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

On the last day of their visit, Margaret started to lose her cool at a café where we had hoped to eat breakfast with Brendan and his parents. My mother tried to calm her down by reading the menu with her, encouraging her to choose something to eat. Unfortunately, Margaret wanted Froot Loops. There was no cereal on the menu. My mother and I looked at each other across the table, depressed, unspoken partners in the minor social catastrophe that we knew was sure to follow when we told Margaret that there were no Froot Loops to be had. In the middle of this silent struggle, Brendan jumped up and ran across the street to the neighborhood market, bought a box of Froot Loops, and ran back. “There’s the Froot Loops!” my sister crowed, grabbing the box out of his hand. We were saved again. And yet never saved. When Mom and Margaret finally left, waving and tooting the horn, I went upstairs and lay down on the floor, which now felt like the place I belonged. I had a migraine for three days.

MORE THAN TEN years had passed between the night Margaret barfed at Bizzarro and the planning of her first-ever solo trip to visit me. The image of the glassful of frothy bananas Foster was still as fresh in my mind as the night I threw a napkin over it and ran away into the happy obscurity of the city night. And yet so much had happened in our lives. We had grown, we had aged, and I hoped that I had learned.

And yet some things would never change. I knew I would never be privy to what my sister was thinking. She would likely continue to be ruled by the stress and compulsion that the disorder seems to wield. I couldn’t save her from its whims, but I could stop taking them so personally. We wouldn’t ever have the closeness of the fantasy sisters in my mind, the people who could talk on the phone and pick up where they had left off. We wouldn’t have normal family vacations, but I wasn’t sure I knew what that meant anyway. Normal for me had ceased to mean, “What I don’t have.” Normal was what I’d wanted back then. Normal meant “like other people.” Normal meant “ordinary.” But I’d been lucky enough to trade that desire for something much more interesting.

During my recent quest, one thing had become very clear to me: I would live with Margaret’s autism for the rest of my life. One expert put it plainly: Siblings of people with disabilities have all the same hardships as parents—only for longer. As another writer put it, the impact of having a sibling with autism never ends. Parents usually die first, and we siblings are left to sort things out.

But other points remained unclear to me. What role would I take? Full-time caregiver did not seem a likely choice for me, although I’d been hung up on that phantom obligation for years. One reason it had been so easy for me to stay in New Mexico was that I thought I’d be stuck holding the bag if I took part in any way. But running away no longer seemed like an option. Home had called me back, and Margaret, difficult as she is, was part of the siren song. Middle ground, then—was that where I belonged? Could I carve out a place for Margaret in my life, and could she find room for me in hers?

My relationship with my sister was a paradox. Although we could never communicate like other people, I would get more of the genuine article than I did from most relationships, because she never hid her feelings. Whenever I saw Margaret, I knew she would remember me and would greet me in exactly the same way. She might be nervous or not, but she was always expecting me. It was pretty simple, really. She expected me to show up from time to time, and by God, I’d better be there when I said I would. She always opened the door when I drove up, even if she didn’t always let me come in the house. “Hi, Eileen!” she’d say, like she had just seen me yesterday, and then she’d get in the car, slam the door, and wait for me to drive us to wherever we were bound When Eileen Gets Here.

I was fairly certain that this would happen when I went to meet her and Clifford at the appointed pickup spot. I was pretty sure my sister would enjoy the drive from her house to Richland, Washington. After that, all bets were off. We’d decided to meet for lunch at Red Robin, where Clifford and I would eat and she might not. She might be happy to see me, or she might be quiet and withdrawn. She might get upset and scream, but Red Robin is pretty noisy anyway, so if that happened, one of us would simply get up and walk outside with her. And after we had paid the bill, I could only hope that instead of getting back in the car with Clifford, she’d decide that she felt like coming with me for the Vacation.

Once she decided to put her suitcase in the car, I’d be satisfied. Unlike the rest of us, Margaret never hides her feelings. She can’t. So at least I knew she wouldn’t come for a visit unless she felt like it, unless she was all in. That’s the thing about Margaret. She can’t help but be exactly who she is, so now I knew what I was getting—the unexpected, always, but the real deal. My elevated expectations had slowly departed along with the yearning for some kind of normalcy. I no longer expected to blend in when I was with my sister, nor did I hope to