About My Sisters (14 page)

Over those years, Maya finished high school and started university. She found her own niche and developed some close friendships. She went to Grateful Dead concerts. She fell in love, but wouldn't discuss it—at least, not with me. Very rarely, she came to visit me. I always sensed an underlying wash of disapproval from her, although I was never sure whether this disapproval was over my friends, my lifestyle, or my personality. It was almost as if she was waiting for me to get on with it and get to whomever I was supposed to be. Not that I knew who that person was. And I never asked her. Like so much of the emotional undercurrent between Maya and me, this stayed in the realm of the undiscussed, never quite reaching the surface. On a barely conscious level, though, I knew that she had a better understanding of who I was than I did. And she knew that eventually our circles would intersect again. For this reason, I never really felt Maya's absence. Nor, it seemed, did she feel mine. It was somewhat different for the rest of my siblings.

While I wasn't paying attention, Déja had left her babyhood and started school. At nine years old, she'd become an individual with preferences and dislikes I knew nothing about. She had a schedule, activities, and playmates. She had opinions. She had, too, a distinct position in our family. No matter who moved out, went away, or came back, Déja would always be the youngest. She would always be the baby.

And my brother would always be the only boy. Since I'd moved out, he'd really become my father's only son. Bo was a jock, no longer a little boy at fourteen years old, and no longer content to hang out at home or ever be the center of familial attention. I had to admit I didn't have much of an idea who my
brother was. For his part, he seemed to view me with a kind of wariness, something like trepidation, especially after I gave birth to Blaze. It was if the role of uncle was undefined for him and too much to integrate.

But, for me, it was Lavander who had undergone the most startling transformation during the time I'd been absent. She'd morphed from a saucy little girl to a wild sixteen-year-old and I had no recollection of what had come in between. Lavander was the first of the Ginsberg offspring to drive. I'd never gotten my license and Maya wouldn't get hers until she was almost twenty-three. For Lavander, getting a driver's license was almost an afterthought. She'd already been driving for years—whenever anyone would let her take control of the wheel. Once it was official, she was
out
. For the first time ever in my family, my parents bought a second car and Lavander was given free reign over their old Mazda. When she was home, which wasn't very often, she was on the phone—her own personal line, because in those days before call waiting, there was a constant busy signal when Lavander was in the house. She was extremely popular, constantly in the middle of one drama or another and was always in transit, either on her way out or just stopping at home briefly on her way to somewhere else.

Lavander was also the first (and only) one of us to have secret parties in the house while the parents were away. My parents never took vacations, so “away” meant when they were out of the house for any reasonable length of time. When Peppy's first opened, my parents (especially my father), Maya, Déja, and I were there until closing every night. Lavander was then, as she is now, the consummate party planner. She made excellent use of the hours between five and eleven.

When my parents pulled into the garage after a night at Peppy's with Maya and Déja in tow, they often sensed a vibra
tion in the air, a displacement of ions, like the sudden stillness after a tornado or the wake of a speeding train. They could never quite put their finger on what it was that was different, because nothing had been moved or broken inside the house and everything was clean. Had they lingered in the garage for any length of time, they might have noticed the faintest odor of beer and cigarettes, but their senses were somewhat dulled by the constant onslaught of garlic and tomato sauce from Peppy's and the only thing anyone wanted to investigate after a full day of work was a package of cookies and the inside of a bed. Lavander, of course, was gone by the time everyone came home.

Bo was the only witness to what went on during these hours and would have sooner sacrificed his limbs than divulge to my parents what he'd seen. Even so, his grateful astonishment over the level of partying in which he was included caused him to slip somewhat over time, but only to his sisters. (“Dude,” he once revealed with the reverence of someone recounting a mythic tale, “you don't even
know
what she pulled off. She had
kegs
in the garage. She had
whole bands
playing music in there.
Whole bands
. With instruments and amps. And it was all gone by ten. Gone, without a trace. No cars, no beer, nothing. It was
amazing
.”) It must have taken a Cat-in-the-Hat type of cleanup effort for Lavander to get the house back in shape after these shindigs, a supreme display of organizational ability. My brother still looks back on it as some kind of miracle.

