About My Sisters (18 page)

“Well, no, but I do think it's a necessary end point of a romance novel. Otherwise, how is her bodice going to get ripped?”

“A bodice ripper is a very specific kind of novel—and that's not what we're doing. Anyway, the point is
romance
, okay? They meet, they come together, they're forced apart, they suffer, they
come back together, they live happily ever after. Get it?”

“I get it. But that doesn't mean they don't have sex.”

“You know, perhaps if you didn't think the only conclusion was a sexual encounter, you'd…”

“I'd what?” I said.

“Nothing, never mind. This is a book, okay? It's a fantasy.”

“You're telling me,” I said. “Okay, fine.” On the paper where we'd decided to put down the physical attributes of our characters, I wrote,

“You know, if you're not going to take this seriously, we should just stop,” Maya said as she watched me write.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “But it has to have some grounding in reality, otherwise I can't write anything.”

“There's a formula,” Maya said. “You know what to expect. It's just the details that are different and that's what makes it interesting. Besides, people like it when things work out in books. They don't want to read about reality. That's why they like to read romance novels.”

“Maybe that's why
you
like to read them,” I said. She folded her arms across her chest, an extremely annoyed expression taking over her face.

“Do you want to do this or not?” she said.

“Yes, I want to,” I said. “Maybe you should just tell me what to write. That would be easier. Then I can just fill in the blanks, so to speak.”

“I can't tell you that!” She flushed. “You're the writer. I can
only tell you whether or not it's going to work.”

“All right, let's talk about the hero, then,” I said. “What's his name? Lance?”

“Again, if you're going to be facetious about the whole thing, it's not going to work. People will know if you're making fun of something while you're writing it.”

“
Okay
. What does he look like?”

“Well, of course he's got to be good-looking. They all are.”

“Can you give me more?”

“You can do that part.”

“Right, high cheekbones. Maybe a Native American look. Maybe Italian. No, not Italian, forget that. Strapping and muscle bound. He can close his big, manly hand around her waist. And what's he like?”

“He can be brooding,” she said. “Sometimes they're moody. You know, these guys, they just don't get it. That's usually why they don't get the girl right away.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Okay.” On our character page, I wrote,

Maya took a look at the sheet and turned to me with a look of utter finality on her face.

“Forget it,” she said. “We're done. We can't do this. It's obviously a bad idea.”

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Come on, let's get back to it. I'll try not to be so—um—realistic. Come on, I'm sorry, really.”

“No,” she said. “You're too cynical to write a romance. You have to like the concept, at least a little bit. You have to believe
that things really could work out in the end.”

She made a good point, but I felt compelled to argue it. I wasn't cynical, I claimed, merely practical. And I did believe that things could work out in the end. It was just that they often didn't. Maya shook her head in disagreement. If you don't think it will work out, then it won't, she said. One's orientation was everything. That, and the choices one made.

“What's better?” I asked her. “To take a chance and run the risk of making the wrong choice or play it safe and hope the right one just falls into your lap?”

“I guess it depends on how much you think you can take,” she said.

Therein lay the specific difference between the two of us. I was the romantic risk taker. She was so unwilling to make the wrong choice that she didn't choose at all. And it seemed that as long as we didn't talk about this, everything would be fine. And everything was fine, more or less, until I met a man who I thought fit the very happy ending Maya claimed I couldn't conceive of.

Maya, Blaze, and I had moved to California from Oregon three years earlier and were living in a two-bedroom apartment that was walking distance from the beach. We were working as waitresses, alternating shifts so that one of us was always home with Blaze. We'd set up a joint checking account and pooled all our cash. We split all of the household bills and made all of our big purchases together, including furniture, televisions, and a car. There was never a moment of stress in this arrangement, never a question of who would get what if we were to split the house. Splitting the house was not a consideration. Nor did we ever have a single argument about money. We were more stable and more egalitarian about the sharing of funds and household duties than most married couples—so much so that Déja (who
was fairly young when Maya and I first moved in together) told our mother that “if you and Daddy ever get a divorcement, I'm going to live with Debra and Maya.”

Aside from our family, though, most of the people we met at work or socially (often the same thing in the restaurant business) assumed that our relationship couldn't be as well balanced as it seemed and that one of us had to be taking advantage of the other. Usually, I was the person assumed to be taking advantage because I was older, I had Blaze, and Maya often shared in his care. How could that be an equal arrangement, most people questioned? Why would a single woman in her midtwenties want to spend any time at home taking care of her nephew? Why would she give any of her money to her sister? Why would she feel she had any obligation at all to that sister?

Despite what I knew to be true—that beyond the fact that we were sisters, Maya and I actually
liked
each other, enjoyed spending time together, and had a very similar worldview—I often questioned whether or not Maya was the loser in our relationship and whether I was taking advantage of her. I could never bring myself to ask her directly, though, for fear she'd agree that I was. Instead, I tried to make sure that everything was as fair as possible. For a few years after we moved in together, I made more money than Maya and so I put more into the joint kitty. I kept Blaze's expenses separate and paid for those myself. I was the one with credit at that point, so it was always my name that those expenditures went under. And I rarely went out unless it was to work. Maya didn't stay home with Blaze while I was out gallivanting.

