About My Sisters (27 page)

This, finally, is what stops me short, what deflates me instantly, and leaves me with a sense of total futility. Because maybe she's right, maybe I do make it all up. Maybe all my perceptions about who we are and what we're doing here are completely false—figments of my own imagination twisted and shaped so that, I hate to think now, they
look good on paper
. With that one sentence, Lavander has managed to make me question what I think and what I do and I've come up short. I feel, for lack of a better word, invalidated.

“I'm not getting this from nowhere,” I tell her now. “I can't.” I don't sound convincing, even to myself, and Lavander knows it.

“I can't talk about this anymore,” she says. “I have to go.”

“Don't hang up on me,” I tell her.

“I'm not hanging up on you. I've got a lot of things to do. I have to go. I'll call you tomorrow.” She hangs up and we both know she won't call me tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. I won't speak to her again unless I call her first. Even then, there's a good possibility she won't answer her phone. I resist the urge to hurl my phone against the wall and sit on my couch in a state of vibrating frustration for several minutes until I can come up with another course of action. Déja, I think to myself. What was she thinking? I dial Déja's number and wait impatiently for her to answer the phone.

“What?” she says. “I'm on my way out the door. Can I call you later?”

“No,” I say. “I need to know right now why you told Lavander that I don't like Tony. Why, Déja? What good did you think could come of that?”

Déja is furious. “I never said that!” she barks. “And I'm sick of being caught in the middle of your thing with Lavander. She—both of you are always making trouble and being mean to each other. I don't want any part of it.”

“You made yourself part of it,” I shout. “What did you tell her?”

“I CAN'T TALK ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW!” she bellows in my ear. “I'm late and I've got to go. I'll call you later or tomorrow.”

“Don't bother!” I scream into the phone, but she's already gone.

 

As I predicted it would, my argument with Lavander has turned into a long, cold silence. This is not at all of my choosing. After my initial anger passed, I started to think again about what she said and convinced myself that her points were all valid and that
I assumed too much about what went on between her and Tony. As she said, I was so caught up in my own version of reality that I couldn't see hers. I didn't feel that I had anything to apologize for, but I wanted to keep our lines open. I wanted to talk to her without it turning into a battle. It seemed as if we'd been conflicted for so long and I couldn't understand it. She didn't fight like this with Maya or Déja, I told myself, even if those relationships weren't discord free. Why, I wondered, did she always take target practice on me? I wanted this to stop and I was determined to transform our quarrel into something positive, the beginning of a better understanding between the two of us. This, like so many best laid plans, was not to be.

She came to my house a few days after our phone call, but not to see me. She came to pick Maya up so that the two of them could go holiday shopping for her office parties. I was not invited. She breezed into the house, nodding in my direction.

“Hi, Lavander,” I said as brightly as I could.

“Debra,” she murmured, acknowledging me, but leaving off any kind of salutation. “Maya, are you ready to go?”

I'd gotten some family photographs developed and I had them spread out on my desk. There was one of the two of us (in happier times, I thought) that I wanted her to see.

“Hey, Lav,” I said, “do you want to see these photos? There are some really good ones of you here.” I smiled at her, beckoning.

“I'm really in kind of a hurry,” she said, shutting me down completely. “I just need to get going.” She didn't bother to say good-bye on her way out.

I gave up then, at the very moment she turned on her high heels and click-clicked out my door. I couldn't do it anymore, I decided. I couldn't keep feeling bad about myself and I was sick of being hurt by her. To hell with it, I thought. What she said
was true; I'd made everything up as I went along. I'd made up our whole connection. Obviously, the notion that we could be close in spite of our differences was a complete illusion.

“Don't tell me that it's my fault,” I told Maya and Déja a few days later as the two of them were lamenting the sad state of my relationship with Lavander. “I try with her, I really do, but she doesn't want to hear it.”

“You say such mean things to each other,” Déja said.

“Stop with the ‘mean things' argument, Déja. I am not mean to her and it's not even that she's mean to me. She's just always so angry at me.”

“Maybe she thinks you judge her,” Maya said.

“No, she thinks
you
judge her,” I said. “That's not it. She disagrees with my whole version of reality. She thinks that I live a fabricated life.”

My sisters shook their heads. “You know Lavander,” Déja said. “She's just like that. She's like that with everybody.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” I asked them, “that she just doesn't like me?”

“Oh, come on,” Maya said.

“I mean it,” I said. “And I believe it. She doesn't like me. What can I do about that?”

“You should tell her how you feel,” Déja said.

“I don't think so,” I said. “I'm tired of getting bitten.”

