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

sound of the waves lapping the shore. Our mother’s voice before we fell asleep saying, “Listen to the water go splash, splash.” I’d give up the nighttime interruptions, the door slamming and the yelling, your laughter and the creak of the bed-springs as you dashed back into your room, Dad erupting in anger, Mom mediating endlessly.

I’d keep this day in a jar on my desk so that I could take it out and remember. Put my hand in and stir it around to feel that way again. Keep it in my pocket and touch it now and again as I walked the streets of my neighborhood in Oregon. Remember the way it felt to be young, unaware, in love with the morning. And waiting for you to wake up.

TELLING LIES CAME early for me. Almost earlier than memory. This untruth: Louie did it. My mother asks who put the teeth marks in your arm. She’s pulled back the flannel sleeve of your nightgown to reveal the curved red circle, clearly the imprint of my three-year-old mouth, but I blame it on the ancient dachshund who sits blinking up at me. I had to make you be quiet. It didn’t work, my teeth in your arm only made you cry harder, but then I was the one in trouble. Later, when the other dog bites me in the face, I figure it is payback.

I always felt like I had to make you be quiet. Why can’t you shut up? There is the rocking and wailing for hours, the screaming and banging. You can’t tell us what you want. Maybe it is a small piece of plastic you’ve treasured for days and dropped somewhere. Maybe your skin hurts, or the noise is bothering you. We’ll never know. And we’ll never be able to do more than wait it out.

At the lake you scream and scream, and none of us can get away, because there is no road and no neighbors and no way to make you stop. Dad is so angry, again. Why can’t you shut up? And I’m angry and afraid and helpless. For a few minutes, I hate you. I imagine how satisfying it would be to slug you in the stomach. I imagine the look on your face after my small balled-up fist punches you there. And then I do it. And you’re stunned, the wind knocked out of you, and when your breath comes back, you cry even harder. Then I hate myself more than I ever hated you.

Later, much later, you come to visit me in Seattle with Mom. We’re at the Coastal Kitchen, and you won’t stop laughing, spraying water across the table in my face. I wanted to bring Mom here, and Mom brought you, and now you are ruining everything. I know how much it will hurt you, my heavy shoe slamming into your delicate shin, before I kick you. And I do it anyway. Now your laughter has turned to wailing. And I am sickened by my own nature. It’s been almost fifteen years, and I can still see you, open-mouthed and sobbing as you clutch your shin. What kind of a sister am I?

You shoved me, pinched me, spanked me, smacked me on top of the head, pulled my hair, grabbed my neck, kicked me for decades. A couple of years ago you kneed me in the face when I hunched down next to your chair, trying to calm you down. I fell and hit my head on the tile patio.

But all of that was different coming from you. You couldn’t control yourself. Sometimes you were trying to be funny. Other times you wanted me and everyone else to get the hell away from you as you grappled with some nameless anxiety; the last thing you needed was someone in your face.

The physical struggle leaves an imprint. It’s a violent intimacy that we carry in our history. The pain in my neck, I can feel it now. The red tattoo of my teeth on your arm. Your stomach, my face. Your shin, my heart. I want to heal that history and replace it with a gentler one.

That is the challenge, then, the desire to make whatever future we might have as a family different from the past. Your disorder—autism—brought so much sadness into my life. It took away the sister I could have had and replaced her with you, locked away inside yourself. Sometimes you’d show yourself, waving at me from behind the bars. But mostly it was battle. Autism took away the family we could have had and replaced it with seven struggling individuals alienated from each other by the same enemy. I always thought I just needed to try harder: If I only try harder, I will find Margaret in there somewhere. If I try harder, we will get along and be happy. I’m just not being patient enough, smart enough, diligent enough. I’m borne forward on the false hope that you will get better someday. Somehow there will be a measurable improvement if I just keep trying. Be a better sister. Help your sister. Take care of your sister. You’re not trying hard enough.

Just the other day, you sat on my couch here in Oregon listening to June Carter Cash’s Wildwood CD for the fifth time in a row. You were calm, lightly patting a throw pillow to the beat of the music, head cocked, looking at the ceiling. My dog was asleep with her head on your lap. I looked at you and thought, This is it. This is you, and here I am. This is what we’ve got. And it’s got to be enough, because it’s all there is.

I’D ALWAYS WANTED to believe that there was some magic to your disability, some deeper meaning in the barrier that separates you from the rest of us, like opaque, wavy glass on the principal’s office door. For years I held on to the notion