“When the other kids get up, then you can play the music, Margaret.”
“When the other kids get up, then you can play the music, Mom.”
“That’s right, Margs.”
“Then you can play the music.”
“Then you can play the music, Margs.”
“Then you can play the music, Mom.”
“Then you can play the music, Margs.”
After a certain period of time, Margaret just couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d sprint into the kitchen and switch on the stereo at full volume for a split second, blasting music through the house. Before someone yelled at her to turn it down, she had already turned it off again. Of course I was no longer sleeping after that, but I clung stubbornly to my right to be in bed, and I kept my eyes shut tight. Often, Margaret would start checking on me to see if I was moving. I’d pretend like I was asleep as she pounded up the stairs and shuffled to my bedside. Then she’d just stand there, breathing on me. I’d look at her through my lashes, always sensing that she knew I was faking my slumber.
Some days her face would be pulled into lines of worry, and she’d stand there twisting her hands, looking like she was about to cry or scream. On other days I would see her mischievous smile. “You can play the music when the kids get up,” she’d say loudly, into my face. And if I so much as flickered an eyelash, she’d pounce on me, rolling around on the bed and laughing, “YOU’RE GOING TO LISTEN TO THE MUSIC WHEN EILEEN GETS UP! HA HA HA HA!” Then she’d sprint down the stairs to crank up the stereo. “You’re going to listen to the music when Eileen gets up, Mom!” she’d holler up from the kitchen in her high monotone voice. And I’d be, against my will, up.
I’ve never quite recovered from those days. I still hide my face in the morning, only now I’m hiding from my dog, who starts pawing at my shoulder if she sees me move, hoping to expedite a quicker breakfast. I feign sleep around the cats, one of which starts knocking pictures off the walls or flinging my glasses and other bedside items if she thinks there’s a chance I’ll rise up and open the window for her, the other one wanting me to fill her very special water bowl in the bathroom and crying and pacing if she sees me awake. Yes, it’s true—I’m a grown woman who feels the need to deceive her pets. But I hide from my husband, too, who, like Margaret, always wants to get up early on the weekends. So far, he has been easier to fool with the pretending-to-be-asleep bit.
ALL OF THIS is to say that sleep-related anxiety makes me pretty keen to avoid shared sleeping arrangements. If I sleep alone, I don’t have to worry about being watched or, consequently, try to hide the fact that I am worried about it. But no such luck this time. Here I was, trapped by the enthusiasm of a sweet young boy. As I lay awake, I knew I should be flattered by the attention. At least I wasn’t some scary relative that everyone hid from—the Aunt with the Hairy Mole, the Aunt Who Chews with Her Mouth Open, the Aunt with the BO Who Hugs Way Too Much. Tony was young enough to take it for granted that he liked me just because I was his auntie. He was too young to make any critical sort of judgment about me as a person; I was just an aunt. For this I knew I should be grateful. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on gratitude, but I moved in the wrong direction and felt a muscle in my lower back start to spasm. While I waited for the pain to pass, it occurred to me that there weren’t too many years left for Tony to be so cuddly. As the youngest of my sister’s three kids, he tolerated the babying, snuggling, and hand-holding. But his big brother was on the football team, his dad was in the military, and I knew a time was coming when the little man in him wouldn’t stand for any of it; he’d rise up and throw off the sweet bonds of women’s affection, at least while other people were looking.
As I finished this thought, Tony kicked me in his sleep and my spine twanged like a loosely strung violin. My sleeplessness intensified, and I realized that in just a few short hours I was going to have to face a room full of alert family members, and I was pretty sure there wasn’t any coffee in the house. This thought terrified me into full wakefulness. I thought about climbing the stairs into Tony’s room and taking over his twin bed so that I would get enough sleep to communicate with my relatives long enough to find out where the nearest coffee shop was. Then a powerful thought came to me and superseded the caffeine problem. I’m never going to have one of these, I thought. I’ll never have a little boy of my own. Suddenly I felt completely calm and aware. I don’t have any children, and it’s unlikely that I ever will. I often ponder the advantages of this decision, but at that moment, as Tony pitched onto his side and threw me an elbow, all I could think of was the loss it brought. The realization pierced me sharply just then, and the little feet didn’t bother me anymore, and after a while I fell asleep.