And that's where the two of us are now, frozen in our separate realities with no sign of a thaw. All three of my sisters have gone out together today. Another shopping adventure that I've not been invited to participate in. I believe that the destination this time was to the great temple of Ikea. I tell myself that I don't care and remind myself that I can't stand shopping, but it's a weak argument and I'm not buying it. I'm realizing now that I've been depressed and exhausted since Lavander and I had our
falling out. I don't know how many days ago it was, but right now it seems like years. Who knows, perhaps we've been falling out since the day she was born. I can't tell anymore.

Blaze is out doing “guy things” with Bo today (most of which involve eating candy and slurping frozen Cokes) and the house is quiet. I'm debating whether or not to take a walk before he comes home when the door opens and my three sisters come marching in bearing batteries, bedspreads, and lightbulbs.

“We've come for tea!” Déja announces.

“All right, then,” I smile at her. “Did you have a successful outing?”

“All kinds of wondrous items,” Maya answers, turning on the kettle.

“Hey, Deb, can I see those photos now?” Lavander asks me. She sits down next to me on the couch, smiling and conciliatory. I look away from her for a moment only, but it's long enough to see a look pass between Déja and Maya, telegraphing a wealth of silent information. So that's it, I think. They talked to Lavander. They told her how I felt and they tried to make it right. I turn my eyes back to Lavander, looking for a sign that she's trying to pacify me because she promised the other two that she wouldn't fight with me anymore. I search her face for a clue that she's faking it, that she'd rather be somewhere else, but I don't find it. She looks open and interested. If I weren't feeling so tentative about it, I might even say that she looks loving.

“Okay,” I tell her, “I'll get the photos.”

We spread them out on the coffee table and Lavander picks them up one by one, studying them. “These are great,” she says. “Especially this one.” She points to the photo that shows the two of us turned to each other and laughing as if we are sharing a particularly juicy secret.

“That's my favorite, too,” I tell her. Lavander throws her arm around my shoulders as we shuffle through the rest of the photos
and I realize that this brief touch is all it takes to change my mind about her. I can't give up and neither can she. I'm ready to get up and give it another go. I don't believe it will ever be easy between the two of us. She will keep challenging me and I will keep questioning my version of reality as long as she's there to call me on it. This is who she is and this is what we do. She doesn't always like me, of this I am certain—just as certain, in fact, that she will always love me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Déja and Maya steal another glance at each other. They are smiling. Mission accomplished.

december

I'm on my couch and Déja is on the phone. “I'm not going to be able to go with you tomorrow morning,” she says. “We're going to have to reschedule.”

“Okay,” I say.

“It's just that I've got rehearsals now for this new play. And I've been working these double shifts. And Danny's mother's coming to town. She's staying with us. You knew that, right?”

“It's no problem, Déja.”

“I mean, it's just that this is the worst possible week for me to do this. I'm sorry.”

“Déja, I said it's fine, don't worry about it. We'll reschedule. Why don't you call me tomorrow when you know what's going on and we'll make another plan?”

“I know, but I really want to do this. I just can't—”

“Déja, call me tomorrow.”

“Okay, I'll call you tomorrow. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hang up the phone. Déja was going to take me driving tomorrow and this is at least the fifth time we've rescheduled it. I'm off the hook again and I'm glad. I shouldn't be, but I am.

I don't drive. Four decades here on earth and I've never driven myself anywhere. I am perpetually in need of a ride. It's not even that I don't know how, because I do, and over the years I've taken the wheel several times in vain attempts to become a driver. I'm great in an empty parking lot. I know what needs to be done and I am able to handle a car. I know the rules of the road. I've taken the written test for a driver's permit at least a half dozen times and each time I've missed no more than two questions. But that's always as far as it gets. Although I've made the decision that I
must
do it now and Déja is more than willing to help me, I still don't want to. This is the truth of it.

Driving (or
not
driving, as it were) is my Achilles heel, my bête noire, my weakness, and my curse. This sounds extreme, I know, but it's really not an overstatement. I don't have the slightest difficulty being
in
a car as a passenger, but as soon as I get behind the wheel myself, I start to sweat and tremble. My heart rate goes into the hundreds and I become short of breath. I lose depth perception and the space around me twists into a totally unfamiliar shape. Crash, my brain shouts. You are going to crash, crash, CRASH!

Over the years, it's been very difficult to explain the intensity of this fear to anyone who isn't a family member. Driving isn't high on the list of common phobias in this day and age. When I tell people I don't drive, I get a variety of responses. I once had a boss who was sure I just wanted to be driven like some kind of princess my whole life and that was why I claimed I couldn't
drive myself. Acquaintances and co-workers have been convinced that I didn't drive because I'd had my license revoked for drunk driving and didn't want to admit to it. My insistence that I'd never had a license to lose fell on disbelieving ears. I dated a man for a while who took comfort in the notion that I was some kind of throwback.

