I: 10/29/02

Work Diary, 10/29/02

I have a sister, an older sister, who lives about five miles from me. I
see her at Christmas, and sometimes Thanksgiving if I'm not in Texas or
having an orphan's party at my house. On her birthday, August tenth, I
send her peridot jewelry. God love her, she hasn't forgotten her Emily
Post. She sends me a thank-you each and every time. She's called me
exactly once, when she was stuck at a filling station, out of
cigarettes and gas. Her husband sat sulking behind the steering wheel
while we chatted and shopped. I used my credit card; we'd been warned
about giving her money.

My sister has my mother's size-nine feet, and perhaps her hair, but the
similarities end there. I have an old photo of my father, when he was
skinny, and if you put some long hair and a bosom on him, that would be
my older sister.

My sister could be pretty if she wanted to be. She prefers baggy jeans,
secondhand clothes, and little makeup. The bangs of her hair hide her
eyes, which are blue and green and brown all at once. She says "ain't"
instead of "isn't," and most of her children are being raised by my
aunt and uncle.

I need to backtrack here because I'm not being entirely fair. My sister
was never conventional; the feminine props were never her forte. She
lost what made her pretty when she withdrew into herself, becoming a
functional outcast, so to speak. Her second daughter once remarked, "I
can always tell it's mommy because she walks with her head down."

At an early age, my older sister had an amazing ability to draw. She'd
copy faces from magazines, and later she would draw beautifully
stylized women, breasts and all, though her images always stopped at
the waist. She would teach me to draw, show me how a man's eye's were
really located almost halfway down his face. I learned not to fill in
an iris, to leave carefully lined circles of white.

The first time she wore makeup, I was there, showing her our mother's
beauty products. I'd watched my mother enough to know how each was
applied. I told my sister to use lipstick for blush, and I carefully
monitored her use of powder. That first time, she left the house
looking more like a model than a girl with a messy room and pimples. I
was proud, then scared. The makeup didn't last, but the awful boys it
initially attracted did.

My sister has never forgiven our mother for dying, before she had the
chance to tell our mother just what had happened between her and our
father. She spent her years in elementary school peeing her pants,
waiting for somebody to pick her up. Later - particularly after our
father briefly reentered our lives - she would disappear for long
periods, the longest being the birth of her first baby. To this day, we
don't talk about who the father might have been, though I think each of
has similar suspicions.

My sister has a scar on one cheek, the result of a bar fight with
another woman who was hitting on her first husband. Though I wasn't
there - the fight took place in California - it is my favorite image of
my sister. I picture her as some sort of demonic Cat Woman, throwing
her slight weight into that first punch and using her slender fingers
as weapons. Weird, I know, but it's good to know my sister was
prepared. She would have ignored the blood on her face; later, she
would be glad of the scar. It would represent a battle she'd been
fighting for years, before she resigned herself to her life and became
the woman walking down the street with her head down.

A few years after my sister left to make a go of it on her own, she
allowed our father back into her life. He came up from Texas under the
pretense of visiting, though really he was running from the police. My
sister let him stay in her house - a decision none of us understood -
and then he returned to Texas and prison, where he would later
die.

Afterwards, an aunt asked my sister, "Why? Knowing what you know, why
did you let him stay in your house?"

My sister's answer was blunt, delivered to the floor as is most of her
speech: "Because he's the only family I got."

That answer stings to this day, and not just because my sister lives
five miles from me. I've seen television movies in which family members
end up tearfully hugging one another in the final scene, usually after
some horrible experience. Those movies always make me laugh.

My sister and I share too much to ever be entirely comfortable around
each other. We can talk, or laugh, or sit on a bench together and smoke
cigarettes, but those moments are fleeting, bearable only until our
eyes meet one last time and we turn away in embarrassment. Or is it
shame?