Still, I wondered if, somewhere, there was resentment building in Maya that she wasn't even aware of herself. Julian, the man she started dating around this time, didn't do anything to disabuse me of this notion. Julian, who was closer in age to our father than he was to Maya, wasn't particularly interested in
becoming one of the family. His view was that Maya wasn't nearly autonomous enough and he found her attachment to her family puzzling. He preferred his own space to anyone else's and so didn't hang out at our house (he wasn't really the “hanging” type anyway). He didn't come to family dinners. His relationship with Maya didn't unfold under the scrutiny of the family eye. As was her usual way, Maya kept it close to the vest, steadfastly refusing to talk about it until the refusal itself became her primary source of communication where her love life was concerned. And, as was my usual way, I didn't press her for details and was left to come to my own conclusions.

I didn't have much inclination to discuss Maya's relationship, however, because around this time, I met Norman and all things domestic underwent a seismic shift. Actually, to say I met him is a bit misleading. I already knew Norman and even had a brief but intense romance with him ten years earlier when I was a college freshman. I took that romance very seriously, but Norman was in love with someone else, quickly dumped me, and disappeared. I was crushed and dealt with the heartbreak by drinking one too many homemade piña coladas and threatening to throw myself off my second-floor dorm-room balcony. It took my roommate telling me repeatedly, “You know, you'll probably just break an ankle or something,” and at least three rotations of the Rolling Stones's “Can't You Hear Me Knockin'” on her turntable to finally get me to come back inside where more piña coladas were waiting. It wasn't one of my prettiest moments. It was, however, one I never forgot and so I never forgot Norman either. When he showed up one day (directed to me by a mutual friend), it seemed like kismet.

This was precisely where Maya was wrong about me. I wasn't cynical at all. I loved the idea that a man from my past had fallen into my present and that he was saying things like, “Where have you been all this time?” Ten years later, the timing
was finally right and he was in love with me. What's more, he considered the fact that I had a child, whom he seemed truly fond of, an asset. And he liked my family—every last one of them. It was heady and romantic in the extreme and I was completely caught up in the thrill of it all.

And what did Maya think of this? Although she tried mightily to hide it, she didn't particularly like or trust Norman. There was something about him that struck her as emotionally unreliable, but she swallowed her uneasiness. She was even more a sucker for a happy ending than I was and my delirious happiness was as beguiling to her as it was to me.

Norman was living in New York. We'd reconnected because he'd come to California on business. For the next year, we had a bicoastal courtship. Every couple of months, one of us would fly out to see the other. We had teary scenes at airports, walks through summer rainstorms, and afternoons at the beach—all the elements of a good romance novel, or perhaps a romantic film. By the end of that year, because we simply could not bear to be apart any longer, Norman decided to move to California. We pledged total commitment to each other. We wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. It was love, love, love.

I was convinced that this was forever.

Maya and I went looking for a house to rent for the four of us and when Norman arrived, we had already moved in. We never considered splitting up our household and moving anywhere separately. Forever, at least as I saw it, included Maya.

The philosophical, charitable term for what happened over the next twelve months would be
life lesson
or, perhaps,
learning experience
. I prefer the word
disaster
, which seems much more in keeping with what it actually felt like. The romantic in me died hard that year as all the elements of the dreamy happy ending I had envisioned collapsed and came apart like the house of cards that it was. I can't say that everything went wrong right
away. More accurately, nothing was ever right.

Almost immediately, Norman started complaining about the house, the neighborhood, and the state of California in general. It was too suburban, too uptight, too fake, too
neat
. “This isn't who I am,” he said over and over again. “I'm not the kind of guy who mows the lawn.” This was a one-eighty from his position of the year before which was that he couldn't wait to leave the urban decay of New York City. Then the problem was everything was too spread out. There were no subways, nowhere to walk. Every excursion required a car. And I didn't drive, which had been kind of cute the year before, but was now a problem for him. He didn't like the fact that I waited on tables, thought it was low class, but it was the only steady income either of us was producing because, relegated as he was to the backwoods of southern California, there was no work to be had for him. And this wasn't all. The problems continued to pile up like bags of garbage that nobody wanted to take out. My vegetarianism became a problem, despite the fact that I'd made clear that it was the one, the
only
, issue that I would never compromise. I wouldn't eat meat, wouldn't cook it, and wouldn't have it in the house. Whatever he ate outside the house was fine with me. The year before this had been fine, even an admirable show of principle, but now it had turned into an indictment of him. Even worse, he claimed I was denying him proper nutrition by not allowing burgers, steaks, and ribs to be cooked in our kitchen. And how was he supposed to find a job or function as a human being when he was practically starving?

Inevitably, Blaze became an issue as well. Norman felt he was undisciplined and needed a firmer hand. His child-rearing strategies were in direct opposition to Maya's, who resented the fact that he even felt he had the right to an opinion on the matter. In my absence, Maya felt justifiably proprietary where Blaze was concerned. To say that she and Norman argued would be
overstating. It was more like mutual, slowly seething antipathy. Of course, it was neither fair nor possible to expect me to take a side between Norman and Maya, each of whom complained to me about the other. Usually, I just ended up in tears, which drove Norman out of the house and Maya into her room.

And then there was Norman's cat, the most telling problem of all. That ugly, evil-tempered bastard of a cat became a metaphor for everything that was wrong with our relationship and an accurate predictor of how it would all end up. I am not an animal hater, although since I'd lost my hamster to Marlon's feline appetite, I hadn't been a real lover of cats. I'd also always been slightly suspicious of single men who owned cats. But Norman was attached to that cat, a purebred something-or-other gift from his mother, and didn't want to leave it behind in New York. Fine, I thought, love the man, love his cat.