About My Sisters (10 page)

Our plane was due to leave in the evening, by which time my mother had worked herself into a larger, more comprehensive version of her usual airport anxiety. Just as she'd been the one to see us in when we'd arrived, Grandma was the one elected to drive us all to JFK International. She was not happy that we were leaving, never mind going to the Dark Continent. On the drive to the airport, her lips were tight and her face was drawn from her reluctance to let us go. Once we got to the airport, however, everything got much worse and there was no time for the kind of orderly, weepy departure that Grandma was no doubt expecting.

We were over our weight limit. Way over, it turned out. About three duffel bags over, in fact. My father was cursing. My mother was crying. Lavander was wailing. Grandma smoked, her lips getting thinner and paler. My father explained to her that she'd
have to take three of the duffel bags home with her. There was some verbal scuffling between the two of them as he insisted that she take them and Grandma told him that there was no way she'd be able to store them in her tiny apartment and what was she supposed to do with them and how could she even get them out of her car when she got there? Maya and I stood quietly, watching. I had the hideous panicky feeling in my stomach that would accompany me to every airport from then on. I wanted it to be over and I wanted us to all be sitting on a plane, flying to somewhere else.

I'm not sure how we selected the one duffel bag that did make it onto the plane. The bags had all been packed haphazardly and there was no real order to the contents. In the end, frustrated to the edge of his limits, my father just grabbed one and threw it after the suitcases. Although the details of what happened to the other three remain hazy in everyone's memory now, the generally agreed-upon story goes that Grandma stored the duffel bags at the airport until she found someone to help her haul them out. After that, assuming that we were never coming back or that we didn't care too much what happened to them, Grandma pieced out the contents and gave everything away. Where it all finally ended up will be forever lost to the mists of time.

The bag that made it across the ocean with us was the one that contained Lavander's baby toys, Maya's and my B list dolls, my father's astrology books, and most of the family photos. What was missing represented what had been the individual elements in our collective family identity prior to that point. All of my father's record albums were gone. He wouldn't listen to the Doors, Hendrix, or Cream again until his children became teenagers and brought it around one more time. My mother lost her pottery and the will to try to replace it. She also lost all of her mirrored dresses, the only clothes that weren't in a suitcase.
Maya and I had put all of our favorite dolls (we never had toys, only dolls) in the same missing duffel bag. Also gone were our ballerina tutus and all of our books, an impressive collection of fairy tales from around the world. For a long time, it wasn't even possible to know exactly what was missing. We discovered the absence of most of these things when we went looking for them. For years after in our house, there were conversations that began and ended this way:

“Hey, where's my—?”

“It was in the duffel bags.”

“Oh.”

They were only things, of course, and things can be replaced by other things. Over time, we collected different books, different dolls, and different music. What my parents never sought to replace, however, was what all these missing things signified. They left a way of life behind along with all the people who were part of it. Our family was coalescing and becoming an entirely new entity. I was the only one who ever wondered what became of my parents' friends, the people who wandered through our houses on their way to somewhere else.

“Don't you want to know where they are? Who they are now?” I asked my parents decades later.

“They were all your mother's friends,” my father said to me. “And I never liked your mother's friends.”

“They weren't my friends,” my mother said. “Some of them were just people I knew. The rest were Daddy's friends. And Daddy's friends were always weird.”

There were some other items that never got replaced. Maya and I didn't get new ballerina outfits, for example. Nor did we stock up on fairy tales again. Our roles as the fairy girls had come to an end and new roles had taken their place. I wouldn't get a real fix on the exact nature of my own role for many years,
but on the day I hit double digits, I began to have some sort of inchoate understanding. My mother had given me a book for my birthday. On the inside cover, she wrote, “To my eldest lovely daughter, turning ten today. Your loving Mummy.”

The title of the book was
Lavender's Tree
.

