About My Sisters (7 page)

“I can't play Ma's anymore,” I told her. “I'm too old.”

If she'd protested, even scoffed, it would have made that moment easier, but Maya didn't say anything, she just stared at me with a look that pieced hurt, incomprehension, and acceptance into an impossible mosaic in her face.

“So don't ask me again,” I said, sounding like the curt and officious big sister I was pretending to be. But my own Marianna was heartbroken. I felt I'd let myself and Maya down at the same time. I felt like I'd cut off an arm. I never gave Maya an explanation for why I stopped playing the game and she never tried to get one out of me. We wouldn't mention the game again for over twenty years. The issue of the Mariannas themselves, it turned out, was the only thing the Mariannas couldn't talk about.

A few days later, before we went to sleep one night, I asked Maya to teach me the hustle. There has never been a simpler dance invented, but I couldn't get the sequence of steps right.

“It's so easy,” Maya said. “I don't know why you're not getting this.”

“I don't know,” I said. “Why does the mailman drive a blue truck?”

Maya made a disgusted noise and got into bed. She turned her light off and rolled over so that her back was to me. Soon after, I clicked off my light as well and lay motionless in the darkness. As always, Maya was sleeping long before I fell into unconsciousness in the bed next to hers.

 

When I was eighteen, I moved out of the house and went away to college. When I was twenty-five with a newborn son, Maya
moved in with me. We are still living together. We have lived together, in fact, all but seven years of our lives—long enough to run out the bad luck of a broken mirror. In the last fourteen years, we've shared a checking account, a couple of jobs, and, quite often, my son's care. Maya, in fact, was the very first person on earth to see my son's face as he left the shelter of my body. Ours is truly a domestic partnership. Until he was about seven or eight, my son referred to the two of us as “my parents.”

We've done things together as adults that the Mariannas couldn't have conceived of. There were the hospitals, for example. The two of us sitting in emergency rooms at three, four, and five o'clock in the morning with my sick child. These were times when Maya never slept, but stayed awake with me, making jokes about the seizure and suicide-attempt patients next to us in order to keep my mind off the fact that my son was blue and gasping for breath.

We've also done things that the Mariannas would have loved, like sharing a suite at Beverly Wilshire Hotel the night before I had a TV interview for my first book, noticing that room service popcorn cost ten dollars (
before
delivery charges and tip), and wondering if we should order some just so that we could get a sense of what ten-dollar popcorn tasted like.

Fairly often, Maya will start a sentence and I will finish it for her before she gets to the main point.

“I was going to say that,” she tells me. “Why don't you get out of my head and get your own thoughts?”

“I was born first,” I answer her. “I had those thoughts before you.”

When Maya gets stuck in conversation and can't remember the word or phrase she's looking for (and, as we all get older, this kind of thing tends to happen more frequently), her standard response is, “I'm sorry, I can't get the words right now. Debra's using them all.”

Maya and I don't share clothes. We don't wear each other's shoes or read the same books. Our views on men, relationships, and affairs of the heart are different enough to be diametrically opposed. We have different eyes, hair, and bone structure. But we have the same voice. When we sing together, it sounds like the same person on two vocal tracks. Sometimes our own mother can't tell us apart on the phone.

We have a house full of kitchen gadgets, books, and furnishings from Ikea. I work at home and she is out most of the time.

There are no Harrys. At least not in the way we envisioned them.

Maya is still my first reader, just as she was when she was Marianna. Then, Maya would listen to my stories whether they were about the Ma's or some other world we were creating together and give me her opinion on how well they worked. Maya saw everything first whether it was a short story, a drawing, or a play the two of us would perform together. Today, it is the same. Everything I write goes through Maya first. Maya knows if it's not working because Maya, more than anyone, knows what I mean to say.

When I published my first book,
Waiting
, Maya went on the road with me to every interview, book signing, and radio show up and down California. One glance at her expression during these events told me how well I was doing. If I faltered, I looked for her face, a fixed star, and found my way back to center. If I'd needed any reassurance that the fabric of my life was inextricably connected with Maya's, I found it during one of those radio interviews in Los Angeles.

The show's host greeted us warmly when we got to the studio and told us, “We'll be live today. And we'll open up the lines for callers. Are you up for that?”

