About My Sisters Read online

  “Why not?” I ask her. “He’s not exactly popular at the moment. Why would we have him over for dinner? Why would we act like he’s part of the family? Why?”

  “Because he’s her boyfriend, that’s why.”

  I know she’s right, that to specifically eliminate Tony would spark a war the likes of which nobody even cares to contemplate. And Lavander is so good at setting us up this way, using our dislike of her boyfriend (a dislike I believe she has fostered herself) as a reason to act wounded, misunderstood, and angry. So what if he’s a loser/sponge/poser or any of the other epithets that she, herself, has slung his way lately? He’s her boyfriend—the Boyfriend of Damocles, hanging precariously over all of our heads.

  “I really don’t want him here,” I say.

  “Yes, well, maybe she’ll have the good sense not to bring him,” Maya says.

  “If she had any good sense, she wouldn’t be seeing him in the first place,” I say.

  “Well, we know that.”

  We sigh in tandem, and then I ask her, “What are you making?”

  This is the other Rubicon to cross where dinner is concerned. Everybody has at least one favorite dish and one that they can’t stand. Lately, too, several members of my family have developed special dietary rules (aside from vegetarianism, which we’ve all had in common for twenty-five years) that must be adhered to. For example, my mother is “off” pasta this week. Last month, she wouldn’t eat any cheese. Now she doesn’t want bread either and is asking for raw food. My father has rules against “fruit and nuts in food.” No raisins on the salad, in other words. Nothing even approaching say, pears, in a main course. He’s only just accepted capers into his culinary pantheon, previously dismissing them as “too exotic.” Danny, on the other hand, won’t eat tomatoes. His plate can always be identified by a bright red ring of picked-out pieces around the rim. Lavander will most likely arrive saying she’s “not very hungry” because she “had a big lunch,” which will set Maya off (“Why come to dinner then? That’s what we do at dinner—we eat”) and then she’ll pick from the serving dishes until she’s eaten the equivalent of a full plate. Ironically, my son, Blaze, who is always thrilled when we have these get-togethers, won’t be eating with us at all, having an intense aversion to most foods and their odors. He only joins the table for dessert, of which he always partakes. And I must admit, I have my own dietary peculiarities. I have issues with both garlic and onions, two foods that nobody else has a problem with. But even Maya, who claims open-mindedness about everything, has a few items she won’t touch. No avocado. No mushrooms.

  Admittedly, these restrictions tend to make dinner more interesting. Maya is very sensitive about her cooking, as well as being proud of her abilities with food, so if someone dares to say something snide about bell peppers, for example, she takes it very personally. So, naturally, during the course of any given dinner, someone is bound to say something snide about something. Tonight will doubtless be no different.

  “Well?” I ask Maya a second time. “What are you making?”

  She shoots me a somewhat sardonic look and says, “Macaroni and cheese.”

  “Trying to start a revolution?” I ask her. Surely this dish, containing onion, garlic, cheese, pasta, and tomato, is guaranteed to commit dietary offenses for just about everyone.

  “I can’t do anything about it,” she says, “there are too many people to make anything else and I can’t keep up with what people are eating or not eating this week. Besides, there’s a salad.”

  “Yes, well, just be prepared,” I tell her. “Salad or no. So what time do the festivities begin?”

  “I told everyone six o’clock. We’ll see who manages to get here on time.” I glance over at the clock. An hour and a half. I wonder if there is anything I can clean while I’m waiting.

  The macaroni and cheese is in the oven and Maya is in the shower when I hear the clickety-click of high heels on the walkway outside our front door. Lavander walks in, half hobbling and slightly bowlegged, as if she’s just gotten off a horse. She’s wearing a tiny black sweater with faux leopard trim and tight black Capri pants, neither of which contains a single natural fiber. Tony, I am relieved to discover, is nowhere in sight.

  “Ugh,” she says by way of greeting, “I just had a Brazilian wax. I’m in such pain.”

  “Brazilian…” I venture. “That means, what, everything? Almost everything?”