“It's okay,” he said. “My grandmother never drove either. I loved my grandmother.”

A woman I was friendly with for a while, who had spent many years in analysis, commented that, “I think it's great that you've come to a place where you're cool with the fact that you don't drive. Some people might, you know, want to do some work on that, but you're just totally okay with it. Aren't you?”

Over the years, I've had many friends who have offered to teach me to drive, each one convinced that he (because they've almost all been men) would be the perfect instructor. I respond by saying that if it were only a matter of learning, it would be easy. It's the crippling fear that's the problem.

“But,” they say, “can't you just get over it?”

As I said, I've made some attempts over the last twenty-odd years to do just that. When I turned seventeen, I asked my father to teach me to drive. My father is still the best driver I've ever known. He has driven taxis and vans for a living and even spent some time as a driving instructor. None of that meant anything, unfortunately, when it came to helping me behind the wheel. I'd start the car and he'd yell, “Mirrors!” right off the bat. Then there were a series of omigods as I headed down the street. “Too slow!” he'd say. Then, “Too fast! Did you even
see
that car? This is somebody's driveway—what are you doing?” His favorite trick was to quickly cover the rearview mirror with his hand, and say, “What's behind you?”

“You know, I just don't think I'm ready,” I told him after a few abortive lessons.

“Fine,” he said.

I didn't really need to drive for the next few years. I lived in Portland, a city with excellent public transportation and, all through college, very few of my friends had cars anyway. Then, suddenly, I was twenty-two and a license seemed way overdue. I made the mistake then of buying a used car and asking the man I was in love with to teach me to drive it. I'll skip the ugly details. Let's just say it all ended with a bent front axle, waiting for AAA in the rain, and a big bottle of gin.

When I was thirty years old and had been living in California, the land of cars, for almost four years, I tried a driving school. My instructor was morbidly obese and showed up at my house for every lesson reeking of the fast-food burgers he'd consumed on his way over. He hardly ever spoke, except to say, “Doncha worry, I got an extra set of pedals right here.” My hands slipped from two and ten to five and seven because the steering wheel was consistently covered in grease. After the first set of lessons, the instructor asked me if I wanted to pony up two hundred dollars more to continue and I declined.

A few years after that, I tried driving with a girlfriend of mine who hadn't gotten her own license until she was thirty years old. She understood my fear and I felt very comfortable with her. But we were living quite a distance from each other and had opposing schedules. It became very easy to just let it slide.

Finally, a year ago, I went to a therapist. “This driving issue,” I told her, “is the only thing that's wrong. Everything else is fine. Perfect, actually. In fact,” I joked, “if I drove
I'd
be perfect.”

“Ha,” she said. “Wish I could say the same for myself.”

Our sessions turned into the exact opposite of what I was looking for. We started talking about my family, my relationships, and my work. I began thinking that there were problems in each one of these areas. I started getting depressed. And I still wasn't
driving. My therapist insisted that I obtain a car somehow and just enlist people to go driving with me.

“You have to do this,” she said. “We only have an hour a week together and that's not enough. You have to make the effort and if you keep resisting, I can't help you.”

Well, it was true, she couldn't.

My father, however, took a particular interest in my therapy.

“What do you talk about?” he asked.

“Oh, like I'm going to tell
you
,” I said.

“No, really,” he said. “Do you talk about me? You must. One always talks about one's father in therapy.”

“Dad, please.”

“I mean maybe it's my fault that you don't drive. Has that come up?”

After a good laugh over this statement, I told him, “Okay, Dad, yes. It's your fault. It's all your fault. You get full blame.”

That fact is, it would be easy to blame my father and make someone else responsible for my own inadequacy, but I can't pin this one on him. Even if I could, it would be high time to get the hell over it. Unfortunately, there is nobody to blame here, no fault to be assigned. A few months after I canceled my visits to the therapist, however, I finally came to an understanding of what is probably the genesis of my driving phobia. It was my mother who brought it up first as a possibility.

“I think you're afraid to drive because of what happened that day,” she said. “Do you remember? When we were living in the Catskills. Bo was a baby and you were all in the car.”

I knew exactly what she was referring to, but I dismissed her. “It wasn't such a big deal,” I said. But then I took the memory out, looked at it, and relived it in full color.

It was early 1974 and I was eleven years old. Bo was barely a year old, only beginning to walk. Maya had just turned nine and
Lavander was two. There was no Déja yet. She wouldn't be born for almost four years. I'd been invited to a birthday party and my mother took us all out in our big green Pontiac to buy a gift and drop me off at the party. Car seats were unheard of in those days. Not one of my siblings came home from the hospital in a car seat. Each was nestled in my mother's arms, which everyone always assumed was the safest place for a newborn. We didn't even wear seat belts. I don't know if that car even had any attached to its long vinyl bench seats. I never saw any. When we went out for drives, my parents would sit in the front with Bo. The three girls sat in the back seat, Lavander wedged in between me and Maya.

