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

blend in this or any other corner of my life. Blending in means you’ve been worked into the sauce, assimilated to the point of being indistinguishable. We should not hope to live undistinguished lives, but to revel in the rich bits and pieces that stand out and give us our flavor.

Ruminating on this, I finished putting away the groceries and went upstairs to put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room, because my sister was coming to visit.

11.

how to be a sister

Etiquette was never intended to be a rigid set of rules. It is, rather, a code of behavior that is based on consideration, kindness and unselfishness.

 

—On Good Manners, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

WE ARE STANDING together, naked, our small toes curling against the cold floor of the linoleum in the bathroom. Cowboys and Indians crawl up and down the wallpaper toward the high window, shooting over each other’s heads across a cactus desert. I am three and shivering. You are six and silent. I hug my arms to my chest as we stand there waiting outside the high, gleaming white sides of the bathtub. I bounce on my toes. Cold. Cold. Cold. You just stand there, not saying anything, arms at your sides, impassive.

Here comes Ann, in through the door. Ann the Beautiful. Our older sister is already almost nine, a celebrity in my small universe. I love her so much it hurts. Too bad she hates me. Hates both of us. For being babies, for not being able to do anything, not even turn on the goddamn bathtub faucets for ourselves. And yet it doesn’t bother me that she treats me with the scorn of the oldest child, who is burdened with the rest of us four younger kids. I love her all the more for being superior.

Grumbling to herself, she wrenches the taps open and turns a quick heel, then comes stomping right back at some admonishment from our mother calling from the other room, where she is busy with the boys, to make sure the water isn’t too hot for the little ones. And don’t forget to turn it off. More grumbling. More stomping. The door slams and she’s gone.

Steam rises and clouds the mirror behind us. I’m grateful for the warming air. I move toward the tub, clamber up. But it’s a high climb for short legs, and for a moment I hang stuck, high-centered on the cold porcelain. Then I reach with one toe, tip, and I’m in. You climb right over the side. You are tall and gangly, like a monkey. I sit in the front, closest to the spigot. Wonderful hot water. I hold my hands out under the rushing stream, small palms up, a prayer of thanks. You sit in the back because I can make you. Even though you are older, you do it because I tell you to. Just like later, when I make you get out and sit on the side of the tub so that I can lie down and let my hair stream out like Ann does. When we three bathe together, she makes us get out of the water and wait shivering in the cold air so that she can stretch out in there. Her golden hair looks like seaweed. She’s a mermaid. She closes her eyes, and I think she looks like Sleeping Beauty. Then her eyes snap open. “Stop touching me!” she says, even though we aren’t touching her. “Well, stop looking at me, then!”

You never want to lie down in there. At least you never say you do. You never say anything to me. Not a word.

I tell you to get back in and you do. We pass a bar of Jergens soap back and forth; we share a worn washcloth, like we always do, you and me. We are the youngest girls, two of the five kids, clumped together in this nighttime ritual as in so many other things. But this night is different from the others, because at some moment during this bath it dawns on me that something is wrong with you, that you are different from the rest of us. Because you are pretty much a big girl, like Ann. But you can’t do anything, like me. You are tall enough to reach the faucets, and you are probably strong enough to turn them on, but you don’t know how. Or maybe you know how, but I have never seen you try. I don’t question any of this or even judge it. I simply acknowledge it. You are different.

The next thought follows so closely behind, right on top of the first, that it’s like the same thing: Because you are different, I’m different, too. Somehow my small brain makes this leap and it stays with me, always. My sister is different because she is autistic, so I am different, too.

THEY GAVE YOU the label “autistic” when you were three years old. I was still in our mother’s belly when she drove you to the University of Washington in Seattle for weeks of tests. Was that why I came early, trying to claim what I could of our crowded childhood? Soon you were in intensive speech therapy, ferried to and from Eastern Washington University by our mother five days a week for two years. I waited at home for both of you with our grandmother.

What else do I remember about this time? Not much. The smell of soap on our grandmother’s neck when she held me, coffee on her breath. The diaper pins she wore like a badge on her sweatshirt over her heart. Later, when we are older, she tells me I would try to draw you in, saying, “Come on, honey.” I’d take your hand and bring you into whatever game the rest of us were playing. But mostly I can’t untangle you from the whole unit that we were before we were in school.