“Oh yes,” I told him. “Sounds great.”

“Okay,” he said, “get yourself comfortable with the micro
phone. Your sister can sit in there,” he gestured to a small glassed off area, “and she can hear the whole show.”

Maya situated herself with a pair of headphones. She was behind glass but directly in my line of vision. The host warmed up and introduced the show. The on-air lights went on and within minutes the plastic squares representing callers started blinking madly. We were off and running. I could see Maya smiling, enjoying a call from a disgruntled waiter who claimed that customers were always asking for items off the menu and expecting servers to provide them. The host asked me if I thought customers generally had unrealistic expectations of their servers or if servers just complained too much. I told him it might be a bit of both, but yes, there were certainly times when customers made demands that couldn't possibly be filled. The host asked if I could give him an example.

It was then that I started to drift a little, my train of thought unraveling slightly and I felt I was on the verge of missing what I was looking for. For a split second I thought I was going to have to switch gears and move to a different topic. I looked up at Maya who was gesturing to me in her booth. She was mouthing a word but I couldn't quite figure out what it was. I shrugged slightly and she scribbled something down on a piece of paper. I just kept talking, although I wasn't exactly sure what I was saying any longer. Maya held the paper up against the glass and I saw that it said wasabi in giant letters.

And suddenly it was all clear.

“Well, here's one example,” I told the host. “I was working in an Italian trattoria at one time, waiting on a large party of Japanese businessmen and the host asked me for wasabi. I told him I was very sorry, but we didn't carry wasabi, it being an Italian restaurant and all, but he got angrier and angrier,
demanding
that I find him some and absolutely fuming that we didn't carry it. ‘You should always have wasabi!' he screamed at me. ‘People
want wasabi. It's outrageous that a place like this doesn't have it.' And then he asked me if there was somewhere nearby I could go and purchase some. And obviously I couldn't. So that would probably constitute a good example of when a customer has unrealistic expectations of his server.”

The host loved this and the entire board lit up. Maya smiled and nodded, pointing in approval at all the flashing lines.

“Please be patient,” the host announced, “the lines are full, but we're going to try our best to get to all your calls.”

The rest of the show seemed to run by at hyper speed and we ran out of time before we could get to all the callers. Afterward, the host asked me if I'd come back and do it again and I told him I'd love to.

As we walked back to the car Maya said, “I can't believe you forgot that story.”

“But you remembered,” I told her.

Maya was working beside me in that Italian restaurant on the night of the wasabi fiasco, although that day was the first time either one of us had mentioned it since. I couldn't have said how many years had passed since then, because most of them had blended together. I knew only that she had always been there. That experience, like so many others in our lives, had been a shared one.

“I could do these shows, you know,” she said.

“You could,” I said. “Like the first runner-up. You know, if I'm unable to fulfill my duties. Something like that.”

“Huh,” she said. “Funny.”

Back in the car, driving through a relentlessly bright August morning, I asked Maya to take a detour, to the corner of Sunset and San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood where we'd lived for a short time twenty-seven years before. We were sunburned girls then, dressing up for Halloween costume contests and putting on plays in the living room. We went to Disneyland in
matching crocheted ponchos. For fun, my father drove us around Bel Air in our ancient pink station wagon and we pretended to be eccentric millionaires.

Our childhood exists like this; a kaleidoscope of different places layered into the past. It struck me then that we lived only one hundred miles from this particular piece of our history yet this was the first time we'd even come close to seeing it in a quarter century.

But Maya did not share my desire to plunge into the past.

“We don't have time for a trip down memory lane,” she told me. “Let's go home.”

Maya is less sentimental than I am. She is also more practical. The subtext of her words was very clear to me. There was hardly a need to rediscover our past when we were always carrying it, and carrying each other, with us. Our past is woven seamlessly into our present, and within that present the Mariannas are often there with us.

At night we still drink big mugs of tea, an addiction we've never kicked. Although we would travel miles for it, we are lucky enough to live close to an oxymoronic “British foods” store that carries imported English tea and we go through an eighty-bag box every couple of weeks. Our particular tea ritual consists of arguing over who will make it:

“I made it last night.”

“Yes, but I made it all last week.”

“It's your turn.”

“No, it's your turn.”

“I'll give you five dollars if you make tea.”

“Not enough.”