When my father was driving, we played the three, five, ten game from the backseat. My father would come up with a question worth one of those point values and Maya and I would take turns answering. We watched his eyes in the rearview mirror for a clue as to whether or not we were on the right track. Three-point questions were the easiest and tens were particularly tough. The questions covered a wide range. There were math questions (I always picked the three-pointers there), current-event questions, logic questions, and general trivia (Maya's perennial favorite). We were allowed to choose which point-value question we wanted. My questions were slightly more difficult because I had the age advantage. Nevertheless, Maya and I were in competition. Not that we really cared who
won
. We were more invested in being able to answer my father correctly. Occasionally, my father would throw in an impossible question and add a couple of points if it was answered correctly. I still remember the one that impressed him the most. “Who is Patty Hearst's lawyer?” he asked me, and I knew. I dined out on that victory for a long time.

When my mother was driving, though, there was no game and one of us got to sit up in front. My position as the eldest usu
ally got me that privilege and that was where I was perched that day. We bought a birthday present that was standard for us at the time, which was a sketch pad and colored markers. At the drugstore where we purchased the gift, there were several nickel gumball-style machines offering plastic rings and bracelets. Maya and I got five cents each and tested our luck. My prize, encased in its bright blue plastic bubble, seemed unusually heavy. When I opened it, I saw that it contained a ring, but a ring unlike I'd ever seen in one of those machines before. This one was a real prize and I showed it to my mother and Maya with a great show of excitement. For starters, it was made out of metal instead of plastic, but I couldn't tell if it was silver because it was dull and gray. The center was cut out in the shape of a lightning bolt and there was a tiny cut-out moon on the left side. I slipped it on my finger and it fit perfectly.

“Wow,” my mother said. “That's a special one, isn't it?”

I felt pretty smug with my special ring on my hand and I kept staring at it. Perhaps, I thought, it was a magic ring placed in that machine especially for me. Maybe it would give me secret powers that I would discover only when I turned it a certain number of times. I experimented with that, twisting the ring back and forth, wishing for things like invisibility and the ability to control the weather. The only thing that happened, though, was that my mother said she had to stop for gas before we could go to the party.

The gas station was directly off the freeway, perched on the top of a steep incline. One could drive in, get gas, and merge right back into traffic at the bottom of the hill. My mother left the motor running and the driver's-side door open when she got out of the car to pay for the gas. Bo stood up and bounced up and down on the seat, inching away from me and over to the driver's side, where he leaned against the steering wheel, banging and twisting it and singing some baby song of his own creation.
I admired my new ring and let him play. In the backseat, Maya and Lavander were starting to make noise, which I also ignored.

I didn't notice that Bo had grabbed hold of the gear shift. I wasn't watching when he dragged it from park into drive. And then, suddenly, we were rolling. It took a fraction of a second for me to realize that my mother was not in the car and, for that reason, it shouldn't be moving at all. My brother was laughing, delighted that we were in motion. I looked at him jumping with glee, leaning onto the steering wheel for support. Unbelievably to me, the car kept going. After what seemed like a long time, I finally comprehended that we were not going to stop, that we were going to keep rolling down the hill until we rolled right into oncoming traffic. I turned my head to see my mother at the top of the hill, growing smaller as we picked up speed and moved away from her. I could see the look of stark terror on her face as she saw what was happening. Her mouth dropped open and she was shouting something I couldn't hear. I couldn't hear anything. The world had contracted into the silence of fear. I froze in that position, utterly disabled and helpless. I didn't make a move over to the driver's side. I didn't grab my brother. I didn't try to slide my leg over to put my foot on the brake. If the car had been at a stop and I'd been asked to point out which pedal belonged to the gas and which to the brake, I could have done it because I knew which was which. But at that moment, I knew nothing. The car had become a huge unknowable monster that had sucked all of my power into its own. I did nothing at all.

My mother hesitated for a second (perhaps she also expected the car to just stop moving, or perhaps she felt, somehow, that I'd be able to stop it) and then she started running toward us, faster than I've ever seen anyone move. She was in four-inch platform shoes and she ran like a hurricane down that hill. I knew that she wasn't going to make it. I knew that she would miss us and that we'd go hurtling onto the freeway. We'd be hit instantly in
the rush of oncoming cars and we'd all be killed. I knew this. I knew that we were all going to die. And I knew that it was going to be my fault, because, even in possession of this knowledge, I did nothing.