The reason I was in the Big Nana Pat Bed in the first place was that I was on an auntly errand, one I probably wouldn’t have been able to perform if I’d had kids of my own, in fact. Ann, whose husband was out of the country, had asked me to stay with her three children—Bobby, Julia, and Tony—while she attended a class in another town. My mission was simple: pick the little kids up from school, be home when Bobby got home from carpool, feed them dinner, make sure they did their homework, and keep them alive until they left for school the next morning. Then I was off the hook. I had accepted, but with a pang of fear in my heart. As a childless freelance writer, I lead a rather simple life. My day is centered on the coffeepot and a hot shower. I wander around in my bathrobe for the better part of the morning, and if you took away my computer and replaced it with a television, people watching what I do all day would say “loser” instead of “writer.” It’s all relative. Despite the simplicity of my solitary routine, I can make a part-time job out of letting the cats in and out on a given day. Being responsible for humans was another matter entirely. But I wanted to do it, so I had said yes and tried to feel brave.
For an hour or so after I arrived at their house, I just stood in the middle of the kitchen, wide-eyed. Living with children must make you feel like your house is haunted, I thought. Around every corner of Ann’s house was the sound of a person, or a pile of that person’s stuff, a recently vacated chair sliding across the floor, an electronic device just turned on, the shadow of a child disappearing around a corner, the flash of a shirttail, a sock heel. It seemed like they were in constant motion, so I stood still, clutched my glass of wine, and tried to pay attention to the directions my sister was giving while she made dinner. She’d get about halfway through some complex explanation about their education, health care, or spiritual well-being, and then she’d look up at me and say, “Oh, you know what I’m talking about.” I was too overwhelmed to say, “Do I? Are you sure?”
As we sat together enjoying the meal she’d prepared, my confusion intensified. It seemed like they all talked at the same time, but that could have been the wine. My sister mediated the conversation by asking each of them to tell the rest of us three things they’d done that day. Bobby was taking his turn when I heard Tony making a funny noise, and when I looked at him I realized he was choking. Before I could even think of what to do, he opened his mouth to breathe. A warm mist of milk sprayed across the table and showered my hair, shoulders, and chest. I sat there, milky beads cascading down the wales of my corduroy shirt, not reacting. There was a moment of silence, and then they all dissolved with laughter, my sister laughing the loudest. The four of them pounded on the table and gasped for air, unable to speak. I reached up with my napkin and dabbed at the milk pooling in my collarbone, calmly patted my hair, and waited for them to be quiet. After a minute or two it occurred to me that it really was hilarious to have milk in my hair, and I started to chuckle, which made them laugh harder. Then I really got going and snorted so loud that Tony nearly spewed milk all over me again. Eventually we pulled ourselves together and finished dinner. Thank God there was a parent there to lead us through.
