About My Sisters

  About My Sisters

  DEBRA GINSBERG

  For my sisters,

  and for our mother

  With the exception of members of the author’s immediate

  family, all names and identifying characteristics of individuals

  discussed in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1.

  Four Elements, One Pattern

  2.

  The Mariannas

  3.

  Departures and Arrivals

  4.

  Already Seen

  5.

  Mirror to Mirror

  6.

  Misters and Sisters

  7.

  About Our Brother

  8.

  Aunties

  9.

  Separate Realities

  10.

  Driving Forces

  11.

  Presence

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Debra Ginsberg

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  february 2002

  It’s a week after Valentine’s Day. Winter, such as it is here in southern California, is effectively over. The air is warm and dry enough to crackle with static electricity. I’ve had twelve long-stemmed red roses sitting on my coffee table since last week and they are still fresh. They are huge and beautiful and look as if they might live forever.

  In South Africa, on the other side of the world, my mother’s sister is dying.

  My aunt, who has been fighting cancer for the last few years, is not an old woman. She has been ill for some time, it is true, but, until recently, it seemed as if she might have beaten her disease. It is only now, in the last month, that her death has become imminent. My mother spoke to her sister a few weeks ago in what turned out to be their last conversation. They discussed my aunt’s illness but not her death. Now my aunt is in the hospital and no longer conscious. And my mother waits for a phone call.

  Among us, my family has experienced few premature deaths. In this way, we have been very fortunate. My parents have also spent most of their adult lives physically separated from their families of origin. We have always been removed, by many miles, from the deaths of our relatives. I am almost forty years old and I have never been to a funeral.

  Although she was a presence in my life and despite the fact that I saw her fairly regularly over the years, I have never been very close to my aunt. The constant geographical distance between us prevented the formation of a strong bond and it is impossible to know now whether or not one might have been created had we lived in closer proximity. I have spent more time thinking about her in the last few days than in the last several years combined. I grieve for my cousins, her children, although I can’t truly imagine how they must be feeling. It is for my own mother, however, that I feel the greatest sadness. She is losing her sister. And the loss of a sister is one, in the selfishness of my sorrow, I can’t envision.

  I can remember a time before I was a mother. And, with some difficulty, I can picture a future when I am no longer a daughter. But I can neither remember nor imagine my life without sisters. As the eldest of five children, four of them girls and one of them our only brother, my role as sister will always be an inextricable part of my personal identity. All four of us maintain an exceptionally intimate bond with each other. We all live within ten minutes of each other and speak every day. This is not a recent phenomenon. My sisters and I have been close our entire lives. The four of us are hardly ever in unanimous agreement and our very different personalities prevent us from ever thinking with one mind. Yet, in our relationships, our work, the face we present to the world, in every day of our lives, each one of us carries some part of her sisters with her. I can’t imagine my life without any one of them. Nor do I want to try.

  In keeping with our disparate viewpoints, my sisters and I have been responding to our mother’s grief in different ways. But we are united now in the desire to comfort her. This is why we are gathering to take her out for lunch and shopping today. Despite the frequency with which we see each other, we are seldom together at the same place and time and never go shopping as a group, so this is an extraordinary circumstance.

  We assemble at my mother’s house and, after some debate, decide to ride in one car. My mother seems subdued but not depressed. I’ve made her a mixed CD of all the songs that have been going through my head over the last couple of weeks. They are songs that were always playing in our house when I was growing up. There’s a bit of Leon Russell, a little Sly and the Family Stone, some Beatles, Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, and the Staple Singers. We listen to it in the car, and my mother says, “This is lovely.”

  Nobody talks about my aunt, although she’s there, in the air among us.

  I am impressed by how well my mother seems to be managing emotionally. She is sad, yes, but not in a morbid way. I’ve been talking to her every day lately, after she receives updates on her sister’s condition. Although she has clearly come to an acceptance of what is happening, she still expresses some surprise at the inevitable trajectory of this illness.

  “She’s a very strong woman,” my mother says. “She always has been. She didn’t have to die this way. She’s had a lifetime of bad advice, all of which she’s taken as the gospel.”

  For the most part, though, my mother seems philosophical and resigned, willing and able to let her sister go. I have begun to believe that my mother will get through what is euphemistically called “this difficult time” with heartache that will at least be bearable. My mother can be cagey about certain things, but I’ve never known her to hide her emotions. What she projects is almost always what she feels. Still, I expect to see a crack in this calmness of hers. I anticipate a visceral expression of impending loss. I wait for tears.

  That rupture comes now, before we can hit the freeway. One of us asks her whether we should go to Ikea or Nordstrom, and my mother leans her head against the window, hand to her mouth, and sobs.