“How about that book you want? I'll buy you that book you want if you make tea. How's that? It's a
hardcover
.”

“Okay, done.”

Unlike the old days, we now have television with our tea.
Maya has at least a dozen shows she likes to follow. On any given prime-time evening, there is one show on the TV and two VCRs recording a couple of others. Sometimes I read while she watches and sometimes I watch with her. Sometimes I can do neither.

Like tonight, for example. It's after 11:00
P.M.
and I'm on the couch, suddenly awake and disoriented. The living room is quiet except for the whir of the VCR rewinding a tape. Maya is holding the remote and flipping through the Living section of the newspaper.

“What happened?” I ask her. “I missed the last ten minutes.”

“You didn't miss the last ten minutes,” she says. “You were out for almost the whole show. I can't tell you what happened, it's too complicated and you missed too much.”

“I saw some of it,” I say feebly. “I wasn't paying attention.”

“You were sleeping,” Maya says.

“No, I wasn't.”

“Yes, you were.”

“I was?”

“Yes,” Maya says. “I saw you. You should go to bed. I'm off. Good night.”

I hear her door close and drag myself off the couch, turn off the lights, and head for my bedroom.

It took a long time, but these days Maya often goes first and sometimes I fall asleep before her.

may

It's Mother's Day, a big deal for our family, regardless of the old saw that “every day is Mother's Day, not just this one.” Despite its significance, we never take our mother to a restaurant on this day. Every one of us has worked a Mother's Day brunch in a restaurant at one point or other and, after witnessing countless displays of bad familial behavior from the other side of the table, a restaurant is the last place any of us wants to be. Therefore, as it has been for countless Mother's Days past, brunch is held at my house.

My mother and I are the two mothers in this group, but, rightly enough, my mother is the one who gets the homage. I do get a little lift at the beginning of the day because Maya always makes sure that Blaze takes care of me in some fashion. Every
year, she takes him shopping for a gift (“That kid's really going to owe me once he gets a job,” she says with a laugh) and helps him make me breakfast, or at least coffee, in bed. Over the last couple of years, too, Lavander and Déja have started giving me small bouquets of flowers and cards that state emphatically what a great mother I am. These are the cards I always keep and the sentiments I hold dearest to my heart. That my sisters consider me a good mother is more important to me than their opinions on any other aspect of my being—as their sister or as a woman.

Those lovely bouquets are scattered throughout my house now and, since my mother hasn't taken hers home yet, the living room is an explosion of red, pink, and gold. We are sitting in the middle of it, having eaten our fill of bagels, fruit, and pancakes. I've made a second pot of coffee, but it will probably go to waste since everyone seems sated. Lavander and Bo have already left, citing obligations (work-related in Lavander's case, unnamed in Bo's). Déja is sprawled out on one of the couches and my father wanders through the kitchen, picking at the leavings. My mother sits on the second couch amid a bounty of colorful boxes and wrapping paper.

Gift-wise, my mother made out like a bandit this year and, I have to say, I am partially responsible for setting the bar so high. A few days ago, I took her shopping and bought her an extravagant moonstone ring for her birthday. It didn't take long for news of the Gift to spread and for me to get quite a bit of ribbing, albeit good-natured.

“That's just great,” Lavander said. “And how are the rest of us supposed to compete with
that
gift?”

“Guess you're the favorite now,” Maya said. “Got yourself in pretty good, didn't you?”

Déja said, “That was such a sweet thing you did for Mommy. Of course, now
I'm
going to look bad when I show up with my pathetic little gift.”

Well,
whatever
, I told them all. She loved it, she wanted it, and I was able to get it for her. It made her happy. She's also very happy about the box of Godiva chocolates I got her for Mother's Day. So happy, in fact, that she's even
sharing
them with my father.

“Anything else for me?” she asks, and laughs to herself. “Or is this it?”

“Ha!” Maya says by way of response.

My father comes out of the kitchen, having found nothing there that satisfies him for the moment.

“How about another one of those chocolates?” he asks my mother.

“No way,” she says, grabbing the box and shoving them under her arm.

“Come on,” he says, hand out.

“And I said no. Get your grubby mitts away from my chocolates.”

“You'll be sorry later when they're all gone and you can't have any of mine,” he says.