  “They leave a little bit,” she says patiently. “It’s called a landing strip.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Want to see? Look,” she says, and starts pulling down her pants.

  “Oh no, please. Oh, hell no,” I gasp, shielding my eyes with my hand. I’m not squeamish, not in the least. I can deal with open wounds, projectile vomiting, bleeding, and injections. But this is too much even for me.

  “You know, there’s a reason we have hair there,” I tell Lavander when she’s covered up and I can safely look at her again. “What you’ve done—I don’t know, it’s like self-mutilation or something.”

  “It is not,” she says indignantly. “It looks so much better like this.”

  “To whom?” I ask.

  “Oh, come on,” she says.

  “Why would a man want a woman to be hairless?” I ask. “Think about it, you’re making yourself look like a child. I think that’s really weird, don’t you? I couldn’t look at myself if I had that done. And the pain! Like the bikini line isn’t bad enough.”

  “Debra,” she says slowly, as if speaking to a child, “I don’t think you understand. But it’s okay. Women your age like to have a nice little triangle there. And that’s what men your age like.”

  I cross my arms in the ancient posture of self-defense. “My age?”

  “You know,” she says, “over thirty-five. This is for women in their twenties. Times change, you know.”

  “You’re not in your twenties.”

  “I’m only thirty.”

  It’s true, she’s only thirty, but looking at her now, I am reminded once again of Grandma, our father’s mother. Lavander has always had a fair bit of Grandma coming through her, in fact. Historically, Lavander hasn’t enjoyed that distinction, although my father once pointed out that, “You know, in her time, my mother was considered a beautiful woman.”

  “By whom?” my mother asked wryly. “Like Daryl Zanuck spotted her somewhere and thought she was a beauty?”

  “Among her group,” my father said testily. “Those who knew her. Lavander has that same kind of beauty.”

  “Whatever,” Lavander said.

  None of us knew Grandma “in her time,” and there are no photos of her in her youth, so it is impossible to say exactly what she looked like then. But more than a similarity of actual features, Lavander has inherited from Grandma a certain mode, a collection of mannerisms. There are the fingernails, for one thing. Grandma always had the most immaculately polished and shaped nails. Lavander’s are the same. Every nail parlor within a twenty-mile radius has an intimate knowledge of the state of her cuticles. Her nails, in fact, are one of her business expenses. And differences in clothing styles aside, Lavander dresses very much as Grandma used to. Grandma was one of the most “put-together” women I’ve ever known. Everything matched, from pants and tops to jackets and purses, and she had a belt to go with everything. Grandma could wear anything and somehow make it look stylish, from macramé to gold chain. She even looked good in white vinyl. Lavander is the only other woman in the world who can wear white vinyl and not seem like she’s going to a 1960s revival party. In fact, like Grandma, Lavander can pull off just about any bizarre cut or poly blend while simultaneously matching it with an accessory or two.

  There was a certain quirkiness to Grandma that I see reflected in Lavander, as well as what I can only describe as an orderly, precise kind of sadness. Lavander had just turned four when Grandma had her sixtieth birthday and she remembers nothing of that day, but for me, it stands out in sharp relief. Grandma wasn’t particularly thrilled to be turning sixty in the first place and didn’t seem very jovial, but she went through the motions of having a birthday celebration convincingly enough. It was the only time we would ever celebrate her birthday together; before and after that year we would always be living in different places when it came around.

  That afternoon, Grandma was wearing a cream-colored sweater set, belted at the waist, and matching slacks. Sometime around four or so, she took her cigarettes and went into the large walk-in closet off the living room where we kept the stereo. She sat there in the dark for a long time, smoking and listening to Billie Holliday as one tear followed another in wet tracks down her face. She let them go, let her cheeks soak with them. All the time, her only movement was the lift of a cigarette to her lips. I watched the glowing coal between her pearl-painted fingertips as it went back and forth and down to the ashtray. At thirteen, it was the first time I really felt the silent weight of adult sorrow. Grandma had been dealt some difficult cards in her lifetime. She’d lost her first child, a daughter, to pneumonia. Her husband had died young, leaving her a widow in her forties. She never remarried. These were the events I knew about, but I sensed that there were more under the surface. She could have been crying about any one of them. What struck me even more than the intimacy of grief, though, was the utter femaleness of it. It was something always present in Grandma, but never as much displayed as it was that day. Lavander has none of the same life experiences as Grandma at this point, yet I can see it in her, that same kind of controlled female pain.