  The inside of the car rings with a chorus of “What? What is it?”

  “I hate to think of her there, dying,” my mother weeps. “Alone. She’s all alone.”

  My sister Maya says, “She isn’t alone. All of her children and her grandchildren are there with her.”

  My sister Lavander says, “Don’t feel bad because you aren’t there. There isn’t anything you can do other than what you are doing.”

  My sister Déja says, “In the end, you have to go alone. There isn’t any other way.”

  I say nothing. Alone without her sister. This is what my mother means.

  “Do you want to skip this outing?” Lavander asks her. “We don’t have to go if you’re not up for it.”

  “Or we can just go to my house for tea,” Maya says.

  “What do you think, Mumsie?” says Déja.

  “I’m all right,” my mother says, wiping her eyes. “I’ll be okay. It just hit me now. That’s all.”

  “Then you still want to go?” I ask her.

  “The living must live,” she says. “And how often do I get to spend time with all my beautiful daughters?”

  “All the time, actually,” Déja says.

  “I mean together,” my mother says.

  There is an uncharacteristic quiet in the car for a while after this, as we each shift around in our seats, wondering what to say or whether to say anything at all. And then, as if her memory has opened in a slide show before her, my mother says, “When I was a girl, I had this friend Shirley who was an artist. We must have been about eighteen or so and she
had a project she had to do for a class, a lino cut. She asked me to write a poem and she’d make the print to go with it. So I wrote this poem, ‘Four Thin Girls.’ Shirley did a Modigliani thing with these four figures and she displayed it with the poem on one side.” She pauses as she looks at the print in her mind’s eye.

  “Do you remember the poem?” I ask her, and she recites it easily.

  “Four thin girls standing in the rain.

  ‘Are we living or are we dead?’

  Four weary souls, they complain,

  ‘We are dissatisfied, we are well-bred.’”

  “Not a happy poem,” I say.

  “It’s not unhappy,” she protests.

  “What does it mean?” says Lavander.

  “It’s all of you,” my mother says. “I just remembered it and realized that the poem is about you. I didn’t know then, of course, but those four girls are you. I saw all of you way back then. Four sisters. My girls.”

  Less than a week after our shopping trip, my mother gets the phone call. And then she calls me.

  “My sister died,” she says.

  “Are you all right?” I ask her.

  “Yes,” she says. “I’m okay.”

  We don’t talk about it again in any detail. We still speak on the phone every day, but there are no more updates. She is no longer waiting to hear. What is left now is to sift and sort through the layers of emotion. My mother will do this on her own. As for me, I have been spending my time thinking about my own sisters and our relationships. I have been thinking about the nature and the quiet strength of sisterhood. My sisters and I are unique in our particulars. There is a fifteen-year span between the first and last, for example, and because of this, we have grown up in different generations. We share the same parents, but not the same parenting. Our family lives closer and spends more time together than most. But in our generalities, we are much like sisters everywhere. With personalities shaped by birth order, we are the keepers of each other’s secrets and protectors of each other’s childhood memories. We are givers and receivers of female wisdom and are constantly learning from each other. We are each other’s harshest critics and strongest supporters. As sisters, we mirror and define ourselves as women through each other’s eyes.

  It is this relationship, I decide now, that I want to write about.

  After I make this decision, but before I really embark on the journey, I put the proposal to my sisters. I have written two memoirs in the last two years. The first, Waiting, is an account of the twenty years I spent as a waitress. The second, Raising Blaze, is about my son, an exceptional child with undiagnosable learning differences, and the journey the two of us have made through the public education system. My sisters have appeared in both books, but as supporting players. This time the focus will be sharpened on them. I am not asking their permission, but I want—no, I need to have their approval. Characteristically, my sisters don’t ask me why I want to write about them. They have long since come to an acceptance of my position as family chronicler. Maya tells me to go ahead, that she’s got nothing to hide. Lavander assures me that I will do a great job, but asks me, please, not to ruin her career. Déja says she thinks this will be the easiest book I’ll ever write because what else, who else, am I more familiar with?

  It is true, my sisters are as constant and familiar as fixed stars in the night sky. They are my geography. But it is also true that any landscape can change depending on the lens and angle through which it is viewed. This is what I think about as I start writing. I rely on the familiar, but I expect to find some new scenery here in the territory of my sisters.

  1

  Four Elements, One Pattern

  march

  Maya stands in our kitchen wielding a spatula.

  “I’m making dinner,” she says. This brief sentence of hers tells me much more than it would seem. It doesn’t just mean that she is whipping up something for the two of us. If that were the case, she’d ask me, “What do you feel like eating?” and then we’d go around for twenty minutes with neither one of us able to decide what culinary ethnicity we’d prefer:

  “What about Greek? You want Greek?”