IT’S TIMES LIKE this when I feel like my emotional comprehension runs about two minutes behind everyone else’s. And when you think about t
he nuances of humor, grief, or anger, that’s a lot of time. This lag time was kind of trained into me as a kid, when I had spent years trying not to respond to some antic of my sister’s. For instance, Margaret always got a huge kick out of spitting her juice in our faces at the dinner table. Some of her jokes would come and go after a few days or weeks, like chin pinching or hair pulling, but this one stuck around for years. As we five kids sat crowded around our sticky dining room table, one of us would feel the weight of her eyes upon us and, unwillingly, turn to look at her. She’d blow like a spouting whale, just inches away. Then she’d laugh and laugh, and our mother would tell us not to react, because it would only encourage her to do it more. So we’d just sit there with water or juice running down our cheeks and take another bite of canned corn or beans while she loaded up and did it all over again. Sometimes I’d get angry and yell at her, which usually made her laugh harder, and she’d say something like, “You don’t spit your juice, Eileen! That’s good manners! Ha ha ha ha ha!” And then she would spit on me again. She also loved to grab the gallon jug of milk out of the refrigerator and pour it down the drain to make us scream, “No, Margaret! Don’t pour the milk out!” This also made her laugh, and we were not supposed to respond as she hollered, “You don’t pour the milk out! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
We’ve spent a lot of time not reacting to Margaret’s kooky jokes, and I don’t think it has made a bit of difference. I love her and she has shaped my life in ways that I continue to try to understand, but when I was young, mostly I felt like I wanted to kill her when she did this sort of thing. In college when I read the myth of Sisyphus, I felt an immediate kinship. I knew what it was like to do the same thing over and over again, to go beyond exhaustion with the repetition of some meaningless task, and to wake up the next day and do it all over again without any hope of reprieve. That’s how I felt when we, as a family, were trying to teach Margaret to do, or not do, something. I always think about Margaret when I am around other people’s children, because I was one of the many people who helped bring her up. Although I am three years younger than she, I am, for all intents and purposes, her big sister, and it’s the only frame of reference I have for child rearing. I realize it is not a conservative comparison, but it’s all I’ve got.
TONY, UNLIKE MARGARET, only spit on me the one time. And I came to recognize that it was an accident, although after the response he got, you could tell he really wanted to do it again. After Ann left for her class, I kept reminding myself that these three children were not like my unpredictable sister. They were fairly reasonable little people; they had rules and a moral code. They might have been a bit too focused on keeping score—who ate the last cookie, whose turn it was for Xbox, who got to pick the last movie—but at least they all followed the same basic playbook with a range of rules: What Is Allowed, What Is Not Allowed, and What Aunt Eileen Might Not Know Is Not Allowed. This last category left me at a serious disadvantage. The rules and regulations of the childhood code of ethics seemed to have left me, and I felt panicked. I thought I was supposed to have some kind of answer to their nonstop negotiating for sugary snacks, television, a later bedtime, or their turn with a toy. The internal bickering and massive power struggles made me feel like Colin Powell during the Bush administration: I was supposed to have the answers, but no one was listening to me.
But I soon realized that I didn’t have to say much, if anything at all. These kids knew what was right and wrong within the family charter, even if I didn’t. I found that if I didn’t say anything and just looked knowingly at them, they came to the answer on their own. This tactic kept the peace and gave the illusion, at least, that I was on to them.
To be fair, they didn’t give me any real trouble, because they are good kids. They’ve moved around in the migratory army life—California, Massachusetts, Virginia, Beijing, Virginia again, Hong Kong, Virginia one last time, and now Washington State. Through all that, they’ve hung together. They are kind to one another and still play together, even the boys, who are separated by seven years.
And did they ever play; this was a gaming family. On the first night the three of them tried to teach me to play chess, a game I have never even tried, but which is a passion for my husband. It made me shudder, the anonymous-looking pieces and the blank board, which somehow inspired very mysterious, specific moves. Where were the chutes and ladders? The Lollipop Forest? The metal wheelbarrow and Scotty dog? But Bobby, Tony, and Julia were good little teachers. Plus we were using the Lord of the Rings chess set with its recognizable Orcs and Wizards and such, not those neutered-looking wooden pegs. I was actually starting to catch on, and then I won by default when Tony, who had been beating me soundly, fell victim to teasing from his older brother, got pissed off, and threw the board.
On the second night, they asked me what I wanted to play after dinner, and I said, “What do you have?” “Risk,” they said, “and Murder in the Abbey, and Scattergories, and Cranium.” I said I didn’t know how to play any of those, but I’d be willing to learn.