“I don't want your sorry-ass domestic chocolate,” my mother says.

“We'll see,” he says. He turns to his daughters. “Don't worry, she'll be looking in my couch soon enough.”

“You've got separate stashes?” Déja says.

“Oh yes,” my father answers. “We hide from each other all the time.” He turns back to my mother. “Time to go,” he says.

“Right,” my mother says. “Thank you, girls. It was lovely.”

After they leave, Déja says, “You know, I think the two of them are getting a bit weird.” Maya and I just laugh.

“Seriously,” Déja says. “Do you think Mommy and Daddy are going to get old? Is that really going to happen?”

Déja seems wistful about this. She's not yet twenty-five and still wants to believe that everything goes on forever. She still has
that sense of immortal youth. I can't figure out if I miss that feeling or not. In some ways, it's comforting to know that, at almost forty, my life is into its second half. And, of course, the older I get, the closer in age I am to my own parents and therefore, the closer our experiences, the more similar our life weariness. But Déja hasn't approached that place yet, nor should she. Nor has Lavander, really. But Lavander has the unique distinction among my sisters and me of being born when my parents fell into the average category. What I mean by this is that my parents were very young when they had Maya and me—barely out of their teens, in fact. Lavander and Bo (who are eighteen months apart) arrived when my parents were into their twenties, the time when most people their age were just starting their families. They were in their thirties when Déja was born at the end of 1977, an age then considered a little late to still be adding children to the family. As a result, Lavander's peers have parents the same age as she does. Maya's and my peers have parents who are much older, Déja's have parents who are younger.

Lavander is not philosophical about my parents aging, but she's damn funny. The issue of what one does when one's parents die came up recently when we were discussing the case of a Las Vegas woman who wanted to bury her mother in her backyard so that she could always be close to her. There were some municipal issues involved with the burial and that's why the case made it into the papers. Lavander stated emphatically that she would never consider burying our parents in the backyard, but she wanted always to be as close to my parents as she is now. When they die, she said, she planned to stuff them and seat them on her couch, “so they will always be with me.” It says something about our family that all of us, especially my parents, found this tremendously amusing and that the only comment offered was that she was going to have to find a really good taxidermist.

“Debra, really, what do you think?” Déja repeats. “Do you think they're going to get old?”

“What do you mean by old?” I ask her. “They're already a lot older than they were when
we
knew them.”

Now Déja's really confused. “What do you mean?” she says. Maya is laughing. My comment was for her anyway.

“I know exactly what she means,” Maya says. “We knew them a long time ago. When it was just the four of us. Before all of
you
lot.”

“Oh sure,” Déja says.

“She's right,” I tell Déja. “You missed quite a bit.”

And it's true, our parents never had a nest egg, a set of silver, or a dinner service for six. With all their moves, they never even accumulated furniture. For many years, we sat on giant foam-filled pillows that my mother had created with reusable Indian-print bedspreads or swaths of wide-wale corduroy. We had tapestries and plenty of hanging beads to separate areas of space. There was a time when our living rooms looked like the inside of Barbara Eden's bottle in
I Dream of Jeannie.
Throughout my childhood, I was sure that only the elderly owned couches. Headboards were a foreign concept altogether and forget about curio cabinets. Those are still a mystery to me (what if you have to
go
somewhere—what are you going to do with all that stuff?). Our parents were perpetual renters. They never had what is now referred to as a starter home. They never bought any kind of home at all, in fact.

But my parents did have a set of starter children, me and Maya. They had the two of us, and we got the two of them, at their youngest, hippest, and most experimental. We got them in the days when their friends (few of whom had kids of their own) would come over, hang out, pass hash pipes or joints, and wax profound over the latest Doors, Rolling Stones, or Beatles album. We got them very early, when they were still figuring
each other out and formulating what would become their personal ethos. When they wore long hair, shades, and floppy felt hats. In other words, we got them in the '60s.

Those were the days when my mother still wore makeup. She was the essence of mod. She had purses full of Mary Quant eyeliners and shadows in shades of gray and black. During one season, she painted a single tear below her left eye in silver liner every day. She had an eye for style, my mother did. She smelled of Shalimar and patchouli and wore little paisley and velvet dresses, snakeskin shoes, and knee-high leather boots. Her clothes were a child's paradise of tassels, embroidery, and mirrors. During her silver tear phase, she also wore the ankle-length black woolen cloak she got married in, which later became a central prop in the plays about witches and lost princesses that Maya and I would put on in the living room. I would spend years trying to emulate the way my mother looked during that time, but I could never quite pull it off. I may have inherited her good taste but I didn't get her long, lovely legs and I could never duplicate her sense of style.

