About My Sisters (26 page)

“Look, look!” I said. “I fit into Lavander's jeans. I'm so excited about this.”

“That jacket looks great on you, Déj,” Lavander said, ignoring my happy outburst.

“It does, doesn't it?” Déja said. “You know, I really need a jacket.”

“You can't have it,” Lavander said. “The tag is still on it. I've never even worn it. And you know how much I paid for it.”

“Are you sure?” Déja said. “I really, really need a jacket.”

“Déja!”

“Okay,” Déja said, and took it off. “Pity. We'd better go downstairs now. They're all gearing up for the karaoke.” She handed the jacket off to Lavander and left the room.

I'd finished putting the jeans on and off by then and stacked them all in a neat pile on Lavander's bed. “Thank you so much for these,” I told her. “I can't tell you how much time and trouble you've saved me.”

“You're welcome,” Lavander said. She stood looking at the overpriced jacket in her hand for a second or two as if she were solving a puzzle in her head. “Déja!” she called, and, in a moment, Déja popped her head back in the door.

“Here,” Lavander said, handing her the jacket, “you can have it.”

“What? Really?”

“It looks better on you anyway,” Lavander sighed.

Déja enveloped Lavander in a hug and squealed with delight. “That was quick,” she said to me. “Usually she waits a day or two before she gives it to me. Thank you, Lavy. You're the best sister in the world.” She winked at me. “But don't tell the others,” she said.

The three of us headed downstairs then, Déja and I laden with our gifts and crowing about how happy we were. It was like going to a store, we told the gathered crowd, and finding everything you want for free. Even better, I said, was discovering that I was small enough to fit into Lavander's jeans. I considered it a personal best. I held my stack of jeans up in a victory salute.

“Looks like you scored, huh?” Tony said to me, and there it was again, that note of familiarity and my ensuing discomfort. What was it that was bothering me, I wondered, and why didn't I know?

Maya had set up the karaoke machine in the middle of the living room and was no longer accepting refusals to sing from anyone. My mother offered to go first, but Maya offered the microphone to Tony and pointed out the songs she thought he might like. Tony begged off, saying that he had to leave and go to his second dinner. Lavander asked him if he would come back afterward and he said he didn't think so. She asked him why not and he said he thought it might be too late. He said good-bye to all of us and Lavander went outside to see him off. She shut the door behind her and a brief ripple and murmur went through the room. Would have been nice if he'd stayed, somebody said. He's got family to see, someone else countered. Still, the consensus went, for Lavander's sake he could have stayed a little longer.

When she came back inside, Lavander took her place on the couch and even did a rousing karaoke rendition of “Baby Got Back” which made everybody laugh, but her heart wasn't really in it. Nor, it turned out, was anyone else's. Déja refused to sing anything and Danny complained the songs were scripted incorrectly on the screen. After a couple of tunes, people started criticizing each other's ability to follow the music, read the lyrics, and pick songs that were in an appropriate range. Bo and Lavander got into it over one of these items and then he left in a huff,
signaling the beginning of the end of the party. Maya and I decided that, rather than waiting for the little smoldering disagreements to ignite into a major conflagration, we should leave while the going was still relatively good. Knowing when to leave, in my opinion, is as much an art as anything else.

 

It's been pretty quiet around here over the last few days since our Thanksgiving dinner. Maya got some sort of stomach ailment right afterward and spent the next day in bed. My feeling was that her disorder was psychosomatic, spurred by karaoke disappointment, but I would never have mentioned that. As always, she accused me of being cold and unfeeling while she was sick.

“How is it you don't even come in and offer me a cup of tea?” she said.

“You hide out in your room with the door closed,” I told her. “If you were out in the living room, I'd be happy to make you some tea.”

“So I should lie on the couch in my sickness and bring everyone else down?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can't come running into your room.”

“As usual,” she said, “you're the very soul of compassion.”

She's back on her feet now and off rehearsing with her orchestra. Blaze is in his room, watching a movie, finished with me for the evening. I decide to call Lavander to say hello and see how she's feeling.

“What's the matter?” she says when she answers the phone and finds out I'm on the other end.

“Nothing's the matter,” I tell her. “I just called to see how you were doing. To see what's up. Why does something have to be the matter?”

“Well, it's just that you never call,” she says. “So I figured something's got to be wrong.”

“Come on, Lavander, that's not true. I do call, you just don't ever answer your phone. Anyway, I'm calling you
now
, so let's get on with it, okay? How's it going?”

She tells me that things are fine, but that she's starting to get busy now. There are all kinds of Christmas parties coming up through work, she says, and she has to go to every one of them whether she wants to or not. And then there are the gifts she has to buy and they have to be
nice;
she can't buy anything cheap for her managers. Do I have any ideas, she wants to know. I suggest gift baskets and she laughs. Gift baskets are nothing special, she says. She gives a gift basket practically every day. I tell her I can't think of anything else because I'm so out of the loop. I have no idea what goes on the business world that she's in and I don't know how she does it. Then she tells me she's glad that I called, actually, because she's been thinking that she wants to do something creative on the side. She's been thinking about writing something, she says, but she doesn't know how or where to start.

“You know I get all these magazines,” she says, referring to her subscriptions to
Glamour
,
Cosmo
,
Elle
, and a host of others, “and I read these articles and think I could write them just as well if not better.”

“You probably could,” I tell her. “You know those women's magazine issues better than anyone I know.”

“But I wouldn't want to write anything
personal
,” she says. “That's the real problem, I guess. When I think about writing, I get so self-conscious. Like, who cares what
I
think?”

“You can't let that stop you if you want to write,” I tell her. “It's not like you're under contract to write an article or a book that somebody's going to critique. If you want to write, you should just do it. Nobody has to see it, anyway. Write for yourself. Sometimes writing is the best way to work things out.”

