About My Sisters (13 page)

“But why?” I ask her, genuinely puzzled.

“
You know
,” she says. “You're my big sister. What you think really matters to me. Not that nobody else matters, but you're always so…
critical
isn't really the right word, but…”

“When have I ever been critical?” I ask, critically.

“Not critical, okay? I mean, you're not just going to automatically think it's great just because I'm in it. You're harder to please. You have higher standards.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“I told everyone you were coming tonight,” Déja says, “and that I was nervous. And then I look out and you're sitting in the
front row
. Why did you sit in the front row? Nobody else sat in the front row—not Maya or Lavander or anybody.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I'm sorry about that. I just didn't want anybody else to get in the way.”

“I saw your little face from backstage,” she says. “I was checking to make sure you were laughing. I saw you laughing.”

The director walks out as she says this and smiles in Déja's direction.

“Mike, Mike, come here,” she says, waving him over. “This is my big sister, the one I told you about. You know, the one who hated the
other
play.”

“
The Torturing,
” I offer. “Or whatever it was called. That's what we named it.”

“Yes, Déja told me about that,” Mike says.

“But this one was great,” I say hastily. “Loved it.”

“My big sister,” Déja says again, putting her arm around me and resting her head on mine. “Look how tiny she is. Tiny cute little person.”

“Funny, Déja,” I say.

“She used to rock me to sleep when I was a baby,” Déja tells Mike, who nods as if he's heard this story before. “She took care of me,” Déja says.

Mike says, “Nice to see you,” and takes his leave.

I tell Déja I'm going to leave and let her take off the rest of her makeup and do whatever she does with her fellow thespians after a performance.

“Did you really like it?” she asks me.

“You were wonderful,” I tell her. “Really.”

“I'll call you in the morning,” she says. “And then you can give me details. I want to know what you thought of everything, down to the last detail.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “But you were still great.”

“Next time maybe don't sit in the front row, okay?”

“
Okay,
” I say. “So kill me because I wanted an unobstructed view.”

She hugs me for a third time and kisses me hard, leaving the perfect imprint of her red lips on my cheek. “Love you,” she says.

“Love you more,” I tell her.

“No, I love you more!”

“More!” I laugh and walk away.

“More!” I hear at my back.

When I get to the theater door and turn around to give her a last wave good-bye, I can see her standing there, still mouthing the word “more” until I am out of sight.

july

Lavander is in crisis.

I am the first of my siblings to hear about this. I'm on the phone with my mother and the weight in her voice is like that of a teetering seawall.

“I don't know what to do with her,” my mother says. “She rejects everything I have to say. She's accusatory. I don't know why she's so angry at me.”

“What's the problem?” I ask my mother, but we both know that it's about Tony. Bad Boyfriend, as he is becoming, is behind it all. And Lavander herself stands behind Bad Boyfriend, alternately defending him and vilifying him. The story is the same as it has been for the last few months, none of us would care who or what Tony is if Lavander was
happy
in the relationship, but
she clearly isn't. Now, my mother tells me, she's broken up with him, or maybe he's broken up with her, she isn't clear on the details. Whatever it is, she's distraught and my mother is to blame. At least, this is what Lavander is currently projecting.

I was in New Mexico over the weekend and I bought my mother and each one of my sisters a turquoise bracelet. I thought about the choices carefully, even though I bought them all from the same vendor in Santa Fe, a wizened Native American woman with a hearing aid that squealed every time I asked the price of her jewelry. I got my mother a bracelet with big green-tinted stones. Maya got one made up of silver beads with designs of suns and arrows etched into their surfaces. For Déja, I picked one with small, perfectly round, deep blue stones. Lavander's bracelet looks very much like my mother's, the only difference being that the stones are slightly smaller. This morning, I went to deliver the bracelets with Maya. I figured that since Lavander lives in a condo nineteen steps from the one where my parents live (we counted them one night and there are exactly nineteen steps), I could give both of them their bracelets at the same time.

“Where's Lavander?” I asked my mother after I'd taken the bracelet off my wrist and fastened it on hers. I was keeping Lavander's bracelet warm on my own wrist as well until I could give it to her.

“I don't know,” my mother said. “Maybe she's home. Why don't you go check?”

We were standing between the two condos when Lavander clicked her way up the concrete stairs from the street below and walked toward her door without so much as a greeting.

“Hi!” Maya called over to her.

Lavander turned and looked at us. Her expression was one that I could only classify as dangerous: a mixture of misery, disgust, hostility, and desperation.

“I'm taking the rest of the day off,” she said in slow, measured tones. “I don't want to be disturbed, so please don't call me.” She went into her condo and closed the door behind her.

