About My Sisters (17 page)

When I had my first real boyfriend in the summer of 1978 when I was sixteen, I didn't talk to Maya about what we did, how I felt, or what he said to me. She indicated quite clearly that she didn't want to know. Nor did she have any desire to start up the romance I encouraged with my boyfriend's younger brother who was the same age as she. I thought that this would be a neat little package, the brothers and the sisters together, but Maya, thirteen years old at the time, was repulsed by the very idea. She wasn't crazy about my boyfriend to begin with and thought his little brother was an immature tool.

Maya's aversion to my romantic choices was an ongoing theme (I think it's possible that she didn't even like the Harry I'd created), although she always stopped short of outright condemnation. She was more subtle about her dislike, exuding a whiff of disappointment, like an imperceptible head shake in the negative. It was her opinion, always, that I could do better and that I was selling myself short. In this respect, she adopted the role of older, wiser sister, a sort of Jiminy Cricket ever whispering in my ear that I was making a mistake. There were two ways to deal with this as I saw it. I could try to corrupt her and draw
her into my adventures as an accomplice (such as the attempt to get her to pair up with the boyfriend's younger brother), or I could completely separate that part of my life from my relationship with her. It didn't take too long to decide on the latter option.

Maya and I had always been dedicated and extremely loyal to each other. Neither one of us had ever ratted the other out, to our parents or anyone else. Never once had either of us attempted to blame the other for something she didn't do in order to escape punishment. In fact, both of us would feign ignorance of the other's wrongdoings if questioned. And, although Maya was rarely in the wrong, she would go to the mat to defend me. For many years when we were growing up, Maya had the reputation in our family as being the “sweet” one, whereas I was the “sullen” one. Rather than reveling in her elevated status as the more pliable daughter, Maya took great pains to convince our parents that I deserved that status as well. She didn't idolize me, but she would have followed me, literally and metaphorically, wherever I asked her to go. Rewarding that kind of devotion by taking advantage of it was something I was unable to do. I couldn't ask, pressure, or demand that she go along with something she felt was wrong or even unpleasant, and therefore I couldn't draw her in as a co-conspirator in my amorous escapades, real or imagined. What's more, I even felt the need to protect her from them, and so I stopped sharing my thoughts on the subject altogether.

There was a certain dissonance created in our relationship by this gap, but I wasn't fully aware of it until one August night in 1980, a few weeks before I was scheduled to start college. I had one girlfriend, Charlotte, in my last year of high school. Charlotte was very rich, very smart, very refined, very quiet, and had a wild streak a mile wide running through her personality. Just my type. Charlotte was dating a university frat boy (a sophomore, no
less) and was on the pill. She said things like, “He's not really an intellectual, but the sex is very good,” which I thought were just astonishingly sophisticated. Charlotte and I were slated to go to different colleges in the fall and she wanted to take advantage of our last few weeks together by inviting me to as many of her boyfriend's frat parties as possible. She was set on fixing me up with someone, anyone, so that we'd have more common experiences to share. I was heartily sick of being Miss Goody Pure Shoes and I can't say I was unwilling to go along with her plan.

Two parties were a bit of a wash. At the first party, Charlotte introduced me to several drunken Ricks (every male at these parties seemed to be named Rick) who were willing to chat for about ten minutes (“How old are you?” “What school are you going to?” “What's your major—uh—going to be?” “What's your name again?”) before suggesting a trip to whatever bedroom was available. Because I couldn't stand the taste or smell of beer, I was not drunk and was, therefore, unable to convince myself (although I really tried) that Rick or Rick was interested in any aspect of my being other than what immediately met his eye. Charlotte suggested I take a trip to the keg, but I couldn't face the thought of meeting more Ricks in the kitchen where the Budweiser was flowing like ambrosia. Charlotte took me home early after that one, a little disappointed, I sensed, that I hadn't found a Rick to drive me.

At the second party (more beer, more Ricks, but this time there was dancing in the living room), Charlotte had an argument with her boyfriend and left, taking me with her, before we could really get settled in.

Charlotte took me to the third party to make up for the second where I hadn't “had a chance” to meet anyone. This last party was markedly different from the first two. For one thing, there was a bar with actual liquor available for anyone who wanted it. Charlotte, ever the aristocrat, got herself a gin and
tonic and set me up with a vodka and orange juice, the first of four I would end up drinking that night. The music was different here, too. The previous two parties had blasted the Rolling Stones, the Police, and the Pretenders. This one had the decidedly more laid-back Eagles humming along at a low volume. People seemed to be talking to each other as opposed to shouting, and were actually sitting down on chairs and couches instead of endlessly milling around a keg. Charlotte had made up with her boyfriend by then and was eager to spend some quality time with him. She left me in the living room with my drink and a guy whose name was Joe, not Rick, and melted into another part of the house.

Joe wanted to talk to me. He asked me the obligatory questions about where I was going to go to school and what I wanted to study, but he didn't stop there. He started to talk about what
he
was studying (English lit) and he asked me what books I liked to read. He asked me what music I liked to listen to. He was drinking Jack Daniels, straight up, and smoking Camel cigarettes. After the first drink, I thought he was interesting. After the second, I thought he was
deep
. After the third, I was in love. After the fourth, I was so drunk I had to lean on his arm to keep from falling as he walked me up the stairs to an available bedroom. I saw Charlotte sitting with her boyfriend on the stairs as I climbed them. They were a amalgam of arms, legs, and lips. Charlotte's boyfriend had one hand on one of her breasts and the other sliding up her thigh. I couldn't see where her hands were. As I passed her, she broke her lip lock and looked up at me. That look was the clearest thing I'd seen all night. It was surprised, pleased, and vindicated.
Good luck,
it said.
You're on your own from here
.