  Lavander is looking at me now, asking me something, drawing me out of my reverie.

  “What?” I ask dimly.

  “I said, you should try it. Why not?”

  “The waxing thing? Never. I’m s
till mad at you for convincing me to wax my upper lip. I can’t stand it, it’s the most painful thing and now I have to keep doing it every few weeks because it keeps growing in.”

  “Oh no, you really had to do it. You had a mustache, a thick one.”

  “I did not,” I whine, instinctively touching my upper lip. “I just allowed you to talk me into it because I’m insecure.”

  “Didn’t you finally start seeing someone after you got rid of that ’stache?”

  “Two years later,” I tell her. “You know, I think you have a problem with hair.”

  And it’s not over, this hair/no hair debate, not by a long shot, because now Maya has reappeared in the kitchen and Lavander is in there after her, going through the same maneuvers, attempting to bring her over to the side of the hairless.

  “Oh no,” I hear Maya say. “No, please don’t show—oh no, that’s awful.”

  “Sisters!” Déja bursts through the door with her customary greeting. (Nobody knocks when they come here, they just immediately turn the door handle. If it’s not locked, they stride right in. If it’s locked, there’s a second or two of angry pounding as if to say, “You knew we were coming over, so why is this door locked?”).

  “Déja!” Maya exclaims in response.

  “Hey, Déja, come look at this,” Lavander says, “I got a Brazilian.”

  “Where’s Danny?” I ask.

  “He’s coming with Bo, because I have to leave early,” Déja says, giving me a kiss on the cheek. Déja has been the most physically affectionate sister since her earliest infancy. As a baby, she was constantly smothered with kisses and hugs of which she could never get enough. She’s the same way now; at twenty-four she’s unable to enter a family room without a kiss and a hug for everyone present. When she exits, it’s the same, except she always combines the kisses with an I-love-you, something she never leaves out of her phone conversations either. Lavander is big on saying “I love you” also, will do a nice job of air-kissing from time to time, and isn’t above the occasional embrace, but it’s not a priority like it is with Déja. Maya is very affectionate with Déja and sometimes with Lavander, but I can’t remember the last time she and I exchanged either a hug or a kiss. Even when we were very little, Maya and I weren’t very physically demonstrative with each other. We were just too close. Kissing her is like kissing myself. And the number of times we have said we love each other in our lifetimes can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But not Déja, who seems to need these expressions of love and who soaks them up like a sponge. We indulge her, this baby of the family who, at five feet seven, towers over her sisters who are between five feet and five feet two. She moves among us now, bestowing kisses, laughing at Lavander’s wax obsession, and proclaiming that she is “absolutely starving.”

  For a few minutes, we four sisters are by ourselves. Although we speak to each other every day and see each other almost as often, it is a rare occurrence for all of us to be in the same room without the rest of our family. It’s an unstable combination, this quartet. Astrologically, we have all the elements covered: fire (Déja, the Sagittarius), earth (Lavander, the Virgo), air (me, the Gemini), and water (Maya, the Pisces). Conventional astrological wisdom would assume a balance in this combination, a flow of disparate but complementary energies. But most often we form a tight square when we are together, each one of us protecting her own corner, holding fast to a pattern shaped by birth order, personality, and the gravity of inertia. When there are only two or even three of us together, we are able, with some effort, to reach out past our positions, but when we are four, our combined elements are often more like oil and water, salt and sugar, or gunpowder and spark. Predictably volatile, in other words. The only question is what will be the trigger.

  Lavander is still going on about her waxing. This time, she’s cornered Déja whose friend Katie is the one who performed the actual tearing out of hair.

