How to Be a Sister

by Eileen Garvin

  That night as I watched my older sister Margaret, my heart was full. It made me happy that she could sometimes blend in with the rest of us and not have everyone staring at her, making her seem like the odd one out. Although she couldn’t express complicated sentiments, I imagined she liked to feel included just like the rest of us did. I felt a surge of gratitude toward my new sister-in-law for making room in her life for Margaret.

  Later, when the groomsmen and bridesmaids were making toasts, Margaret hustled in close so she could get right up next to the cake. All eyes were fixed on the lovely couple as their friends and siblings took turns telling funny stories and expressing their good wishes. Cameras flashed as people recorded the special moment.

  I’d like to believe that everyone was so intent on the words of love and encouragement pouring into the microphone that probably not very many people noticed Margaret. My dear sister, who had edged in right next to the bride and groom, was waiting tensely, eyes on the cake, with the hem of her skirt tucked down into the front of her pantyhose.

  Michael’s wife, who was standing next to me, noticed, too. “Oh, no,” we said in unison. My mother was standing closest to Margaret, and I tried desperately, silently, to get her attention. Mom saw me gesturing wildly and misunderstood. Thinking I was pointing to the bride and groom, she smiled at me, her eyes shining with joyful tears. “I know,” she mouthed. “Just beautiful!”

  4.

  winging it

  In conversation, as in most things, the middle road is best. Know when to listen to others but also know when it is your turn to carry on the conversation.

  —On Conversation, EMILY POST’S ETIQUETTE

  SOME OF MY relationships have become trapped in the amber of my memories, and comparing the present with the past can be confusing. My fiery dad, for example, somehow became a mild little white-haired person who makes polite dinner conversation with me instead of insisting everyone shut up so he can watch TV. My ever-tired mother, who ignored my decades of nagging about exercise, is now a road-biking demon with calves of steel. We are all always changing, I know. Even Margaret, who appears to stay more the same than most people I know, is moving through time and space in her own individual life just as I am moving through mine.

  I was thinking about this one day as I sat in my backyard in Oregon, watching the swallows dip and swoop over the garden. Their graceful flight paths reminded me of my childhood and the endless hours of summer sunshine during which I had had no greater responsibility than to sit on the dock and watch the birds. Of course, I was supposed to be watching my big sister, too. That much was always understood, if unspoken. Before I was conscious of being conscious, I knew enough to worry about losing track of Margaret. We siblings were all equally terrified when she wandered off on her own. Where did she go, and who was going to get in trouble for it?

  My Birds of Oregon book told me that the birds I had watched as a child were the subtle-colored cliff swallow and the brighter, blue-feathered tree swallow. Arriving each spring at our lake cabin, we always found a new nest above the front door, created before we finished our own migration for the year, putting the boat in the water and navigating the icy spring waters of Lake Coeur d’Alene, our life jackets bunched up around our small ears. Swallow eggs incubate for only about two weeks, and the babies stay in the nest for about three more. Compared to our human lives, the entire childhood period of these little creatures is truncated into just a month and a half, which makes me realize I must have been watching many different bird families each summer above the front door, not just one. But at my house it was definitely only one family, the same family.

  That’s part of what is so difficult about being a child in a big family: Wherever you go, there your siblings are. The ill-informed (probably “only children” themselves) might argue that this is the magical part of being a big family. But I’ll bet those people have never had to engage in a physical battle for couch space. As children, my siblings and I were afflicted by the constant and involuntary presence of one another. We crowded together around the same sticky dinner table, fought for position in front of the TV, and struggled for our hard-won minutes in the lukewarm shower while someone else was banging on the bathroom door. We loved each other, but that concept was buried deep during the moments that we battled tooth and nail for the last bottle of Pop Shop pop.