 

I still have the book my mother gave me for that birthday. Next month, it will be thirty years old, half a decade older than Déja is now. I look at her now, this sister of mine, and realize that it will never be possible for me to explain to her who our parents were all those years ago and how we were formed and changed together. She wasn't even a spark in the ether when we moved to South Africa. Even Lavander, the line of demarcation between how we were and what we became, is too young to remember that we stayed there for only a few months and that when we left for California, my mother was pregnant again, this time with our brother, Bo, who was born a mere year after we ditched those duffel bags at JFK.

For all Déja knows, our parents never had friends or a social life that didn't involve their children. She'll never remember them as longhaired groovers, traversing the globe with their fairy girls in tow. She's known them only once. Maya and I have known them twice and for a long, long time.

“You know what?” I tell her now. “I don't think they ever will get old. They'll always be exactly who they are.”

june

Tonight, I am finally off to see Déja's play. I am the last one to go. Lavander has already been twice, each time bringing a posse of her friends and making sure to pay full price at the door. “It's brilliant,” Lavander says. “And Déja is so great. I've never laughed so hard at one of her plays. It's hysterical.”

“I could hear her laughing in the audience,” Déja says. “You know that laugh Lavander has. You can always tell it's her. I had to keep from laughing myself when I heard her.”

Maya has been three or four times. I've lost count. She offered up clothes for costumes and went to the dress rehearsal. And she's watched the whole performance with a number of her friends.

“It's different every time I see it,” Maya says. “I can really see how it's come together over the course of a few shows.”

Déja calls Maya every morning after a performance, whether it's one Maya has seen or not, to discuss the specifics of her and her cast mates' performances and to gossip about the production. Maya knows all the players by now and jumps right in.

“I don't think she should wear the apron up so high on her waist,” Maya says one morning. “And I love that thing where you pop out from behind the couch—and that whole Cuba scene.”

“Hey,” I yell, “do you mind? I haven't seen it yet. You're going to ruin it for me.”

“Sorry,” Maya says. “I keep forgetting that you're the only one who hasn't gone. What are you waiting for?” From the other end of the receiver, I can hear Déja faintly but quite clearly saying, “When
is
she coming? Ask her, will you?”

My parents have seen the play, too. My father remarked with conviction, “Funniest play I've ever seen. Period,” signaling that everyone else should find it the funniest play that
they'd
ever seen, too, or else there was something very wrong. “And Déja,” he added, “is just…She just lights up on stage. And she's just so good.” He doesn't get any arguments there.

Even my brother has beat me to this play and he's usually the last to go to any event, if he makes it at all. Unlike almost everyone else, he's only gone once, but he, too, professes it “hilarious.”

And Danny…Well, Danny has been to every show. He goes every single night without fail. He doesn't pay and is now in training to take over the lighting to fill in for the production designer who is going on vacation. After the first performance, word has it, Danny stood up, clapping wildly and turned to my mother saying, “You are a very lucky woman. And I…I am very lucky, too.”

“It's so cute,” Maya said. “He's in love.”

And now it's my turn.

I have to laugh a little to myself on the way to the tiny theater, remembering the last time I went to see Déja perform two years
ago. This play has the same director, but Déja assures me that the two plays are nothing alike. Which is a good thing. I can't even remember the title of that play—it was something like
The Scavenging
or
The Degrading
or
The Violating.
Some kind of gerund indicating the destruction of any kind mental peacefulness. I call it
The Torturing
when I refer to it now because that's more or less what the whole production ended up being. I'd gone with Maya, my brother, and his brand-new girlfriend, who was meeting us for the first time.

There was my little sister in the black box, costumed to look like a Dumpster-diving teen runaway, smeared with running mascara and white makeup. Her character wailed and sobbed and cried.
Loudly
. When she wasn't crying (with real tears) and screaming, she was cursing and spitting out lines such as, “Shut up, goddamn it, you fucking jerk-off!” And all of this under the glare of a single, blazingly harsh spotlight so we could see the full extent of her character's agony.

Her pain very quickly became ours. If there had been any chance of escape, I would have left, but I was trapped, along with everybody else, in the black, sweaty confines of the small room. As the scenes escalated in anguish and I heard Déja become hoarse from shouting, I turned to Maya, and whispered, “How long is this going to go on? I can't take it.” Maya, who always rushes to defend from criticism anything Déja does, could only shake her head in agreement.