  “How can she do that?” Lavander wants to know. “How can she get all over people’s crotches without getting sick? And she’s totally cool about it, says it doesn’t bother her at all.”

  “Well, it is her job,” Déja says. “But, you know, I’m angry at her and I don’t want to talk about how great she is because she has not been a good friend to me lately.”

  “Well, can you please make up with her?” Lavander says testily.

  This is something of a hallmark of my sisters’ and my relationship with the rest of the world. If one of us is happy with a hairstylist, doctor, or beautician, the rest of us will usually patronize that person as well. Business from one of us almost always translates to business from us all. Conversely, if one of us has a bad experience with any of the above, there is pressure for all of us to drop out. Katie is proving to be a sticky exception. Déja has known Katie since high school (and she’s shared many family meals with us), but their friendship has always been a bit erratic. They’re on the outs now, but Lavander and Maya have become so enthralled with her skills as a beautician that they’ve even offered to go in on a portable wax pot for her so that she can make house calls.

  “I’m not going to stop going to her,” Lavander says now with a touch of stridency creeping into her voice, “so I hope you can work it out.”

  “Do what you like,” Déja says. “I don’t care.”

  But of course she does care and Lavander knows it. If the current tiff isn’t worked out, Lavander, who is fiercely loyal, especially to her baby sister, will have to find someone else. This is always the bottom line.

  “Where’s Blaze?” Déja says.

  “In his room,” I answer. This is Blaze’s usual pattern when everyone comes over here. He stays in his room and lets everybody come to him, one by one. Individually, he has a completely different relationship with each one of my sisters, and seeing them one at a time allows him to control the conversation more easily than when they are in a group. Blaze is no fool; he wised up to the “Who’s your favorite auntie?” question when he was still a baby. “You are,” he’d say. “But don’t tell the others.”

  “Well, I’m going to go say hello to him,” Déja says and disappears down the hall.

  There is a too-brief silence before Maya says, “I’m making macaroni and cheese, I hope you can handle it.” She turns to Lavander. “Don’t tell me you’re not hungry.”

  ‘Why? Do I have to leave if I’m not hungry? Will you throw me out?”

  A preemptive strike and a counterpunch. Should be an interesting evening.

  “I’m just saying, I’ve made a lot of food here,” Maya backpedals, “and I want it to get eaten. Because you know what it’s like living with Debra. She never eats anything. Doesn’t believe in meals.”

  A brilliant deflection. Now I’m in the fray, too.

  “It’s true,” Lavander says, turning to me. “I never see you eat. You have food issues.”

  “Oh, please,” I sigh. “I do not. I just can’t eat continuously or think about eating all the time. Three meals a day is too many for me.”

  “That isn’t normal,” Lavander says. “Those are not normal eating habits.”

  “Oh, like yours are normal,” I tell her. I cast a glance over her tiny little frame, her birdlike ankles and wrists. Lavander and I are the same height, but she’s a full size smaller than I am and I am fairly light at the moment. She’s been losing too much weight lately, on the verge of trading trim for gaunt. “You don’t eat properly either,” I tell her.

  I am hoping against hope that this discussion doesn’t go any further because then we’ll surely get into the topic of smoking, at which point Lavander will accuse me of doing what she does, smoking on the sly. There are many ex and secret smokers in my family, but Lavander and I are the only two who have smoked to keep our weight down. When she told me recently that the most effective diet she knew of involved a few bottles of water and a pack of cigarettes, I had to tell her that I’d already discovered it many years ago. “Throw in a heartbreak,” I added, “and Bob’s your uncle. Skinny in no time.” Maya and Déja don’t share this neurosis, although both of them, like every woman I have ever known, occasionally complain about their bodies. Not one of us is completely free of insecurity when it comes to the way we look and we will often make “suggestions” as to how our sisters can improve their hair, clothing, or makeup (“You know, you should probably wear something different. Those pants don’t really do anything for you”) as well as soliciting their opinions on the same topics.