About My Sisters (9 page)

The one I liked the most had a dinette, two bedrooms, and a living room window that looked out on the fire escape. It felt bigger than anything else we'd looked at. More importantly, there was light, although the name of the neighborhood, Gravesend, seemed to imply the exact opposite. We moved in. Characteristically, we had almost no furniture. The living room was decorated exclusively with a wall tapestry, a turntable, a
stack of record albums, and a television set that Maya and I moved from my parents' bedroom every time we wanted to watch cartoons.

Almost immediately, my father went to work driving a taxi in Manhattan. His shifts were long and his hours were erratic. Sometimes he left for work at four in the morning, sometimes at four in the afternoon. My mother was in a constant state of panic over this job, always worrying that he'd be in an accident or pick up a dangerous fare. Grandma, who started coming over more frequently as my mother neared the end of her pregnancy, was most often on the receiving end of these fears.

I lost almost all of my baby teeth that summer and continued to put them under my pillow, even though the Tooth Fairy no longer came to visit. Maya and I slept in bunk beds and, because she had a tendency to roll, I got the top bunk. Perhaps the Tooth Fairy had trouble finding me there, I fantasized, all high up and tucked away. It was important for me to hang on to concepts like the Tooth Fairy, even though in my heart I knew she didn't really exist. My parents had encouraged this kind of fantasy in their way. For my parents, but especially for their friends, Maya and I were little cosmic miracles. We were often referred to as the fairy girls, a couple of tabulae rasa who, in our innocence, somehow held the secrets of the universe. How else to explain the fascination they showed when we stood outside in our huge furry hats eating snowflakes as they fell from the sky? Or their delight when we donned our matching pink tutus and twirled around the house? How else to figure why, every time I made up a story about princesses and witches and dictated it to my mother, it was viewed as a work of great significance and deeper meaning?

During the summer of 1971, though, that fairy-child status was changing. I was still a little girl, my parents often reminded me, but now, with a new baby coming, I was about to become
the
eldest
and, therefore, someone who would always be old enough to know better. My mother encouraged me to play with dolls, but she often spoke to me as if I were an adult. She gave me the minute details of menstruation, pregnancy, and birth to the point that I could easily have sketched the female reproductive system by the age of nine, but she never spoke to me about sex. I had no clue how a baby got started, but I could tell you exactly what stage of development it was in at any given trimester.

So when my mother came into our bedroom very early one late August morning and said, “Girls, you have to get up, my water broke,” I knew exactly what she was talking about.

“That means the baby's coming,” I told Maya, who was blinking uncomprehendingly. This was another essential part of my role, explaining things to Maya. Luckily, she never questioned my authority and pretty much accepted anything I told her.

We waited for news of the birth with a stack of comic books on Grandma's plastic-covered couch. Maya read
Wendy Witch
and
Casper the Friendly Ghost
. I read
Archie
and
True Romance
. We never read each other's comics. When we were finished, Maya and I speculated on the baby's gender.

“I think it's a girl,” Maya said.

“It's definitely a boy,” I told her. “Grandma said she could tell.”

“She's carrying like a boy,” Grandma interjected. She was sitting by the phone, smoking double-time and playing solitaire. “But it should only be healthy, God willing. Boy, girl doesn't matter.”

“I hope it's a girl,” Maya whispered. I didn't disagree. Boys were cute, but girls were a known quantity.

The phone rang sometime before noon. Grandma jumped out of her chair and grabbed the receiver as if it were a fire she needed to put out. Maya and I watched while she conducted
her end of the conversation, punctuated by sniffing, reaching for tissues (Grandma always had a box handy), some mild chest clutching, and “Thank God” and “Oy Gottenyu” thrown in several times for good measure. I never, ever saw Grandma get hysterical or even seriously worked up. But she could get
verklempt
with the best of them.

“It's a girl,” she said hoarsely when she hung up. “Ten fingers and ten toes. Thank God.”

That night, our father took Maya and me out to dinner to celebrate and filled in some of the details.