It was Joe who took me home that night, not Charlotte.

“Maybe you should give me your phone number or something,” he said as he dropped me off.

“Not necessary,” I told him. “It's okay.”

It was well after midnight, hours after I'd promised to be home, and I was terrified that my parents would still be awake when I crept into the house. I was deliriously relieved to find that all the lights were off and that nobody called my name when I locked the front door behind me. But when I slunk into my bedroom, the glare of Maya's reading lamp sliced into my eyes like a laser. She was wide awake, reading a romance novel, and eager to chat. She'd been waiting up for me.

“How was the party?” she said, bright as can be.

“It was okay,” I said very slowly.

“Must have been better than okay, you're home really late.”

“Uh-huh.” I was a deer stuck in the headlights of her questions.

“Are you
drunk
?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Not drunk. Tired. I just have to go to the bathroom now. I'll be right back.”

I sat on the bathroom floor, knees up, head down, for what seemed a spinning eternity. I fought, with every screaming-in-pain fiber of my body, to keep from retching into the toilet. It was essential that I not throw up, I told myself. Everybody would hear and the jig, all of it, would be up. To keep my mind off the nausea, I focused on the pain I was feeling in parts of my body I didn't even know existed.
Have to go back to my room,
I thought.
Have to pretend that everything's fine. Maya will know if I don't. Maya will know.
I tried to get up and get undressed, but the sight of my ruined underwear sent me back to the floor. Only then did I start to cry.

I never knew the real meaning of what it was to “collect” oneself until that night. Sitting in that bathroom, I had to make an effort to collect the sections I'd been split into and put them back into something that resembled the person I was before I'd gone to that party. I washed my face and brushed my teeth. I
drank water from the faucet. I went back into my bedroom. Maya had turned the light off and had curled into a lump on her bed. I could tell she was angry, even in the dark, even in my altered state. I could tell because she was Maya and there were things I knew about her without having to see and without being told. The same was true, had always been true, for her. And that, I assumed, was why she was angry.

I slid into my own bed as carefully as possible. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to be able to say
I did a stupid thing. I made a mistake.
I wanted to describe that look on Charlotte's face when I passed her on the stairs. I wanted her to help me figure it out. But none of that came out.

I said, “Good night, Maya.”

And she said, “Okay, good night.”

I fell asleep that night as I had for as long as I could remember, in a bedroom with my sister, the person who was at once closer to and further away from me than anyone else would ever be.

My actions that night were only the beginning of a long series of similar mistakes I would make. For the next seven years, though, I didn't have Maya around to hide them from. I had little direct contact with Maya over most of those years, even though I continued to live close to home. The distance between us didn't strike me as peculiar. Like so much of our relationship, it seemed to be a thing that had been arrived at by mutual, unspoken understanding.

In my freshman year at college, I invited Maya to come visit me a couple of times, but she never found it in the least bit appealing. Maya didn't view these excursions as a chance to get away from home and live it up. In fact, the opposite was true. She viewed the whole college scene (at least,
my
college scene) with the vague distaste I'd come to know so well. Far from initi
ating my sister or being in danger of leading her astray, I felt I had to set a good example for her and was forever letting her down in that respect. She didn't want to party, found my friends pretentious, and my boyfriends unworthy even of comment, although she never shared this with anyone else.

Just as she always had, Maya came to my defense when my parents had a breakdown over my moving in with my boyfriend at nineteen. They hated the whole situation, from top to bottom. Taken alone, they didn't mind the boyfriend, who was well-mannered and always pleasant around them. But the fact that I was shacking up with him was too much for them and he went on the hate list shortly thereafter. The fact that I was “living like a lowlife” was a constant topic of conversation in the family home for at least a year. I got to escape most of this, of course, living as I was in the house of sin, but Maya got an earful on a regular basis. She consistently refused to offer an opinion or a judgment on my behavior to my parents, even though she disagreed with what I was doing as well and didn't think much of the boyfriend, besides. I know this because, years later, when it had all blown over and there were other daughters to worry about, my mother told me how frustrating it was to get any kind of commiseration from Maya, no matter how hard she was pressed.

I think that Maya assumed I was more or less finished with my run of bad relationships by the time we moved in together when I was twenty-five. I'd pretty much hit the jackpot with the last one, John, who had left me alone to parent the child he didn't want me to have. Maya and I never discussed that relationship in depth, either, although she'd sat next to me for the nine months of my pregnancy, gone to childbirth classes with me, and stood by my side when I gave birth. “What do you need him for if he doesn't want to be there?” she said of John, but never offered much more of an opinion as to what she thought of him or my
inability to sustain our relationship. Instead, we attempted to write a romance novel together.

I was a writer in search of material at that point and Maya was a veteran romance reader. This was our way of talking about how we felt about love and men. Our effort turned out to be ineffective but quite enlightening. To begin with, we couldn't even agree with what our heroine would look like.

“You can't have a romance heroine with double D breasts,” Maya told me. “That can't be a defining physical characteristic.”

“Why not?” I questioned. “Maybe her big breasts have been a source of discomfort to her all her life. She got teased in high school. Everyone thought she was easy. Now she doesn't know whether or not men are attracted to her or her breasts. It's a problem.”

“No, no, no,” Maya said. “You've got it all wrong. She doesn't have any kind of past like that—not in this kind of book. And, anyway, it's not pornography, you can't talk about breasts.”

“Breasts are pornographic? What about when they have sex? Can you write about them then? Wait a minute, they
are
going to have sex, aren't they?”

“It depends on what kind of romance you're writing. In some of the romances, the couple doesn't actually get physical,” she said.

“
What
? What is the point, then?”

“Do you think sex is the necessary end point of everything?” she asked with severe disdain.