“This is not art,” I hissed. “This is horrible.”

“Sshhh,” Maya whispered, but she was grimacing. I looked down the aisle to my brother, who looked as if he might be redefining the word
uncomfortable.
I couldn't see his new girlfriend's face from where I was sitting and couldn't even imagine what she was making of all this.

It went on and on. In reality, the play was an hour-long one act, but it had obviously been written in dog minutes because it
seemed at least seven times as long. It wasn't so much that I was offended by the material, although I started to feel that the writer desperately needed psychiatric help, or that Déja's character was one-dimensionally nightmarish. I just couldn't stand to watch Déja
emote
at such a shrieking pitch for such an extended period of time. I didn't feel that I was watching a play. I felt as though I was watching my sister have an onstage nervous breakdown.

When the lights finally came up, I could swear I heard the entire audience exhale at once. We stood numbly waiting for Déja to come out and say hello as people filed out of the small side door onto the street.

“I thought it was never going to end,” I said finally. “Made
The Crucible
look like a comedy.”

“That was really an awful experience,” my brother said.

“What did you think?” I asked his new girlfriend.

“She was really good,” the girlfriend said diplomatically.

“Wait,” Maya said, to the girlfriend, “have you met Déja before?”

“No,” said the girlfriend.

“So this is the first time you've seen her?” Maya started laughing. “She's not really like that, you know.”

“Did you think you really had to make that clear?” my brother said.

Déja came out of the wings, black streaked tear lines still on her cheeks. She looked exactly as she always did after she'd been upset and crying. I couldn't stand it. “Hi, everyone,” she said. “What did you think?”

“Why didn't you warn us?” I said.

“I told you it was a heavy play,” Déja said.

“
Hamlet
is a heavy play,” I said. “This was something else entirely.”

Our brother took that moment to introduce his new girlfriend to Déja.

“Oh, hi,” Déja said, smiling through her mask of misery. “It's great to meet you.”

That play, and our reactions to it, became something of a joke around the house. My imitation of Déja wailing her way through the endless scenes was always good for a laugh, although I was careful not to do it very often.
The Torturing
settled one thing, though. I told Déja that I couldn't watch her in another performance like that. It had nothing to do with lack of support. She would always be my baby sister and I just couldn't watch her in that kind of pain, real or imagined.

When I get to the theater now, I choose a seat in the front row. This is an unusual choice for me. I'm almost always a few rows back and as inconspicuous as possible. But tonight I can't deal with the thought of somebody sitting in front of me (and lately, wherever I go, the biggest person in the crowd has to be sitting
right there
), blocking my view. I don't want to have to lean this way or that and miss something in the process. I don't want to have to notice the breathing, fidgeting, or cologne of the person in front of me instead of the visual subtleties on stage. So here I am, parked and ready. There will be no torturing this time, I've been told. This time it's a sexual farce. And that's all right with me. I can deal with Déja sexualized. It's only agonized I have trouble with.

The lights go down on the audience and up on the stage. There are several scenes before Déja makes her appearance so I have time to form an impression of the play itself before I see her. The energy level is high onstage and I find myself laughing at the clever dialogue, full of double entendres and clever one-liners. When one of the scenes moves off the main set and to the edge of the audience, I am slightly alarmed to find out that my front row seat has actually put me inches away from the action. I can actually see the pores in the actor's skin. I think that maybe I am just a tiny bit too close.

After twenty minutes or so, I am so involved in the play that Déja's entrance gives me a start. She's wearing a beehive wig, mod jewelry, and false eyelashes. And she is so lovely. It could all be my imagination, of course, but I'm sure I can hear a sigh of appreciation coming from the audience as she launches into the dialogue. I watch Déja vamp across the stage and find myself slipping out of the objectivity I've so carefully constructed. It's always been difficult for me to be objective about Déja, whether the objectivity is in regard to her performance on the stage or in life. In a sense, I almost feel as if I am able to be more objective about my own child. After all, I have always been his mother. Our roles in relation to each other have always been very clear. It's not as clear with Déja. There was a time when I was more of an intermediate mother to Déja than a sister. And for a while, we had the best of both of those worlds.

