About My Sisters (4 page)

The front door is flung open once more and my parents stride in. “We're here!” my father exclaims. “Let's eat!”

“And only fifteen minutes late,” Maya says, but in sotto voce.

I feel the shift occur somewhere in my midsection. Subtly and silently, my sisters and I adjust to the presence of our mother and father. The pattern holds, hardening its shape.

Our brother is next, lumbering through the still-open door with Danny. “Where's the grub at?” he says, and Danny laughs, closing the door. Now it's really a party.

There is much shuffling of chairs as everyone struggles to find a seat. A central irony of the fact that family dinners are most often here is that we only have four dining chairs and a round table that doesn't really seat more than five comfortably. Somehow we manage, plates balanced precariously on the edge of the
table, elbows bumping, and folding chairs creaking under too much weight, to accommodate however many people show up. It's a particularly full table tonight because Bo and Danny take up a lot more space than my little sisters. Maya sets a giant steaming bowl of gourmet macaroni and cheese in the center of the table with a great flourish.

“Here you go,” she says.

Ah,” my father says, “
mac
-aroni and cheese.”

“What?” Maya says. “What's wrong with macaroni and cheese?”

“Nothing,” my father says. “Nothing at all. Did I say there was anything wrong with it?”

“You implied—”

“Pity about the pasta,” my mother adds.

“You know, I can't keep up with all the different diets,” Maya says. “This isn't a restaurant. In fact, even if it
were
a restaurant, you probably couldn't get all these special requests. Danny, I'm sorry, but maybe you can just pick the tomatoes out. I didn't put any in the salad.”

“Hey, I'm fine,” Danny says. “This is great, really.”

“Maya, if you're going to invite people to dinner, you can't have such a bad attitude about feeding them,” my father says. “You can make people physically ill with an attitude like that.”

My mother and I stare at each other across the table. I mouth the words, “Same argument every time,” and my mother mouths back, “Without fail.”

Déja says, “Why are you giving Maya a hard time, Daddy? She made this lovely meal—”

“Yes, but there are always restrictions,” Lavander pipes in. “There are always rules for Maya's dinners.”

“What is
with
you?” Maya says, turning to Lavander. “Why do you always have to chime in against me.”

“Nobody's against you,” my father says. “Don't be paranoid.”

“You're always defending her,” Maya says.

“We have
neighbors,
you know,” I say. The decibel level has gone up considerably in the last few seconds. We're on the verge of no return here. I see that my mother already has her head in her hands and, any second now, she's going to interject with a slightly hysterical admonishment that will exacerbate all tensions and solve nothing. My brother looks as if he's getting ready to flee, his usual mode when arguing starts, but Danny eats gamely, soldiering on. He and Déja have been together for two years now and he's seen quite a few of these dinners.

“Anyway,”
I cut in, “what were we talking about? I believe it was me, wasn't it?” I am guaranteed to get myself in trouble with this question, but it's all that I can think of on the spur of the moment. Call it the verbal equivalent of a sacrifice fly.

“Oh yes,” my father says, “let's talk about you. We haven't talked about you for at least ten minutes. What's happening in your world?”

“No, let's talk about me,” Déja says. Another sacrifice. I smile to myself. We do tend to look out for each other from time to time.

“Yes, let's,” my mother says. “Let's talk about Déja's play.”

Between my sisters and me, we've got most of the arts covered. I am the writer, Maya is the musician, and Déja is the actress. Lavander, in real estate, is the only one whose chosen profession is outside the entertainment field. For this, she has earned the distinction of being the only “closer” in the family. For example, when my mother had an opening at a local art gallery recently (she's the visual artist in the family), Maya played her violin at the reception. Next to my mother's business cards were two stacks of postcards: one advertising the opening of Déja's play and the other announcing the publication of my new book. Lavander, on the other hand, brought in some wealthy clients who immediately bought two of my mother's paintings.

