Photograph by Joyce Tennyson
This morning I drove my sister and her daughter to the airport. I’ve been laughing and talking for three days straight, in a way that only happens when my sister is around. She’s the one person who will travel with me from the cradle to the grave, the person with whom I can have a five-second conversation in which no words are spoken, but advice is offered and answered and argued and resolved by means of eye contact alone. With my sister, silliness is unavoidable (dying to tell the marshmallow story, Jen, but a promise is a promise) and adventure is optional. We can putz around the kitchen or get hopelessly lost in the suburbs of Portland, drink lavender cosmos at a riverside bar or walk laps around our neighborhood park, and we’ll spend the hours perfectly entertained in each other’s company.
It wasn’t always like this, of course. We are seventeen months apart, childhood rivals for mommy’s affection. I watched her prepare for her role as Betsy Ross in the school play with such bitter envy in my heart that I appropriated the memory as if it were my own; to this day I see myself on center stage in Mom’s homemade bonnet and apron, fake-stitching the stars and stripes in time to the piccolo, when in reality I was eating my little heart out from my seat in the fifth row. (Which may explain the time I carved her initials in our dining room table in a diabolical attempt to incriminate her.) You’d understand in my place. She had the pink fake-fur beanbag, the Farrah Fawcett hair, Chemin de Fer jeans with laces up the back. Her skin didn’t break out. She could play hacky sack. She was a rebel in liquid eyeliner, banging her head to the Scorpions and smoking with the big kids. I was a dark little emo chick who could not make the boys understand just how easy I wanted to be. Oh, big sister. I stuffed my bra full of cotton balls, trying to keep up.
We are grown women now and the playing field has long since leveled out. But admiring my sister is a lifelong habit, as comfortable and homey as my mother’s kitchen. I wish I didn’t have to do it from afar.
What’s it like with your siblings, then and now?
We can forget my two brothers (who helped me be confused about the kind of treatment a woman should accept from a guy), but my sister and I are getting close to what we had before weirdness set in when mom was so sick. We can’t have the silent (or unintelligible to anyone but us) conversations anymore, but we still talk about nothing for hours on the phone and giggle while we do.
I’m the oldest, so I remember her as the pesky little kid who could be fun when life wasn’t kicking me in the butt. When she was too young to read, she memorized her favorite 45s of mine by the pictures and colors on the labels. I loved her to pieces even when she wanted to hear the wrong song for my mood.
Hey, I just got back from Twitter. Yay you for getting into the swing of things there.
I think there’s something to this idea that birth order affects our world view. The oldest child tends to be more responsible, the middle child mediates, the youngest veers toward petulance. My sister and I have always had a pretty healthy relationship but even so, our roles were set a long time ago and are part of the dynamics of our friendship. She figures things out, I watch and learn.
I am attempting Twitter. It’s something my publisher would like me to try and that’s cool, as it doesn’t take up too much time. I should probably get back into Facebook but I’ve made a strategic choice to keep blogging instead. Too much social media = lack of writing time, and that’s not good for anyone.
“Too much social media = lack of writing time, and that’s not good for anyone.”
Particularly writers. And I could not agree more. Facebook is a black hole down which time can swirl, never to be seen again. It is Internet heroin. I see writers who post to it so frequently, I don’t know what else they have time to do. Maybe they don’t have day jobs. For my part, I strictly ration my Facebook time. I’ll take a taste–not even a snort–and I won’t shoot it up, no fucking way.
Same with blogging. Yours and a couple others are the only blogs I frequent. There’s not enough time and there’s art to make. Life is short and art is long. And I have a day job. I’m at it right now. Things are slow but they pay me by the hour so no sweat.
Internet heroin, yes indeed. It’s just too much of a muchness. I haven’t been on for years and I really don’t want to go back. Blogging and Twitter are enough for me. I have books to write.
I kind of ‘get’ Twitter, but I hate trying to work it on the computer. Seems to me it was made for cell phone use. And I hate Facebook, too, though I get out of there fast and mostly just check my email to see if anyone is talking to me. (If they do, it never has to do with my writing, but of course, career coaches say that’s because I’m not ‘working’ it right.)
