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

was pulling his car out of the icy slough. When the cat wouldn’t come in at night, it was a rabid raccoon that got her. When the plane hit a patch of turbulence, it was all I could do not to clutch the hand of the stranger sitting next to me and tell her about the things I hold dearest in this life.

I’d been trying to give up this habit. It just wasn’t very restful. Plus, the rational side of me knew that there really are people who live in crisis day in and day out and that I should count my blessings that I was no longer one of them.

As I watered my colorful garden, I thought about a pending trip home to see my sister and admitted to myself how nervous I was about the things I couldn’t predict. I’d put this trip off month after month without a good reason. But I was pretty sure it was mostly because I didn’t know what would happen when I got there. I knew what might happen: I could drive three hundred miles to her house just to have her slam the door in my face. This hadn’t happened for a long time, but it was still a very real possibility.

IT HAD BEEN more than six months since I had last seen Margaret and gone hiking with her. At first the winter kept me away; icy roads climbing out of the Columbia River Gorge and up into the desert plains of eastern Washington were too much for my two-wheel drive and my nerves. But the snow had melted a long time ago, and now what was keeping me was just the uncertainty. Six months is a long time to go without seeing someone, and yet with Margaret, it might seem the same as six days or six years. I didn’t know what she thought about time. For her, five minutes could seem like an eternity when she had to wait. And yet she might greet me after several months as if she had just seen me the day before. Because her communication skills were so limited, we didn’t correspond, at least not in a normal way. I’d send a postcard every now and then. Sometimes I would call and talk to a staff member about how she was doing. At the end of our conversation they’d hand the phone to Margaret, who usually said hello before hanging up on me. As a result, there were large drifts of silence between our visits.

But it wasn’t like we would have months of catching up to do, either. Margaret didn’t talk much, so I anticipated that when I did see her there would be a lot of quiet, maybe some sudden singing or loud commentary. Or whispering behind her cupped hand. If I wanted to know how she had been, I had to ask her caregivers, the people who were paid to make sure she ate three meals a day, took a shower, brushed her teeth, got to swimming practice, and left the locker room with her swimsuit turned around the right way. These people were almost complete strangers to me, and yet they inhabited my sister’s daily life and created the stability she needed just as my family used to.

If I asked Margaret how she’d been, she wouldn’t be able to tell me. She wouldn’t be able to ask me, either. I doubted she even knew what any of that meant in the context that we normally ask each other these kinds of questions: Tell me what you’ve been thinking and feeling. How are your old wounds, and do you have any new ones? What about your joys? So we wouldn’t have any long conversation like some sisters might. We would just have the day—a car ride, a hike, lunch, the drive home—things we both enjoy. We’d just have those few hours to spend together—mostly in silence—and maybe that was enough.

At the time, I had been very conscious of her absence in my life. I didn’t miss the bad times, the years of family tension and violent outbursts—years that I had spent feeling somehow simultaneously responsible and resentful, ineffective and unappreciated. Countless times Margaret had worked herself into a rage or a panic over some nameless thing that she couldn’t communicate. And there was absolutely nothing to be done but wait it out, like one waits for a cyclone to pass. But we struggled against it anyway, trying to calm her down; trying to get her to stop throwing herself on the floor, against walls; trying to tame the screaming with our own quiet words, our own anger and tears of impotence. Those years were like battle, and they cast a shadow far into our twenties and thirties.

Walking on the beach in Mexico at Christmas, my brother Mike had told me about the emotional turbulence a friend of his was going through. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been depressed before, too. It was really, really hard.” Mike nodded. “But it only lasted about twenty years,” I said. And then we both just howled. Perhaps it had taken this long for the quiet to take hold, for the dust to settle, for me to feel Margaret’s absence in my life.

I missed my sister. I felt the lack of her very physical presence. I missed her familiar bulk, the feel of her thin hand in mine when she was happy, the sound of her joyful laugh, her real, beautiful smile, not the fake one she saved for the camera. If I closed my eyes, I saw Margaret in a red-and-white-striped shirt and blue jeans with an elastic waistband, white tennis shoes—her teenage uniform. She had a bob and bangs, like me, our eternal haircut. I breathed in this image and smelled spaghetti noodles, one of her favorite foods. She often spilled food on herself from eating too quickly. This wasn’t an unpleasant smell, although I was often embarrassed for her. But