My baby sister Maddie was at a playground with my Dad, a playground next to a flat, grassy knoll that stretches until the horizon cuts it short. It was getting dark but it was early, so the moon, effulgent and glowing, hung low in the sky. It hung so low that it looked like it was touching the grass, like if you walked to the other side of the field you could maybe touch it or casually lean up against it.
Maddie caught on. “Moon!” she shouted and pointed at the beaming sphere. “I got it!” she said, and started ripping across the field to catch the moon.
I’m willing to admit to nosy strangers and curious friends that my family situation is odd. I have one sister four years younger than me, one sister 22 years younger than me, and another sister on the way. Sometimes I worry that people will think Maddie is actually my kid and my parents pretend she’s theirs because they’re super Catholic or something. This is probably because everyone is always so incredulous to discover our age difference. “That’s your sister?” they ask, like in 2011 they’re still incapable of comprehending divorce or remarriage or blended families.
But really I just feel lucky: lucky to be 23 and to have a sister young enough, sweet and innocent and celestial enough, to try to catch the moon.
My dad and I never really had much in common, except a shared love for politics that he purposefully cultivated in me early on. When I lived at home and we’d exhausted all of our favorite current events topics, we’d almost always turn out attention to our cocker spaniel, Cocoa, whose bad behavior was a constant source of anxiety but also a welcome discussion subject. Cocoa’s antics, like his penchant for rug peeing and tearing up the mail, never ceased to amuse and connect us. We loved him, he was part of our family, even though he destroyed the hardwood floors and chewed holes into all of my underwear.
I got Cocoa for my 8th birthday. On that day, my mom showed up at school with this adorable, shaking puppy and I refused to believe he was mine. “Why are you holding Brad Smith’s dog?” I asked. “He’s not Brad Smith’s,” my mom replied, grinning. “He’s your dog.” Cocoa was so scared of everyone we had to carry him to the car. I remember he licked my face on the way to pick my sister up from daycare. My mom went in and got Alison and I sat in the car with Cocoa. My sister couldn’t believe our luck either. Didn’t my Dad say we couldn’t get a dog?
We learned later that my dad hadn’t been informed of the impulse purchase. My mother bought Cocoa in a fit of mania, without consulting him. She was blinded by her desire for love and admiration from my sister and me; she reveled in the gleeful looks that graced our faces when we first saw her holding Cocoa. I like to imagine that my dad took one look at Cocoa, so scruffy and buoyant, and completely changed his mind. In actuality it took much longer to adjust. But my dad did grow to like Cocoa, to bond with him even. He’d never admit it, though.
She will never know the grating awkwardness of parent-teacher conferences. Not because she’ll get bad grades, or because her teachers will hate her (they won’t), but because her parents will drive there together, from the house in which they live together, and when they sit down next to the teacher there will be no doubt about the fact that they are a “unified front.” There will be no “I’ll meet you in the parking lot at five minutes to seven” or “Your Dad’s going and I’m sitting this one out.” After class the next day the teacher will smile and say, “Your parents are so lovely!” instead of knitting her brow and in a low-whisper grunting, “I’m here if you ever want to talk.”
When she accomplishes something notable, the celebration won’t be a source of anxiety. There will be no fretting over whose house to host it at or whether her Stepparents will get along. There will be no awkward silence as she sits by and watches the adults in her life struggle like children with polite phrases. It won’t be about them. It will be about her.
Until I was in high school, my grandmother lived in a modest 3-bedroom farmhouse on a road called “Bull Run Crossing” in central Pennsylvania. It was a quaint two-story affair with black shutters and hideous yellow carpeting. As a break from the summer doldrums, my parents would drive my sister and I there for a week each year to keep my grandmother company. I was too young to realize it then, but my grandmother has always been one of the loneliest people I know. She occasionally goes to the movies or has her sorority sisters over for coffee, but aside from her family I don’t think there’s been love in her life for a long time. Back then, before her brain fizzled with a series of mini strokes that would threaten her physical ability, she still had a car and a license. Back then, she could still go anywhere she wanted, but she only ever really went to Church or to the grocery store when she was running out of sherbet.
My grandfather died of a heart attack before I was born, when my dad was just 19 years old, and I don’t think my grandmother ever really got over it. It’s been over 25 years and the only time she takes off her wedding band is to do the dishes. Her fingers have gotten bonier over the years, the various illnesses she’s fought against and won make their permanent mark on her body in the form of her frail, protruding bones. I wonder if she’s ever had to have the ring resized, if she’s ever had to go to the jeweler and field questions about her husband. I’ve wonder if she’s lied just to save herself the shame of admitting that she’s been married to a dead person for 25 years. I wonder if that fact even embarrasses her. Even though I’m her granddaughter, even though we’re family, these are things we won’t ever talk about.
There was a time when I wouldn’t sleep at my Dad’s house because I didn’t want to. Now, having grown old enough to put aside the typical grudges we hold as teens, I don’t sleep there because I can’t.