This all came to an end after I had Blaze. From then on, my mother, Déja, and I spent much less time at Peppy's. On top of that, my father had started closing the restaurant earlier on weeknights and altogether on Sundays. Lavander reacted to this shift by going out even more often. I barely saw her, but when I came home on the weekends, I began to get a sense of the storm her adolescence had become. Since there was no spare room for
me when I came home with Blaze, I slept wherever there was a free bed. Sometimes I took my brother's room and sometimes Déja bunked with Maya and gave me her bed. Most often, though, Lavander was absent and I slept in her room, surrounded by her scattered notebooks, hair spray, flame-blackened candles, and the jittery scent of rebellion.

When I was in Lavander's bedroom, I tried to keep myself and Blaze in as small a space as possible. Diapers and receiving blankets had absolutely no place among her Aerosmith and Motley Crüe cassettes, glittery lipstick, and acid-wash jeans and I felt like a rude intruder. The disordered order of her room rejected anything maternal or soothing. When I sat up to feed Blaze in the wee hours, I let my eyes follow the trail of hair ties, folded notes, and matchbooks on the floor, looking for clues as to what might be going on in Lavander's head. There were tiny worry dolls in a box next to her bed. She had a corkboard tacked full of photographs of her friends and one framed photograph of our parents on her nightstand. Random keys were carelessly scattered on the floor, as if she'd decided to jettison her responsibilities to whatever they opened. There were small books with decorated covers that looked as though they might have been diaries, but they were sitting out in plain sight and I couldn't fathom how anyone would leave her innermost musings in a place where they could be read and judged. I didn't touch them. I touched nothing, in fact, despite my vexed curiosity. The air around my sister vibrated with the tension of a stretched rubber band and I didn't want to touch or disturb anything in her room, didn't want to investigate the icons of her existence, for fear of breaking it and getting stung in its snap.

These best-laid plans came to ruin one Sunday morning. I was on one of my weekend visits and Lavander was temporarily without a place to go or people to see. She sat on the couch
disheveled and smudged with last night's makeup, wearing a look of utter disdain as I planned an outing to the mall with my mother and Maya to buy Blaze a new stroller.

“You're always
shopping
,” she barked at my mother. “Doesn't it get boring? Doesn't that baby have enough
things
?”

“You can come with,” I told her.

“Yeah,
right
.” She sneered.

As the tension in the room ratcheted up by several notches, Maya and my mother dissolved into other parts of the house. The unmistakable odor of confrontation was in the air. I stayed where I was, preparing Blaze for an outing, which involved maneuvering his infant limbs into a one-piece, getting socks on his feet, and a blanket wrapped tightly around his body. Lavander watched my machinations with disgust. I could feel waves of hostility splashing over me. She muttered something unintelligible but distinctly unfriendly.

“Have you got something to say?” I asked her, matching her tone.

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “You think you're so special, but you're not. You can't get anything together by yourself. You and your baby. Debra's
baby
, Debra's
baby
, that's all I fucking hear about anymore. Why don't you learn to DRIVE already? Get yourself a nice car and drive off to your own apartment with your baby and get yourself a life!”

“What are you talking about?” I asked her, stunned almost to the point of laughing.

“I said, why don't you get yourself a
life
and stop leeching off Mommy and Daddy!” She was actually snarling.

Angry thoughts exploded in my head like firecrackers. How dare she accuse me of being financially dependent, I seethed. I'd been fully self-supporting and financially independent for seven years and had never asked for or received any monetary help
from my family in all that time, nor was I now. Until Blaze was born, I had worked an average of three jobs at a time. That she knew none of this, had never even bothered to know any of this, threw me into a blind fury and I reacted without compassion or a trace of rationality.

“Why don't
you
just go to fucking HELL!” I screamed at her.

“What did you say?” She was up off the couch.

“I said fuck OFF!”

That was it—we were at each other, fists and feet, kicking, snarling, pulling, and punching. In the small part of my brain that wasn't consumed with rage, I had two useless thoughts. One was disbelief that I was actually engaged in a physical battle with my sister in front of my infant son and the other was that the tight white leather skirt I had squashed my postpartum body into was seriously inadequate fight wear. The rest of me merely wanted to rip her face off.