Tony slapped the table with an open palm like he’d just about had it with me. “Aunt Eileen, you don’t know ANYTHING!” he exclaimed. The older kids looked at me to see if I was going to get mad. I’m pretty sure there is a rule in the family charter about how you are supposed to address adults, but by this time I’d decided that I mostly fall into the middle ground regarding this sort of etiquette; I am not a parent and I am not a child, but I feel a closer kinship to the children, especially when I’m sleeping on the hide-a-bed in the middle of the living room. So I just smiled at Tony and told him it was okay that I didn’t know anything, because I had him to teach me.
That’s the truth, too. These kids taught me something every time I saw them. I learned not to be terrified if Julia asked me to brush her beautiful auburn hair in the morning. I used to flee the comb myself, and remembering the unkind pull of the sharp teeth in my own snarly young locks, I was afraid I would hurt her. But this kid was resilient. I brushed, I braided, and I wasn’t half bad at it. She smiled at me and told me I did a pretty good job.
With Tony I learned to trust that I would know what to say when he padded into the kitchen at 10:00 PM in his little Spiderman pajamas to tell me he couldn’t sleep. That I would find some trick in my Auntie Toolbox to comfort him enough so that he’d be able to slide into bed and burrow his head down like a small animal, wearing the remnant of his security blanket like a scarf. And he showed me I can get over my ancient hang-ups—like sharing a bed with somebody else and not minding if I don’t sleep very well.
And then there was Bobby, the stoic eldest. When I went to bed and saw his light on upstairs, I thought about his lonely breakfast that morning in the dark kitchen. He had to leave at 7:00 AM each day for high school in the next town over and at fourteen was getting himself up and out the door on his own. I worried that I had been too serious about following my sister’s instructions about the rules. So I got out of bed and climbed up the stairs. I poked my head in through his open door and saw Bobby with his headphones on, doing his homework. I pointed at the clock and called him the family vampire. That made him smile. We talked about how fun it is to stay up late and how hard it is to get up in the morning. He told me about what he was working on, a critique for his creative writing class. I didn’t say much. I didn’t know what to say, but I just wanted him to know that I saw him, that I recognized him, and that I could see the person he is always becoming.
The next morning I listened to Bobby trying to get up for an hour—5:45 AM, 6:00 AM, 6:15 AM, 6:30 AM—his alarm shouting me awake every fifteen minutes. Alarm! Snooze. Alarm! Snooze. I dragged myself into the kitchen to make some coffee at 7:00 AM and told him he should get a medal for getting up so early. Before he left, I put my arms around him and told him to come visit me in Oregon soon.
Julia and Tony held my hands on the way to school, and I loved the feeling of their smooth little paws. More than that, I loved the feeling of trust, their cheerful assumption that I love the
m back, which I do, immensely. They let go of me and jumped up to walk the rock wall next to the sidewalk, all the while chatting away to me, not missing a step. At the school I watched them head into their separate classrooms and into a day that would become part of a lifetime as it piled up on the other days that had come before it. And I hoped my short time with them would be a good memory in that pile.
I DROVE HOME through the Pacific Northwest rain, dodging semitrucks and puddles, thinking of their red-gold hair, their sweet faces, their laughter. I thought about my sister and her husband, the architects of their children’s characters. How do you do it? I wondered. How do you figure out the right rules to sustain you through a day, a year, or a lifetime? When do you know you are teaching them how to become the people they were born to be and when you are getting in their way? Is it the success of the day-to-day or the crisis that proves it to you? How do you encourage them to do things their own way, and how do you stand back and let them fail, knowing that it is just one small part of who they will become?
Soon I was back in my quiet house with my needy cats and my patient dog. Nobody wanted to play with me. They just wanted food, water, and the couch. After climbing the stairs that night, I was happy to be in my own bed, but I missed the warmth and weight of Tony dreaming next to me. My house was full of the dark and the silence that comes from the absence of children. And even after all these years, I still felt the quiet created by Margaret’s absence.
How to Be a Sister Page 13