  “Too much garlic. How about Chinese?”

  “Too much work. Pasta?”

  “Boring. Want to have Thai for a change?”

  “I can’t eat Thai, too much peanut sauce in everything.”

  And then, ultimately, we’d grow weary of the debate to the point where nothing seemed worth eating and settle for a couple of frozen pizzas, or toast (my default meal), or prepackaged stir-fry (hers).

  But when she says, “I’m making dinner,” it means she’s already decided; that we will be having penne with fresh julienned vegetables, or orzo with feta and tomatoes, or tofu Milanese with roasted corn and mashed potatoes. It also means that we will be having a big family gathering. Just how big remains to be determined. Our parents will be here for certain. Our brother probably won’t show up. Our other two sisters probably will. And there is always the possibility that various significant others might appear. Everybody will arrive at a different time, despite the fact that Maya has designated a specific hour for the meal. There will almost definitely be an argument about that. There may be other arguments as well. There might be a couple of scenes or more than one furious exit. There might be a lively debate over whatever turns out to be the topic of the day and it might even be amicable, but it certainly won’t be calm and quiet. Calm and quiet is not something my family does when they’re all together. However, the exact tenor of the meal will be determined by who shows up this time and by what well-established patterns we choose to tread. And my sisters and I are adept—no, brilliant—at maintaining our patterns of behavior.

  I am trying to remember when it was, exactly, that Maya started making these dinners or how our house got to be the designated destination of almost every family gathering. It may have been about fifteen years ago when our family owned Peppy’s, a little pizza parlor in Oregon, and Maya became the chief cook (in reality the only person who could actually make a pizza). But I think her position as family chef has its origins much earlier. Although I had my turns with crescent rolls and apple pies when we were growing up, Maya was the one who really developed an affinity for and understanding of pastry and cakes. Where I found cooking for large groups of people (our family, in other words) overwhelming, Maya was always able to put together a big meal with whatever was in the house. I got very tired of using the same ingredients in the same way (there’s nothing more depressing to me than a pot of boiling potatoes), but Maya was always able to replicate her dishes effortlessly. For Maya, cooking was not only easy but a source of pride. I always preferred to clean up afterward.

  Maya and I moved in together in 1987 and our house (or apartment—there have been five different places since then) gradually became the place to go whenever there was a meal attached to a birthday, a celebration, Sunday brunch, Mother’s Day, a New Year’s Eve party, or anything that could be seen as an occasion. For a while, we were all eating a meal together at least once a week. There was a period, too, when dinner at our house became the testing ground for new friends and lovers. The theory behind this being that it is less threatening to introduce someone to your whole family when it’s your sister’s house as opposed to your parents. And between the two of us, we’ve got a couple of important bases covered. Maya cooks, providing nourishment, and I do the astrological birth charts and subsequent interpretations for the potential mates. I can always tell that there’s a new romantic interest in the offing when one of my sisters (or my brother, for that matter) calls me up and says, “Hey, can you run a quick chart for me?”

  When a friend or lover becomes a long-term relationship, Maya will even fix up a to-go container if that person can’t quite make it to dinner, but sends a message that he just loves Maya’s cooking so much and is so sorry that he can’t be there in person and will miss it so much…. And the Tupperware comes out. Like I said, it’s a source of pride fo
r her.

  “Who’s coming?” I ask her now. I need to be prepared.

  “Everybody, I think.”

  “What do you mean, everybody?”

  “Lavander, Déja, Mom, Dad…”

  Well, that covers the parents and the sisters at least. “What about Bo?” I ask, referring to our brother, who doesn’t attend these gatherings regularly.

  “He’s coming, too.”

  “Really? And Danny?” Danny, Déja’s boyfriend, has lately been a fixture at these family dinners.

  “Yes, Danny’s coming, too.”

  Full house, I think, and am mentally adjusting when another thought crosses.

  “Tony’s not coming, is he?”

  Maya says nothing just long enough for me to know that Tony, Lavander’s current boyfriend, might actually be attending. “I don’t know,” she says, finally.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” I ask her. “Didn’t we all decide that it was a bad idea to have that guy over for dinner? Or anywhere, for that matter?”

  By “we” I don’t just mean the two of us. This has been a family conclusion that’s been bubbling to the surface for the last few weeks. Lavander started seeing Tony in December. He was here, at our house, on Christmas Day when we all gathered for a family brunch. As I recall, we all liked him and welcomed him with open arms at that point. Somewhere in the last three months, things started to go south between the two of them and, therefore, between him and the rest of us.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” Maya says with exasperation as if we’ve already been arguing about this for hours. “I can’t not invite him. I can’t tell her not to bring him, can I? Well, can I?”