“She's very tiny,” he said. “And she has very long fingers. Her name is Lavander.”

“‘Lavender's blue, dilly dilly,'” Maya sang. I pictured a plump cherub sitting in a purple flower. Another fairy girl come to stay.

“Can we go see her?” I asked.

“Children aren't allowed in the hospital,” my father said. “She'll come home in a couple of days. It's very exciting, don't you think?”

“Oh yes,” we said. What a question. Who wouldn't be excited to meet Thumbelina in person?

The baby my mother brought home two days later was not Thumbelina. She wasn't, in fact, at all who I had expected. She was small and alien, and looked way too fragile. I was alarmed when my mother insisted I hold her for a photograph. I wanted to refuse, to say that I'd hold her later, maybe, but my fear of how bad this would sound won out and I allowed my mother to position Lavander on my lap. I put my arms around her awkwardly, afraid to move, afraid I would break her. She had that exhausted and somewhat startled look on her face that newborns all seem to share, as if they can't believe that this is their final destination after the odyssey they've just made. She was little and red and covered with a downy fuzz. Like a lively peach, I thought. She lay there on my lap, a light but completely unfa
miliar weight. I was terrified she would twitch, slide off, and crack into pieces. She seemed so helpless, I thought, and so dependent. And I just didn't know what to do with her. Only when my father snapped the photograph and my mother finally took Lavander off my lap did I let out the breath I'd been holding. My arms were stiff with the effort of trying to keep them around her.

When I look at that photograph now, it appears to be simply a picture of big sister holding new little sister. I see myself looking intently down at Lavander, my face obscured by a long fall of hair. Lavander's eyes are closed and her mouth is set. It's the same expression she gets now when her mind is made up, which it usually is. It all looks very sweet and natural. Nobody looking at the photo would be able to make out my fear and confusion—not knowing how to hold her, terrified that I would hurt her.

 

A couple of weeks after Lavander was born, Maya and I started school; first grade for her, fourth for me. It wasn't easy to fit in at my new school. To my classmates, and to myself, I was foreign in every sense of the word. There was my British accent, for one thing. And the fact that, for the first time and for reasons unknown to me, my schoolwork, especially math, was very difficult. I was too shy and scared to ask for help at school and tried to just blend into the woodwork. And there was the clothing issue. Let's just say that nobody else wore hotpants at that time. My parents were a half generation younger than those of my peers and so I was, unwillingly, ahead of my time. I had no desire to stand out or set trends. I wanted to be like everybody else. That year gave me my first inkling that I wasn't.

At home, the parameters had begun to bend into a pattern that would eventually become permanent. Though never wildly
social people at the best of times, my parents were becoming steadily more insular. They stopped going out at night altogether. My father spent many of his waking hours working. My mother spent a lot more time cooking than she ever had before. And, ever so slowly, people stopped coming over. The gatherings (too laid-back to really be called parties) that had been a frequent occurrence in our house became smaller and smaller until they vanished into the smoke of their own incense.

My father cut his hair.

My mother stopped wearing makeup.

Maya and I lost our identity as the “fairy girls.” We were now, all three of us, “the kids.”

Lavander became the living room centerpiece, lying on a yellow receiving blanket with toys scattered in a circle around her. It hadn't taken long for her to grow out of the delicacy that terrified me the first time I saw her. Maya and I played our games in a slightly wider radius, dragging Lavander back to center when she started to crawl. We incorporated her into our games whenever possible (“Look at this baby I just found in the woods!”) because she made a splendid, if somewhat unpredictable, prop. Most of the time Lavander tolerated us, gazing at our machinations with a look of puzzlement, but there were often times when she just opened her little mouth and wailed like the damned. One of us would have to take her then and rock her on our knees or hold her high in the air and spin her around. As an infant, Lavander hated to be left alone or even left out, and, before she started walking she wanted very much to be transported to where the action was. More than anything, though, she wanted
out
, disliking confinement of any kind.