For the past three years, every time I’ve tried to fall asleep in my childhood bedroom I’ve woken up in the middle of the night saddled with an allergy attack so intense its generated sounds cause my father to shoot up from bed and dart into my room at a rate faster than I’ve ever seen him move. The amount of Benadryl I take prior to going to bed only slightly impacts the amount of hours that pass before I wake up wheezing and bleary-eyed, covered in hives and almost completely unable to breathe. I have tried inhalers and high doses of Zyrtec, anti-dust mite bedding encasings and hypoallergenic sheets. My Dad has even bought a HEPA air purifier and changed the air vent in my room—twice. None of this seems to have any effect; every time I spend more than an hour or so in my bedroom, I end up completely succumbing to my allergies.
My allergist tells me that I am allergic to my dog, the dog I’ve had since I was a kid. I got him for my 9th birthday, and before going off to college I never had any issue with pet allergies. But according to my allergist, this is a very normal occurrence—often times kids go off to college and come back completely allergic to the pets they grew up with. Aside from learning from your mistakes and having a higher tolerance for your parents, “growing up” apparently also entails developing a hyperactive immune system incapable of withstanding childhood comforts.
My parents got divorced when I was 13 years old, which is arguably the worst possible time for parents to get divorced. An awkward, depression-prone pre-teen, my increasing angst was engaged in the constant struggle for an outlet, and I had more friends on the Dave Matthews Band message boards I frequented than I did in real life. But one of the things you learn when you are a tween and your parents sit you down in the living room and tell you they want to end their lives together is that, contrary to what the TV and the radio and Tiger Beat tell you, the world does not actually revolve around you. Beside the credenza on the cheap embroidered couch my parents told me and my sister that they were separating, and instantly the focal point of our intimate family life shifted. Immediately our lives had very little to do with the small victories of childhood—the straight-A report cards and carpools and birthday parties—and everything to do with the fact that my parents did not love each other anymore.
This is an earth-shattering realization to have at 13, when every single event in your tiny universe is divided into two opposite camps: everything is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. How simple and black and white life is at 13! How simple it was to forget, to resent, that the pottery project I made in art class was meaningless next to the reconstruction of a solid family unit. It is like worrying about what to wear to a funeral. The details and minor accomplishments and joys of childhood were continually eclipsed by the larger picture—mainly, that our small, quiet, suburban life would never be the same again.
In college I would become maniacally selfish, perhaps in an attempt to make up for those years when the dissolution of my parents’ marriage wavered on the court docket. In 2001, tweendom ceased to be about Britney Spears and began to be about what to make for my little sister for dinner because my father, wholly obsessed with his job, was running late again.
I always made spaghetti: I was 13 and didn’t know how to cook anything else.
My grandmother has something lodged inside her, a tumor in her intestines that tests and charts and wires tell us is cancerous. Doctors with protective masks will have to operate on her, slice her open and gingerly remove the knotted mass. Radiation that at rates just slightly higher would mutate her will attempt to chase the disease from her frail body. She is almost 80.
My grandmother is Catholic in the way that people who make fun of religion disdain. She went to secretarial school and calls pants “slacks.” She married my grandfather when she was very young, and even though he died of a heart attack almost 25 years ago, she has never taken off her wedding band. Once, when she was suffering from seizures that meant we spent Easter in the hospital waiting room, the doctors had to remove the ring to run tests. The skin beneath was pale and papery, a permanent, luminous band around her finger. The first thing she did when the tests were over was put it right back on.
My sister and I have always been opposites, but whether or not we are opposites in spite or because of each other is something I’ve never been able to figure out. I sometimes worry that the person I grew into took up so much room in our quiet life that my sister was forced to grow into the places I left empty. From a scruffy sapling I shot into the sky year by year, unfurling wildly, branches chaotic and menacing. Smaller, subtler, ever more empathetic, I worry that my sister felt she had no choice but to simply stretch out where I left room for her. It’s that way with sisters, or at least it always has been with us: we intertwine and grow apart and collide. We fight and leave angry, half-moon shaped nail marks on the back of each other’s arms–but then we find a reason to make fun of the way our Mom laughs (I want to invent an adjective form of ‘hyena’ just to describe it) and get back to watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
My sister was captain of the field hockey team, and I was layout editor of the yearbook the year everyone proclaimed it “too artsy.” I was Alice in the 8th grade production of “Alice in Wonderland,” and she was…Ali Roy–no need for acting, her own name, its three-syllable rhythm cascading with verbal ease, carried enough cache on its own. I got grounded time and time again for exposing my PG-13 exploits on various blogging outlets (Xanga, Deadjournal and Livejournal), and she got grounded for attending the popular kids’ parties. Everyone knew we were siblings, but we looked and acted so differently everyone also probably thought one of us was adopted. She inherited my mom’s tan Portuguese glow; I am pale, freckly, embarrassingly Northern European.