About My Sisters (3 page)

There was a certain quirkiness to Grandma that I see reflected in Lavander, as well as what I can only describe as an orderly, precise kind of sadness. Lavander had just turned four when Grandma had her sixtieth birthday and she remembers nothing of that day, but for me, it stands out in sharp relief. Grandma wasn't particularly thrilled to be turning sixty in the first place and didn't seem very jovial, but she went through the motions of having a birthday celebration convincingly enough. It was the only time we would ever celebrate her birthday together; before and after that year we would always be living in different places when it came around.

That afternoon, Grandma was wearing a cream-colored sweater set, belted at the waist, and matching slacks. Sometime around four or so, she took her cigarettes and went into the large walk-in closet off the living room where we kept the stereo. She sat there in the dark for a long time, smoking and listening to Billie Holliday as one tear followed another in wet tracks down her face. She let them go, let her cheeks soak with them. All the time, her only movement was the lift of a cigarette to her lips. I watched the glowing coal between her pearl-painted fingertips as it went back and forth and down to the ashtray. At thirteen, it was the first time I really felt the silent weight of adult sorrow. Grandma had been dealt some difficult cards in her lifetime. She'd lost her first child, a daughter, to pneumonia. Her husband had died young, leaving her a widow in her forties. She never remarried. These were the events I knew about, but I sensed that there were more under the surface. She could have been crying about any one of them. What struck me even more than the intimacy of grief, though, was the utter
femaleness
of it.
It was something always present in Grandma, but never as much displayed as it was that day. Lavander has none of the same life experiences as Grandma at this point, yet I can see it in her, that same kind of controlled female pain.

Lavander is looking at me now, asking me something, drawing me out of my reverie.

“What?” I ask dimly.

“I said, you should try it. Why not?”

“The waxing thing? Never. I'm still mad at you for convincing me to wax my upper lip. I can't stand it, it's the most painful thing and now I have to keep doing it every few weeks because it keeps growing in.”

“Oh no, you really had to do it. You had a mustache, a thick one.”

“I did not,” I whine, instinctively touching my upper lip. “I just allowed you to talk me into it because I'm insecure.”

“Didn't you
finally
start seeing someone after you got rid of that 'stache?”

“Two years later,” I tell her. “You know, I think you have a problem with hair.”

And it's not over, this hair/no hair debate, not by a long shot, because now Maya has reappeared in the kitchen and Lavander is in there after her, going through the same maneuvers, attempting to bring her over to the side of the hairless.

“Oh no,” I hear Maya say. “No, please don't show—oh no, that's awful.”

“Sisters!” Déja bursts through the door with her customary greeting. (Nobody knocks when they come here, they just immediately turn the door handle. If it's not locked, they stride right in. If it's locked, there's a second or two of angry pounding as if to say, “You
knew
we were coming over, so why is this door locked?”).

“Déja!” Maya exclaims in response.

“Hey, Déja, come look at this,” Lavander says, “I got a Brazilian.”

“Where's Danny?” I ask.

“He's coming with Bo, because I have to leave early,” Déja says, giving me a kiss on the cheek. Déja has been the most physically affectionate sister since her earliest infancy. As a baby, she was constantly smothered with kisses and hugs of which she could never get enough. She's the same way now; at twenty-four she's unable to enter a family room without a kiss and a hug for everyone present. When she exits, it's the same, except she always combines the kisses with an I-love-you, something she never leaves out of her phone conversations either. Lavander is big on saying “I love you” also, will do a nice job of air-kissing from time to time, and isn't above the occasional embrace, but it's not a priority like it is with Déja. Maya is very affectionate with Déja and sometimes with Lavander, but I can't remember the last time she and I exchanged either a hug or a kiss. Even when we were very little, Maya and I weren't very physically demonstrative with each other. We were just too close. Kissing her is like kissing myself. And the number of times we have
said
we love each other in our lifetimes can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But not Déja, who seems to need these expressions of love and who soaks them up like a sponge. We indulge her, this baby of the family who, at five feet seven, towers over her sisters who are between five feet and five feet two. She moves among us now, bestowing kisses, laughing at Lavander's wax obsession, and proclaiming that she is “absolutely starving.”

For a few minutes, we four sisters are by ourselves. Although we speak to each other every day and see each other almost as often, it is a rare occurrence for all of us to be in the same room without the rest of our family. It's an unstable combination, this quartet. Astrologically, we have all the elements covered: fire
(Déja, the Sagittarius), earth (Lavander, the Virgo), air (me, the Gemini), and water (Maya, the Pisces). Conventional astrological wisdom would assume a balance in this combination, a flow of disparate but complementary energies. But most often we form a tight square when we are together, each one of us protecting her own corner, holding fast to a pattern shaped by birth order, personality, and the gravity of inertia. When there are only two or even three of us together, we are able, with some effort, to reach out past our positions, but when we are four, our combined elements are often more like oil and water, salt and sugar, or gunpowder and spark. Predictably volatile, in other words. The only question is what will be the trigger.

Lavander is still going on about her waxing. This time, she's cornered Déja whose friend Katie is the one who performed the actual tearing out of hair.

“How can she do that?” Lavander wants to know. “How can she get all over people's crotches without getting sick? And she's totally cool about it, says it doesn't bother her at all.”

“Well, it
is
her job,” Déja says. “But, you know, I'm angry at her and I don't want to talk about how great she is because she has
not
been a good friend to me lately.”

“Well, can you please make up with her?” Lavander says testily.