  By the time I’d moved to Oregon, those days were long gone, and now we had to go out of our way to get in one another’s lives. As adults, my brothers and sisters and I inflicted ourselves on each other by choice. One way we did this was by forcing one another to participate in our hobbies. This was why I was willing to watch The Lord of the Rings with my oldest sister Ann’s family ad infinitum. And why I let Ann pay for me to get a French manicure for my birthday, even though whenever I looked at my nails I felt like a hooker. It’s also the reason why Ann, who now lived a couple of hours away from me, agreed to come to my book club. I had told her—my beautiful, conservative, army-wife sister—that we would be camping, but maybe I just assumed she’d infer the rest—that anyone who would camp out in the woods for book club would necessarily be a bunch of tree-hugging liberals. If she didn’t suspect, it didn’t show; she was so gracious at the all-organic potluck and our ensuing discussion about the evils of the logging industry. She didn’t even bat an eye when, after we’d eaten our s’mores and the kids were tucked in, someone lit up a joint; she just excused herself politely and went to bed.

  SINCE I’D MOVED back to the Pacific Northwest, it was easier to connect with my siblings, at least geographically. But getting together with Ann, for example, was much easier than trying to spend time with Margaret. For one thing, Ann would answer the phone when it rang and usually didn’t hang up on me. Moreover, with Margaret this kind of interest-sharing business was fairly one-sided. With her autism, she didn’t have the kind of empathy that would make her suffer through something she didn’t feel like doing just for the sake of another person’s happiness (as Ann did by riding in my dog-hair-covered van into the darkening Gifford Pinchot Wilderness with my beloved mutt Dizzy inching deeper into her lap with every mile). That’s simply too abstract a concept. But I had non-autistic friends and relatives who were less empathetic than she was, so I wasn’t ready to give up on this project, not quite yet. I decided that the next time I went home, I was going to try to get Margaret to go hiking with me.

  I had tried it once before, the summer before I moved back to the Northwest and was home visiting. Hiking was something Margaret and I had never discussed, so I didn’t know if she knew exactly what I meant when I asked her to go, but she was game to try. At least that’s the way it seemed before she slammed down the phone. “You’re going hiking with Eileen! OKAY!” SLAM!

  As with our then-recent lunch date, I found myself focusing on low expectations. Just get there first and see what happens, I told myself on the car ride from northern Oregon to eastern Washington. On the appointed day, I drove five hours to get to her house, knocked on the door, and waited for her to open up. She yanked the door open and peered out at me through the screen. She didn’t say anything. There was no “Hi! How are you! How was your trip? Come on in while I grab my things.” We don’t have those bridges of small talk, no stepping-stones of cheek kissing and shoulder squeezing. She just looked at me for a few long, silent seconds. Then she said, “You’re going hiking, Eileen?” When I said yes, she grabbed her purse, brushed past me, and got in the car, slamming the door as hard as she could. Then she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the drive, which was really lovely.

  Margaret does not talk much. She is definitely not on my top ten list of great conversationalists. If you ask her a question, she is apt to answer yes or no at random. So the questions “Do you want eggs or pancakes?” and “Are you going to stop spitting, or do we have to leave right now?” will elicit the same answer: “Yes?! No?!” So I wasn’t surprised or put off by her silence. Which isn’t the same thing as saying I didn’t wish for more. I hadn
’t seen my sister for months. Given the choice, I’d like to know what was going on in her life and her heart. What had she been up to since we last saw each other? What was making her happy? Or sad? What had she been doing with her housemates on the weekends? But these are the kinds of questions my sister simply couldn’t answer. I had to make do with the limited information I got from the staff members at her house, who saw her every day. I had to hope that she was finding joy in her own way.

  ALTHOUGH I WISHED for a foray into my sister’s thoughts, part of me didn’t mind Margaret’s quiet on this particular day. I think we could all use a bit more silence, frankly. The world is a noisy place, becoming ever more cacophonous with our cell phones, laptops, and iPods. My father-in-law can’t sleep unless the television set is on. My husband likes to read his e-mail and talk to me over breakfast while he listens to NPR and sends text messages to his chess club members. My nephews play Xbox for hours at a time and watch the same movies over and over again, often wandering away from the TV halfway through the film, leaving the volume up. I’m frequently in the car with friends or family and realize that everyone but me is talking on the phone.