The play Déja is rehearsing for now is her first in two years and it's as if she's had new life breathed into her. When Déja is performing, she is like a lighted torch. The last two years have been fallow for her, creatively speaking, and her natural sense of drama, brilliant onstage, was starting to warp into moodiness.

“Yes, let's talk about my play,” Déja says. “It's opening next week. I don't want anyone to show up on opening night, please. I want to make sure we have it right before you all see it. And you are all coming, of course. And just a warning, it's a farce, but it's very sexual. And I'm playing a very sexual character, so I want you all to be prepared. It is called
Down South
, so you can take it from there.” She's speaking to all of us, but she's looking at Danny. Word is, he's a bit disturbed by the sexual content of the play.

“What do you mean,
Down South?
” my mother says. “Where does it take place?”

“It takes place
down south
,” Déja says. “Get it?”

“Yes, but where is it set?” my mother presses on.

“Philadelphia,” Déja says, sighing.

“Speaking of down south,” Lavander says, “I'd like to get some opinions on the Brazilian wax.”

“Oh come on,” I tell her. “Do we really have to talk about this
again
?”

“Nobody minds, do they?” she says. “I just want to know what some men think of this whole thing.”

“You can't ask
these
men,” Maya says.

“Yes, I can. Daddy, what do you think?” Lavander leans over to my father, hand under her chin, sweet as you please.

“Do not answer her,” my mother warns my father. “I am telling you, say nothing.”

“Wha—?” my father gets out.

“Come on, Lavander, you know the only reason you're at all interested in this is because Tony likes it,” Déja says.

“All men my age like it,” Lavander says and this sets off a
round-robin cacophony of voices: yes, they do; no, they don't; it looks good; it looks weird; beauty should come from within; and does Katie wax hairy backs? In the middle of all of this, Déja says, “The only reason Tony likes that look is because he watches so much porn.”

“Porn?” snaps Lavander. “Who said porn?”

Déja raises her hand and laughs.

“How do you know he watches porn?” Lavander says.

“You tol—um, I mean, uh,
somebody
told me,” Déja finishes lamely, but can't stop herself from giggling.

“This guy just keeps getting better and better,” Maya mutters under her breath.

“Who watches porn?” my father says.

“You watch porn?” Danny asks him, completely confused.

“It's okay, Dan, I'd just stay out of this one if I were you,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I think I'm going to have some more salad,” Danny says.

Lavander turns from my father to my brother. “You're a man,” she says, “what do you think?”

My brother waits half a beat before throwing propriety to the winds and making an obscene gesture with his tongue. It's clearly all he can think to do and it's so ridiculous, so childish, and yet so deeply amusing that every one of his sisters starts laughing uncontrollably. We can't stop; Lavander with her high-pitched shriek, Maya slapping the table and gasping, Déja with her deep chuckle, and me, silently convulsed. We laugh until each one of us has tears streaming down our cheeks and then we laugh some more. It is the first time I can remember that my brother has made all four of us laugh at the same time and he is clearly both astonished and very pleased with his efforts.

“We used to fight when we all got together for dinner,” Bo says. “Now we're talking about porn. What's happened to us?”

The laughfest diffuses the tension at the table and soon all the food is gone as well. We break up; Maya to the kitchen to do the dishes (I feel only the slightest twinge of guilt that she has cooked
and
cleaned—after all, this dinner was her idea), Déja, Danny, and Bo to Blaze's room, and the rest of us to the living room. This post–dinner hour can also be a little dicey, a time when the angry exits occur if they're going to happen at all.

“I have an announcement,” Lavander says, settling into the couch. “There is going to be an addition to the family.”

We stare at her blankly, knowing that she's not talking about a baby, a news item that could not possibly be announced with such nonchalance.

“I'm getting a dog,” she says.

“Don't be ridiculous,” my father says immediately.

“Sure, a dog, that's all you need,” my mother adds.