“Well, I guess that's that,” I said, touching the turquoise stones on my wrist. I could feel the hard silver clasp pressing into my skin.

“What's the matter with her?” Maya asked my mother, and my mother shrugged as if she didn't know, as if she wasn't privy to Lavander's every dot and dash.

Now it's close to five in the afternoon and I'm on the phone with my mother and it's clear that nothing has improved.

“She's screaming at me,” my mother says. “She threw me out.”

“Maybe you should try to detach yourself a little,” I tell her. “Just leave it alone for a while.”

“Can you detach yourself from your children?” my mother asks. “
You
know. You're a
mother
.”

“I know,” I sigh, “but you are so involved. And the two of you react to each other in the same way every time. It's a pattern.”

My mother is too miserable to listen to this. She talks about Lavander's choices and her own inability to influence them. “She doesn't listen,” my mother says. “She never listens.” It goes on like this for several more minutes and then she hangs up, citing emotional exhaustion. I feel depressed and angry at the same time. Lavander doesn't retreat into her sadness, she uses it as a weapon.

The phone rings a half hour later. This time it's my father.

“Where's Maya?” he wants to know.

“She's out working,” I tell him.

“All right, I'll call her on her cell phone,” he says.

“What is it?” I ask him, knowing already, but wanting him to say it anyway.

“It's Lavander,” he says. “I think Maya should go over there and talk to her. She needs a sister right now.”

“And what about me?” I ask. “I'm not a sister?”

“You can't go over there,” he says. “You've got Blaze.”

“I could go if I was needed,” I tell him. “But I'm not. Lavander doesn't want to talk to me. She's barely spoken to me in the last six months anyway.” I say it without bitterness and more as a statement of fact.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“She doesn't want to hear what I have to say about anything, Dad. I don't know why.” There is a pause and I think he's going to give me an answer I've heard many times before: that one has to keep trying, that you never give up with family, that if one approach doesn't work, another one has to be tried. But there's none of that this time.

“Why don't you just consider yourself lucky that you're not in this one,” he says and it's not a question, it's more like a directive. “I'm going to call Maya now. I'll speak to you later.”

Maya comes home an hour after this conversation. She's obviously gotten the message.

“It's Lavander,” she says by way of greeting. “I'm going to eat something and then I'm going over there. I might spend the night—I'll call you and let you know. Déja's meeting me there as soon as she finishes work.”

“So Déja's in this now, too?”

“Déja's coming as
my
support,” Maya says.

Now, I have to admit, I feel a little put out. I want to know why my advice and sage counsel aren't deemed necessary. Why nobody seems to think that I am capable of helping. Of course, that's not entirely true. My mother will be the one who ends up needing me. I will be the one she calls, again and again, to talk about Lavander until both of us are so tired the only thing we can do is sit in front of our respective televisions and watch something mindless. I know this is coming, because it's always been this way with my mother. I am the only one of her daugh
ters who is a mother and that has added a layer of understanding to our communication. When it comes to my siblings, especially my sisters, she talks to my father first and then to me. When she and my father disagree on any given issue, she speaks to me first. Sometimes my mother and I are able to discuss my sisters so objectively that they become other people for us, detached from their roles as sisters and daughters. I have no doubt that my mother also discusses
me
with my sisters, but I know that, for them, I come up more as a passing topic, not as the center of the discussion. It would never happen, for example, that my mother would spend an afternoon with Lavander, Maya, or Déja and talk about nothing but me. But she and I have spent many mornings and afternoons together with one, two, or all three of my sisters as our sole focus. I suspect that we'll be talking about Lavander for quite a while. Lavander has been stressed, unhappy, and not particularly pleasant about it for some time. My mother always gets the cutting edge of Lavander's moods, whether these are angry, conciliatory, or distressed. I suspect this is because they are more alike than either one of them even knows.

“I'll call you,” Maya says now. “I'll let you know what's going on.”

“Right,” I say.

But the hours pass and she doesn't call. Nobody answers the phone at Lavander's house. My mother doesn't want to talk anymore, either. I try Maya's cell phone, finally, and she answers only after several rings.

“I can't talk now,” she says. Her voice is low and stressed and I think I detect a note of officiousness as well.

“What is going on?” I ask.

“I said
I can't talk
,” Maya replies. “I'm hanging up now. Don't call me again. I will call you when I can.”

“Oh, come on, what is this?” I snap. “What could be so—”

She disconnects me midsentence. I am furious for a second or two and debate calling her again just so that I can hang up on her, but I stop myself and settle for yelling “COW!” into the quiet phone in my hand.