  I’m misplaced in the technology generation. I usually drive my car with the radio off. I recently drove thirty-two hundred miles alone without even popping in a CD. I work in a quiet room, the silence broken every now and again by the sound of my dog snorting herself awake or the cat crying to be let out, and then in, and then out again. I leave my phone off when I’m driving, writing, or—wonder of wonders—talking to another live person. Often I’ll have several messages when I turn it back on, but none of them urgent, unless you count the ones from Brendan demanding to know why my phone is off.

  I grew up in a noisy household, which is part of the reason I crave quiet. But there is something more there, and it’s about observing human behavior, the nonspeaking parts of communication. The beauty of the pause, the nonverbal cue, escaped me in my younger years, but I appreciate these elements more and more as I age. I learned from Navajo students at the University of New Mexico how abrupt and foreign an Anglo style of communication could seem. To them, Anglo students and teachers talked too much and too fast. While the Navajos were waiting quietly for what they deemed the appropriate cultural pause so they could respond to a question, the Anglos would get nervous about the quiet and start chattering again, asking more questions. Then the Navajo students would have to wait some more, prompting more nervous chatter and an unfortunate cycle of miscommunication.

  When I taught fourth grade in American Samoa my students clued me in a bit about nonverbal communication by teaching me that an eyebrow waggle means “yes.” As I’d stand there, hands on my hips, demanding a verbal response, they’d crack up, thinking it was hilarious that I didn’t know what they were “saying.” I just wasn’t listening. I hadn’t learned how yet.

  My raucous, crowded childhood had given way to a life full of quiet and space and time, three things I’d never thought I’d have so much of. And though I’d been years away from that chaos and close quarters with four siblings, the sense of tension and disruption had stayed with me all along, and I was still trying to shake it.

  AFTER ABOUT A half an hour of complete silence in the car, Margaret looked over at me and said, “Hi, Eileen!” Then she went back to looking out the window. I laughed to myself, thinking about how this quiet car ride with my sister was full of irony for me. After all, one of the reasons that my childhood home had been so loud was because of this sister who was now riding along beside me in such a state of tranquility. This scene I was experiencing was one I might have fantasized about, but had never really expected: my quiet big sister.

  We drove up U.S. Route 2 to State Route 206 and north out of Spokane as KPBX played Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Margaret looked out the window and watched the scenery as her neighborhood in the quaint college district gave way to strip malls and Chinese restaurants, then big-box shopping centers. Beyond that were the rural outcroppings that had become housing developments, sparsely inhabited, then the last few working family farms, then forest. We entered Mount Spokane State Park and wound up the narrow road toward the ski area. Margaret didn’t say a word. Now and then she pressed a finger against the window and whispered something to herself. I’ve been through a lot with Margaret—violent outbursts, public nudity, explosive vomiting in restaurants—but nothing in our past could have prepared me for this long silence.

  During our childhood, Margaret’s autism had made her prone to frequent, unpredictable, violent tantrums. They might occur during dinner, in the middle of the night, or in the morning, and often for no discernable reason. Was it her diet? Was it her hormones? Was it her medication? Was it her autism? It was crazy-making to try to predict or resolve the issue that might be upsetting her. But as a child, somehow I felt like I was supposed to figure out what she needed. So did my other siblings. What was the magic trick we needed to do that would make her world right again? We tried everything, and when nothing worked, we tried it all again. What else do you do when someone is screaming bloody murder if not try to figure out how to make her stop? But we were children, not autism experts, and our efforts often seemed futile. Consequently, our collective childhood was marred by the anxiety that plagued my sister and her inability to communicate with the rest of us about what she needed. So now I watched her watching the road, saying nothing, and simply marveled. Deep down, though, I was still as edgy as ever.