She's not convinced. She tells me that she doesn't want to write a journal, that she's not into that touchy-feely kind of thing.
She needs an assignment, she says, and can I give her one? Then she can write it and maybe I could look at it for her and tell her what I think. She knows how busy I am writing my own stuff, she says, but maybe I could take a little time and help her. I tell her I'd never be too busy to help her and I think it's a great idea and, of course, I'd be more than happy to look at anything she writes. I tell her that she should write an article about waxing.

“Waxing?” she says. “What is there to say about that?”

“Plenty,” I tell her. “This is something you really know about. Remember when you told me that women
my age
don't go for the same kinds of extreme waxing as women your age? I think you should write about how the standards of beauty are always changing. Waxing is just a part of that, but it makes a good lead-in to the rest.”

“Hmm,” she says. “I could do that. That's a good idea. So if I write something tonight and e-mail it to you, will you look at it?”

“Of course,” I tell her.

“I'm going to do it,” she says, “as soon as we get off the phone.” There is a small pause and I swear I can hear a shift in her tone before she even speaks again. “I need to ask you something,” she says.

“Yes?”

“Why don't you like Tony?”

“What? Who said I didn't like Tony? Where did that come from?”

“Come on, Debra, it was totally obvious at Thanksgiving. Everybody could tell. Everybody. Except Tony. He didn't notice, thank goodness, but it was plain to everybody else.”

“I don't know what you mean,” I tell her, scrambling frantically through possible responses to her impossible question, wondering if there's any way I'll get out of this conversation without making her angry. She's halfway there already as it is, that
note of stridency I know so well insinuating itself into her voice. “I was perfectly nice to Tony at Thanksgiving,” I tell her.

“Well, you weren't outright
rude
, if that's what you mean,” she says, “but you were definitely not nice. It was all over your face. And I don't know why. Why don't you like him?”

“Why do you care whether or not I like him?” I ask her, avoiding the question and knowing that she'll be right there to call me on it. “It doesn't matter whether or not I like him. It only matters if you like him.”

“Bullshit,” she says. “I want to know what he's ever done to you.”

“He hasn't done anything to me. I don't even know the guy, Lavander. Which is why it makes me a little uncomfortable that he seems to know a lot about me.”

Now it's her turn to ask me what I mean, so I tell her that, if she must know, it's slightly upsetting to me that she shares information with Tony that I've given her in confidence. She is a little startled by this and tells me that she really didn't think it was that big of a deal, that there wasn't any malice in it, and that I'm so open and out there about everything in the first place.

“Not everything,” I tell her.

“Well, I'm sorry,” she says, her tone clearly indicating that she isn't, “but that doesn't excuse your behavior.”

“What behavior are you talking about?”

“Just ask Déja.”

“What's Déja got to do with this?”

“After you left, she told me that you didn't like Tony. She told me that it was really obvious.”

“I don't believe that. She wouldn't say a thing like that, she's got no reason to.”

“I wish she was on the phone right now,” Lavander says. “She'd tell you.”

“Don't worry, I plan to ask her myself!”

I realize that I've raised my voice to match the pitch of hers and that this is as good an indicator as any that we are no longer having a conversation but a full-blown argument. I tell her to calm down, that we need to talk about this like adults, and that means lowering our voices. I reiterate that what I think of Tony is irrelevant, that what matters is that she's happy in her relationship.
If
she's happy, I stress. Because as everybody knows, I tell her, she hasn't exactly been happy in this relationship most of the time.

“How do you know?” she says. “How do you know whether or not I'm happy or what goes on between the two of us?”

I know I should let this go. I should just shine it on, tell her she's right, and move on. But I can't. I just can't let it go.

“Lavander, how many times have you been miserable during this relationship? Think about it.”

“I had one breakdown,” she counters. “So what? Everything's been fine. Everything is fine now.”

“Look, all I know about Tony is what
you've
told me. And if you tell me you're unhappy, if you're crying on the phone—”

“Crying on the phone? How about you? How about when you called me hysterically weeping when you were—”

“First of all, I wasn't hysterically weeping. Second of all, this isn't about me! This is about you and what you tell me. You can't expect everybody else to bounce back like you do. Your relationship with Tony, for whatever reasons—and no, I don't know what they all are—has been tempestuous, and everyone's been there to share that with you.”

“Tempestuous? Do you even know what you're talking about? This is the way I am. I'm an emotional person, I have highs and lows. We can't all be as
cold
as you, you know. I have
tempestuous
relationships with everybody in my life. I have a tempestuous relationship with my boss, okay? That's just who I am.”

“All I know is what you tell me, Lavander. If you complain
about Tony, if you're upset with the way things are going, why wouldn't I take that to heart? Why would I like him in the face of that?”

“Well, why do you have to listen to me all the time? Why do you have to take everything I say so seriously?”

“You're going to make me nuts,” I tell her. “Listen to you, don't listen to you. What you're saying now doesn't make any sense.”

“Well, I'm telling you that this is the way it is. I love him.”

“Fine, I'm glad you're happy now and I'm glad everything's okay.”

“You've got no reason not to like him,” she goes on. “If you knew him, if you'd spent some time with him, you'd have a right to an opinion.”

“Listen, Lavander, I liked him fine when I first met him. In fact, I liked him more than you did. You didn't even like him that much when you first started seeing him. He was a second-best for you. Don't you remember?”

“You're crazy, do you know that?” she spits. “Where do you get this from?
Do you just make this shit up as you go along or what
? I don't know what reality you're living in, Debra, but it's got nothing to do with mine. It's all in your own head. It's your creation.”