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

show tune. She stood over us brandishing her tray, trilling away, reveling in the attention of the entire restaurant. She was slightly off key and didn’t seem to care. Everyone stopped talking to watch her. As for me, I’d about had it with this woman and the atmosphere she was so bent in creating. The suburban girl rose up in me, feeling indignant about this big-city pretense. If you had asked me, a server was supposed to take your order and bring you your food. She was supposed to be worried about where your extra bread was, not wondering if she had everyone’s undivided attention. I was annoyed that she had trespassed so far into our personal space and yet refused to see us, to see Margaret struggling to communicate. I wanted to say something to make a dent in all that seemed to be wrong with the world—my sister’s disorder, this woman’s indifference, my own anger. But as it turned out, I didn’t have to say anything.

Margaret had had it. Like many people with autism, she is acutely sensitive to sound. My sister also has a perfect sense of pitch and simply can’t bear to listen to music that is out of tune. So just as the server turned her face toward our table, her loud, flat voice pulling all the air out of the room, my sister put her fingers in her ears and let out the most terrific screech, right in the woman’s face. It was like a train whistle, but two octaves higher. The train bore down on all of us and passed into our inner ears. For a minute the world felt unbalanced, and I thought I might pass out. Then the train passed through and everything was all right again.

I looked at the Celebrity Server, who was standing there with her mouth open, silent and staring. Then she dropped her tray to her side and scurried off to the kitchen, the door banging shut behind her. You could have heard a pin drop. The entire restaurant was staring at us in terrified silence. For once, I didn’t care. They could stare all they wanted. It wouldn’t change the fact that Margaret had slain the giant. Looking at their shocked faces, I was killing myself trying not to laugh, but I was also proud of my big sister for defending herself in the only way she knew how. I know it might sound mean find humor in the fear of a room full of strangers, but I knew there was nothing to be afraid of. And it helped balance out the fact that my sister is scared so much of the time. After all, we all have to live in this world together. My mother reached and out and took Margaret’s hand, and we kept talking like nothing had happened. Soon my sister’s face relaxed.

There was no more singing in Bizzarro that night. We three quietly finished our meal, and everyone else did, too, like they knew what was good for them. The server never came back to our table, but sent the host over to deal with us instead. Margaret ordered a bananas Foster, which she wolfed down. A few seconds later she suddenly went pale, grabbed her empty root beer mug, and vomited foamy ice cream barf up to the rim. The other diners were trying so very hard not to stare at our table that nobody noticed. I think we all knew it was time to throw in the towel at that point. And if our server hadn’t been such a cow, we would have cleaned it up. My mother would probably still be there, washing dishes and apologizing. Instead, we left an enormous tip and fled. I never went back.

On the way home, Margaret was quiet in the backseat, staring out the window at the light rain that had started to fall. Seattle was swallowed up in the darkness and had turned on her lights to outline her tall and curvy silhouette. I sat in the front seat, giving my mom directions and looking out at the dark sky hanging over the Puget Sound, my heart full. When we were about halfway home, Margaret sighed and said, “That’s better, Mom.” Then in her very solemn voice, she said, “You don’t yell in the restaurant, Mom. It’s bad manners. You don’t yell.” And I wondered who she was talking about.

The images of that trip were captured in my mother’s photographs and in my memory: Margaret and me at Volunteer Park. Margaret at the Space Needle. Margaret and me sitting on the Murphy bed at the John Winthrop Apartments. Brendan’s father took us all for a boat ride in Portage Bay, and there are photos of Margaret sitting in the bow of the little boat with her arm around Honey, the big yellow dog that would one day be the ring bearer at my wedding. I’ve looked at the photographs so many times that they have become like woodcuts in my memory: the shapes of our bodies, the outline of the buildings and horizon like permanent marks on a canvas. These images, with sharp corners and deep grooves, have worn their mark year after year in my memory and our history.

There were more cafés, more outbursts. When I took my mother to meet my future mother-in-law, Margaret threw herself backward off Sharon’s couch and rolled around on the floor with her shirt riding up over her big tummy, yelling and kicking her shoes against the brand-new carpet. During an anxious morning, she had picked a scab on her chin and bled onto the couch pillows, something I always wondered if Sharon noticed. The stain was still there when this couch was handed down to us years later. I watched her writhing around on the floor, seeing flashes of her belly and big breasts as her shirt flopped around, and thought, “This is not normal. This is not what I