Before any real damage could be done, Maya and my mother came running from their hiding places to break up. Maya started yelling at the two of us for acting like babies and my mother burst into loud tears, threatening to tell my father and exact punishment. Lavander retreated to her room, all the while spewing vitriol about what an unbelievable bitch I was and how she had been grievously wronged.
As usual
.

When we finally reassembled and headed out to the mall (because fight or no fight, shopping would not be denied), I was still trembling. My mother continued to sob in the car and Maya clicked her tongue in dismay. I could feel the anger pulsing off me in steamy waves and it nauseated me. But worse than that, I was deeply embarrassed—and not because of my own loss of control. I was embarrassed because Lavander's words had an underlying ring of truth. If I had taken even a second to think about the subtext of what she was saying before I leaped at her, I
would have understood Lavander's frustration. I would have seen how my reappearance after such a long absence (with a baby in tow, no less) constituted a major intrusion for her. It was undeniable, when I was there the family revolved around me and my new baby. Lavander, in a precarious battle with her own entry in womanhood, was relegated, again, to middle-child status. And she was right about the fact that I depended heavily on my family, just not in the way she thought. I could understand Lavander's irritation with my prodigal daughter reappearance at the family table, but I still couldn't figure why she seemed so repulsed by my life and why she was so intent on shutting me out of hers. Of my three sisters, only Lavander seemed to find my new motherhood repellent.

When I told Maya I was pregnant, she'd just finished playing the
Messiah
at a Christmas concert in Eugene, Oregon. We'd driven down from Portland, en famille, to see her. It should have been her moment, but I'd taken the opportunity of the long drive to break the news to my parents and they insisted I tell her on the spot. Her face lit up much brighter than mine and she actually jumped up and down. “So exciting,” she said. “So, so exciting.”

Maya sat beside me for almost my entire pregnancy, experimenting with different menus for my confused palate, talking to my belly, and organizing a baby shower for me at Peppy's. We went to childbirth classes together and secretly made fun of the instructor. She managed to find a Mother's Day card for me before I delivered that was printed with “For the mother-to-be with love from her sister.” Maya was my labor coach. She was an oasis of sanity when I thought I was losing my mind during the delivery. Her connectedness and part in this experience was never in question. I couldn't have imagined going through it without her.

Déja was as excited as Maya about becoming an aunt. She was also curious about the pregnancy. What did it feel like inside when the baby kicked, she wanted to know. How did I know it was a boy? How would I be able to tell when he was ready to be born? She put her hands on my belly and giggled when she felt the skin rolling. She promised me hours and days of free baby-sitting. She was the only one who was less patient than I for the baby to be born. On the day Blaze was born, Déja waited in the hospital for thirteen hours, refusing to sleep and refusing to go home until she could give me a kiss and tell me how much she loved me.

From the day I announced that I was having a baby, Lavander's reaction was markedly different. It was if she couldn't find a way to connect with the whole situation and it pushed her away. I was aware of this on a mostly subconscious level in the months leading up to Blaze's birth and couldn't have defined it if I'd been pressed. And, of course, I was very focused on my own experience and not looking to explore anyone else's. As Lavander pointed out, it was pretty much all about me at that point. There was one moment, however, when Lavander's feelings became very clear to me. I was in the end stages of labor and had passed into that phase of teeth-gnashing pain where even the strongest of women start cursing their lot. I'd kicked everyone but Maya out of the delivery room because I couldn't stand the thought of anyone, especially the people closest to me, seeing me in that state. That's when Lavander made her entrance. She'd come to the hospital late and walked into the room, a girlfriend in tow, just as the labor nurse bent both of my shaking knees back and reached into me up to her elbow. Neither the nurse nor Maya noticed the two of them standing by the door, but, over the IV, fetal monitor, and the giant rise of my belly, I saw an expression of naked horror on Lavander's face. The girlfriend backed out of the room as quickly as she'd come in, but
Lavander stood there for a few moments, undecided about what to say or do. Maya and the labor nurse turned toward her then, aware of her for the first time.