This is something of a hallmark of my sisters' and my relationship with the rest of the world. If one of us is happy with a hairstylist, doctor, or beautician, the rest of us will usually patronize that person as well. Business from one of us almost always translates to business from us all. Conversely, if one of us has a bad experience with any of the above, there is pressure for all of us to drop out. Katie is proving to be a sticky exception. Déja has known Katie since high school (and she's shared many family meals with us), but their friendship has always been a bit erratic. They're on the outs now, but Lavander and Maya have
become so enthralled with her skills as a beautician that they've even offered to go in on a portable wax pot for her so that she can make house calls.

“I'm not going to stop going to her,” Lavander says now with a touch of stridency creeping into her voice, “so I hope you can work it out.”

“Do what you like,” Déja says. “I don't care.”

But of course she
does
care and Lavander knows it. If the current tiff isn't worked out, Lavander, who is fiercely loyal, especially to her
baby
sister, will have to find someone else. This is always the bottom line.

“Where's Blaze?” Déja says.

“In his room,” I answer. This is Blaze's usual pattern when everyone comes over here. He stays in his room and lets everybody come to him, one by one. Individually, he has a completely different relationship with each one of my sisters, and seeing them one at a time allows him to control the conversation more easily than when they are in a group. Blaze is no fool; he wised up to the “Who's your favorite auntie?” question when he was still a baby. “You are,” he'd say. “But don't tell the others.”

“Well, I'm going to go say hello to him,” Déja says and disappears down the hall.

There is a too-brief silence before Maya says, “I'm making macaroni and cheese, I hope you can handle it.” She turns to Lavander. “Don't tell me you're not hungry.”

‘Why? Do I have to leave if I'm not hungry? Will you throw me out?”

A preemptive strike and a counterpunch. Should be an interesting evening.

“I'm just saying, I've made a lot of food here,” Maya backpedals, “and I want it to get eaten. Because you know what it's like living with Debra. She never eats anything. Doesn't believe in meals.”

A brilliant deflection. Now I'm in the fray, too.

“It's true,” Lavander says, turning to me. “I never see you eat. You have food issues.”

“Oh, please,” I sigh. “I do not. I just can't eat continuously or think about eating all the time. Three meals a day is too many for me.”

“That isn't normal,” Lavander says. “Those are not normal eating habits.”

“Oh, like yours are normal,” I tell her. I cast a glance over her tiny little frame, her birdlike ankles and wrists. Lavander and I are the same height, but she's a full size smaller than I am and I am fairly light at the moment. She's been losing too much weight lately, on the verge of trading trim for gaunt. “You don't eat properly either,” I tell her.

I am hoping against hope that this discussion doesn't go any further because then we'll surely get into the topic of smoking, at which point Lavander will accuse me of doing what she does, smoking on the sly. There are many ex and secret smokers in my family, but Lavander and I are the only two who have smoked to keep our weight down. When she told me recently that the most effective diet she knew of involved a few bottles of water and a pack of cigarettes, I had to tell her that I'd already discovered it many years ago. “Throw in a heartbreak,” I added, “and Bob's your uncle. Skinny in no time.” Maya and Déja don't share this neurosis, although both of them, like every woman I have ever known, occasionally complain about their bodies. Not one of us is completely free of insecurity when it comes to the way we look and we will often make “suggestions” as to how our sisters can improve their hair, clothing, or makeup (“You know, you should probably wear something different. Those pants don't really
do
anything for you”) as well as soliciting their opinions on the same topics.

But on the issue of weight, there is an unspoken agreement
between all of us. When we argue with each other, there is a Maginot Line that may never be crossed. Every one of us is adept at cursing and have been known to call each other some choice names. But we never,
ever
use the F word. We have a silent understanding that, even in the heat of battle, the word
fat
must never be hurled. We can insult each other's intelligence, life choices, or emotional development, but never the amount of flesh we are carrying. In the array of insults, even the vilest of all possible slurs is trumped by
fat
. Fat is like a nuclear bomb—there is no turning back once it is dropped and the devastation would be irrevocable. Were I or any of my sisters ever to use this word, the ensuing rift would be unbridgeable. But too thin, now, there's a topic that just begs to be broached because somewhere in that indictment there is a twisted compliment, a slightly sick sense of accomplishment. And that's where I go with Lavander right now.

“You're starting to look too skinny,” I tell her. “You should be careful.”

“Hmm,” she says, inspecting the amount of give in her waist-band. “I don't think so.”

I wonder how much of Lavander's current weight loss and desire to remove as much body hair as possible has to do with Tony, who, by her own account, is obsessed with appearances. Although none of us can understand how, he seems to have convinced Lavander (or she's convinced herself) that he is some sort of Adonis and totally irresistible to women. I find him a bit closer to Narcissus, if we're going for a Greek mythological counterpart, although I think this might give Tony a bit too much credit. At any rate, Lavander's general mood has been on a downswing since the two of them have been together. This, to put a point on it, is what really bothers me and everybody else about their relationship. And it is also something I can't talk to her about, not while she's got that familiar jittery, combative energy coming off her like little lightning bolts.

Déja reappears from Blaze's room.

“He said he'd come sit at the table with us tonight,” she says. “I asked him.”

“He won't,” I say. “There's salad. He can't stand the smell.”

“You know, Debra, he should sit with his family when we're all having dinner. You should insist on it. I don't see why he can't.”

“Oh no,” I say, looking up at my little sister. “You're not going to do this, are you? You're not going to start? Please.”

Déja looks at me through her big, round blue eyes that have changed not one bit since she was an infant. Occasionally, I'll allow her to give me parenting advice because I know that the bond she shares with Blaze is a special one and that he will tell her things he won't share with anyone else. But tonight it's just not going to happen.

“I just think—” she starts, but I cut her off.

“And please, Déja, take off those giant shoes. You're just too damn tall in them.”

“Not my fault you're a short person,” she says, but she concedes. On both counts.