As to blogging, I got tired of trying to compose posts that folks would read and then talk to me about. I decided that if this summer was going to kick blogging’s ass, I should at least make it about writing fiction, so I can do the two at once. Fiction can be ignored just as easily, so why not attempt to amuse myself. It’s not working so well but at least I’m writing.
My sister is the worst friend I’ve ever had, but she’s also the one friend I’ll never give up. I remember when we were in high school and a male classmate told me that she was the pretty sister. “What an asshole!” I exclaimed in confidence later that day. “Oh, come on, he wasn’t trying to be mean. He’s sweet,” my sister replied. That moment was small and a very long time ago, but it’s one of those memories that you blogged about a few posts back… the ones you think about late at night or in the early morning. I can recall all the shouting matches fine too, but it’s the moments in which I wasn’t mad at her that make me think: fuck, sis, couldn’t you tell how much I really needed you!
Oh, sister competition. I can well imagine how you would have carried that moment around for early morning visitation. Take heart, though. You’re a writer now and can plant that exchange in a book for public consumption.
what a lovely post. my brother and I are the exact opposite. we dont talk, i have no idea what he does. my parents feed me occasional info. this isnt because we fought or anything but just grew distant. although i’m trying not to be distant so much. we smoke the occasional doob together
Well, all is not lost as long as you can still burn together. If there’s a litmus test for familial relations, sharing a joint should be on it.
I think so. I also gave him my Bombay stash as a sort of friendly gesture. I think thats a step in the right direction.
I forget sometimes that I have a sister, until the flashbacks come. Or Christmas.
When I see my girls play together, lean on each other, or even fuss at each other (they don’t fight—sisterfighting isn’t annoyance and tattling, it’s hatred and fists and weapons . . . right?) I’m filled with a sense of wonder at their connection.
Is that what it’s supposed to be like? If so, I don’t have any siblings, except the ones I’ve found myself.
Yes, that’s what it’s supposed to be like. Purloined Barbie shoes and threats of ‘I’ll tell Mom’ and shit like that. Fists and weapons are for brotherfights, though there can be a certain amount of crossover during the teen years when the hormones are raging. I remember pissing off my sister once and having this bright-hot moment of terror when I saw her face and knew I’d gone too far.
My little bro, it’s just sweet. We ski and sail on different continents together. I love being his sis.
But my other bro is a bit pompous and he still makes me feel like the black sheep.
Now THAT’s what I’m talking about. A brother to ski with!
Shoot. Three sisters. Do you have all day and some of those lavender cosmos to share?
Drew has a boatload of sisters and is the only boy, second oldest. You’d think the girls would have joined forces against him, but from what I hear he inflicted a fair amount of torture. He once rolled up a sister in a rug and left her there for some awful reason, and I think he hit another sister with a rock when they were walking home from school one day. Someday I’ll ply his big sister with lavender cosmos and get the deep dish on all his brotherly mischief.
So many, many stories…
Make it a top shelf margaritas (rocks and tons of coarse salt) and I’ll spill it all.
How long ’til October?
I adore all three of my sisters and have different relationships, with varying degrees of intimacy, with each. You came along and filled a particular void, though, and I’m really grateful for that.
Done. I will happily get you plastered and pump you for details.
XO
Lovely post about sisters, so leaving the brothers out and going with my stepsister. We became sisters when I was 8 and she was 7, and right from the start we both liked to pretend we were the real deal. Sometimes we even dressed the same. When anything big blows up in the family, she’s the first person I call, and we’ve never once, in 40 years, had anything even close to a falling out. When we talk on the phone, my husband says we’re having a “Loud Contest,” which I find to be the highest of compliments. Here’s to sisters.
Oh, now a stepsister has got to be the bomb. Instant friendship, like a cousin, and without all that angsty competitive shit.
Well, now that you mention it, we were 2nd cousins before we became stepsisters. Long story.
Thank god you’re writing memoir.
The cousins-to-sisters thing isn’t even in the story. Which tells you how pedestrian it is….