“I know what you're all going to say,” Lavander cuts in, “because I know how
this family
is about these kinds of things. But I'm telling you all right now that I'm meeting with a breeder on Tuesday and I'm going to buy a dog. A Jack Russell, I think.”

My parents are not pet people. In Lavander's lifetime, we've never had so much as a parakeet in the house. What she can't possibly remember is that, a year before she was born, we had two cats, Marlon and Greta (after Brando and Garbo), and a hamster (Hampstead, after the Heath in London, which is where we were living at the time). Marlon was a wild fat tabby and black Greta liked to perch on the bathtub and scratch anyone who tried to show her any affection. Maya and I both played with the cats, although neither one of them was particularly cuddly, but I adored that hamster. I thought his little face was the cutest, most darling thing in the world. I was in charge of his cage, which I kept very clean and Maya kept his water bottle filled. Both of us spent many hours playing with him.

One evening, we all returned home from a party (there were a
lot of adult parties happening in those days and Maya and I almost always went with) to find an empty cage upset on the floor and Marlon lying next to it with a Hampstead-size lump in his belly. We searched the flat up and down, but it was apparent that we weren't going to find any semblance of a living hamster. I was inconsolable, weeping hysterically and insisting that my mother throw the cat out on the heath to punish him for his savagery. My parents took a much more philosophical approach. They described the circle of life and how it was a cat's nature to eat a rodent and that the cat was compelled, by his blood, to kill. Sara, a friend of my parents, was living with us then, too, and she chimed in as well, telling me about karma, speculating what kind of creature Hampstead would come back as, and expressing awe at the sheer murderous majesty of the cat. I was not impressed. I cried over that hamster for days and avoided both cats until we gave them to Sara when we moved to New York less than a year later. After this episode, my parents never even entertained the idea of owning another pet.

“You don't know anything about dogs,” I tell Lavander now. “You don't even like dogs. Why a dog all of a sudden?”

“Lavander, you can't keep a dog cooped up in your place all day. What's going to happen to it when you go to work?” my father says, wondering, I am sure, if the task of caring for this imagined creature will fall to him.

“I'll take it with me,” she says, “it can ride in the car with me.”

“I really don't think you've thought this through,” I tell her. “You can't keep a dog in a hot car all day long. Unless you want to be one of those freaks who carries a tiny little rat-dog around in her purse. In diapers.”

“My friend Allison and I are going to co-parent the dog, so you don't have to worry.”

“You know,” I say, “you've got a lot of good catch phrases here, like ‘meeting with a breeder' and ‘co-parent,' but, honestly, I
don't think you have any idea of what the reality of caring for an animal is like.”

“That's right,” my father says, startling me, since he rarely agrees with me in general family discussions.

“Well, would you rather I had a
baby
?” Lavander says, pointedly. “Because that's what I'm going to do if I don't get a dog.”

So now we've gotten to the bottom of what this gesture is all about.

“Is that a threat?” my mother asks.

Maya walks in from the kitchen, where she's been listening to this conversation. “You know what you're overlooking here?” she says. “A dog is incredibly expensive. Especially if you buy one from a breeder. And then there are vet bills and food.”

“I'm certainly not worried about food,” Lavander says.

“You're going to start shopping at the Tack and Feed now?” my father says.

“Hey, that's a good idea,” Maya says, “you can pick up a riding crop for Tony while you're there.”

“That's very funny,” Lavander spits. “At least
my
boyfriend doesn't look like a chipmunk.”

“I don't have a boyfriend,” Maya says very quietly, her face flushing deep red.

“Then your ex-chipmunk-boyfriend,” Lavander says.

“I can't believe you,” Maya says, her voice rising. “Everyone's been talking trash about Tony all night, with the porn and everything, and you say nothing. I make one comment—and it was a joke, by the way—and you lash out at me. I mean, there are all kinds of things I could say, like the fact that your wonderful boyfriend is a cross-dresser, for example, but I don't. So I don't know why it is that you always attack me.”