My position as sub-mom for Déja is one that neither Maya nor Lavander shared. When Déja was born, Maya was twelve years old and Lavander was in first grade. Our sweet little brother, Bo, was four years old. I was six months from turning sixteen and she could easily have been mine. And until I moved out of the house three years later, Déja
was
my baby. In a way, we've been trying to redefine ourselves as sisters ever since. I look at her now and I can't help but see the outline of those baby features in the curve of her woman's face—can't help but notice the passage of time as it reflects through her. And I can't help remembering, again, the person I was when she was born and the person she helped me avoid becoming.

 

In 1977, we were living near Monticello, in the Catskill Mountains, where we'd been for four years, an epic stretch in one place for my family. Of course, we
had
changed addresses several times over that period, moving from a house bordering a
cornfield to a condo on the edge of a lake, and then to a spare, concrete apartment complex. The fourth house was everyone's favorite: an L-shaped ranch-style house on a long leafy street. There was a rolling lawn in the front and a forest of aspen and fir trees in the back. We were never really sure how far back the trees went because after seeing a black bear, a few deer, and a wild turkey stroll by within spitting distance of the breakfast table the first winter we spent there, nobody was brave enough to chart a course through them.

The house suited my parents more than any other I could remember. In the winter, it was possible to look out the window and be convinced that you were completely alone on the planet, an illusion my parents had been striving to create for some time. Our driveway was a shining slope of ice then and the lawn was covered with drifts of snow. Our street wasn't a major enough thoroughfare for the snow plow to make its way there after the constant winter storms, so when the snowfall was measured in feet rather than inches, everybody simply stayed put. On those days the sky was low, the same off-white as the ground, and there was a quiet stillness, punctuated only by the occasional crack of frozen branches.

“Snow day” school closings were announced every morning at 5:00
A.M.
on the local radio station. When the school bus could make it through, it arrived with orange-haired, scarlet-lipped, tough-talking Val driving, heavy chains on its tires, scraping through salt, ice, and gravel. It took almost an hour to get to school. Maya dozed next to me on the bus while I read. When we got into town, we'd pass a light board that displayed the air temperature, often in the single digits. That was my cue to wake Maya up. Her drop-off at the middle school was first, then Val careered over to the high school where the rest of us stumbled off in our clogs and Frye boots to negotiate the skating rink of a parking lot.

We had neighbors on either side of our house, but we never saw or heard them in winter. Both my parents, especially my mother, loved this arrangement. Hunkering down around the wood-burning stove in the dead of winter surrounded by their own children was an idyllic experience for them. My feelings were exactly opposite. For me, this rural, tucked-in existence was a form of involuntary confinement. In October, I started feeling claustrophobic and by the time the first snows started falling, I was suffocating. School was really the only time I got to go out at all and, for that reason alone, I was fanatic about not missing it. My school attendance record would have been near perfect, in fact, were it not for my parents. They believed that we went to school entirely too much and needed more frequent breaks than we got.

“Why don't you and Maya stay home tomorrow?” my mother would say. “It's below zero and Daddy thinks you could use a day off.”

“I'll miss my homework,” I'd say, or, “I have a test,” but neither parent bought these as excuses. I was always ahead of my schoolwork and never brought home anything lower than a B on my report card. This they knew. When I refused to capitulate, though, my mother sometimes got sneaky, turning off my alarm so that I'd simply oversleep and have to stay home. When I woke up anyway and went to school, she actually got angry.

I started to feel trapped at home and said so on more than one occasion. This was definitely a term that didn't go over very well with my parents. Both my mother and father told me regularly that I had a selfish attitude, that I was unwilling to be a giving part of the family, that they were working their asses off for me and that all I did was complain.