About My Sisters (24 page)

I still couldn't understand why she seemed so agitated. I
would have been extremely surprised if Blaze had just hopped into a go-cart and driven around like he'd been born to the road. He's never been a particularly well coordinated kid. Then it finally made sense to me. This was nothing new for me, but for Lavander, who hadn't experienced it directly and who had the highest expectations for Blaze to be just like everybody else, it must have been like a shock of cold water.

“You can't give up,” I said. “He'll be able to do this and he'll be able to drive someday. He just needs more practice than most people. I don't want him to be afraid or to think that he can't do it because you think he can't do it. If that happens, he really won't be able to.”

“I wouldn't have thought you'd want me to take him again after this,” she said.

“A scraped knee is really not a big deal,” I said.

“Oh, but you don't know what he said to me when it happened,” she said. “He told me, ‘You are a terrible aunt. I've injured myself and my mother will never let me go out with you again.'”

“What!?!”

“Oh yes,” she said. “He went
off
on how much trouble I was going to be in.”

“What a manipulator, to deflect blame onto you! Why would I be angry at you? If anything, I'd be annoyed at him for not being more careful. And he probably feels like he let you down. I can't believe this child. You've been played.”

“Hmm,” she said, but she was unconvinced. I stood out there for several more minutes, leaning into her car, stressing again how it didn't matter at all to me that he'd gotten into a collision, how important it was that he try it again, and how vital it was that she be the one to take him. And he definitely needed to apologize to her for being such a jerk, I told her. Most definitely.

“I don't know, Deb,” she said finally. “I just don't know.”

The following weekend, she took him again. This time he drove extraordinarily slowly, prompting Lavander to laugh. But he didn't crash and he was ever so slightly more coordinated.

It was because Blaze intuitively understood Lavander that he knew which buttons to press that day at the go-cart track and he pressed them because he hates the thought that she might be disappointed in him. Most often, he is extremely careful with her. More careful, in fact, than he is with anyone else. “Lavander is a very sensitive person,” he told me once. “It's important to be nice to her.”

“It's important to be nice to everybody,” I responded.

“But it's especially important for Lavander,” he said.

In the last year, Lavander and Blaze have become much closer than they were before. She tells me that Blaze is “good company,” one of her most important criteria. “I really enjoy spending time with him,” she says. “I can talk to him about anything.” I don't ask her or Blaze what the two of them talk about when they are together. I consider it both private and precious. All I need is what I already know, that Lavander will always challenge Blaze to be the best person he can be in terms of his awareness of himself in the world, and along with that, will always be there, believing in him.

I see the two of them in my mind's eye now, Blaze with his long arm swung around Lavander's little shoulders, and smile to myself. One of the flight attendants is walking by my seat and takes my grin as a silent request for another complimentary beverage.

“No, thank you,” I tell her. “I'm fine.” This is a short flight and it's almost over. I'll be home soon. Maya and Blaze will be there to pick me up.

 

I've done quite a bit of traveling to promote my books over the last couple of years. Whenever possible, I've taken Maya and Blaze with me, but most often I go solo. I always miss them when I am on the road alone. The three of us have been a unit for a long time and, with the two of them, I can always find my center. This level of comfort notwithstanding, taking them on the road for a book tour wasn't the best idea for any of us. Still, there was never a shortage of hilarious moments and I wouldn't have traded one second of those adventures.

The first time, in August of 2000, the three of us flew to San Francisco together, where I had a few appearances scheduled to promote
Waiting
. To start, I gave a lunchtime reading in a bookstore in the middle of the city. The crowd was a decent size but totally unenthusiastic and I started to sweat. Blaze and Maya were seated exactly in front of me, a few rows back so that whenever I looked up from the page to make eye contact, they were who I saw first. Thus, it was impossible not to notice the scuffle over my mother's new digital camera that broke out between the two of them while I was in the middle of my reading. Maya held fast to the camera while Blaze attempted to tear it from her hand. Back and forth they went. Their chairs started to rock with the effort. Any second, I thought, one of them is going to scream and then I'm going to have to die right here. I looked back down at the page, still reading (albeit a bit louder), and could smell the stink of fear coming off me in waves.