My father was as hip as my mother was mod. His hair was long, but never too long and
never
in a ponytail. He wore boots, aviator sunglasses, and a turquoise leather jacket. He was rarely without cigarettes. Every shirt pocket he owned seemed to come with its own pack of Lucky Strikes. But he could also always be counted on to be carrying either a box of Crackerjacks or a handful of Bazooka Joe bubble gum because, while my mother was in charge of the passports, plane tickets, and rolling papers, he was the one who always had the treats. He was philosophical about most things and was big on hidden meanings (Maya and I pondered the lyrics to “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” for years because he'd told us that when we could figure out what they meant, we'd really be onto something), but he expressed himself in a way that was straight out of Brooklyn.

“Would you die if you jumped off the fire escape onto the sidewalk?” I asked him once. I was staring out the high window of the Brooklyn apartment where Maya and I attempted our ill-fated running away.

“Yes, you would die,” he answered.

“But what if you landed on your feet?” I asked him. “If you just landed on your feet, you'd be all right, wouldn't you?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked. He didn't say anything then about the force of gravity or the effect of impact or bodies falling through space. He said, “Because your
feet
would go right through your
head,
that's why.”

End of discussion.

My parents would never have considered themselves hippies. They rejected mass movements of any kind, for one thing, and, to this day, they harbor an intense dislike for anything communal. They didn't go to Woodstock even though we were living close by because they couldn't stand the thought of sitting in traffic. They same year we went to San Francisco for about a week with the thought that we might move there, but my father claimed the Haight Ashbury scene made him “itchy,” and we ended up watching the Mets on TV from the comfort of a motel room.

My parents also disagreed with the “loose” way some of their peers were raising their own kids and they were fairly vocal about it. They held no truck with any of the pop psychology coming in and out of vogue. There was something of a “children should be free to set their own boundaries and explore their own space and shouldn't be told negative words like ‘no'” movement happening in those days that my parents shared with Maya and me and then laughed at outright. My parents had an extremely firm belief in the word “no” and the only space that was going to be explored was the one they provided and controlled. Unlike
many of the parents they knew then, my parents did not think that children should be setting their own boundaries or making their own decisions. I would say they even leaned generously to the seen-and-not-heard school of thought. My father once pointed to the passage in
Alice in Wonderland
(my favorite book at the time) where one of the characters tells Alice that she's thinking again and that makes her forget to talk, and said, “See this? This is important because, in reality, the exact opposite is true. When one is talking, one forgets to think. The words come out of your mouth, but you don't know what you're saying. Always remember to think first. And don't talk unless you've really got something to say.”

Whatever the reasons, there were rarely other children around in those days. Because we so often switched schools, Maya and I didn't have time to develop friendships there either. In effect, we were the sum total of our own peer group. I never perceived any of this as a lack. Aside from Maya, I thought most children were much less interesting than adults, at least the adults I knew, because my parents' friends were nothing if not interesting.

Altogether, these friends made a Venn diagram of two circles that intersected in the middle. We switched back and forth between London and New York several times between 1969 and 1971. There was a circle of friends in each city and then a few who drifted back and forth between them as we did. There was Sara, for example, a New Yorker who lived for many years in London. She was already married and divorced by the time she was in her early twenties. I thought she was one of the most exciting women I'd ever meet. Sara dressed like the characters that populated my mother's deck of Tarot cards. In velvets, robes, and scarves, she was alternately the Fool, the Empress, and the Magician. When she lived with us in London, all the sheets, pillows, and blankets in her room were printed with Tom and Jerry
cartoon characters. Sara shaved her head bald and wore a giant ankh around her neck. She always spoke to me as if I were a small adult instead of a seven-or eight-year-old. She told me that she'd had a baby at the age of thirteen and had to give it up for adoption. Her eyes were big and sad when she told me this, but she didn't cry. I wanted to know more but couldn't figure out what questions to ask.