  I glanced over at her as I drove. Margaret is three years older than I am, which at the time put her at forty. She is taller than I am and heavier, having inherited what our family calls “the McGillicuddy figure.” That means she looks like the women on my maternal grandmother’s side: tall, large breasted, carrying a little potbelly, and pencil-thin legs. She wears her brunette hair in a short, stylish cut, which highlights her lovely green eyes. Margaret often stands with her hands clasped in front of her, over her large bosom, looking for all the world like the Venus of Willendorf.

  In the previous decade or so, we’d gone through extended periods of time without seeing each other, and I had held this image of her in my mind’s eye. When I lived in New Mexico, the distance was an obstacle. As a poor graduate student, I had the time to travel but often lacked the funds. Then I got a job with decent pay and a measly two weeks off a year. Margaret could never travel alone, and even with a chaperone, unpredictable plane travel was an adventure that no one was eager to try with her, especially post-9/11. But here I was, living just five hours away, trying to connect with my sister. And with only her. One-on-one, to try to bookmark the past apart from the present, the way things had always been from the way I hoped they might be.

  JUST AS I wanted an adult relationship with Ann, Larry, and Mike, I was looking for a change in my siblinghood with Margaret. In the recent past, visiting with my sister had left me feeling stressed, kind of like doing a beer bong and then getting on a roller coaster. It was her outbursts that got me. “Behavioral issues” was the polite term we used when we became adults. In plainer terms that meant a visit with my sister usually included one or all of the following: being spanked, hit on the head, spit on, shoved, ignored completely for the entire week, laughed at, or pinched in that tender area between chin and Adam’s apple. (This is probably not something many people worry about, the Neck Pinch. But if you take the time to locate this spot on your neck, you’ll notice that it is, in fact, a very tender piece of corporeal real estate. Now imagine that you are just sitting around, minding your own business, and suddenly you feel like that delicate part of your neck is caught in a car door. That’s what the Neck Pinch feels like.) All those things might be repeated, at random, for the duration of a given visit. Let’s just say it was difficult to relax and have fun under these circumstances, and it was even more difficult to feel warmth toward the perpetrator of such assaults, even though this might be the only time we’d get to see each other all year.

  But all these possibilities were preferable to the
screaming. When Margaret got really out of control, she screamed this kind of primal scream that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Actually it made the hair on my face stand up. And I didn’t even know I had hair on my face. This noise also made me sweat in a sudden burst—a sweaty outburst, if there is such a thing. Somewhere deep down inside, I felt I was supposed to do something drastic, like run back into the jungle and drown my baby monkeys because the end of the world was coming.

  When Margaret screamed, it sounded like she was trying to turn herself inside out by the force of her voice. And if that didn’t work, she was going to keep screaming until she turned the rest of the world inside out. Often when she got like this, she simply couldn’t stop. And all I wanted to do was help her stop. But rushing to her aid felt like running back into a burning building to try to turn off the fire alarm and, in my experience, was about as useful. The last time I had tried to help when Margaret was freaking out like this, I had earned myself a twisted ankle and a bruise on the back of my head; Margaret shoved me over backward when I crouched down next to the chair she’d thrown herself into and tried to reason with her.

  I didn’t know how often Margaret acted like this anymore. When we were younger, the screaming had been a part of everyday life, along with the maniacal barking of the dog, my sister’s incessant record-playing, and the whine of my father’s power tools in the basement. The combination often made me feel like hiding in a quiet corner, only I couldn’t find one in our crowded house. Margaret’s tantrums were definitely the worst of all the above, and they were certainly tied to her autism and to the pain or discomfort or anxiety that she simply couldn’t explain to the rest of us. Fat lot of help we were, standing around, alternatively soothing, yelling, cajoling, pleading—or, as in my recent case, getting too close for comfort—as she tried to cope with whatever mania was coursing through her at the time.