I decide I'm going to ignore the whole scene with all its entanglements and implications and settle in with a book or a sitcom rerun, anything so that I won't have to think. Not surprisingly, this doesn't work. I am irritated with Maya, but I know that will pass soon enough. More knotted and difficult is the combination of anger and worry I have about Lavander. The anger operates on a couple of different levels. On one hand, I am angry because her anguish is creating plenty of anguish for everyone else. On the other, I am angry that, despite the fact that she knows the miserable trajectory of my own past love life, that I've been there and back and there again, that she never comes to me. I am the only one of her sisters who has had experiences similar to the ones she's having and yet that's not enough for her to confide in me. I wonder, sometimes, if she likes me. And she is the only person in my family who makes me question this. I wonder, too, if she sees me as inaccessible. I have the reputation in my family for being emotionally bulletproof. Maybe that makes me seem aloof to her. Maybe she thinks I judge her, even though, having integrated so many personal fuck-ups, I am probably the least judgmental person in my family at this point. And maybe we are too similar on a level deeper than either of us wants to look at. I know that Lavander can push my buttons more effectively than anyone else I know. She alone is able to send me into an ugly rage and rage is not a state I enter into easily, with my sisters or anyone else.

As a group, my sisters and I have never been fighters, hitters, or hair pullers. Our arguments manifest verbally and conflicts are usually resolved the same way. Although certain items have occasionally gone flying through the air, there have always been
better ways to strike strategic blows with correctly aimed verbal darts or the ever-popular silent treatment. In fact, among the four of us, there has been only one all-out physical brawl. And that one was between me and Lavander.

Lavander was sixteen and I was twenty-five. I'd given birth to Blaze less than two months before. I was single and living in a tiny studio apartment in downtown Portland, Oregon, where I'd moved two years prior, after graduating from college. My family was living in a suburb about a half hour south of me in a comfortable house with a big backyard, surrounded by Portland's ubiquitous greenery. Maya had taken a leave of absence from her university the year before and was living at home and working full-time in Peppy's, our family's pizza place. I'd spent most of the previous year sitting right there beside her, but after Blaze was born, I confined myself to my apartment for several weeks as I adjusted to a major shift in my priorities, most of which fit into the narrow space occupied with midnight feedings, disposable diapers, and an elusive quest for sleep. I was fine during the daylight hours—confident, happy, even optimistic. But the nights were difficult. When it got black and quiet outside and it seemed as if everyone in the world was sleeping except for me and my squalling infant, that was when I began to have doubts about my ability to navigate the course my life had taken.

Occasionally Déja, nine years old at the time and on summer vacation from school, came to spend the night with me. There wasn't much she could do to help me with Blaze, of course, but she was wild about him, thought he was “sooooo cute,” and loved to walk around the tight confines of my room with him balanced in her arms. We ate Peppy's pizza together and watched TV. She made herself a bed on the floor and was passed out cold by ten o'clock—the time when my night was just beginning as Blaze started wailing, ready for another all-night party. Amazingly, Déja rarely woke up during these ses
sions. I'd pace around her, jiggling Blaze and attempting to will him to sleep, while the blue light of the TV danced across Déja's sleeping form on the floor. Sometimes, if Blaze was crying particularly loud or long, she'd raise her head and ask if I needed something. I always said no, because there was nothing more she could do for me. The quiet solidity of her presence was, in itself, very comforting.

Déja's field trips to my apartment were necessarily limited, though, so on the weekends, I put Blaze in his wicker basket and went to stay with my family. The nights were so much easier when I was surrounded by the sleeping bodies of my parents, my sisters, and my brother. There were people around me who I trusted and who would know what to do in the face of infant disaster. There was a safety net I could fall into if I needed to. Those weekend nights were the only times I could truly relax in the first few weeks after Blaze's birth. I didn't get a free pass, you understand. Nobody got up in the middle of the night to walk Blaze or change him. In fact, one particularly sleep-deprived Saturday, I woke to my mother shaking me by the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said, “your baby's crying. Get up.”

During the day, Blaze was cuddled and passed around the daisy chain of his relatives. I ate and even slept sometimes. This halcyon period was the first time I could remember allowing myself to openly need—to lean on someone else's shoulders emotionally. In the half-submerged part of me that wasn't busy fretting over my baby, I felt somewhat disappointed in this need, but I let it go. I allowed myself to cry in front of my mother, even allowed myself, occasionally, to break down completely.

In a sense, I'd been on something like an emotional hiatus from my family for about six years. I'd moved out at eighteen, gone to college, and attempted to forge some sort of identity for myself over that time. Although we were in close physical prox
imity, I didn't see my family very often and took mostly a surface interest in what was going on in their lives, since I was fairly one-pointed about what was going on in my own.