Lavander's bassinette was in the bedroom I shared with Maya, but she spent most of her sleeping time with my parents. When awake and stuck in her crib, she'd pull herself up, grab hold of the bars, and swing until the crib started banging rhythmically,
and loudly, against the wall. If that didn't work, she'd grab her bottle by the nipple and hurl it across the room. She was an absolute champion at making herself heard. If my mother had been cautious at first to allow Maya or me to lift Lavander out of her crib or balance her on the bassinet, we never knew it. Typical scenarios went something like this:

Lavander sits in her high chair, a small plate of mashed bananas in front of her. She's had enough of the food, of the chair, of everything. Bananas hit the floor with a wet thunk. Lavander looks up with an expression that says clearly, “Yeah, I did it, so what—get me out of here.”

“Somebody take her out,” says my mother.

Lavander is behind a closed door, “napping.” Bang. Bang. Bangbangbang. A brief respite and then, thwack, as her bottle hits the wall. She gives us a two-minute grace period before she starts shouting indignantly.

“Somebody go get the baby,” my mother orders.

Lavander is on the floor, kicking her legs and trying to get off the blanketed spot she's grown weary of. Maya and I watch
Petticoat Junction
a few feet away, lying on our stomachs, elbows propped, chins in hands. Lavander looks at the pillows surrounding her, blocking her from sliding out of her spot, and her mouth turns down at the corners. There's a brief moment of silence followed by an angry howl.

“Somebody pick her up,” my mother calls from the kitchen.

It was never clear to me where Lavander wanted to go once she got out, only that she couldn't—absolutely couldn't—stay where she was for very long.

 

By the spring of 1972, I'd lost my British accent. I no longer referred to swimsuits as bathing costumes and both Maya and I had switched from calling our mother Mummy to the much
more American Mommy. After several grueling sessions with my father, I'd finally learned my times tables. Maya watched, giving us a wide berth, while my father drilled me on both the multiplication and telling time. As a result, she learned how to multiply and read a clock long before she was required to for school. Maya, in turn, taught Lavander when Lavander was still a tiny thing. I'm quite certain that they both benefited immensely from my suffering.

By that spring, too, I'd managed to win a Citizen of the Month award presented during a school assembly. I had no idea what I'd done to deserve such an honor, other than stay silent for the entire school year (perhaps that was enough), but I was very proud of it nevertheless. I still hadn't found a social group of my own to replace the adults who used to wander through our home, however. And although Maya had managed to collect a large enough group of children to fill up our dining room table for her previous birthday party, she wasn't going out on play dates either. We remained each other's primary peer group.

It's impossible now to tell whether or not that would have changed, had we stayed in Brooklyn, or even in the United States, for another school year. Because while my parents' taste for people who weren't produced by or directly related to them had diminished substantially, their desire to leave had not. We had been in New York for less than one calendar year when it was time to pack up and move again.

We had added another person this time and, once again, we were changing continents. For reasons that were never clear to me and lost to them over the ensuing years, my parents decided to move to South Africa, where my mother's family still lived. It was as big a move as we'd ever made. I shared our destination with as few of my classmates as possible because invariably their response was, “You're going to
Africa
? Are you going to live with lions? And elephants?” At that time and place, there probably
wasn't another place on earth that would have seemed as exotic or primitive.

The preparations went on for weeks as my parents obtained visas, renewed passports, and decided what would stay and what would go. For reasons that were part financial and part not wanting to be bothered, my parents did not believe in the magic of shipping. Essentials (mostly clothes) went in the same suitcases that we'd dragged off the S.S.
France
less than twelve months before. Nonessentials (toys, books, record albums, and my mother's small but very classy pottery collection) were packed into four large, green army duffel bags. Those duffel bags were deep and dark. Maya and I could both fit into one empty one and could pull the top up almost to our heads. I watched my mother take a giant black marker and write our last name and our destination (“Rep. South Africa” underlined four times) on each one. They weren't exactly easy to maneuver once they were full and getting them all out of the house on moving day was quite a feat.