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

Jell-O and you still don’t like Jell-O, but you miss having dessert, so it turns out that Jell-O was better than no dessert at all. The loss I felt was partly just life taking its course. As an adult, I’d moved and traveled as I had the liberty and facility to do so. My sister hadn’t done those things, because she couldn’t. She had stayed in the same place, and we only saw each other when I returned to my childhood home.

There was another reason I’d seen her less; a couple of summers before, I had told my parents I would rather see Margaret alone when I came to visit instead of seeing her at the family lake cabin. Translation: don’t invite Margaret. My sister’s behavior at family gatherings had become unbearable to me. Our family’s response to her behavior had become even more unbearable. As my visits grew ever briefer in adulthood, they remained violently colored with dramatic outbursts from Margaret and consequential fractionalization of the family as we failed, collectively and separately, to cope. And unlike when we were children, there was no time in between these intense sessions to enjoy the good stuff. I’d return to wherever I was living at the time completely drained. I’d get migraines on the plane, pulled muscles in my neck and back. I’d go back to work feeling exhausted, feeling like I hadn’t really been on vacation. I don’t know how Margaret felt, but I’d be willing to bet that she was worn out, too.

So she wasn’t invited. The rest of us gathered at the cabin, and these visits were quieter and calmer than we’d ever experienced before as a family. And when I saw Margaret separately on my visits home, she was like a person transformed. I’d pick her up at her house for lunch or coffee, and she was quiet, watchful. She always seemed glad to see me. We had what you might call “normal” times together. And yet I felt, somehow, that I had lost something. We never discussed this issue as a family. But then we were never a family that was prone to discuss much. We were better at silent brooding or sudden fits of temper that went unresolved. I’m pretty sure, though, that my parents did not agree with me that things were better this way. Because that’s what I kept telling myself: It was better this way, to draw boundaries, for her and for me, to try to act like the adult I wanted to be instead of the child I had been. I wanted to change the parameters of our relationship as I had with our other grown siblings, albeit in a more a mutual way.

PONDERING ALL OF this, I moved my hose to the rose-bushes in the front of the yard and aimed at the roots to try to keep the water off the leaves. They’d been here when we moved in, eight bushes all in a tangle of thorns and weeds and broken shoots. I left them alone for the first year as we got settled in the house. In the spring I gave them the pruning of the century, or at least their first pruning of this century. I’d spent hours hunkered down on my hands and knees cutting back the dead wood, ripping out grass and weeds, whittling the crowded stalks down to a healthy few. I got my hair tangled in the branches and cut my arms on the thick thorns. When I’d finished, I stood back to look at what I’d done and felt a rush of panic. Although I felt I’d been careful in the choices I’d made, the plants just looked butchered to me. I wondered if they would ever come back. But I waited and prayed and watered them, and now here they were—gorgeous, exploding with healthy growth and enormous blossoms. I felt vindicated. But mostly I just felt happy that they were so alive. That was something I’d learned about the benefits of starting over, of trying again when I thought something was impossible.

MY DRIVE TO Spokane, Washington, was just under three hundred miles. That was four and a half hours of straight driving, with a coffee stop for me and a pit stop for Dizzy the dog. It was 10:00 PM before I pulled up in front of my brother Larry’s house. We visited for a while, and then I headed out to sleep in my camper van with the hound. I woke up the next morning in front of Larry’s house, looking out on the mild suburban landscape of the town I was born in. I was parked about a mile from the house I grew up in. Ponderosa pines swayed overhead in the weak sunshine. I climbed out the side door of the VW and moved stiffly toward the house with hopeful thoughts of coffee. A neighbor appeared to be staring at me as I shuffled up the driveway and into the house, but I was probably just imagining things. I had grown up thinking everyone was always staring at us. That’s because they usually were.

MY SISTER’S DISORDER overshadowed every major event in my life from First Communion and eighth-grade graduation to my first day of college and my wedding. It’s fair to say her autism loomed over me even at my birth. On my twenty-seventh birthday I sat across the table from my mother with a question on the tip of my tongue: What was happening in your life when you were twenty-seven? I wanted to know. She was that same age when I was born, her last child. I wanted to know what she had been thinking about as I floated there within the curve of her belly. What did you think about me? I wanted to ask. What did you say to me when it was just the two of us alone? But I never got the chance to ask.