When I was a little kid I’d sometimes wear my hair in two side ponytails. Once my brothers and I were fighting in the car and they each grabbed one ponytail from each side of me and pulled in opposite directions, hard, while i screamed in the middle.
When I was four I threw a tantrum and was screaming so much that my brother decided to shut me up by throwing a hairbrush across the room at me. It hit me in the mouth and knocked out my two front teeth. My permanent teeth didn’t come in for 2 more years. That some brother told me I could fly a year later and so I jumped off an outdoor staircase and broke 7 bones in one foot.
I did redeem myself once: When I was about 5 or so I exacted revenge on my brother by biting my wrist as hard as I could and then running, in tears, to show my mom the teeth marks. She was horrified he would bite me that hard, and thank god no one thought to ask to see if it was even his teeth that lined up with the bite. I was so proud of myself.
I think that about says it all. Gee, I wonder why I went through life wishing for a sister?
I’m cracking up. The bite mark! What we won’t do to tarnish the reputations of our siblings.
When I was a kid, I always wanted a brother. I thought he’d be kind and protective and would introduce me to his friends. Ha! Hahaha!
“What’s it like with your siblings, then and now?”
As is your sister, so is my brother–seventeen months older. I wore his hand-me-downs and resented it. He was the strait-laced goody-two-shoes and I was the rebel whose cause was rebelliousness. He made straight-As while I made out with the bad girls. He watched over me in high school such that I maintained in those days I had three parents, not two.
He was my first employer, when our dad invited him to hire me as his assistant on his paper routes. He couldn’t stand that I smoked and swore, but I could do the work. Nearly twenty years later, when I moved up to New York City and he was living there and working in finance and I pounded the pavement for weeks and couldn’t find a job, he and his fellow commodities traders hired me to be their clerk. I still smoked and swore, but I could do the work.
He was a religious lad who became a religious man. When he was eight or nine, I was in the kitchen one morning with our mom when he came in and said, Mom, it says here in the Bible that I’m my brother’s keeper. Am I my brother’s keeper? She said, Yes, you are. He seemed excited and somewhat daunted at the prospect.
We fought as brothers will. We went through years when we would not speak to one another. We got through all that nonsense. We’re not chums but we get along. We don’t see one another often. He lives in the Northeast and I live in the Southwest. But we are brothers. As he is my keeper, so am I his.
Ah, Tetman. Where were you when I was looking for a bad boy? I was desperate to be corrupted but could only attract kind little Jewish boys who would help me with my math homework.
That’s wonderful that you’re so close with your sister. I love the portrait you drew of two sisters, evolving into friends.
I’m the monkey in the middle. Little sister to Denise, big sister to David. Growing up was typical. A mixture of mutual torture and loads of goofball. My sister was susceptible to blackmail and my brother was a hair-puller. I, of course, was the perpetrator and instigator.
Today we enjoy each others company and don’t see one another nearly enough. I’m going to see them for the first time in 2 years this weekend and I’m really looking forward to it.
How cool that you get to see them this weekend. Two years is a long time, but with siblings you can pick up at any point and resume the conversation right where you left off. Enjoy yourself, my friend. And wear your hair in a bun in case David gets any bright ideas.
Chemin de fers! I had to get a job at the Baskin Robbins to pay for my habit.
I wish I had a sister. My mother sometimes acts like one. She does a pretty good job but we don’t get to complain about our mother.
My mom has really become the third sister over the years. The three of us together would probably win Teri’s ‘loud contest’, hands down.
I don’t have a sister but you and I are sisters in the bra stuffing department
.
Now they build the stuffing in, to save us the trouble. My husband refers to this as ‘false advertising’.
not “falsie advertising”?
{snort}
Sisters. The biological kind. I have seven. Five on my mother’s side and two on my father’s. I am an eldest. It’s complicated.
Seven! Gracious. I knew you had a big family but I didn’t realize you had so many sisters. That’s a lot of responsibility for the eldest girl.
You’ve hit the epicenter of all my envy. All my life I have looked for a sister I could call my very own. Someone once said that my three daughters will become that for me and I hope they’re right. You’re a lucky girl, my Averil. I hope you share this post with yours. It’s beautiful.