When I opened the floor to questions, Blaze's hand was the first to pop up. I refused to call on him because I was almost positive that he had some sort of non sequitur cued up (“When do we get to ride on BART?” for example) that would further estrange this already apathetic crowd.

“Why didn't you take Blaze's question?” Maya asked me when it was all over. I rolled my eyes as if that would be answer enough. “He had a good question,” she said. “He wanted to know if you ever served old bread.”

“With bites taken out of it,” Blaze added.

“Well, how would I have known that?” I asked Maya, sotto voce.

“You know I wouldn't have let him ask it if it wasn't a good question” she said. “Don't you?”

“I don't know,” I said, “it seemed like you were too busy fighting over the camera to be discussing the questions.”

Maya shook her head. “You should have called on him,” she said.

There was a similar scene the next day when I had a radio interview at one of San Francisco's biggest stations. To begin with, we arrived late, having run twenty minutes from the BART station without any clue as to where we were going. I left the two of them in the waiting room when I went into the studio and assumed they were settled. Well into my hour-long interview, I turned slightly to look into the control booth behind me and saw a frantic struggle between my son and my sister over what looked suspiciously like the kill switch for the whole broadcast. From the corner of my eye, it seemed very much like one of those cartoon fights where all you see is a rolling ball of arms, legs, dust, and feathers. I turned my head back to face the host and finished the show, expecting, at any minute, to hear the glass breaking behind me and the two of them to come crashing through. I was surprised, then, when I saw the two of them smiling broadly when I was reunited with them after the show. Blaze flashed a cassette with great pride. He and Maya had been invited into the recording studio where he'd recorded a long monologue about his adventures on BART.

“What the hell was going on back there?” I asked Maya. “I almost had a heart attack when I saw the two of you.”

“Why would you worry?” she said. “Don't you think I've got it under control?”

Despite the madness of that jaunt to San Francisco, we decided to try it again the following summer. This time, the three of us flew to Portland where I was starting a West Coast loop. I scheduled a couple of free days before the tour began in earnest so that we could walk around the city and visit all the places we used to live. I thought I'd take advantage of Blaze's constant desire to revisit the past and show him where he was born and where he spent the first year of his life. I hadn't been to Portland since we'd moved to California thirteen years before. Maya and I christened the trip the Memory Lane Tour.

Again, it wasn't the smoothest of visits. Blaze had an almost total lack of interest in seeing where we used to live, work, or go to school. He didn't want to see old friends or visit any of the three homes my family had lived in. What he did want was to ride on every form of public transportation Portland had to offer (including buses, trolleys, and trains). But this was minor. The most pressing problem was that Blaze couldn't find a single thing in the entire city that appealed to his palate.

“I don't eat in other states,” he announced after gagging over a plate of restaurant pasta. Maya was on me like white on rice after this pronouncement. How could we stay for two more days if he wasn't going to eat anything, she wanted to know. Why wasn't I doing anything about this? What was wrong with me—didn't I care?

Well, of course I
cared
, I told her, but to myself I had to admit that I relaxed in my motherhood when Maya was with me, especially when we were all away from home. In Maya, I felt as if I had a partner who could pick up the slack where
Blaze was concerned. After all, aside from me, who knew him better? Who else had been as close to him since the day of his birth?

