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

time. She’d stop in the middle of an order to tell a joke or sing a song. All the diners would stop talking to listen and then applaud hugely. She was no server. She was an artist! Purposely and purposefully conspicuous. She was one of many such neighborhood celebrities in Seattle when I first moved there. If only I could be so interesting and sure of myself. Someone like her could save the publishing house, I thought. I slugged some more wine and watched her, jealous and intimidated.

I heard the bathroom door bang again and saw Margaret wading through tables and chairs as she hurried back to our corner. It seemed like everyone was watching her as she plunked down in her chair saying, “There you go! You say excuse me, Eileen! That’s good manners!” Margaret grabbed her glass, took a big slurp of her root beer, and slammed it down on the table. My mother reappeared, all aflutter about the Alice in Wonderland mural on the bathroom wall, which she’d photographed. She had also popped into the men’s room to see if the mural continued in there. It did! She had pictures! She’d show me! All of this loud enough for other people to hear. I wanted to slither under the table.

At this moment, the Celebrity Server sauntered over to our table to take our order. She stood over us, one hand on a cocked hip like she could barely stand it, she was so bored by us already. I quickly told her what I wanted, and then she shifted her exasperated gaze to my sister, which Margaret failed to notice. Like many people with autism, my sister doesn’t make eye contact as often as other people do. When she was in school, she and her classmates played card games to work on this simple part of social interaction that so many of us take for granted. It was rather hilarious to watch—four teenagers sitting around a table, cards fanned out in their hands, each one looking away from the rest, looking at the ceiling, the floor, the door. Every so often someone would mutter, “Gimme me alla your eights,” while he was gazing down at his knees.

Eating dinner at a restaurant afforded multiple opportunities to help Margaret practice looking at people while she was talking. Ordering her dinner was one such occasion. But the server didn’t ask my sister what she wanted. She just turned her cold stare from me to Margaret. Saying anything, even “Gimme alla your eights,” would have been more helpful than this silence. Margaret simply didn’t understand this kind of shift as a nonverbal cue, although my mother and I did. My mother prompted Margaret to say what she wanted. My sister nodded and pointed at the menu. I mean, are you stupid? she seemed to be saying. We’re here for the spaghetti, right? What do you mean what do I want to eat? The whole reason we drove across town and waited outside in the dark for over an hour was because she’d been promised a plate of spaghetti, so what was with all the questions? My mother and I knew what she was thinking, but to practice normal social interaction, Mom gently urged Margaret to let the server in on our secret and let her know about the whole spaghetti thing.

To be fair, it was noisy and she was busy, but the woman completely missed the fact that Margaret wasn’t making eye contact with her and didn’t notice the interaction among the three of us. She was annoyed and leaned in. “What? Didn’t hear that. What do you want?” Margaret, now looking at my mother, said, “You want spaghetti, please, Mom.” She was beginning to sound worried. By this time the server was visibly irritated with us, and it dawned on me that she wasn’t clueing in to Margaret’s difference. She just thought we were pokey, stupid tourists. Exasperated, she finally extricated the rest of our order, grabbed the menus from us, and stalked off. My mother and I patted Margaret’s hands and told her she’d done a good job. She let out a sigh and took a big gulp of her root beer.

When our food came, my sister ate quickly and so did I, as I often do in Margaret’s company. For some reason I find it hard not to wolf down my food when my tablemate is doing so. She ate quickly at home, too, but I think the anxiety she was feeling in an unfamiliar place made her eat even faster. After a few minutes she put down her fork and sat back, looking pale. Although she’d eaten fast, she hadn’t eaten much and sat with her hands in her lap, braiding and unbraiding her fingers. About now I felt the full force of the guilt and remorse for trying to have things my way. We should never have come here, I thought. The room was too loud and crowded for my sister, and the spicy pasta—trying so hard to be special—was probably upsetting her stomach.

Looking back, I recognize that there was so much more going on under the surface of this visit, the constant presence of certain truths that we never spoke aloud. I was mad at myself for not being more patient. I was so angry that Margaret had autism, that there was no cure, that she never seemed to get better, that she dominated my mother’s attention, that I didn’t know who I was supposed to be in this family or in this lifetime. I wasn’t ever my mother’s daughter. I was just Margaret’s sister. And nothing I did could change any of that, but I was too young and stubborn to swallow this complicated and barbed truth or to just walk away from it.

About this time the Celebrity Server decided to launch into one of her solos. She paused right next to our table and began to sing a lively