would be paying attention if the answers ever revealed themselves.

That night, I lay in bed, not sleeping in my quiet house. Outside I could hear the eternal wind of the Columbia River Gorge rushing over the peak of the roof and squealing around the corner eaves. I closed my eyes and listened to the whistling dark. And then I was falling toward sleep, holding the two of them, Margaret and Tony, in my mind’s eye: Here is Margaret, rushing through the dark hallway in her flannel nightgown like the wind itself, gripping a tattered record cover in one hand and scolding herself in a whisper. And here is Tony, muttering in his sleep, clutching his tattered baby blanket to his chest.

I saw them and I saw the truth. We hold so tightly to what we treasure, not knowing that grasping what is precious to us only makes it fall away faster, not realizing that if we would loosen our hold, the objects of our affections would become lighter than the air we breathe, more magical than our dreams, more constant than sleep. And in that we can find rest.

9.

what’s next, margaret?

If you cannot participate in sports or games with grace and good temper, you should not participate at all. Cursing your luck, excusing, complaining and protesting against unfairness won’t get you anywhere.

—On Being a Good Sport, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

ON A PERFECT June morning I stood in the sunlight in my front yard, hose in hand, watering the berm I’d recently planted on the west side of my lawn. Since I’d moved to Oregon, gardening had given me a sense of pleasure I never knew was possible. How satisfying to plan, to clear a space, and to plant small, delicate seedlings. To begin. What a surprise to watch these small green shoots grow and blossom, even thrive. I was happy I hadn’t give up on gardening after my first attempt, which amounted to nothing short of seedling slaughter. I was living in New Mexico at the time, and it had never occurred to me that soil and climate had much to do with the mass destruction that had followed my first attempts. I’d always thought it was me.

I’d been thinking about beginnings a lot. Not so much first attempts as much as second tries and second chances. I’d never been much good at sticking with something unless it was easy at first. I was used to things coming easily—academics, sports, music—or not at all. Now here I was in my fourth decade starting all over with all kinds of things—activities and work and relationships—inconceivable as that might have seemed just a few years ago.

I was thinking about all of this as I moved my hose across the berm, spraying across the hopeful faces of blue fescue, bright yarrow, thready Karl Foerster grass, lavender. I was cheered, inexplicably, by the wind stirring the diminutive branches of the miniature tabletop pine I had planted for Brendan. I had spent hours clearing the weeds from this spot, working the soil, choosing the plants, plotting the layout, laying weed cloth, shoveling mulch. And all of a sudden, there it was, just like I pictured it would be. How satisfying and how unusual.

To date, my life had not been as tidy as this little plot of land. I had grown up with the dynamics of autism, so I was used to surprises, but I was unaccustomed to the happy ending. I was hardwired for the quirky finale, the crisis, and the climax of the unforeseen and the unmanageable. Even though I hadn’t lived with my sister for almost twenty years, when it came to Margaret, I always expected the worst. That gloomy outlook had somehow bled over into my daily life years ago, giving me an incredible imagination for disaster. First out of habit and then out of talent, I’d spent a lot of time imagining things going terribly wrong, things that have never actually happened: car accidents, fires, fistfights, general crime and mayhem. Every time Brendan was five minutes late, I was sure the state patrol