It is nearly impossible to give a name to who Maya is for Blaze. For example, although she's been very much like his parent, she has never been a surrogate mother to him. Maya doesn't play the role of father for Blaze, either. She is his aunt, yes, but to give that as her title is to understate their relationship. Blaze has never called her Aunt Maya or Auntie Maya. Occasionally, he accidentally calls her Mom and then follows it hastily with “No, Maya. I meant
Maya
.” He used to get very embarrassed when this happened, as if he'd made a grave mistake, but these days he just corrects himself and moves on to call her what she is, simply Maya, an entity to herself. In a way, this echoes the way Maya and I refer to each other. When Maya mentions our sisters in conversations with others, they are “my sister, Lavander,” or “my sister, Déja.” When she refers to me, it is always just as “my sister.” I never even put “sister” before her name when I talk about her. She is the part of me who is Maya. This, too, is the closest I can come to a definition for who she is to Blaze. And this is why I had the luxury of relaxing somewhat when it started to look as if Blaze was going on a three-day hunger strike in Portland. Maya was there, after all. It would work out.

This past summer, the logistics of my travel made it impossible for Maya and Blaze to come with me, as I was scheduled for a two-week tour covering both coasts. Long before I left, Maya and Blaze went into planning mode, discussing everything they'd like to do while I was gone. Eventually, Maya told Blaze to type up a list and post it on the fridge so that they could check off each item as they went. By the time I packed my suitcase, the list was already up, taped discreetly to the side of the fridge.

Things to do when Mom is gone:

• 1. Go to Disneyland
  
• 2. Make curried lentils
  
• 3. Karaoke
  
• 4. Explore the places you went to do concerts and see where you go for orchestra
  
• 5. Go in the pool with clothes on
  
• 6. Get the video camera fixed
  
• 7. Make bagels
  
• 8. Sing the songs that you and Mom wrote
  

The list made me laugh and it almost made me cry. It occurred to me that it could just as easily be titled “Things I could do with Mom but are
so much better
with Maya.” “These are great,” Maya told Blaze when she read his list. “We can do all of these. If you want, we can even add some more.”

When my sisters are asked whether or not they plan to have children of their own (and they are all at an age where this kind of question tends to come up fairly frequently), they have some interesting responses. Déja says she wants to have children
for sure
. Someday. Lavander is realizing that she doesn't and is in the process of reconciling this choice with what she feels (and I agree) is a societal imperative to reproduce. And Maya? Maya says that she doesn't need to have children. She's had Blaze, she says, and that is enough for her.

I am holding this thought in my head as the pilot announces our imminent arrival in America's Finest City and we start our descent. The nuts on my tray table remain unopened and so I grab them and stuff them into my bag. The plane lands and I walk outside into the warm California sun. I stand with my bag at my feet for five minutes or so before I spy Maya and Blaze
pulling up to the airport curb. Blaze gets out of the car, surrendering his coveted spot in the front seat for me.

“Hi, Mom,” he says without coming in for a kiss or a hug. It's always like this when I come back from a trip. He likes to check me out for a second or two, make sure I haven't grown a second head or a third arm in my absence and am still the mom he knows.

“Hi, honey,” I say, and give him a big, squeezing hug. “Missed you.”

I settle into the front seat and Maya looks over at me with a small smile. “Hiya,” she says. “How was the flight?”

“Fine,” I tell her.

Nobody speaks for the next few minutes. We shift and readjust to each other as I move into the space that Blaze and Maya create around themselves when I am gone. Maya hits the play button for the CD and the song that's been going through my head since I woke up this morning comes ringing through the speakers. I turn my head and smile at Blaze.

“You guys have a good time while I was gone?” I ask him.

“Yeah,” he says. “We made an excellent cake. We made
white
frosting, Mom, because, as you know, I don't like chocolate.”

“So, I guess you didn't get to your science homework then?”

Blaze and Maya give each other a quick, guilty glance.

“You know, that's really not our thing,” Maya says.

I do know and I'm glad it's not their thing. What they have is so much better. I have a sudden, unexpected wave of sadness for my mother. Her sister was never to us what mine are to Blaze. A big part of the joy I have in my sisters is tied to the love they have for my son and the roles they play in his life. My mother never got to experience that particular form of joy and for that I am sorry in so many ways. I can only hope that she gains some of what she missed through her daughters, my sisters, three exceptional aunties.